You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning Read Online Free PDF

looked best with my consignment-store steal of an evening gown.
    “Oh, the white one, definitely the white,” she said.
    “Are you just saying that or is that a beauty pageant trick like where you tell another contestant they look perfect and really they’ve tucked the back of their dress into their panty hose by accident?”
    Miss North Carolina looked hurt. Great. The mean old lady had hurt Miss North Carolina’s feelings.
    During the Pecan Harvest parade lineup later that morning I got to meet my “queen’s court,” seven cute and bouncy high school girls.
    “How did you get this gig?” I asked the nearest one, a sweet thing named Madison.
    “I had to write an essay about how much I wanted to represent my town because I really wanted to give back to the community that has given so much to me.”
    “No, quit shittin’ me. Really, how’d you get this gig?”
    OK, that’s what I was dying to say because all that sinceritywas starting to make my eggs come up. Besides, I’d been told these girls would serve me. Not a stinkin’ one of them had so much as offered to detail my car. These girls had a lot to learn about servitude.
    As queen, I was on the last float, just like Santa is in the Christmas parades. Which was fine since, after that breakfast, we were roughly the same dimensions. The float snaked through the tidy streets of Whiteville, North Carolina (yes, its real name). Small children scampered ahead, trying to grab all the candy tossed by the firemen who had preceded us.
    “Get out of the way!” I called cheerfully.
    Somewhere Miss North Carolina was cringing on the back of a convertible and thinking that I have a lot to learn about being royalty, even for a weekend.
    The journey had been fun, though. When they first approached me to be queen, I reminded them that, despite a very flattering picture on my Web site, I am not nineteen or even close. Plus, I wasn’t really pageant-ready. My thighs got more dimples than Jeff Probst and I can actually find Rwanda on a map. That’s two strikes right there.
    Y’all know I have issues with beauty pageants but this was different. The Pecan Festival queen committee actually wanted its choice to be a bit of a hag. They didn’t say that but they did say “seasoned,” which is the same thing.
    Having turned fifty just as the invitation to be queen arrived, I have to admit it sounded like just the shot in the flabby upper arm that I needed.
    Frankly, until the queen committee called, I’d been feeling a little down. It hadn’t helped when, at my favorite grocery store just a few days earlier, the cashier had said, while I swiped my debit card, “Don’t worry! I took off the senior discount.”
    “Whaaaa?”
    Apparently convinced that I was both old
and
deaf, he smiled even wider and said, quite loudly,
“I said, I deducted the senior citizen discount for you. It’s Tuesday, you know. You get five percent off!”
    What can I tell you? The room began to swim. Yes, there was prune juice in the cart, but that wasn’t for me. And what if it was? Prune is the new plum.
    “How old do you think I am?” I asked through clenched, and now that I thought about it, somewhat loose teeth.
    “What?” he asked, still grinning foolishly and not quite understanding the out-of-nowhere raging can of whup ass that was gonna be opened up on him.
    “I said,
How old do you think I am?
”
    Finally, the slow dawn of recognition crossed his lineless face. Other shoppers paused to listen in.
    “Oh, I-I-I-I’m sorry,” he stammered.
    But it just wasn’t enough. A primer on manners was in order. Primer, now that I thought about it, sounded like a very old word.
    “You should never, ever assume a woman is a certain age; it’s rude,” I said. Besides, I was wearing $45 foundation and day-old highlights. Clearly, this asshole was blind.
    The bagger, a sweet elderly fellow, having missed all of this horror, approached with his own goofy smile.
    “Ma’am, do you need some