12.12.2010

Things She Said

She said, "Hi, my name is Angel. I smell like the Thanksgiving dinner you haven't eaten all summer long." That was a weird way for a stripper to start a conversation.

Perhaps a man might expect to meet a woman at Centerfold's Cabaret who smells like green-bean hotdish, but that wasn't the case with Angel. She had just returned from the alley, where she held the hair of another stripper, Ashley, who was puking into a garbage can.

"Is anyone ready for a lapdance?" she asked.

"You are," my friend Chris said to her.

* * *

Joyce said she's been good friends with Eli for many years. "Back when he was chief of police, he gave me a great piece of advice. He told me if I ever had to shoot an intruder I should aim to kill. That way there would only be one side to the story."

* * *

Connie said every time her family had a party there was a cake, and her grandmother always took a picture of it. "After she died we had to go through all her photographs and divvy them up," Connie said. "No one wanted the cake pictures, but we all thought we'd like to have pictures of Grandma taking pictures of cakes."

When Connie graduated from college the cake at her party came from the grocery store in a box. A sticker with the order printed on it in fuzzy dot matrix read, “full sheet decorated buttercream cake.” Her younger brother took one look at it and called it “shit-decorated buttcream cake” for the rest of the day. Connie said her grandmother didn’t like that.

* * *

Chelsey said the various rocks of the world have different psychological affects on people -- particularly agates, which are an aphrodisiac. "That's why people around Lake Superior are always thinking about sex," she said. "There are all these agates driving us crazy. It makes it hard to think about anything else."

She presented this bit of information as if she read it in a scientific journal. At first I considered searching the Internet or going to the library to see if I could find data to support or refute the claim. Then I decided it didn’t matter either way. Knowing the truth wouldn’t change my life at all.

Paul Lundgren is a newspaper columnist and a very nice man. His book, "The Spowl Ribbon," is available at the Electric Fetus and online at paullundgren.com.