{i miss paper letters}

Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to the fifth annual Philanthropic Gala.  It gives me great pleasure to call to the stage a very important person to our organization; a woman who has given tirelessly of herself and her time, as well as her own resources, for years, to keep us all in worthwhile tax-deductions—hrumpf, hrumpf, excuse me, charitable causes, *wink-wink.  Please put your hands together for Marilyn McGreevy and the exorbitant amount of money she’s managed to extract from our tightly-guarded retirement accounts this year for the children of the AIDS epidemic in Africa.  Come on up here, Marilyn!

She pushed back the gilded “bamboo” chair and placed a lavender silk napkin upon its seat with the grace of a geisha.  Marilyn McGreevy had long suffered under the thumb of her controlling husband Oisin but now he was dead, and she had been looking forward to tonight’s event with fervor.  She was stunning in an ankle-length, vintage Dior gown.  For a woman of fifty, she still cut a magnificent silhouette, and her skin was like alabaster; her hair held a curl just as well as it had when she was young.  All the society wives were green, to say the least.

She stood at the podium, smiling and radiant, and began her all-out, no holds barred character assassination of the three biggest fish in the organization; she then went on down the line.  She voiced confirmation of corruption, adultery and other various unattractive vices of those staring back at her.  It went on for at least twenty minutes because everyone had been immediately and completely stunned into total silence.  One woman in the back fainted at the mention of her husband’s illegitimate teenaged son; a man near the center of the banquet hall began choking on his foie gras, another stood and pointed a corpulent finger at her but was still unable to speak; she continued until she had reached the end of her prepared remarks . . .

I really do want you all to know I’m glad to be here, I’m so very, very glad, and I’m also glad that you all could be here tonight as well, because we all know how much it hurts to be left out of such a happening, and to have to read about it on page six in tomorrow’s paper; cameras flashed incessantly from the line of reporters along the side wall who, up until this point had been wondering why they’d wasted a perfectly good Saturday night on this assignment, and the video recorder rolled on for posterity.

Now finished with all of it, and I do mean all of it, she gathered her 3×5” cards together and walked with her head held high, down the center aisle and straight out into the crisp night air.