It takes one to…

I have grown up thinking that I shouldn’t be judgemental. I learned about the idea of “walk a mile in his shoes” as a young boy scout. 

 

But Donald Trump is an egomaniacal fool, or a very sick person. Probably both.

 

How do I know this? Because it takes one to know one.

 

Anyhow. I now live in Florida, a state populated by extreme right people and their equally insane leaders. So I want you, and them, to understand where I’m coming from. 

 

You should know that I am under the influence of Rachel Maddow and Liz Cheney, I just finished reading Maddow’s “Prelude” and listening to her podcast called “Ultra,” both are about how Nazi spies influenced 1930s and 1940s pre-war right wingers to attempt a bloody coup in the United States through congressmen and other influencers.

 

I am now “reading” Cheney’s

 “Oath and Honor” on Audible as it is not yet available on Kindle. Thus far, Cheney reads her book without the passion I expected but lays out a damning case against Trump following the election but prior to the Jan. 6 uprising.  It is clear that Trump, not to mention his most ardent supporters, was aware he lost the election but refuses to concede while plotting to nullify the eldctrol vote count. 

 

I have yet to continue to read the book but I have watched several of her interviews, including one with Maddow, who points out that from a political point of view, they couldn’t be further apart. 

 

But this isn’t about these two women.  It’s about my personal viewpoint.

 

I first heard of Trump in the 1980s when he was able to rebuild a skating rink in New York City when no one else was successful. It earned him some prestige among New Yorkers which he parlayed into a business book called “The Art of the Deal,” which was entirely ghost written.

 

Working in the city, I would sometimes browse bookstores. I found the book in the $2 overstock bin and after scanning it, I found it was more about Trump than business deals and I ignored it.

 

The next I heard about Trump was when he demanded that four Black young men be severely punished for attacking a woman in Central Park. They were innocent. During that time it was revealed that Trump and his father lost court cases when they refused to allow people of color to rent their apartments.

 

I am proud to say I never watched his reality television series.

 

Then came the day he took the escalator down Trump Tower to the cheers of dozens of attractive young people. I didn’t care about his attacks on Mexicans. What got to me was that cheering crowd were out-of-work Broadway actors who were paid $50 for the two hours of cheering him on. I immediately decided he was a fraud. 

 

And when I learned how he stiffed his contractors and others, I decided he was a criminal. And as his pronouncements piled up, I absolutely knew he was a fucking liar.

 

 Another thing I want to express was throughout his time in office, there was absolute chaos as people were constantly fired, especially his chiefs of staff.

 

I want to add just two things: how many hundreds of thousands died because of denial of the realities of Covid while we stayed in our homes and wore masks and couldn’t even go to church? Perhaps he was also a killer?

 

AND HOW CAN ANY REASONABLE PERSON DENY HE INCITED THE JAN. 6 RIOTS?

 

I am too old and disabled to ever be an anti-MAGA activist but you can bet your ass I will vote against Trump in any election. 

 

I have two hats that say “Make America Sane Again.” I thought that might have happened when Republicans lost the presidency, house and senate in 2020. But I fear the only time that will happen is when The Donald leaves our planet. Though since we're the same age, perhaps he will become a senile egomaniac.

Fear and scaring in Sarasota

Letter to a store manager

I'm not the biggest fan of Walmart, but it seemed like every one in the store was there when I needed them.

 

Oct.27, 2023

 

Store Manager Jarad

Walmart 

Lockwood Ridge Road

Sarasota, FL 34243

 

Dear Jarad,

 

While I spend several thousand dollars per year at your store, I have never experienced so much help from many of your associates until today.

 

You see, I lost my phone. Frankly, I was very scared and upset. For one thing, I do not drive. I have to depend on Uber and that means I need my phone or I am marooned in your building. I. had nightmare visions of spending the night sleeping on a table. 

 

Anyhow, here is what happened. First, I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription and get my flu and Covid shots. 

