What Not to Say

If you happen to be one of the people on my reference list DO NOT tell any prospective employers the following:

About that time when I was 8 and ate hot dogs for lunch at Aunty Fay's house and then got sick and it got all over the toilet seat.

About that time I put birdseed in this guy's underpants while he was actually wearing them.

About my weakness for cheesy How-to art books. Well, what? You have the food channel, this is what I have.

About that time when I was walking to the transit center in Germantown one afternoon to catch the bus to the Metro and I stepped on something sort of spongy and it turned out to be one end of a pair of pantyhose that I had forgotten to remove from inside my jeans the night before, so then I stopped, reached down, grabbed it, and sort of hauled and wrestled it out from underneath and it sort of came out with a sproing! and flew past my head and I caught it and then that's when I noticed I was standing in front of the window of the Chick Fil-A. There will be no need to mention that at all.

You can also skip mentioning that I am not completely at my ease in high heels.

I have ceased to eat raw onions or any relatives of raw onions, so you can leave out all that ancient history.

I haven't been on a date in five years so I think my taste in boyfriends is sort of moot at this point, though I'd prefer that you not bring up my not having been on a date in five years. OK there was one little datelet but it was just a workday lunch and it was perfectly polite, platonic, and sentimental. But don't bring that up either.

On the subject of my recent cravings for the music of my teenage years (that big orchestra-heavy soul music of the mid 1970s and also the odd things like the Carpenters) I enjoin a tactful silence. In fact don't even talk to me about it, much less to anybody else.