You'll Poke Your Eye Out...

Four pairs of eyes were glued to the table top as the glossy pictures glinted in the glare of the Tiffany light hanging above.  Summer picked up a card and looked at it intently.  Stacey poised her pen above her paper, ready to write.  Tiffany stared blankly around the room - wishing to be anywhere but there.  The chubbiest one of the group, the one most unlikely to be seemingly teeming with creative juices suddenly burst forth with giggles.  All broke into wide smiles as she recanted her latest caption: " Stacey has left me for another man, the worst has come to pass.  Now I set here, a broken man, on bricks that hurt my ass!"  She giggled and carefully copied the words from her scratch paper to the bottom of the card where the naked man was poised next to a pool.  He seemed to be watching her intently, daring her to gaze upon his groomed nether-regions and beckoning her to join him for an interesting game of naked water polo. 

They were in full bachlorette party mode.  The invites had all been addressed and properly captioned with naked men longing for the loss of one of the lovelies from the shores of Singletonism.  All were sad and down-trodden  - from the waist up.  All four girls contributed captions and headers and made jokes involving forgotten underwear and 8-balls.  The merriment continued into the wee hours of the night.  Twas nearly ten o'clock and way past the chubby one's bed time when the posse finally parted ways.

When the chubby one awoke this morning at six AM- she pushed her purring feline out of the way and slapped at her alarm clock.  She slept in the shower, eyes barely open while sudsing up her long, hair that seemed to be falling out in chunks as of late.   She blamed stress.  She dried off and then put her hair in pin curls and went to watch the rest of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - a morning ritual as important as most people's morning coffee.

And then it happened.

With five minutes to spare she went to put on her jewelry and realized with a start that she must've had a total mental breakdown somewhere between waking up this morning and this moment that was occurring between herself and her stark reflection in the mirror.  

She forgot to put on her make-up.

Having not left the house without her face on since the early eighties, she rushed into the bathroom, threw open her case and deftly applied the works:  foundation, eyeliner, dark green eyeshadow, mascara and sunny pink lipgloss.

She stared at her reflection and contemplated the cost of Prozac. 

And clown school.