 

After that, I picked up some groceries. And then, I checked out. While checking out I had a problem with one of my credit cards. I thought I had properly activated it, but failed to do so, and used my debit card instead.

 

Anyhow, I decided to check out the Holiday store. For more than a decade, Walmart has sold cute little holiday teddy bears with the year imprinted on the foot. It isn’t available yet, which is not unusual. But I used the phone to take a photo of a Christmas tree I was interested in. Then, while shopping for some gift bags, I got a phone message from my credit card company telling me why my credit card was refused and how to activate it. 

 

Anyhow, I went to the register to pay for the gift bags and discovered my phone was missing!

 

Not think very straight, I went to the first place I used the phone – the pharmacy. I had a notice when my prescription was filled. They didn’t have it, but the pharmacist on duty was kind enough to dial the number to no avail. 

 

Next, I went to the register where I checked out. The cashier was gone and the lane was closed, but one of your associates was using the area to apparently organize merchandise. He too, called the phone, again to no avail. But he referred me to another register which was designated for use as a lost-and-found station. The person there (perhaps a CSM?) went through the drawers but didn’t find it.He also tried calling the phone with the same results.

 

It was on to the Christmas tree area where an associate went throughout the entire area ringing me and searching for the phone without any results.

I then went to the area wheI I found the gift bags to no avail.

 

Having worked for five years at Walmarts on Long Island, I finally realized that just about the only person in the store who could walk around with me searching would be a manager.

 

Now, nearly hysterical, GM Coach Carrie arrived and in a calming voice asked me to review what I had done. I finally had figured out something of the last place I had been and we headed towards the Christmas section. She dialed my number and immediately found the phone by the gift bags. I had left it upside down and it was difficult to see and hear with my older eyes and ears. 

 

She continued to talk to me, further calming me down and I was finally able to order an Uber to get me home.

 

Again, so many people expressed their concern and willingness to help that I have to congratulate you on the magnificent core of associates you have.

 

Sincerely,

 

Michael Munzer

JUST A THOUGHT

Just a thought.

 

Our current political climate can be traced back half a century, or even longer. 

 

Buried under Nixon was Agnew. He was forced to resign after facing extensive bribery charges. I cannot comprehend how Americans could support Trump, due to his track record and moral recklessness. And how is Biden charged with financial issues with absolutely no proof?

 

It started with the Nixon nightmare. Except for 9/11, we have continued to become a nation of haters. Even then we found a new group of our citizens to hate, despite the fact that, unlike the terrorists, they fled their former homes to leave the oppressive and extreme Muslim culture.

 

When I was a student teacher, years before 9/11, I had a couple of students whose family fled the Islamic revolution in Iran. One of the students was a young teen who insisted on becoming as ‘American’ as possible. She insisted she wanted to become a Christian because that’s who Americans were. 

 

A few years later, during the 2002-03 school year, I taught a young student who lived on the lower East Side. Wearing a head covering every day, she rarely spoke and appeared to live in fear. She ate alone at lunch. A year earlier, the school’s playground was used as a staging ground for rescuing 9/11 victims. 

 

Politics in MY country has become convoluted and filled with rage. I once lived in a time when the minority party was called “the loyal opposition.”

Discourse was usually civil.

 

I’ve come to realize that, unlike previous years, I’m getting too old to care. If I live long enough, I’ll vote against Trump or whoever the GOP candidate is. But many of the friends who once made wonderful advocates for both sides are gone. It’s not so much fun anymore. Politics has gone from a great sport to all-out war tearing apart friends and family. 

 

It reminds me of the ‘War of Northern Aggression,’ which still has  roots in today’s climate as the differences between north (liberal) and south (conservative) cultures are filled with fear and distrust. How many times over our lives have we commented that the south is still fighting the Civil War? Yet even if we spend a day at Gettysburg, we still fail to realize how high the cost of that heritage is. Is it ‘history’ and has little to do with us, or are we doomed to repeat it by not learning from it?

