Greatest Hits Volume II

One year ago today, it all began here.

In honour of the occasion of the one year anniversary of Postmodernes Sprachspielen, please allow me to present to you, Gentle Reader, Postmodern Sass's Greatest Hits Volume II, a selection of the ten best stories of the last six months:


VIRTUAL ALBUM COVER

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

In which Postmodern Sass and her friend Zee spend three days at The Banknote

Boys Don't Cry

A story for Jack, in memory of Paco

Dear God

In which Postmodern Sass, who never believed in God anyway, is given proof

Hypnotize Me

In which Postmodern Sass watches her students write their final exam

Don't You Want Me Baby

In which Postmodern Sass recovers from her crush on The Viking

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head

In which Postmodern Sass tells her father about Jack

Money For Nothing

In which Postmodern Sass tells stories of the good old Internet days

Paper Roses

In which Postmodern Sass celebrates her birthday

New Orleans Is Sinking

In which Postmodern Sass leaves New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina destroys it

Cat Scratch Fever

In which Postmodern Sass remembers Mokie the cat

Update: I've had a request to add a link to "the story about the Bewitched statue" — since it's a standalone story, not otherwise connected to the storyweb.


Each story includes forward and backward links which, if followed, may pull you inextricably into the story web. Please proceed with caution.

And thank you so very, very much for reading.

I simply cannot express how much it means to me, not to mention how much it surprises me, that so many of you seem to enjoy reading about the misadventures of a dorky existentialist basket case with a Nancy Sinatra complex who hangs out in karaoke bars when she's not otherwise engaged being stood up or turned down. But I love that you do.

So just for today I'm taking Udge's advice and turning the comments on, in hopes that some of you who I haven't heard from via email will say hello. Of course, I'd also be happy to read comments from those of you who do email me from time to time.

By the way, I'm allowing anonymous comments, for those of you named after cartoon characters, seventies pop stars, playing cards, movie stars, Vikings, fairy tale protagonists, SNL characters, science fiction movies, musical instruments, or letters of the alphabet.

In Dreams

I'm sitting at the bar at The Banknote and Andrew is bartending. Amy is looking after the people brave enough to be sitting on the patio (it's getting chilly in the evenings), and there are no Murphy Brown waitresses tonight. That's what we call the endless stream of new waitresses who quit after one or two shifts. They are all young, blonde, and interchangeable; I've given up trying to remember their names.

I had this dream last night: I was walking along the street, somewhere, on my way to a wedding. The wedding.

I'm alone tonight; I've just returned from my late evening class at the university where I teach, and I need a beer. Jack is coming here in October. He's taking me to a wedding; a friend of his from university. Another university.

In the dream, I am on my way to that wedding. It seems odd that I should be walking, alone, on my way to the wedding of people I don't know, but in Dream World I seem to know what I'm doing. Or at least where I'm going.

Then I run into Peter, there on the street. We each understand immediately that we are both heading to the same place, so we walk together and begin chatting.

Somewhere in the conversation, instead of saying "the wedding" I say "my wedding."

I notice that the music isn't the usual, Frank Sinatra. Far from it; it's muddy, mottled disco, not throbbing enough for dancing (not that there's a dance floor at The Banknote) but throbbing enough to be irritating.

"Where's Frank?" I ask Andrew.

"Sinatra?" Andrew replies, without missing a beat. "It's his night off. He called in a request for this station."

"Liar."

"There is no all Frank Sinatra station, you know," laughs Andrew. He tosses a plastic coated card on the bar beside my Beck's. It's the playlist from a company called DMX Music. The cable radio that's piped into the bar.

Andrew's right. Sometimes that station plays Dean Martin, too.

Peter stops.

"Your wedding? What do you mean your wedding? It can't be your wedding."

I say nothing. I'm confused, but I think it's my wedding. It's somebody's wedding, in any event.

"Does Jack know?" Peter demands.

"I... I'm not sure," I reply, and I'm not.

DMX Music offers a hundred stations in 13 categories. Each station has a name that describes its style, and a corresponding number to be punched into the remote control to select it. Andrew has told me, previously, that the all Frank Sinatra station which he just denied exists is number 33. Sometimes, when Sid is bartending, I snitch the remote and punch it in.

