Her “wooing doth not end like an old play”
Terri is single, 36 years old, female and has two cats. These facts you see, place her in a particular category. You should by all accounts find her ad in the lonely hearts column of a broadsheet, under "professional woman seeks man" and it should read:
Mixed race female, gsoh, likes cinema, travel, reading, the theatre and good food. Looking for friendship, romance and possible long term commitment.
Translated into very simple terms all of the above means: 35 plus, single and desperate for a shag. Terri can't dispute this assessment since at various times of the day she is one of those three things and periodically all three simultaneously. Friends have given up on trying to pair her off with prospective mates. She has respectively been classed as fussy, high maintenance and generally weird. At times Terri has been told she is all three these things concurrently; which makes her feel immensely proud since she is helping to prove the hypothesis that all women are superb multi-taskers.
Terri enjoys her own company and sometimes craves it. Evidence of this can be seen by the long list of rentals on her DVD internet site, the humungous pile of books next to her bed and the persistent flashing of the ignored messages on her answer phone. Don't misunderstand her now. This does not mean Terri does not suffer bouts of loneliness. Because she does But she seems to want to turn to aloneness more often than not. Terri fears this illness for solitude which she suffers from may never be cured and, has in her wilder moments contemplated giving up her urban existence and running off into the hills to become a hermitess and live the good life. But sadly, she lacks the gumption, likes hot baths, her microwave, central heating, DVDs and her mobile phone far too much. And is also a hopeless gardener.
So the simple fact of the matter is that Terri presents herself and her friends with a bit of a conundrum: how to get her hooked up and out of hermitess mode?
Certain
options have been considered:
A go
clubbing every weekend - preferably not in the gay clubs she has been
frequenting as she is seeking heterosexual attentions
B join
a club which will provide a new skill and new acquaintances, preferably male
and not gay
C do
a course which will improve her steadily age-decaying mind and provide new acquaintances,
again preferably male and not gay
D learn
to drive which will allow her to travel vast distances and meet many new people,
preferably male and not gay
E fraternise at work
F stand on a street corner as a last
resort
A few problems have arisen:
Option
A has invariably caused Terri to meet VERY drunk, short, fat, smelly men who thought
she was Courtney Cox and they were Matthew Perry. Wroooong!
Alcohol is a wonderful mind enhancing drug. Alternatively, boys no older than her current
charges would accost her with a cheeky grin and the words “Hello darling, fancy
a quick one?”
“Not
till you’re eighteen and legal love or the laws on under-age sex change.” has
become Terri’s standard response.
Option B has provided activities Terri enjoys between the hours of 10.30am to 11.30am, Monday to Friday. Does no-one work? And when an activity finally surfaced during the evening or the weekend, its entire enrolment consisted of women over sixty with sons long since married or moved abroad and one male aged 42, also undeniably gay. Sigh!
For option C things seemed brighter - lots of things for Terri to do: macramé in 5 easy steps, fighting stress on many levels, train-spotting for beginners etc. The only hitch - getting to and from the education centres, which seemed determined to hide in the darkest, dingiest corners of any area and have insisted on being practically inaccessible by public transport. She has decided she might need a car.
Which leads neatly on to option D. This is something even Terri can pull off. She’s always been good at following instruction and is somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to honing new skills. Okay, so she’s stopped and started (pardon the pun) not for lack of ability but simply the constraints of time. So a concerted effort was made and the deed was done. Terri has also been officially adopted into her driving instructor’s family since she spent so much time on her lessons that her instructor’s husband began to think his wife was having an affair. Terri had to be invited round to prove this point to the contrary. Having a gender ambiguous name can present its own challenges. The instructress did however want to carry the deception on just that little bit longer since her husband was suddenly paying her a great deal of attention. Terri now regularly baby sits for the couple while they have much needed one to one time. She thinks that this counts in her favour as community service. Terri has decided this can be put on lay-away on her social services account just in the event that she ever decides to take up the offer of one of the pip squeaks we’ve mentioned in option A and then come a cropper when she discovers he’s an undercover copper.
Since Terri has passed her driving test she has come to realise that she needs a car. Fearing the world of incomprehensible automotive parts, being geographically challenged and lacking any ability to understand the entire mapping system of the British motorways; she has swiftly begun to explore option E.
Now, if memory serves her, she has tried this route once before and if she’s not mistaken it was a bit of a fiasco. But, she girded her loins and was determined to spring once more into the lion's den. Terri made elaborate plans of how to catch the single available and half way decent man which work provided. She got herself invited to an A-List staff party. She dressed appropriately, wore make-up and was very genial. She joined in when they bitched about the bosses and she participated in the making fun of the staff stooge episode. She even smoked some weed for Dutch courage. All systems were set to go.
One quick sweaty sloppy snog later and she ran for cover and was never more relieved. Even better news is that hardly anyone at work knows about it - she thinks. She hopes!
So here she is, having to face the prospect of option F. And as we all know F stands for failure.
Now when it comes to clothing for this option Terri’s convinced she can cobble together something from her 1980s trunk in the attic and she also has several cinematic role models to follow:
Julia Roberts - "Pretty Woman"
Sharon Stone - "Gloria"
Melanie Griffiths - she can't remember the name of this one, but Melanie definitely played a hooker. She vaguely remembers that Ed Harris was in it and a cute little kid too.
Terri’s also been studying the Karma Sutra, watching The Joys of Sex and she’s been re-reading a GCSE biology book about the reproductive abilities of the amoeba – it was the only one she could sneak out of the Science Department without anyone getting too suspicious. Terri feels she is almost ready. A small and truly minor snag is that her day time job leaves her so shattered that she may find it difficult to perform at a moment's notice. She has thought of recording moaning sounds to run on a continuous loop so that her prospective gentlemen callers will feel that they are getting their money's worth, not that she’s planning on doing it for the money. She’s simply waiting for her very own Richard Gere type to step out of a limo and onto a kerb very near her.
Even while exploring her wardrobe to accommodate the bringing to fruition of option F, she knows deep down that she’s probably going to opt out and revert back to type:
35+ female, two cats, single, lonely and desperate for a shag, but gsoh.
Terri’s mobile phone beeps her out of her prostitute to privileged princess day dream.
Bo
Love it, Rae! Looking forward to the next one!
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