 

Those of my high school classmates who are still alive remain clinging to different sides. We lost our innocence with the JFK and MLK murders. Here was a group that elected four Black classmates as our senior year officers, not because of the civil rights era we lived in, but simply because the incumbent group of privilege did a poor job. 

 

Today we remain divided. I’m so grateful that we had our 50^th reunion before Trump took office. Trump’s heritage of division, incompetence and election denial has polarized us.

 

It's my belief Trump never would have considered running for president if he hadn’t been so brutally teased by Obama at a White House Correspondents Club dinner. The man’s ego isn’t built to take a joke. We can all agree the Trump family has a history of racism. Court records give us a pattern of ongoing discrimination in their real estate business. Here was a man who was satirized and humbled in a most public forum by a man he grew up considering racially and economically inferior. He is a man so prideful that he could have no choice but to seek validation in the presidential arena, especially since his ‘birther’ claims proved to be false.

 

And his denial of the 2020 election results continues to inflame our nation and deeply encourages chaos in light of both civil and criminal charges. He simply could not accept defeat and repudiation and though his supporters will deny it, this is an example of a childish temper tantrum over incredibly high stakes. 

 

Yet many still believe his Jan. 6 behavior and its consequences are justified. Back in our senior year, we could never have imagined something like this.

 

But we should not be surprised. We quickly entered – and perhaps even caused – the civil strife over Vietnam and the rise of the counterculture. We were the ones who made drugs socially acceptable ­– and some of our best and brightest have died because of it. It is something we have passed down to our children. At the turn of the century, I taught special ed children. Many of these children were abandoned by their parents and their grandparents freely admitted that the mothers used drugs during pregnancy. But the deniers blame vaccines. 

 

We then went through Watergate, which was followed by impeachment of Clinton over sexual misconduct. Yet so many of us will freely admit to cheating.

 

And then on 9/11, we seemed to unify. But we also found a new group of our citizens to fear and hate. And Trump vocalized that fear and hate.

 

And we attacked Trump because of his “Stormy” relationship and three wives, the latest of whom frequently displays public hostility towards him. But I wonder if impeachment is justified over Clinton’s blow job or over Trump’s phone calls? In neither call did Trump get satisfaction. Hopefully Clinton did ( That’s a joke –  sort of).

 

Until January 6, we can view the former president as a man of many character flaws, disorganization, impulsive behavior and very poor decision making. His public lies and misinformation number in the thousands.

 

Though Trump is not an example of a “good” person, the reason I feel he has so much support is he is so much like us.

 

The fact is we deserve the leaders we have and may have killed the ones we need.   

 

Just a thought. 

Harry Chapin and the girls in juvenile confinemen

I did a lot of substitute teaching on Long Island, which included Madonna Heights, a place for girls not unlike the farm for boys I lived in while growing up in New Jersey.

 

These were girls who were often in trouble but not really criminals and the purpose of the place was to keep them protected and safe more than anything else.

 

Anyhow, this was a long-teerm gig and the principal told me that the girls, mostly of high school age, lkked poetry. So I decided to move in that direction.

 

I started to recite Harry Chapin’s classic  “Taxi,” knowing that these girls probably never heard of it. It was four decades since the record came out and Chapin had been dead 30 years. After I recited it, there was a lot of conversation, especially about the lyric: “We learned about love in the back of a Dodge. . .the lesspn hadn’t gone too far.” There was a lot of discussion about how the girls would have sex with the boys and then get dumped, especially after they came to this place. A few of them got pregnant during Christmas recess and could not stay there if they got an abortion, This place was run by the Catholic church.

 

I led them into a discussion about how our hopes and dreams never happened as we hoped and asked them to write about that in a poem, or in a letter to someone, perhaps God as they saw him.

 

The results were astonishing. Some of these girls were really talented writers. They poured their hearts into it.

 

The next day we did another Harry Chapin song/poem called “Dogtown.”

