Baby, I swear I’m a virgin. I promise.
The scene: 4th grade. Miss Andriola’s classroom. Me wanting so badly to be as popular as the kids who didn’t have to buy IOU sweatshirts from the outlet mall.
After several of my classy fourth-grade peers noted that the hat I got for Christmas looked like one of Debbie Gibson’s {available for viewing here}, I felt it was necessary to tell them that, in fact, it was a Debbie Gibson hat. I casually mentioned that, you know, she was my cousin. I was met with disbelief, of course. Joey Galione shook his head and Katie Botsch rolled her eyes. I couldn’t let their skepticism win. That night, I begged and kissed my mom’s feet until she signed 100 squares of paper with the name ‘Debbie Gibson.’
She really did it.
How cool is my mom?
Didn’t work though. Well, maybe it fooled a few. But, as I proudly passed out my cousin’s autograph the next day, some jerkwad said, ‘I have a signed poster from Bop magazine hanging on my wall, and this signature doesn’t look at all like that one.’
This one comment set back my popularity a whole year. If only I could remember who said it… I’d take revenge now.
Not really. But I like to sound threatening sometimes. So watch out.
*******
I recently called my mom and told her that I’d found my first grey hair. “Is it down there?” she asked. In fact it was! She’s so wise (I’ll tell you why in a minute). I guess that’s where they start in my family.
This made me feel very old, as I remember my very first pubic hair. It debuted a long time ago. A pioneer on its own, it poked through my underpants right around the same time people were just forgetting the whole Debbie Gibson debacle. I saw it in the bathroom of Fullerton Elementary and walked back to my classroom with my head held high because I had become a real woman. So what if I was ten? I was a woman. A woman with one pubic hair, but still a woman.
And now another pioneer hair has appeared on its own in a whole different color. Hello there, silver crotch fox.
I felt like this should be something I kept to myself, but the topic arose at a girlie brunch the other day, and I realized that there are other women my age with a similar vaginal changing of the seasons. Our solution is to stop waxing and shaving. We hope that more pioneers will come forth and soon change the entire color of our pubis.* At this point, we will grow our hair to be as long as a beard in order to create what we call Santa Crotch. Hopefully then our vaginas will look very wise, and we will be able to make a living by charging people to ask their lifelong questions to a sage in vaginal form. It’s amazing how big dreams can get over a long brunch.
*How great is the word ‘pubis?’
*******
Poor cows. They need not worry about pubic hairs or celebrity cousins. However, they sure have a lot of flies by their eyelids. AND… the milking cows need to constantly give birth in order to lactate. Cow farmers of course don’t let these cows get pregnant on their own. No! They are on a tight schedule and have no time to waste for courting bulls or the typical female analysis required before insertion is allowed. So they inject them with sperm manually (which means hands, and cows don’t even have hands, so you know that I’m talking about a horrifyingly unromantic conception).
Doesn’t this make for some pretty confused cows? Don’t you think some are sitting around at brunch saying, “No! I swear I didn’t have sex, mom. I’m sorry.” or “I’m totally related to Jesus. All my 13 calves were immaculately conceived.”
I’d be so angry if I got pregnant and didn’t even have the pleasure of going through the whole act of penetration. I bet if cows knew how to produce TV, they’d have so many shows based on reenactments of the times they didn’t know they were pregnant until they had a baby in the toilet. Sadly, humans are the only ones to have access to both TV production equipment and surprise babies in toilets.
*******
After reading these three stories again, I come away with this:
I hope there is life on other planets and that they are way more sophisticated than we are.