Take me for what I am: an attractive spitter.

I'm attractive.

By attractive, I mean of course that I attract crazy, irritating and very often loathesome human beings in much the same way cow doody attracts flies. The only reason John Mark Karr hasn't followed me home is that he hasn't met me. (And I'm not seven years old.)

Not for nothing, but that guy is a stone cold freak. I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about him.

This weekend I took my daughter away for a birthday celebration weekend. We shopped, we ate, we shopped and then we put on our cute clothes and headed to the Starlight Theatre to see RENT live. (As opposed to seeing it dead.)

Kitten and I love RENT. We know every word to every song, we've seen the movie and when she found out the musical was coming to Starlight, she wanted very much for the two of us to see it together. For her birthday, I bought tickets several weeks in advance because I'm clever like that. After all, buying tickets weeks in advance means you automatically get good seats.

Imagine my surprise when we arrived at the theatre to find that we were in row X....which as many of you may know, comes right before Y...which comes right before Z.

Z as in the last freaking letter of the alphabet. Z as way in the freaking back. I paid thirty-five bucks a pop for those tickets. In my cheap brain, I truly expected that thirty-five dollars each meant I'd get good seats. Crazy good seats. Seats within spitting distance of the stage, should I be suddenly overtaken with the desire to hock a loogie on a member of the cast for no good reason.

No matter though. I was all kinds of happy to be there and to experience the musical with my Kitten. All kinds of happy that is until the aforementioned crazy, irritating and very often loathesome human beings sat down in front of me in all my row X glory.

In front, to my left and within that highly coveted spitting distance sat four twenty-one year olds whose behavior truly made me want to spit on them.

I know they were all twenty-one, by the way, because of the newly legal zest for drinking beer only twenty-one year olds posess. Even though Starlight hands out a little flyer that reminds patrons to remain in their seats until intermission, the draw of the over-priced beer and the fact that their parents were no longer the boss of them meant that at least two members of the fab four had to get up approximately every 7 minutes to purchase more alcohol and to pee out the beer they purchased 7 minutes prior.

I hated them so much I wanted to hurt them in some sick, "we'll have film at 11" kind of way. More than once I was swishing my saliva around and trying to figure the exact trajectory so that I would hit one of them in the head without chancing any stray spray falling on an actual grown up.

But it doesn't stop with the four Animal House extras. Oh no. About five minutes before the curtain went up, the woman who was the actual honest-to-goodness model for the popular bobble-head dolls as seen on TV commercials, sat down right smack dab in front of me. The stage actually disappeared from my field of vision and was replaced by her gigantic, way too large for her body, cranium.

I again began vigorously swishing and wondering whether I could experience a direct spit hit while making it somehow seem that one of the keg standing kiddies was the guilty loogie lobber.

During the performance, which was completely brilliant even though I couldn't actually see it, the young drunks never ending need to get up and consume mass quantities meant that crazy big-head woman and her equally big behind had to repeatedly stand up to let them pass. I don't know what I did in a past life that so angered the theatre gods, but I do know I will never look at Levi's, beer or bobble heads the same way again.

Next time I take Kitten to see a musical will be different. I'm going to plan a little better. Maybe I'll check the seating chart before I order the tickets. Maybe I'll spend twice as much cash so as to ensure we get close enough to see 'em sweat.

Or maybe I simply need to start practicing my form so that when I spit, it actually goes somewhere rather than just running down my chin. Is there a class for that? Something online perhaps? A "Spitting for Dummies" book? What about, "How to Spit on Fat Heads and Drunk Kids and Not Get Caught Dot Com"?

Moving on now.....even though I would much rather sit here and come up with fun ways to learn to spit for distance.

How about, "The Secret to My Success" by Jack Spit?

OK. Quitting now. Really. I mean it this time. Cross my heat, spit in my eye.

Take me or leave me.

Copyright © 2004-2006, Sherri Bailey
This blog may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the author.



Tell me you love me at: HumorWriter@gmail.com

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Shut up. It makes me feel better.

My oldest and first born child...my beauty...my daughter...my Kitten... is about to turn twenty-two.

