Humor

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

In the previous 75th Birthday Party article, I mentioned that in the summer of 2002, someone or a group of somebodies in the Georgia Republican Party put a 32-year-old college accounting instructor temporarily into my life. Her Christian Mingles dating website said that she was divorced. Actually, she was not even legally separated. She delivered to me this message.

“If you join the Republican Party, you would probably be elected the Governor of Georgia in 2010.” As a signing bonus, I would also get as my trophy wife, a former Miss America Pageant finalist, who was recently divorced from a Lockheed-Martin aircraft executive. Her husband had blatantly cheated on her for a younger future trophy wife, so she was now a very wealthy woman in her mid-thirties, occupying by herself a huge McMansion in the most pricy part of Cobb County, GA.

Almost immediately after the college instructor disappeared into the fog, the beauty queen posted a profile on Match.com then immediately contacted me. She claimed to have met me, while she was married and I was planning the details of the award-winning Smyrna, GA Downtown Revitalization Plan. I didn’t remember her. I would have remembered meeting a beautiful woman like her.

When I answered her Match.com greeting, she immediately sent me her telephone number. When I called her, she immediately started listing all her qualifications as a trophy wife for someone with political ambitions.

She did not ask me anything. I didn’t volunteer any information about myself, since I figured that she would have asked, if she was interested in me. She then surprised me by inviting me over to her house for us to meet in person, then suggested that I be her guest for dinner at the Atlanta Country Club afterward.

I was immediately suspicious. In Virginia, my closest friends had been some of the intellectual elite of Washington, DC . . . administrators at the Smithsonian Institute and National Geographic Society. In Georgia, I was a relative nobody. She had mentioned something about Lockheed, so I finally figured out that she was the wife chosen for me.

What can I say? She was visually perfect in every way – looked more like 27 than most women in their mid-30s. She suggested that I pour us a glass of wine, so we could chat awhile, before going over to the club for dinner. After I poured the wine, she sat in perfect posture and, daintily took a sip of wine. Her eyes undressed my body from head to foot and informed me, “You’re much taller and more muscular than my former husband.” She then asked her first romantic question:

“Richard, why do you not want to work for a corporation?”

Say what? On the phone, she had not asked anything about my professional life or past experiences. Why would she ask such a strange question now? She must be on some political agenda.

I eventually answered that two years of my mandatory internship experience was with an incorporated architecture and engineering firm in suburban Washington. However, architects have architecture practices. We do not work in large plants that build airplanes. I then asked her why she asked that as her first question. She didn’t answer.

There was no future here in this McMansion. I slurped down the rest of the wine and set my glass down on the coffee table. I thanked her for the wine, told her that she was a lovely lady then said that I was going to get on back to Jasper.

She was stunned and couldn’t get out a complete sentence. She was in such a stage of shock that she didn’t even try to stand up until I was at the door. I said “Bye!” and let myself out the door. She kind of gasped out a faint, “Goodbye . . . what did I do?” I didn’t answer and laughed all the way home.

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PS: In contrast, twelve years earlier, the first question that Vivi the French actress ever asked me, was:

“Bonhomme Ree-shard, may I kiss the hands that made this wonderful chevre?” (goat cheese).

Now THAT caught my attention!