I had no idea there were so many stations to choose from. The one called 80s FAVOURITES must be the Sid channel. I hear Duran Duran most nights when he's bartending. The names are fascinating. Some, you can guess at the musical style. Some, you can't even begin to guess. At least I can't:

CHIC BOUTIQUE	GLOW
ZEN	METRO BLEND
VIXENS	SUBTERRANEAN
SOUTH AFRICAN RHYTHMS	ROADHOUSE

"Do you know what this station is called, the one that's playing?" I ask Andrew.

"No," he replies.

"What number is it?"

He looks at the converter: "Seventy three."

I examine the card. I find it.

"Apparently, it's called CRAP," I tell him.

He laughs, and changes the channel to 33.

Beside number 33 on the DMX card it says: RAT PACK.

Peter says, "Listen: Promise me something. Don't do anything until I get there. OK?"

"OK," I comply easily, and continue on my way.

I arrive at the church and Kay is waiting for me outside. "Hurry up," she says. She grabs my arm and leads me inside, into an anteroom. "You've got to get ready."

"OK." I do as she says. She seems to be in charge. Several faceless women busy themselves with preparations, apparently on my behalf. They make me take off my white go-go boots.

At this, I protest weakly. "Do I have to? They're white, they'll go with the dress!"

Andrew sets another Beck's down in front of me before I can tell him I don't want another. He asks me what I'm writing.

"I was in England this summer," I say, by way of a reply," And I was in this pub called The Hole In The Wall, in Bristol, down by the docks. There was a plaque on the wall — right near the eponymous hole, in fact — that claimed Robert Louis Stephenson wrote Treasure Island there."

"Oh yeah?" Andrew is puzzled.

"Maybe one day there'll be a plaque in here. Over by the safe, possibly." The Banknote used to be a Bank of Montreal, and the walk-in safe still stands in the centre of the back wall.

I'm stepping into an off-white, ballet length, full circle silk skirt. The faceless attendants are holding it out for me, keeping it off the floor. The fabric is shot with gold, and shimmers in the dim light.

I'm curious to see what the top of the dress looks like, and what it'll look like when it's on. I spy a pair of soft gold leather dancing shoes, the kind with the suede soles, on the floor nearby. I wonder if they're mine.

Then I remember about Peter, and my promise. I wonder about Jack. I don't know where he is, but I feel vaguely that he should be here; that he will be here. I'm not sure, though. Everyone but me seems to know what's going on, and that's comforting, so I am not worried.

I tell Kay about my conversation with Peter.

"Mmn hmn," she says. She seems concerned, but not surprised. As if she had expected this, and was prepared to deal with it.

"Leave it to me," she says, as she heads for the door. "I'll take care of it. You finish getting ready. I'll be back in a while."

* * *
In two days it will be Postmodern Sass's blogiversary. And in the next story, a strange man examines Sass's hatch.

Cat Scratch Fever [part III-fin]

Continued from Part II

Mokie was, to put it politely, aggressive. But only with strangers. With me and the X he was a great cat. Affectionate, playful. Sat on our laps while we watched TV. Slept at the foot of the bed, always on X's side. Amused us in ways only cats can.

Like the time he jumped on top of the TV, while we were watching it, and settled down for a nap. I guess it was warm there. He stretched out, draped his back legs in front of the screen — yes, it was annoying, but cats can get away with a lot — and spent ten minutes or so licking his front legs. Then he put his head down, to sleep. As he fell dozed off he slowly leaned farther and farther back, and then, before any of us realized what was about to happen, he fell off the back of the TV.

He immediately regained his footing, then placidly began licking his paws again. He looked at us as if to say, "What? I meant to do that!"

He was the best cat. With us.

With everyone else, our friends, relatives, relative strangers, he was... well, aggressive. OK, downright nasty.

There was the time our friend Ken came to see our new apartment, one of those typical Montreal flats with a long hallway. Mokie blocked his way, and when Ken tried to walk by, Mokie lashed out and clawed his leg so badly we had to put a gauze bandage on it. Ken is a cat person; he loves cats; he was nice to Mokie, at least he tried to be.

There was the time a bunch of us were in the livingroom, watching a playoffs game, and following a particularly tense power play, late in the third period, when Montreal scored a shorthanded goal, Debbie screamed. Mokie lunged at her knees, claws outstreched. Scared her so bad that after that we had to promise to lock him in another room before she'd come into our place.

There was the Cat Nanny who looked after him once, when we went on vacation. She left us a note saying she would not look after Mokie again.