Holy crap on a cracker, Batman.

Last night when I was not sleeping, I was thinking about my pregnancy and my baby's birth and I got all misty eyed.

Misty eyed and pissed off.

Gather round, kids. We're about to take a trip down Woman Scorned Lane in my beautiful 1984 model ex-husband mobile.

Picture it: Wide-eyed barely twenty-year-old southern girl with huge brown hair and brown eyes married to twenty-seven-year-old Drill Sergeant in the US Army. If she's cute, he's gorgeous. Brown hair, blue eyes, olive skin and horns kept cropped short in that authoritative military way our government appreciates. (Did I say horns? I meant horns.)

August in Kentucky is so miserably hot and humid, I can't even tell you. No really. Before you're allowed to move away, the Kentucky Board of Tourism makes you swear on Secretariat's grave not to tell how hot and humid it is there. You're also not supposed to tell anyone there is really no such thing as blue grass, so you didn't hear it from me. I don't want the tourism Mafia blowing up my Focus.

Even though I hardly gained any weight during my pregnancy and only looked like I was carrying a basketball under my shirt, I felt like a lumbering ox. A hot and sweaty lumbering ox who had eaten a basketball.

On August 21, I was sitting at a softball game watching Mr.X Number Uno play short. There was little my hubby enjoyed more than softball, except for maybe making me cry. He had an enthusiasm for both that was inspiring.

During the game, I felt OK, but once in awhile I had a little twinge. As my basketball was two weeks late, it occurred to me that perhaps I might soon give birth.

"I'm tired," said Mr. X when before we went to sleep. "When you go in labor, you need to let me sleep until at least 2 AM."

I woke up in labor at 1:15 exactly and proceeded to freak out and definitely not let him sleep until 2. In fact I went from sound asleep to "Miss Scarlet, Miss Scarlet! I don't know nuttin 'bout birthing no babies!" in three seconds.

The whole eight minutes it took to get to the hospital, I was repeating the calming mantra I had learned in my weekly "How to Do Something Women Have Been Doing Since the Beginning of Time" class.

"I do not want to have a baby. I do not want to have a baby. I do not want to have a baby."

I clicked my heels together, too, but it didn't work. Exhibit A: my 22 year old kid.

When we arrived at Ireland Army Hospital, my beloved parked in the south forty and I penguin-walked all the way to the front door, stopping only to pray aloud to my Lord and Savior that I would tell the world about his miracle working abilities if he would only make this painful thing inside me turn out to be a gas bubble...which would not have to come out my vagina.

Once inside, a kindly Army nurse saw me praying and waddling and offered me a wheel chair. "She's fine," said the man who did this to me.

After finally making it upstairs to the lavishly decorated Army baby factory, I settled in a white room with nothing but a bed, one chair and a gigantic clock right in front of the bed. The chair was for my coach, the bed was obviously for me and the clock was so that I could while away my hours in hell watching the hands tick around and around waiting for my coach to show back up and sit in his chair.

You guessed it. He left. He had "stuff" to do.

In fairness, it wasn't like he didn't warn me the entire nine months prior to this day. "If you think you're going yell at me when you're in labor, you're not. If you yell at me one time, I'm leaving."

Like a good pathetic door mat, I kept my mouth shut throughout my labor. Lotta good it did me. He left anyway. My nurse came in and angrily asked me where my husband had gone. In fact, she was flat mad. I was too pathetic to be mad. I had no idea I was allowed.

Miraculously Mr. X showed back up just as they were about to take me into the delivery room. He threw on some scrubs, commented on how good he looked in them, and followed me into a deeper level of hell where an evil Nazi scientist proceeded to pull something the size of a seven pound six ounce bag of flour from my hoo-ha.

Did I mention I didn't get any drugs? Feel free to worship me as a birthing goddess.

It hurt something awful, but fearing my Darling would bolt again, I didn't open my mouth.

And then I saw her. The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. The basketball turned daughter was suddenly out of my belly and in my arms and I was in mad love.

I was also hemorrhaging.