 

It is about the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Since colonial times, it hass been a fishing village. Today, it is home to Gortons Fish.

 

Over it’s long history, many of the fishermen from the town have been lost at sea and there is a statue of a sailor in a rain slicker gripping a steering wheel called “They that go down to the sea in ships,“ based on a Bible quotation.  Surrounding the front of the statue is a fence listing all the sailors who had perished. 

 

 

A few hundred yards down the road is another statue about a woman looking out to sea with a baby in her arms waiting and hoping her husband would return.

Chapin wrote about these women. He picks one woman who married her husband and he left for the whaling trip ten days later: “He took me up to Dogtown the dday I was a bride. We had ten days together before he left my side. He’s the first mate on a whaling ship, the keeper of the. Log. He said ‘farewell my darling, I’m going to leave you with my dog.’”

 

The girls were very upset the woman had only ten days for her honeymoon. I askled them what they knew of the Puritans from their history lessons. This was the town they settled in.  I noted that the first ttime they ever kissed was possibly when they got married as there were very strong religious rules then. The sailor had gone to Boston to find his bride and they were strictly chaperoned. 

The woman, now a three-time widow, frequently walks along the coast ranting and raving. The song ends with these verses:

“Sitting by the fireside, the embers slowly die.
Is it a sign of weakness when a woman wants to cry?
The dog is closely watching the fire glints in his eye.
No use to go to sleep this early, no use to even try.

My blood beats like a woman's,
I've got a woman's breast and thighs.
But where am I to offer them
To the ocean or the skies?

Living with this silent dog
All the moments of my life,
He has been my only husband;
Am I a widow, or his wife?

Yes, it's a Dogtown and it's a fog town,
And there's nothing around 'cept the sea pounding granite ground
And this black midnight horror of a hound.

I'm standing on this craggy cliff,
My eyes fixed on the sea.
Six months past, when his ship was due, I'm a widow to be.
For liking this half living with the lonely and the fog,
You need the bastard of the mating of a woman and a dog.

And I have seen the splintered timbers of a hundred shattered hulls,
Known the silence of the granite and the screeching of the gulls,
I've heard that crazy widow Cather walk the harbor as she raves
At the endless rolling whisper of the waves.”

 

Dogtown was the place where these impoverished widows and orphans moved to. It was an area about a mile inland from the coast and the women lived in shacks. Alll that remains is a few ruins. The rest is woods and the road into the area is chained off. If you want to visit, you have to hike in and many a tourist has become lost there.

 

The girls in the class responded to the thought of not having anyone to offer their breasts and thighs to. They were all sexually active and thought about their “dry spells.” They also absolutely hated ‘the bastard of a mating of a woman and a dog’ line. I shared the line before that about how Chapin wanted to show the horrors of living in this place.

 

We continued to review poetry for another week with more mainstream poets. 

But the girls didn’t respond with as much emotion to these poems as Chapin’s.

During that time, I discovered “Sequel.” It’s a follow-up song to “Taxi,” ten years later. It’s about how Chapin, now a very successful singer, returns to San Francisco and visits the woman in the song. She has left the luxury of 16 Parkside Lane and has learned to like herself. In the original ‘Taxi,” the woman had wanted to be an actress and he had wanted to learn to fly.  And she acted hppy inside her handsome home while he flew in his taxi stoned.

Chapin concludes this song as follows:

So I thought about her as I sang that night
And how the circle keeps rolling around
How I act as I'm facing the footlights
And how she's flying with both feet on the ground

I guess it's a sequel to our story
From the journey 'tween Heaven and Hell
With half the time thinking of what might have been
And half thinkin' just as well
I guess only time will tell.

 

The girls were quiet for some time. And I repeated the last line. I said that they will decide what their time will tell. Their future has yet to be written. But they need to create and follow a plan. The plan would be subject to constant change but having a goal will keep them out of worse places then Madonna Heights.

 

Maybe you know a girl like these?

