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My Weekend

 I'm ready for retirement. I know this because I spent this weekend's date night at a concert of elderly white men.


The men formed the Maplewood Glee Club, and they performed the hits of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. In one risqué interlude, they tried out a Dylan ballad.

"You're on a date?" said my friend, who was sitting nearby. "When my husband and I found sitters, in the early days, we would just run out the clock at Target. If dinner finished early, you'd wander around Target, because you wouldn't want to return to the babies before you had to."

This is the greatest idea I've heard in a long while. A Target trip sounds like a week in Turks and Caicos.

"Well," I said, shifting subjects, "did you see the new Helen Mirren film? She was with Jim Broadbent. They're so wonderful...."

Later, my husband and I found updates on our newest back-road scandal: Certain parties feel that residents are allowing poison-ivy bushes to grow, and grow, unmonitored. Is there a way to recruit a band of goats? Marc and I thought the goat question was a joke, but then it seemed not to be a joke.

In childhood, I laughed when Howard Ashman made fun of suburbanites. "Between our frozen dinner....and our bedtime....9:15.....we snuggle watching Lucy, on our big, enormous, twelve-inch screen...."

Now, 9:15 seems ambitious to me.

This was my weekend.
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