Mokie the Killer Cat became a joke in our circle. A tense joke. There were those who, in unguarded moments wondered aloud why we kept him. How we could possibly love him.

But we did.

Even after he bit me so bad I had to go to the emergency room. The doctor who looked at my punctured hand pulled a pen out of his pocket and drew a line on my arm, about half way to the elbow. To mark the red zone, the progress of the infection.

"See where it's red?" he said. "If that keeps moving up your arm, and reaches your heart, you're going to be dead. You have cat scratch fever. Like the Ted Nugent song."

"That's a real thing?"

"Yes. The only mammal's saliva more venomous than a cat's is a human's."

Mokie had been out in the back yard with the X, who had been raking the leaves. It was Mokie's fifth home with us, our first house. The yard had a six foot solid wood fence, with horizontal two-by-fours running around the inside. Mokie had jumped up on top of the fence. He was watching another cat, in the neighbour's yard. His back was arched, his hair was standing on end, and his tail was swishing meancingly back and forth. And I was stupid enough to grab him. He sunk his teeth into the soft part of my hand, between my thumb and forefinger, and just held on, like a clamp. His eyes looked up into mine as if to say, "I'm sorry, but I can't help it."

"I hope you have a cure?" I asked the doctor. I was reasonably certain that people today don't die of cat bites.

"I'm giving you a prescription for antibiotics. Take them, then come back in ten days and I'll look at your arm. Don't wash that mark off."

"OK, thank you," I said.

"Oh, and, about the cat," the doctor continued.

"What about him?"

"You have two choices. Either we can cut his head off and autopsy his brain, or you can quarantine him for ten days. Personally, I prefer the former option. That way we know right away whether he has rabies."

"He doesn't have rabies. He's an indoor cat." I told the doctor how Mokie had come to bite me.

"Fine, then, we'll send animal control around in ten days to verify that he's not rabid."

I don't cry much, as a rule. Hardly ever. But I cried the day Mokie died.

* * *
I woke up very early on Monday morning and found Mokie under the coffee table, dead. He was right where I'd left him on Sunday night. Before I went to bed I petted his head, and he purred, but he was very weak, and I knew the end was near. He hadn't had the strength, that last week, to walk up the stairs to the bedroom, and when I'd carry him up, those last few days, and place him in his favourite spot, on his favourite blanky, on the corner on the X's side, he'd jump back down and crawl under the bed instead. It was heartbreaking to watch him jump down. Even though there was a box at the foot of the bed to help him down (it had been there for two years now, ever since he'd started to have difficulty jumping up) he stumbled and fell. He'd been doing a lot of that the last week.

But he wasn't in pain. I know, because I've known Mokie longer than I've known most of the people in my life. He was lethargic, and he was dying, and we both knew it, but he still perked up a little when I'd offer him some raw hamburger, and he still purred when I picked him up, right until the end. I'd been hoping, and would have been praying, if I were to do such a thing, that he would simply go to sleep and not wake up. I couldn't bear the thought that I might have to kill him.

So that Monday morning I braced myself for what I'd find at the bottom of the stairs, and when I found it, I didn't cry. Not then. I wrapped Mokie in his favourite blanky and held him for a while. Then I called my aunt Lo, who lives out in the country, and asked if I could bring Mokie there.

My uncle D dug a grave in a nice shady corner of the field near their barn, and that's where I laid Mokie to rest. And then I cried some. And later that night, when Jack called, I cried a whole lot more.

I'm crying again now, but just a little.

My aunt said she'd plant some catnip there.

* * *
In the next story, Postmodern Sass has a very strange dream.

Cat Scratch Fever [part II]

Continued from Part I

We lived two years in that basement apartment before moving to the third floor of a triplex on Harvard Avenue, below the tracks again. In all, Mokie lived in eight different places with me and the X. Then just with me.

When we brought him home that first day, a teacup full of spitfire, we put him down on the floor just inside the door and let him explore his new surroundings. The X followed him into the kitchen and showed him where his food bowl would be. I went into the livingroom and heard a familiar meow at the window. It was Gus.

I didn't want Gus to feel that he was no longer welcome in our home, just because we'd gotten another cat, so I opened the window and called to him to come in. He jumped down gracefully and began patiently licking his paws in his usual spot, the middle of the floor.