 

 

 

 

Top Ten Women

 My top ten female entertainers

 

I see any number of top ten lists and so I’m being a joiner. My top ten have a somewhat different standard as they are actors and/or singers rather than from one category. Another factor is a personal sex appeal. 

So let’s take a look.

 

10. Martina McBride. 

A beautiful country singer, YouTube has a number of live performances and she is “real” instead of what a director thinks of her in music videos. She has a love affair with her audiences.

 

9. Nataile Wood. 

An amazing actress from the ‘40s on, she is best known for her role as Maria in ‘West Side Story’ (though her singing was dubbed). She held major roles in many films. As a child actress, she co-starred in ‘Miracle on 34^th Street.’ My favorite film as an adult was ‘Love With The Proper Stranger.’

 

To me, her incredible eyes and face were one of the most appealing of any actress of her time.

 

8. Juice Newton. This country singer has an incredible voice and stole my teenage heart with her ‘Angel of the Morning.’

Her long mane of hair is her best feature.

 

7. Shaina Twain.

Beautiful voice and incredible body but her smile is captivating. Man, I feel like that woman. Look at her ‘I’m having a Party’ video on YouTube to see just how her smile will drive any man to desire.

 

6. Denise Richards.

While she has played much more sexy and mature roles, I am convinced she is one of the most beautiful women on any planet from her role in ‘Starship Troopers.’ I saw the movie because the original book was written by my favorite author. But was stunned by her fabulous innocent-to-warrior face. 

 

5. Speak Easy Three (tie)

What man would not want enjoy the ultimate fantasy of a trio of a beautiful blond, sexy brunette and fiery redhead women. Check out their ‘When I get low, I get high’ video on YouTube. The way they sync both their bodies and eyes is awesome.

 

4. Ladyva (pronounced La Diva)

This Swiss beauty is probably the best female Boogie Woogie piano player in the world. She is also a fairly good singer. This Swiss miss has a lovely body and shows off her long, shapely legs with her tight short skirts and dresses. I also love her long, straight, hippie-style straight hair.

 

3. (tie Morgan James and Hailey Reinhart).

Both these women are part of Post-Modern Jukebox, the famed collective group of musicians. They can sing anything from swing to jazz to ssoul to standards and just about any style of music. 

Each beauty has a somewhat different voice, but make beautiful music and audiences love them.

 

2. Katharine Ross. 

I fell in love with her beauty in ‘The Graduate’ and she continued to grab my heart in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’ I do have one problem with her. She had the good sense to marry Sam Elliot instead of me.

 

NUMBER ONE Rita Hayworth.

She could, and did, outdance Fred Astaire and every other partner. Sexy as a person and in single roles, she had a come hither smile and a face that said let’s get excited.

 

Honorable mentions:

Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch, Sophia Loren. These beauties were very well known, but I wasn’t especially turned on by them.

Olivia Newton John, I fell in love with her pre-Grease country music. I honestly loved it.

 

KARMA

 Around 13 years ago, during our bitter, anger-filled divorce, the ex told me that Karma was going to catch up with me. It finally did.

 

I have been extremely depressed this year. So depressed that, among other things, I’m refusing to answer my phone and talk to the two friends I have left who have been calling and supporting me for years. For weeks, they have left a constant flow of messages. It wasn’t until today that was able to send them messages telling them why.

 

Today, I also realized I haven’t taken my meds for weeks, which include heart, diabetic and psych meds. The psych meds treat my mildly bipolar symptoms. I just don’t think about taking them. But when I do, I’ll tell myself I’ll take them in a little bit–and I forget.

 

But I don’t think the current depression is so much a sign of bi-polar as much as it is situational.

 

In the Bible, God sends Eve to Adam because he declares it is not good for man to be alone. And I’ve reaped what I’ve sown.

 

A lot of people, including my divorce lawyer, my shrink and others familiar with my ex have all stated she had serious mental issues. I have to agree. But in the early years of our marriage, we overcame problems. We loved and cared about each other. But as a Gospel song I remember says “Love is not a feeling but an act of your will.”

