Holiday Notes

I'm home, and I miss the sunshine and palm trees and fantastic food. It was such a nice break, and it was all the things I imagined while I was reclining in that chair with a catheter in my arm.

Of course, even on the best vacations, the beard still comes with. There's always this slight hint of Al's makin' everybody wait, and even though it fades throughout the day, overtaken by the clear blue skies and the scent of fresh waffle cones, you go to bed knowing tomorrow you have to go through it all again. And man, my razor did not want to cooperate last week!

We went to a little live show one day, western themed, and after a song and some jokes to warm up the crowd, it turned into a Dating-Game-style comedy. The reason it was a comedy was because the three men from the audience were blindfolded and the woman was an actor in a dress.

It was a half hour of body hair jokes. "She likes men with a mustache bigger than her own," "She's so generous she'll give you the hair off her back," "She's so ugly, if she were an Eskimo she'd live in an ugloo." Okay that one wasn't about hair (and yes, politically incorrect), but it went on and on.

(...And as I'm typing this, I'm watching season one of How I Met Your Mother, where another girl-with-a-mustache joke just happened.)

We are the butt of a lot of jokes. A lot more than I realize or expect, sometimes. It's weird, because sometimes I almost forget I'm a bearded lady, and I laugh. Sometimes I'm all too aware and I laugh anyway. It often depends on the precise context of the joke.

But to borrow from the man on that stage in the pink rockabilly dress: "Ah know, mah beauty is shocking." I was rooting for "her" from the first back hair joke, but after she'd been out on stage a while I warmed to her fireball character. She was confident; she knew herself and what she wanted. Yes, people were laughing at her as well as with her, but she rocked it.

We all need to learn how to laugh at our imperfections. It is so sexy.