Hoss May Have a Girlish Figure

I been thinking about all the female talents I got, and wondering if I wouldn't have been a damn good woman (a.k.a. person without package). Just check out my feminine side:

I am really pretty. I don't know how to put pictures on here, so you'll just have to take my word for it. It would be safe to say I look a lot like Nefertiti, because nobody knows what she looked like, and that's good enough for me.

I am artsy-craftsy. I have braided a 4x6-foot rug, needlepointed a 9x13-inch picture, and hooked a 3x5-foot wool rug. Some crazed ex-wives got away with the braided rug and the needlepoint, but I still have the fruits from my experience as a hooker. More mundanely, I have ironed clothes, darned socks, scrapbooked, and coveted spike heels.

I wrote a cookbook. I am an excellent cook. Everybody says I am the only one they know who can make horsemeat taste like tuna, beef, pork or chicken.

I am not afraid to be pregnant. To prove it, on a cousin's dare I swallowed a watermelon seed when I was 11.

I am not too proud to say that nobody would be envious of me, despite my prettiness, because my breasts are pretty small. I don't want your husband anyway, even if he is too good for you.

I can only think of two disadvantages to being a woman. One, you spend most of the time on the bottom, and, two, you are perpetually underpaid.

Oh, I suppose there are other disadvantages. Serious disadvantages. I mean, if you can believe it, somebody has to be Mrs. Donald Trump.

I think this should count as No. 78 in my list of 2,000-5,000 things I plan to tell you about myself. Yes, let's do that.

79. My mother always claimed that the Maudlin family was related to Bill Mauldin, the famous Stars and Stripes cartoonist of World War II fame. She said his family changed their name from Maudlin to Mauldin because maudlin means "drunk, sentimentally silly." I can't prove this name change thing, so it doesn't mean anything. But if I COULD prove it, it still wouldn't mean anything.

80. In college, our fraternity borrowed some steel tables for our annual sweetheart dance. We moved them from the Capitol to the dance site on a flatbed truck. Three of us steadied the tables while Brother Bob drove the truck. Bob drove it over a curb, dumped me and one of the tables -- on top of me. I didn't tell my folks back in Bend that I spent time in the Emergency Room but they read about it in The Oregonian newspaper. Thereafter, I always voted for 'fessing up.

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My favorite word today is parse. vb., from long division. Def.: In any distribution of food equally among several people, to give yourself the extra slice.