Cock-tail hour
Whereby hangs another cock-tale!:
Gaston de Rosayro
A crusty former obese colleague paid dearly for his bitchy comment on
my satire book at a cocktail party. Swaggering up to me with a drunken
gait and looking very much like a bottomous bull hippopotamus in heat he
slurred: “I read your book the ‘Serendib Spirit’. My idea of serendipity
is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a voluptuous woman
reaper.”
He thought it was funny and laughed uproariously at his own asinine
joke. No one else did. I do not take kindly to hurtful jibes and was
about to dispense the contents of my cocktail glass on the corpulent
malefactor with a generous baptism of alcohol. But a woman writer in my
little circle was faster on the draw. Her hair-triggered shot from the
lip appeared deadly accurate and efficacious to boot.
The lovely lady’s eyes blazed and it could have been my imagination
but I could have sworn that at that moment the smell of cordite
overpowered the cloudbursts of expensive Chanel in the room as she
fired: “At your age one would imagine that you should be taking only an
academic interest in sex! Besides, you’re so fat that your ID card must
state, picture continued on other side.”
Our appreciative circle exploded in torrents of raucous hilarity as
he waddled away in a huff. He moved as fast as his short, stubby legs
could carry him while heaving curses like a sperm whale billowing great
spouts of water. More importantly he would surely have got the message
that women don’t make fools of men because a good many of them are the
‘do-it-yourself’ types. |