Life's One Big Fellini Movie
Here I am, spending a small portion of my Christmas vacation in Florida with my husband and my five kids. When I woke up this morning, every thing seemed pretty normal. The Earth's rotation was stable. Stellar parallax was predictable. The universe had no evil twin. But things were about to get ugly later on. Yes, we went to breakfast at some dive that had a parking lot filled with pickup trucks that were at least a decade or so old and lots of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling and walls. It should have been a tip off to see they had decorated the place for Christmas by bordering pictures and clocks on the wall with squares of pink lights, but no, I was blind for the terror that was in store for me, my husband, and my innocent children, untouched by the harshness of reality. The minute I walked in, I new that I had taken my family into the bowels of the worst Fellini movie ever to taint the universe, for there, before us, were the Austrian twins: two gymnasts who dressed in sexy tards and suits that would have made karolyi proud. They were doing all sorts of things with their bodies that my husband would give his right arm for me to do and seemed to be shoe-ins for the next Cirque Du Soleil tryouts. Problem is, they were at least 80 years old. Yep, 60 pound women with legs that looked a hell of a lot better than mine, that had wrinkles the size of the Grand Canyon's West Rim. Although they had 50 pounds of makeup each, giving that girlish appeal of an aging hooker on a corner of the French Quarter, there isn't enough Bondo or Spackling Compound to cover up the fact that they were both Death Warmed Over. Fortunately, I chose a seat that allowed me to have my back to these writhing Olympics Hopefuls Gone Bad, but I couldn't help but wonder, amid my giggles, why the other customers and the restaurant's employees were regarding their act with fascination and respect. Seriously, I thought the whole thing was a big joke, so why didn't everyone else? I turned to watch now and again, but when they were bent backwards thrusting their crotches toward me, I couldn't help but wonder if they had done the splits on the very table from which I would partake breakfast or if they had to, as an occupational necessity, get a regular Brazilian waxing. Ugh. I carefully examined my banana pancakes for pubes, false eyelashes and flakes of foundation, but my appetite couldn't recover. I began to wonder if I had entered some parallel universe that was actually composed of the mental playground of Salvadore Dali? Or perhaps we're all really trapped in some terrible rerun of the worst Fellini movie ever to have been created--with no English subtitles (okay, maybe that's for the best.) When they finished, they passed around the hat for tips. I had to throw in a fiver just as a show of gratitude that the whole degrading and sickening experience was over. And although my appetite suffered the rest of the day at the very thought of that surreal experience, the worst part of my ordeal was that the Austrian twins had legs that made mine look like those from a cross between an wooly mammoth and a walrus paralyzed by a blubber overdose. (Not getting pretty graphics here, are you?) Now, as Fellini ended his films, so shall I end this blog: FIN