Say it was easy, Mary—blowing minds, burning fans. The day both conspire I hope the batteries in the smoke alarms have been tongue tested by someone still kid enough to mistake pain for thrill.

I’m sorry things did not work out with your boyfriend. If it is any consolation, he was from the UK and in the twenty-first century that is no longer proper justification for walking around with that ridiculous accent. And he had a Muppet face. Most of them, Mary, have Muppet faces.

We shall always be connected by the lunch ladies we shared on either extremity of the same deceased decade, serving up a suspicious menu of hamburger, meatloaf, chili and spaghetti in that order.

Chin up sister, as far as Africa the common folk snicker at the British for their Muppet faces and Tony Blair vocabularies that sailed them across each sea to prove to their dusty women back home that someone took them seriously.

They had a few good heydays, but now have taken their faces and speech back to their women who are detonating grenades of laughter tossed at an enemy made of papier maché  irony. Could you resit? If every man in your down looked like he was designed by Jim Henson.

Women inspire awesomeness in men and when we lack your approval we

learn to paint or go to war. Thomas invented the light bulb because Mrs. Edison was afraid to do it in the dark, unlike nowadays, when everyone fears doing the deed in the light, lest we remember how we are human.

Honestly, yes: my predilection for wearing tight, awesome pants with a frog puppet ready in the pocket and Buffalo Bill Belt Buck is tiringeven in the twenty first century. But if you ever here anyone accuse me of sanity again, show them this video of me moon walking in a field of goats, frog man perched on my hand, demonstrating to Maasai warriors that Americans are not the same gunned animal to colonize but instead the sort armed with the barroom grooves that earns you the respect of the entire tribe.

You’d think with the century being old enough to drink tequila that people would finally stop thinking and just install a disco ball in every room already.

Mexicans have their salsa. The Irish the river dance. Russians their waltzes and the

British exhausting excuses about Why it was not they who taught the world to dance.

Enclosed are seven 9-volt batteries that I hope you’ll take to heart and then to one of those undergraduate house parties you attend. Walk up to the cutest boy still keg standing and ask him if he’ll do the honors of determining which ones still have juice. I’ve included a SASE for you to send the ones that light a fire on his face back to me. Give him your phone number, but be careful of anything additional, he did after all, just lick batteries to impress a girl.

If those lunch ladies taught me anything other than to head to Hardees when chili was on the menu and that the proper way to eat a cup of fruit cocktail was without the slightest hint of irony, leaving always the last maraschino cherry for the syrup gods, it was that there is nothing wrong with being a lunch lady. A hamburger compassionately prepared, served awake is every bit as important as teaching kids howto moonwalk in sexual education courses, by which they will blow everyone’s

mind by making it look as easy and as graceful as a flame posed like a question

before an oscillating fan in the house of life, where the smoke alarm beeps in time

with the rhythm you’ve settled upon, where the guests you invited form a circle

as a clap emerges and you’re pushed to the center. Beneath the proverbial disco ball

someone brushes your shoulders off, grabs at your gaze and you nod, know what to do, have been waiting your whole life to exercise the knowledge and though this level of awesomeness gets exhausting, it’s better than sitting in a chair looking into life’s Muppet mirror, where everyone’s but your reflection is having trouble keeping a straight face as bomb s of hilarity boom about like half dollars of light spinning around a room alive with jive.

 

Love,