RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32542, 27 February 1971, Page 21

RANDOM REMINDER

CONVERSATION PIECE

It is remarkable how really hot weather can affect people. Not just in making them lazy, or sunburnt, or querulous. Those really hot days can dull the senses. ... There is a Fendalton woman who is regarded, among her friends and acquaintances, as being quick with the witty remark, and her reputation has been thoroughly earned. She has a sense of fun. On one of the very very hot days of summer, she was on the telephone, talking to a friend who is also reputed to be able to hold her own in the bright exchanges. The lady of Fendalton was to leave, in a few days, for

a trip overseas and she was explaining where she was going. Her destination, she said, was Oneonta. And where, she was asked, was that? She said it was in the Catskill Mountains, in New York State, and that it was Indian country. . It was about this time that the Dorothy Parker began to come out, in both of them. “Mind out” her friend said “that you don’t get scalped.” “There is” the Fendalton lady replied primly "no need to worry. I am taking two wigs and a hair-piece with me.” Her friend, mystified, inquired further. The Fendalton lady, drawing on childhood recollections of pictures

showing sled parties flying across the snow with hungry wolves in hot pursuit, and a fixed belief that it was the practice, in such desperate circumstances, to throw someone overboard to cause the wolves to halt, temporarily, said she proposed to throw the wigs and hair-piece off. Then, warming to her subject, she added that if necessity demanded, she would also toss out her husband’s false teeth, and then her own. This dazzling display of humour was too much for the woman at the other end of the line. "Oh, go away and sweat somewhere else” she said.

It really was a very hot day. . . .