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A towel girl at the first Club
Med, Comrade Joe the First's
Wife -- or Comrade Joe the Only's
step-aunt, if you prefer, or just plain CJFW for brevity's
sake -- was born in southern France just after that noble
nation's third military catastrophe in just 75 years.
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CJFW's brother receiving the Iron
Cross for betraying a school chum.
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| Papa was a petty local bureaucrat with the Vichy
government. A paper-pusher. A filer. Despite his pitiful protests,
Papa was hung as a Nazi collaborator just as soon as the French
found someone else to surrender to in late 1944. |
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Mama's goal.
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Step-Papa's usual position at
the keyhole.
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Their world turned upside down,
CJFW and her half-wit mother, Giselle, fled to Casablanca
due to mama's belief that Humphrey Bogart lived there. Despite
the disappointment, mama soon took up with a saloonkeeper
named Phil who was decidedly unlike Richard Blaine.
When Comrade Joe the First's future wife
became ripe enough for step-papa to eye with non-parental
affection, mama unceremoniously shipped her off to live
with relatives in Haiti, said relatives being the owner-operators
of a Port-au-Prince brothel and laundry.
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spending her time washing sheets and avoiding being trapped
between them. This unlucky upbringing did little to give Comrade
Joe the First's Wife a positive outlook on life in general
or the masculine sex in particular. |
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At the age of seventeen, fed up with her current state
of affairs, this determined young lady emptied her relatives'
cash-box, hitched a ride on a raft of inner-tubes headed
anywhere, and wound up in Martinique, where she talked her
way into a housekeeping job with the infant Club Med organization.
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CJFW proves her mettle.
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Heather the Hanging Parrot
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She rose swiftly through the ranks until
an audit revealed significant variances between her accounting
practices and the Club’s. Jumping the first boat out, she
wound up broke and stranded in Joetown a few days after
Comrade Joe the First’s ascendance to power.
This lithe little lady immediately attracted
the new leader’s eye by beating the bejezus out of his befuddled
bodyguards and enflamed his affections with her own unique
interpretation of the "Australian crawl."
Alas, now, "post-coup," she
spends her days shooting palm crabs with a target pistol
and plotting her husband's return to power.
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"Mark'a my words. Some day, we be back
on top!" she vows.
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No civilization can be perfect until exact equality between
man and woman is included.
-- Mr. Twain |
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