Like ducks fly south in the winter, mean drill sergeant husbands fly to boobie bars at 9 in the morning to celebrate the birth of their only daughter and don't really wait around to see if their baby birthers are OK.

And I wasn't. The entire day, miles and hours away from any family who loved me, I laid in recovery drifting in and out of consciousness. "What's wrong with me? Where's my baby? Where's my husband?" Each time I'd wake up, I'd repeat again and again the same questions.

At nine that night, after the first of two transfusions I would have, Mr. X showed up. His first words? Grab your Kleen-ex and hang onto your heart strings 'cause this is a Lifetime moment like no other.

"You look like death warmed over."

Are you feeling warm and fuzzy? Dabbing at your eyes? Wait! There's more!

The next morning, as I held the baby we made, my husband told me he was leaving for a week to play in a softball tournament in another state.

"How are we gonna get home from the hospital?" the baby-making door mat asked.

"You know those two gay guys that live in our apartment complex?" asked he. "I asked them to come pick you up. I'll leave the car seat with them."

"We don't even know them," I said.

"They're nice. You don't think I'd have somebody I didn't trust pick you guys up, do you?"

He left for the week, played softball and broke his thumb...although I prayed for him to break something more painful...like his penis.

So that's the story of how the most beautiful girl in the world was born. Would I do it all over again?

Yes. And again, and again, and again.

Of course, if I did it again, I would also be arrested right in the hospital for bludgeoning a drill sergeant to death with an umbilical cord and a coach's chair.


I'm not ready to make nice. But I am ready to make a voodoo doll.



Copyright © 2004-2006, Sherri Bailey
This blog may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the author.



Tell me you love me at: HumorWriter@gmail.com

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I'm too young to be flat.

I am writing tonight from the uncomfort of a bed in a lodge in the big mid-western city that I frequent when for no good reason I feel the need to leave the comfort of home. I think I have a chromium imbalance or something.

My son loves this place... this Great Wolf place. We came last year and although I swore to the OCD gods that I would never return, my love for my son is so great and my memory so crappy, here I is again.

First of all, the rooms here cost approximately one-jiggetyy-jillion dollars a night. Not only is the OCD Chick crazy in that special obsessive-compulsive way that makes me irresistable to psychiatrists, I am also crazy cheap. Thanks to my loving Pop, I tend to see money as something evil that I will never have enough of...therefore, I should never spend it on anything fun or frivolous.

This hotel epitomizes all that is fun and frivolous, if you're 12 years old that is. I honestly don't think my parents spent this much money on me for the duration of my childhood from birth to eighteen. In fact, I don't think they would have spent this kind of dough on me if I had needed surgery.

There is a massive indoor water park, outdoor pools, an arcade, and a fort with bunk beds and TV in it. It's Beulah Land for kids. He and his friend are in fact so happy, I think they may be actually having tiny happiness seizures.

Me? Not so much.

My OCD doesn't like for me to be in the top floor of any building for a myriad of reasons. Imagine my delight when I discovered our room was on the very bottom floor. As is often the case for me, my delight turned to sheer panic when I began to ruminate about the terrible things that happen to bottom floor dwellers.

People who are on the lowest level are the poor saps who get raped and pillaged when escaped prisoners break in their patio doors.

People who are on the lowest level get flattened when the fat people on the upper floors jump up and down and cause the hotel to fall down.

I sent the boys packing to the water park so that I could perform my many inspections, sanitizing rituals and acts of voodoo. While they were sliding down sky high water slides, I was wiping down every surface with Clorox Wipes, pulling back the covers to check for the stray short and curly and looking under the table for gum.

It was during said inspection process that I noticed the crack in the ceiling and the off color spot where I am certain shoddy contractors instructed poorly paid illegal immigrant laborers to patch an area of stress in the hotel's structure. After running my fingers through my hair rapidly and throwing up a little in my mouth, I did what I always do when I am having a tiny freak out attack.

I called someone who gives a damn. Since Puddin Butt aka Mr. Man was at work and unavailable to assist in taking me down, the Evil Red-Headed Berta Lou is speed dial number eight.

