My Cardboard Balcony

Harlequin by Belinda Roddie if you tell me I look happy, it's because I am happy, dancing on tables with seven women in red dresses all watching me with green money eyes. see these bells? they inhale love mint juleps and they exhale this brilliant noise that rattles glasses in a fat man's fists. exquisite spectacle of gold balls hovering in the vision of a sweet twenty-something who will strip the diamonds off my flesh and marvel at the fact that they match.

The man at the demonstration was naked from the waist down. As my son pointed and stared, I tried to cover his eyes with one hand while pushing my daughter's stroller in the other. " 'Let it all hang out?' " I heard one man complain. "That's such a lame pun!" Really? I thought. Out of all the things you see, sir, that's what you complain about?