 

During our marriage, the bipolar punches of mania and depression kept me in trouble, both in my marriage and my jobs. Too many shrinks said I was depressed and I endured a decade of antidepressants which made me far worse.

Between our mutual issues, our lives became violent with frequent screaming battles that kept my boys awake and in fear.

 

And now, I reap what I’ve sown. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of the ex, frequently crying myself to sleep about what was lost. Ro, if you ever read this, I beg you for another chance or, at least, please end the animosity between us. I will do my absolute best to love you, lift you up, support you in the way you deserve to be treated and listen to and honor your feelings.

 

Both my boys rarely speak to me either; so the family I made is destroyed nearly beyond repair. Yet I still cling to hope.

 

After the divorce, I became involved with my high school senior prom date. We were involved, on-and-off for about five years while I traveled throughout the country and we then lived together for another seven years. But the relationship gradually eroded and when her mentally-disturbed granddaughter who was in a psych hospital accused me of touching her inappropriately, she demanded I leave. Within a few weeks, I was cleared by both local police and the state BCW. But by then, I had moved to Florida and she still wouldn’t take me back – leading me to believe there were several other issues that I failed to address.

 

Anyway, here I am in Florida, getting by on Social Security but I can’t afford a car and my cataracts prevent me from driving or renting a car. At the same time, I am unable to motivate myself enough to see an eye doctor. I also won’t see a dentist to get some false teeth.

 

And, of course, I have other health issues. Not taking care of my diabetes has resulted in the loss of half of my right foot. And an old injury from high school baseball has left me with a very bad left knee. My balance is poor. Last December, I fell into my brand new, just- decorated Christmas tree.

 

I suppose I can deal with that but I had a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day in 2021. Now heart problems were nowhere near my wheelhouse. Both my parents were alcoholics and heavy smokers. My dad died of liver disease and my mom of lung cancer. But both lived a couple of years more than predicted because they had such strong hearts. I remain easily fatigued and exercise is minimal. And the only fear I have of death is dying alone.

 

And even though I’m alive, death is constantly taking other people. The worst has been my cousin “Red.” When my parents split, I lived with my aunt and uncle for a few months and he became my unofficial “big brother.” He died about two years ago and I’ve yet to stop grieving. I recently learned his sister, my cousin Rita, about a decade older than me, has become senile. A fellow writer, I am devastated to know that her brilliant mind has left us.  And my other cousin, a long-retired policeman, is now in Florida but, like me, too disabled to travel (even to Red’s funeral) and also like me, does not communicate with others.

 

Besides family, I’ve lost so many friends, classmates and teammates. Bobby C, Debbie L, Pam W, Pete C, Lois C, Frank and Gina S, Chip, and so many others.

 

So, what am I to do about being so lonely? I’ve tried the Facebook dating app for seniors, but I rarely get a response from others. Years ago, I got a lot more response from Our Time but am not ready to try it again.

 

So, as the ex once said, Karma got me – by the balls and the brains.

Memory of a beautiful stranger

Most people are aware that I’m a writer. Unlike most people’s idea of what a writer is, I don’t write fiction. Throughout my career, I’ve been a newspaper reporter and trade magazine editor and writer. After I was forced to retire due to disability at 62, I spent a few years recovering from a number of physical problems, but I did begin writing this blog. It was greatly expanded after my ex decided to divorce me when I went on a road trip to try to discover why my life was so fucked up. During the trip, I found I enjoyed the nomadic life and after the house was sold, I used my share to buy a pick-up truck and a small travel trailer. 

 

The ultimate goal was to drive around the country and by volunteering at state and national parks, I would have no expenses except for food, gas, car payments and insurance. The parks would provide a site, electric, sewer, water and sometimes cable and internet service.