When Mokie's walkabout reached the livingroom, I introduced the two cats to each other. Not because I thought they'd understand my words, but so that they'd know from my tone that it was OK for them both to be there.

But Mokie wasn't having any of it. Though he was one tenth the size of Gus, he walked right up to him, opened his tiny mouth and hissed a tiny hiss. Gus drew back, startled; turned, and in one leap was out the window.

We never saw Gus again.

* * *
Mokie, X and I learned how to live together. We learned each other's likes and dislikes, and how to read each other's moods. When Mokie was upset about something — like when we took him to the vet to be, you know, fixed — he would hide under the bed or the sofa. X would become quiet and withdrawn, and sit with his arms crossed, with a beer, in front of the TV watching a hockey game.

Mokie liked hockey, too. Sometimes he'd sit in front of the TV, staring at the screen and swatting at the puck.

One of their favourite games to play together, Mokie and X, was bedpost hockey. This involved X, who had been a junior league goalie, positioning himself between the posts at the footboard of our bed. He referred to this area as the crease. The foot of the bed faced the door to the bedroom, a few feet away. Mokie would position himself just outside the door, and attempt to get in, and jump onto the bed. X would do his best to block him. Mokie would deke and swerve, sometimes trying a backpaw, and, eventually, would manage to slip himself past the goalie. Then they'd both fall on the bed, laughing and purring, respectively.

It was our second winter on Grand Boulevard, our second winter of watching hockey games together, when I came home one afternoon to find something was wrong. It was cold inside the apartment; as cold as the outdoors. And Mokie wasn't there.

I called for X, quietly at first, then, as the panic began to rise, more loudly. My mind insisted on conning me into the idea that there was a logical explanation for this; I need only be patient and I'd discover it.

The explanation was, we'd been robbed. The thieves had broken in through the bedroom window, which they'd left wide open. There was my logical explanation for the room temperature.

It was three hours before we found Mokie. In the interim there had been phone calls to the police, to the landlord, to the X's mother and to the moving company where he worked part time. There were no cell phones in the 1980s; it took some time to find him and for him to make his way home.

I don't cry much, as a rule. Hardly ever. But I cried that day.

We walked around the building, and around the neighbourhood, calling for Mokie until our throats were hoarse. When it got dark we came inside, but left the window open a crack so we'd hear him if he came home.

We were sitting in the kitchen, having a cup of tea. I was just about cried out. And then we heard it. A muffled, but plaintive, and clearly Mokie, meow.

He had crawled into a hole at the back of the cupboard under the kitchen sink; the hole where the pipes lead to the outside.

That's why Mokie became an aggressive cat.

* * *
Concluded in Part III

Cat Scratch Fever [part I]

The first apartment the X and I lived in together was a one-bedroom basement near the corner of Grand and Somerled in Montreal. It had tiny windows six feet from the floor that looked out onto the driveway that ran along the side of the building, which provided me with the unusual vantage of being able to keep any eye on my car's tires while lying in bed.

I was moving out of a four bedroom house on Prudhomme below the tracks in NDG, where I had lived with three roommates, all guys. I'd had the biggest room, with a bay window facing the street. Because, you know, I was the girl. One of the other bedrooms wasn't much bigger than a closet, but guys don't seem to care about those sorts of things so much.

The house was for sale, our lease was up, but a couple of us were still there. The landlord didn't mind — in fact, he appreciated having someone there to let prospective buyers in. We didn't have to pay any rent those last few weeks, and it gave us time to move slowly. When you're a student, you don't want to pay for a moving truck and movers if you can move your stuff yourself. Even if it means having pieces of furniture hanging out the back of your Volkwagen Rabbit hatchback. Or tied to its roof.

I'd picked the basement apartment on Grand because it was cool, even in June, and because the rooms were large. I have always had a lot of stuff. Heavy stuff. Mostly books. My friends dread helping me move. This apartment was within my budget, it was still in NDG, my favourite part of the city, and it was on a nice, wide street with trees in a nice enough neighbourhood. I told the landlord I'd take it under one condition: that he refinish the hardwood floors. He agreed, but told me it would take approximately a week, and he couldn't do it until July 1, after the other tenants moved out. That was fine with me because I had the house on Prudhomme. A deal was struck.

