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I’d pictured her.
    Mia met Gayle a few years ago when some hotshot designer flew her out to Houston to do the makeup for a trunk show he was doing at Neiman Marcus. Gayle is a rich, childless house-wife with scads of disposable income, as demonstrated by her head-to-toe designer ensemble, so I’m guessing Mr. Struthers is in oil.
    “Well, I’ll be damned!” she crows. “So you’re Mia’s baby sister! Aren’t you just the cutest l’il thing!”
    I’m not that little, certainly much bigger than a “bug’s ear,”
    which was the next thing out of her mouth, but most women I know are significantly more petite than Gayle. We board the bright yellow “Trina’s Tours” double-decker faux London-style sightseeing bus for the four-and-a-half-hour, full-city excursion and clamber up to the roof, where we’re completely outdoors, so we can better enjoy the view. With the plethora of competing tour companies to choose from, Mia confesses that she selected Trina’s because it’s run by the mom and pop team of Bubba and Gladys Taylor, a pair of native Georgians whose brochure proclaims, “We all loved the Big Apple so much, we just had to worm our way in!” Trina herself is the couple’s over-weight, sullen daughter, a twenty-something who is the company’s receptionist-cashier. Not the best first impression, but the Taylors appear to be doing quite well for themselves, so I bite my tongue.
    Mia thought Gayle, being a Texan, would relate to the city sights presented with a distinctly Southern flavor. Gayle, however, explains that there’s a world of difference between Texas and the South, and only Yankees think the two are somehow synonymous. Mercifully, her annoyance with us non-Dixie chicks passes as quickly as a cloud scudding in front of the sun.

    24
    Leslie Carroll
    “Are you psyched for this?! Because I’m psyched!” She hollers. “Here, hold these for a spell.” Gayle reaches into her vo-luminous leather hobo bag and pulls out three plastic cups, which she hands to Mia. “Okay, you hold tight to those, now,”
    she urges my sister, then dives back into her handbag, and drags out a large thermos. “We are going to partaaayyyy!” she warbles at top volume. I ask her what she’s got there. “Margaritas,” Gayle replies. “My own secret recipe. No adventure is complete without ’em.” Gayle unscrews the plastic cup that serves as the thermos cap and pours each of us a round.
    It’s 10 A.M.
    I haven’t had a drink this early in the day since my honey-moon.
    So, here we go.
    As the bus lurches away from the curb in a cloud of squirrel-colored exhaust, a young woman climbs up the stairs, grabs the microphone and cheerily welcomes us. Her name is Kathie—
    with an ie , like Kathie Lee, she emphasizes with a giggle, then apologizes if she’s disappointing any of “y’all” but she’s not going to give us the Southerner’s guide to New York.
    “Good thing,” Mia mutters sourly, then returns to her Margarita. “This is more than enough for me.” Evidently, Gayle’s lesson in regional whatever went in one multi-pierced ear and out the other.
    “I am a native New Yorker, now,” Kathie says proudly. Then she proceeds to tell us that although she hails from Raleigh-Durham, she completed a “very prestigious” acting program in
    “my old home state of North Carolina,” (which she pronounces dropping the r’s so that the first word comes out “Noth” and the second one sounds like “Ca’line-ah,”), “but I am proud to say,”
    she adds, beaming, “that thanks to my theatrical training I have completely lost my regional accent.”
    “Not. Or she’d better return her diploma for a refund,” Mia grumbles.

    PLAY DATES
    25
    “Well, she’s perky, anyway,” I say brightly.
    “She’s making my teeth hurt,” Mia says.
    We head up Eighth Avenue and round Columbus Circle.
    Kathie starts explaining the differences between uptown (“noth”) and downtown (smiling broadly,