"I'm freaking out!" I said.

"Afraid there is sperm all over your room, are you?"

"No. Well, yes. But I've already sanitized the room thereby making it sperm free. Now I'm afraid the hotel is going to fall down and squish us," I said.

"Go get an umbrella," the Evil BL said. "If you can't find an umbrella, get yourself one of those picnic cover things and sleep under that."

You see why she's my best friend. She's brilliant.

I'm trying to be a good girl and not do anything that would take away from the happiness my offspring and his peer are deriving from this adventure. Though it's true I'm a wreck on the inside, on the outside I'm June Friggin Cleaver.

Oh! And did I mention our room number has a number I don't like and can't even type in it? You know... that one between five and seven.

On the bright side, I'll probably be on national TV before this "vacation" is over. I'll be the bleach blonde spot at the bottom of the debris that was once the Great Wolf Lodge. At least I'll look thin.




Copyright © 2004-2006, Sherri Bailey
This blog may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the author.



Tell me you love me at: HumorWriter@gmail.com

Tell me you hate me at: Yeah. I'm so sure I'm going to make that easy for you.



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Hey… look what I can do!

You know what? I’m tired of being me today. What with the menopausal hormone imbalances, a thyroid the size of a walnut on steroids and the odd electric sensation that rips through my brain from time to time leaving me all dizzy and weird, I’ve decided to kiss the tired and aching Sher good-bye and get in touch with my inner child…Sherri Lynn.

Tomorrow I’m leaving the heels at home and wearing shoes with laces. Laces I will double knot and to which I will attach a bell. Or a bow. Or something else entirely festive. Maybe even a multicolored pom-pom made of yarn.

I will not wear a bra tomorrow. (No…you cannot know where I work.) Instead I will wear a shirt with kitty cats and unicorns that will match my Garanimals purple pants with elastic around the waist. I’ll constantly point to my chest and say, “Look at my pretty kitties”.

When someone calls me and attempts to suck me into the grown up world of business, I will distract them by saying, “Hey… hey… hey! Wanna know what I can do? Wanna know what I can do? I can say my numbers all the way up to ten without messing up!”

And should someone come into my office and sit down at my desk to talk about contracts and addendums and other equally grown up and wholly mind-numbing words, I will spin around and around in my chair until I get sick and throw up.

If my secretary, who is young and as such, full of vim and vigor, tells me I have an appointment, I will dance around while grabbing my crotch until she lets me go potty… where I will stay for a crazy amount of time playing in the sink and soaking the entire bathroom in tap water. When eventually she comes to try to get me out, she will find the door locked and no amount of coaxing or promises of a new toy will get me to unlock it. Instead, she’ll hear me giggle and flush various and assorted bathroom items down the toilet.

I will not eat my vegetables, I will not mind my manners and I will not go to bed without a fight. I will pick up worms and old Band-Aids I find on the street and stuff them in my pocket and when told to wash my hands, I will run them under the water and not use any soap at all.

There will be plenty of public nose picking, tons of kid cussing (like “poop head” and “stupid head” and “booger head”) and if I have time and I can get Mr. Man to drive, I will hold my hand out the window of the car just to see if it really will fly off.

It’s gonna be sweet. You should try it, too! Let’s all turn back the clock tomorrow, OK? It’ll be a movement. It’ll sweep the country. It’ll make the news…but we’ll never know ‘cause we’ll be watching those brainwashing commies otherwise known as the Wiggles.

I’m getting too excited. I’d better stop writing and go potty before I have an accident.

Send me an email(humorwriter@gmail.com)and tell me what you’re going to do to turn back your own clock and I’ll do what I always do with your emails… I’ll publish them here and then make fun of you for writing. (In love… I do it in love people.)

Take a Trip Around the Sun. Good stuff.


Copyright © 2004-2006, Sherri Bailey
This blog may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the author.



Tell me you love me at: HumorWriter@gmail.com

Tell me you hate me at: Yeah. I'm so sure I'm going to make that easy for you.



Visit Ms. Crazy On Her Face Online