Nobody Leaves Here Pretty

The voices in my head are singing Be as You Are by Kenny Chesney

What I'm reading: For Better, For Murder by Lisa Bork

First, the book. I met Lisa at Bouchercon at a Sisters in Crime lunch. She's a very warm and gracious person, so I was predisposed to like the first book in the Broken Vows series. I would have loved it anyway--she had me when the dead body flopped out of a Ferrari in the showroom on page three.

So, Precariously Perky Julie tried to kill me at Jazzercise today. I think she might have been trying to commit a suicide dance, because at one point I heard her mutter something about a having a coronary herself. She had chocolate over the weekend--Halloween and all, so we had to pay.

PPJ is a sweet spirit. She's always smiling--bubbling, actually--even as she pushes us ever closer to a synchronized cardiac incident. (She did growl at me one day last week because I wasn't sweating enough, but that's unusual.)

But PPJ has the soul of a dancer. She knows all the real ballet names for the moves we do--in some foreign ballet language. Maybe Russian. Anyway, she's serious about her dancing. She always picks the songs with the most intricate footwork for her sets. The ones where you change what you're doing every four beats.

None of that dancing on autopilot while I zone out and dream of Mega Moo Mocha Moolattes. No. I have to PAY ATTENTION. I have to listen to her cuing. This is stressful.

She is also serious about the sweating. Today, someone in the back wasn't disheveled enough to suit her towards the end of class. That caused her to drop the bubbling and growl. "Hey," she yelled, "nobody leaves here pretty." That's never a problem with me.

I do vex PPJ, though, I think. She seems to hold the opinion that I am sandbagging. She keeps trying to sell me a Polar watch to make sure my heart rate is high enough. There's an alarm on those things for when your heart rate gets too high. I tried to tell her that fool alarm would be going off all during class, on account of I'm always in the blue on the perceived exertion chart--that's the border color across the top, just above the maximum exertion before passing out.

Do you know what she said? "Oh, we'll just turn that off. That's what I did with mine." It's nice to know she cares.

The rumor is the Queen of Pain will soon be back from her Alien Birthing Ritual--actually, it's not a rumor, she told me that herself. It was either a warning or a threat, I'm not sure which.

Meanwhile, I continue to test Precariously Perky Julie's sunny disposition in my quest to become less VOLUPTUOUS while not needing EMTs to cart me out of there on a stretcher.

Peace, out...

Susan