The Tale of Duck Envy
The road to Bed Bath and Beyond is fraught with danger and excitement.
It was a dark and stormy night, and I was home all alone. It was the kind of night when great bolts of lightning and deafening thunder can only make you imagine that Dr. Frankenstein’s anatomy project will be about to rise at any moment. The kind of night when only nefarious characters skulk about, darting from shadow to shadow and murder most foul is on everyone’s mind. The kind of night when any self-respecting queen hunkers down behind safely bolted doors to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and gives herself a pedicure and a cucumber facial. The night was too scary for me to take a shower, for fear of Norman Bates giving me a cutlery demonstration through the shower curtain, so I began the evening by lighting some candles and luxuriating in a hot, steamy, cleansing bubble bath and let “Calgon take me away!”
My usual bath routine is thus: First I take several little rubber duckies and playing the part of Queen Elizabeth the First, I re-enact the sinking of the Spanish Armada. Then I pretend to be the Unsinkable Molly Brown and use my largest duckie to bump into the biggest outcropping of bubbles and re-enact the sinking of the Titanic. (Oh that Leo DeCaprio could stand on my “duck” and shout “I’m the king of the world.” The bastard has stopped returning my calls.) I finish up by becoming Queen Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor and using my most bejeweled duckie, re-enact her triumphant tour of the British Common Wealth of 1953 aboard the royal yacht Britannia.
Studying Liz has helped me perfect my queen’s wave. (Screw the light bulb, touch the pearls, screw the light bulb, touch the pearls.)
On this particular night, I emerged from the bathroom and promenaded into the bedroom. (Even when alone, a true queen must enter a room with style and grace.) Thus, I entered the room as if I were that most legendary of the Zigfield Follies girls, Fanny Brice ready to perform a fan dance minus the fans. I was so au natural, that I wasn’t even wearing nail polish. Most fittingly, the radio was playing “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. Since I believe that air drying prior to getting dressed helps prevent a run in your nylons, I proceeded to prance about the room to the music and shake my money maker, thus speeding up the evaporative process. It could have been an audition for the cast of “Naked Boys Singing.” All I lacked for a complete show was a stripper pole, a peacock feather, and a dozen doughnuts for a ring toss onto my “single mast schooner.”
Since I lived on the top floor of an apartment building, I seldom closed the curtains. Just as I was buffing my bum with the towel, I happened to glance up and out the window. To my horror, between flashes of lightning bolts, there was a pair of eyes glued to a window across the courtyard enjoying the show of my “full monty” and my not-yet-ready-for-prime-time choreography. (Cue the scary organ music).
My boy scout emergency fire training came in handy as I stopped, dropped to the floor, and rolled over to extinguish the lights. Next, I crawled over to the window and closed the curtains. A few moments later, I parted the curtains just a fraction to peek out and see if the voyeur was still watching. They had also closed their curtains, but I saw them part their curtains just a little also, as they were peeking too. We both repeated this tit-for-tat curtain peeking routine two more times before I crawled away from the now-covered window.
The room was now pitch black, as the thunder clapped loudly making the whole building rattle. I felt like Audrey Hepburn in “Wait Until Dark,” panicking about what to do next. Just then my straight, unsuspecting roommate came blundering home and I screamed like a little schoolgirl as he opened the door. When he asked me what the matter was, I quickly told him that I stepped on a spider with my bare foot. I’m not sure he bought that story, but the interrogation ended there.
Like Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window,” for days and weeks later I was obsessed with the occupant of the window across the way. Do they know who I am? How much did they see? Will they tell the bishop? Did they sell tickets? I had to know; were they male? Were they cute? Were they available? A couple of weeks later, I pretended to be taking a survey of apartment residents about the quality of the swimming pool, and nervously I knocked on the door in question. I waited on pins and needles for the door to open. Could this be the beginning of a romance or the end of my sterling reputation? The door slowly opened. Oh, damn it! A university coed answered. So, romance was out of the question. Luckily though I did not know who she was and hopefully she did not recognize me either.
The moral of this story is: unless you are charging admission, close your drapes.
Like always these events leave us with many important questions:
- Is it proper for a queen to wear the pearls in the bathtub?
- Does this experience mean that my ship has sailed?
- Do the duckies experience “Duck Envy”?
- What brand of bubble bath has the longest-lasting bubbles?
- Should I star in a reality TV show, “The Real Queens of Cache Valley”?
- Would there be a market for a “Perils of Petunia” pin-up calendar?
These and other important questions to be answered in future chapters of The Perils of Petunia Pap-Smear.