I say "I," rather than "we," because the X had nothing to do with either the house or the apartment. Not then. We wouldn't officially be living together for another three months. Even though most of his clothes, all his school books and necessities, everything but his records, had been on my shelves and in my closets for several months now, and even though he hadn't slept at his mother's home since March, I still thought of my apartment as my apartment.

I'm an only child; I'm not so good at sharing. And Jack's not the only person on the planet with a fear of commitment, Gentle Reader.

The Grand Landlord, of necessity, kept a path on the floor so he could come and go during the refinishing process, which allowed us to transport boxes of my stuff and stack them up in the kitchen. On the day when the floors were finally dry, we came in with my navy blue sofa, set it down in the livingroom, and heard,

"Meow!"

The biggest, friendliest, grey cat you ever saw was sitting in the corner, under the window which the landlord had left open to ventilate the smell of Varathane, calmly licking his paws. I love cats, and had just lost Beaker the previous summer. I wanted to close the window and keep him there with me. But I knew he must belong to someone, because he was friendly and clearly well fed.

The X called him Gus, a name we'd always given to people whose names we didn't know. Like when you're driving, and a car cuts you off, and you say, "Whatssamatter, Gus, turn signals broken?"

Still, during those first few weeks in my new apartment, as July turned into August, Gus would come visit a couple of times a week. He'd meow at the window, and we'd pop the screen off so he could jump down. I'd bought a couple of small cans of cat food, and a small bag of kitty treats.

In September, back at the university radio station, we were lounging around in the front office one day, listening to The Buzzcocks, when Rainer mentioned that the cat his girlfriend had rescued from Milton Street, when she'd come across a couple of nasty teenagers kicking it, had turned out to be pregnant. A week later, Rainer had four kittens that needed homes.

It was all I could do to wait another six weeks.

The kittens were all different colours. One was solid grey, another black with white markings, like Sylvester. The third was a calico, the fourth the runt — an unremarkable grey and black tabby, with a bit of white on his belly and paws. He had personality, though. During my postnatal visits I'd test the kittens; see whether they'd react to me, whether they'd play with a piece of string. Whether they seemed to be to clingy with their mother. After the second visit, I knew I wanted that tabby.

I named him Mokie, after the character on Fraggle Rock.

As we were driving home to Grand Boulevard with Mokie squeaking endearingly in his cardboard box, the X suggested that he start paying half the rent at my apartment. I agreed, on the condition that he tell his mother he was no longer living with her. A deal was struck, and we had a cat.

* * *
Continued in Part II

My memory is muddy, what's this river that I'm in

I try as hard as I can to give people the benefit of the doubt. I'm also told I can be gullible at times. I love New Orleans and Biloxi. In fact, I just returned from there.

So you can understand why I want so much to believe that it wasn't sheer stupidity that allowed New Orleans to be destroyed. I'm struggling, with all my might, to understand why someone thought it would be a good idea to herd 10,000 poor, uneducated, hungry, frightened, desperate people into a cavernous concrete building that lay directly in the path of an oncoming hurricane.

I'm trying so hard not to scream, "What did you think would happen?"

And then I read this article from Scientific American.

Let me tell you a joke I heard a long time ago, before any of this happened:

A man hears the news that a great flood is on the way. He says, "I am not afraid, for God will save me." His neighbours leave their homes, and ask him to come with them. He replies, "I will stay in my home, and God will save me." It starts to rain. The waters rise. The man climbs onto his roof. Someone floats by in a boat and shouts, "Come with me, and I will take you to safety." The man shouts back, "Thank you, but God will save me." The water keeps rising. A helicopter flies overhead, and drops a line to the man, but he shouts to them, "Thank you, but God will save me."

The water keeps rising, and the man drowns.

At the Pearly Gates, the man is sadly shaking his head in disbelief. He says to St. Peter, "What did I do? Why am I here? The Bible says I had to do was have faith, and I did, and yet God did not save me."

St. Peter is taken aback. "That doesn't sound right. If you'll wait just a minute, I'll go check with God." He returns a few minutes later and says to the man, "God says he sent you help from your neighbours, a boat, and a helicopter. What more do you want?"

* * *
In the next story, Postmodern Sass writes about her cat, Mokie, and tries not to think about all the cats that died in New Orleans this week. And wonders why it is that the last time there was a great flood, she also wrote a story about her cat.

Working For The Weekend [refrain]

Make that, working for the long weekend.