 

But before all that, I headed on a final road trip from New York State to the Florida keys visiting friends. One of my stops was a campground in St. Marys, Georgia.  I really liked this place, which was a mile from the Florida border. I decided to spend the month of March there, recovering from a rather rough Upstate New York winter. 

 

There are a number of local attractions there including a national seashore, and other national park attractions. The office had a number of brochures including one for a gambling boat out of Brunswick. It offered free boarding and two meals over a six-hour voyage. Two of those hours were used to make our way beyond the three-mile border limit into the Atlantic and back, while the ocean was quite calm. The other four hours were for gambling. I had my best night ever, winning about $500 playing $10 blackjack and hitting another $250 in a couple of slot machines. It was certainly enough to pay for campground fees for the rest of the trip.

But a minor memory of the trip returned to me more than a decade later. After the casino shut down, I went to the top deck to get away from the smoke-filled rooms. A woman whom I had met on the trip out came on deck. Early on the way out, she had lost her phone and was very upset until I found it under the table she was previously sitting at. She was probably in her mid-30s and very beautiful with her excellent hair and makeup and a lovely dress. I asked her how she did and she answered “not good” and that was the end of our discussion as we quietly sat there gazing at the stars and the harbor. I really didn’t think much about her though I enjoyed the smell of her perfume as the breeze from the boat’s movement sent it to me.

 

As I said, I had won big and wrote about that in my blog. I only mentioned her in a couple of paragraphs.

 

But more than a dozen years later the memory came back to me for some reason.  And I realized there was probably a short story in that memory.  I remember the man she was with was rather plain – bald and wearing an especially ugly pair of glasses. He wore a dress shirt and slacks. And I thought about how much out of his league she was.

 

So the writer in me began creating many scenes about this woman. I’ve never done this before and I suddenly realized this could be how fiction writers got their ideas.

 

So here are some thoughts about story ideas:

 

She was stunning. But throughout the trip, I never saw her gambling.  She was clearly bored.

So why did she go on this voyage?

 

Perhaps she was simply unhappy that the date wasn’t what she expected. She was wearing a beautiful dress that revealed a beautiful body. In Vegas and Atlantic City, people dressed up. They went to shows and gambled in beautiful casinos. Here the entertainment was a guy with a keyboard. He wasn’t bad, but he certainly wasn’t Tom Jones or Wayne Newton. And most of the men wore shirts and slacks combined with many rednecks wearing too-small tee shirts, well-worn jeans and work boots. And she certainly wasn’t paying much attention to her date as he played poker.

 

So why was she with him at all? Perhaps this was just a very disappointing first date and I imagined the discussion in the car ride back. As I said the theme was that she was way out of his league and she would be telling him so.

 

But then I took this a step further. Was this man renting her for the evening? I’ve been to Las Vegas many times on business and I suddenly realized she was dressed in a similar manner to the hookers who cruised casinos. Unlike streetwalkers, their fashion sense clearly showed the goods, but not semi-nudity. I supposed he could be spending thousands for her escort services. Perhaps that was why she was so crazed about the loss of her phone – and a very important part of her business.

 

But that story idea was a little off too. Unless he told her not to bother him, she didn’t pay any attention to him – especially after the casino closed. That didn't match the behavior of an escort. ,

 

I finally returned to the hope-disappointment theme. Was this an office romance? Could she have been the boss? Or was she sleeping her way up her career ladder and running out of time?

 

I remembered an incredibly lovely receptionist at an office I worked at after finishing high school. She was a former Miss America contestant, representing a southern state. She used her southern charms to keep visitors happy while waiting for appointments. In her early 40s, she was never given a promotion after working there for a decade and her looks were starting to age. I was a kid and I played on the company’s basketball and softball teams and the guys always speculated if she was sleeping with one of the big shots.

 

But the bottom line is this: we have a female protagonist who makes a considerable effort to please a man, and is disappointed. Hell, just how many romance novels use that same theme. Perhaps, at the age of 75, I should write soft-core romance books? I’ve certainly spent way too much time dealing with disappointment.