The friend who sent me the link, is more politically conservative than I. She is arguing with me that Sarah Palin is more than a beauty queen bimbo. At the same time she has some useful advice for me about how to avoid the six-year old nightmare birthday party from hell. Between the two classes where my twins are in enrolled, there are fifty children...
"Just invite the boys so you only have 25 kids to deal with. I, in the meantime, have been trying to negotiate the smallest possible party with my son. There are 10 boys in his class so I told him he can have twelve kids because all the favors I have to buy come by the dozen. So I told him I would pass on the savings to him by reinvesting it into the final product of his party. Meaning that for his Indiana Jones party, instead of getting a bag full of crap, each kid will now get an authentic Indiana Jones whip that they can take home and terrorize their younger siblings with. I figured I'd try to teach him some precepts of capitalism before it becomes totally antiquated...as it seems to be headed. :-)"
I am excited because my first-choice candidate for a live-in helper has accepted the job. It's so nice to have somebody who is excited to work for me--not because the children or I are so nice and lovable, but because in the local job market I pay top-of-market wages and am a catch as an employer. Although I have four children, the three older ones are in school most the day, I don't have a ginormous three story house to clean, I don't require every article of clothing we wear to be hand-ironed, don't require them to wear a uniform, and I am willing to provide food and pay social security.
While my conservative friend dedicates her time to worthy charities to make the world a better place, I, Wellesley graduate that I am (like Hillary and also that bitchy stock broker played by Sigourney Weaver in that 80s movie "Working Girl," the one who rightly gets what she deserves from the hard working blue collar secretary played by Melanie Griffith), in the words of the twenty-something, American current incumbent of the job (with the kind of self righteousness that you can only have when you're still subsidized by your parents)--am "taking part in the exploitation of the third world and women."
This moment of zen is seconded only by my IT industry marketing skills, which included hiring females to liven up our user conference party. On the advice of my older cousin, who at 36 married a 20 year old swim suit model and event promotions girl, I learned that I could request head shots of these girls before hiring them, dictate what they wear and request "that they not chew gum." When I told this to a good friend and colleague, he drily suggested that if JBoss didn't pan out, at the least I could get a job as head of HR at Hooters.
Ironcically, thanks to my experience at JBoss, I can now afford to contribute to the Arts as a playwright/expiate the sins of my past life and experience catharsis therein, by writing about characters as self-indulgent and flawed as myself.
A former boss of mine, who took pity on me and hired me, partly because I could talk about literature and partly because I reminded him of a Wellesely girl he dated in the fifties (he, himself, was a graduate of Harvard Law who never practiced law a day of his life, but went into advertising instead)--once had this to say about that great American contributor to the Arts, Aaron Spelling, "if you want to liven up a tier-three soap opera that is going nowhere (Melrose Place), sometimes you gotta bring on the bitch (Heather Locklear)."
Of course, if you were talking about Shakespeare, she'd be Lady Macbeth, but same premise.