It's been a while since the last time I sang this chorus to thank you, Gentle Reader, for reading, and to share with you some of the more interesting tidbits about my blog. So here, forthwith (as Tim would say), are the tidbits:

I told you back in June that I'm fascinated to see where my readers are coming from. I continue to be popular in Texas, and I continue to have no idea why. Recently I had visitors from the Texan towns of Kingsville and, I swear I'm not making this up, Sugar Land.

I also had a visitor from the unfortunately named Boring, Oregon.

Let's see... I learned that Erin Murphy, who I wrote about here, is a twin.

I found out that Operaman's birthday is only a week or so before mine. I still miss him, and I hope he comes back to Toronto one day.

Congratulations to Joan and Paco, who just got married. Joan, I sure hope you were kidding when you said you'd asked Paco to print the last month of my stories so you could read them on your honeymoon!

A very wise man, when he read this story, emailed me to say, "Very few men would say "I was going to ask you if you'd like to come along" if they didn't mean it, simply because they're not subtle enough to think of it in real-time. So your Gentle female Readers might have been thinking that, but not the rest, I bet." This is useful information. I am always keen to learn more about the species.

Though I was tagged by Udge for the book meme, I never got around to it... and, besides, I don't want to admit that this was the last book I read.

I have made a new friend.

I had the loveliest email message from the bloggers at Moleskinerie, who linked to my story, Paper Roses, in which Jack gives me a Moleskine notebook for my birthday. I don't know which I love more: the notebook itself, the fact that Jack gave it to me, or Moleskinerie's saying, "We love how it sounds like part of a novel."

There was some embarassing stuff, too, which I'm sure will come as no surprise to you. Though I love my students, there are exactly two things I'd rather they didn't know about me, but guess what? A few weeks ago I ran into a former student while singing Groove Is In The Heart at the Rivoli, and a few days later another one emailed me to say happy birthday, after reading this story.

Thank you, Donny, for almost sort of asking me out on a not-date. Back when I wrote this story I didn't tell you, Gentle Reader, that Donny, who as you know is a big fan of Dave's and no fan of Jack's, had offered to take me as his strictly-platonic-get-your-own-room guest to Wendy and Joey's wedding, if he were to be invited to it, so that I could get to know Dave better. Which was very sweet, in a weird sort of way, don't you think? It was also a couple of months before the invitations even went out, and a lot can, and does happen in a few months, including Dave's starting to date, and then breaking up with, Red. So perhaps it wasn't sporting of me to remind Donny of his offer when he showed up at The Rivoli for Kickass Karaoke last Sunday — when Donny made the offer he wasn't sure (and didn't want to presume) whether he'd be invited at all, so for all I knew he hadn't been, and I'd sound like a beyotch mentioning it. To my surprise, he sounded disappointed as he informed me that he had received an invitation, but that it read only "Donny," not "Donny and guest,"** and so he would not be able to take me along as his not-date so that I could have a not-date with Dave. I'm not sure that I'm not disappointed, too.

And finally, I must thank a very nice man named Richard, who I've never met. He's a claims manager at Cunningham Lindsey in Toronto, and his home address is number 75 on the street on which I used to live at number 15. My cousin Evelyne in Germany had sent me a birthday card, and because of the way Europeans write the number 1 it looked like a 7 to the Canadian postal worker. Instead of throwing the card away, or writing return to sender on it and putting it back in the mailbox — which is what most people would have done, isn't it? — he tried to reach me. He couldn't find me in the Toronto phone book because my number is still listed under the X's name. So he cast a wider net using an online directory, and found my father, who gave him my phone number... then he called me, told me what he had, and offered to mail it to me, which he subsequently did, in a separate envelope and with his business card attached.

There are still people like this in the world. Isn't that wonderful news?

**Donny emailed me after I first published this because he was concerned that my words could be taken the wrong way. He wrote, "I am more sensitive to the possibility of how it makes the wonderful wedding party appear as opposed to the suggestion of my sheepish bleating akin to the one a truck makes when backing up." I have rephrased the paragraph, hopefully conveying only good and kind things about all three. I know Wendy and Joey only well enough to know that if they were to invite everyone who cares about them to their wedding, and allow each one to bring a guest, that they'd need every ballroom in every hotel in Boston — and probably Cambridge, too. And I never thought Donny was lying about what the invitation said.

* * *
Click here to sing the next chorus of Working For The Weekend.