The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation by Melissa Rivers

Author:Melissa Rivers [Rivers, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781101903834
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-05-05T07:00:00+00:00

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When it came to my boyfriends my mother had no middle ground; she either liked them or hated them. The ones I liked the most she liked the least. Oddly, she seemed to prefer the rich ones.

The Purse

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Colossus of Rhodes.1 I would like to nominate an eighth: my mother’s purse.

A couple of years ago we were going through airport security and something in her bag started beeping, so the TSA agents pulled her over to the side for a security check. She didn’t mind the pat-down (in fact, I think she enjoyed it and might even have tried to give the agent her number), but when they decided to empty her purse, things got ugly.

She didn’t feel violated with a strange man patting her ass, yet one going through her purse was a step too far. She started in with “What do you think, I’m a criminal or a drug mule? That’s right, I’m part of the famed Finkelstein cartel and I’ve got a kilo of coke in my vagina.”

First off, her purse weighed between eighteen and twenty-five pounds. (Its weight fluctuated, just like my mother’s, depending on the time of year, her exercise regimen, or whether she’d had Chinese food the night before and was feeling a little puffy.) All women carry around a lot of useless junk in our purses, but twenty-five pounds is a lot of junk. Even the TSA agents, who have seen everything, were shocked at the weight. (Can I mention that my mother weighed only one hundred ten pounds, so she was carrying around nearly a quarter of her own body weight? No one ever believes me when I say she must have had the physical strength of a titan.)

When they dumped the bag, here’s what they found (and I know this because they inventoried everything): in her wildly overstuffed wallet (besides the obvious driver’s license, credit cards, etc.) were dozens of receipts, random business cards from all over the world, discount coupons from stores she would never in a million years shop in, a dry-cleaning ticket from 2006, and so many one-dollar bills that I thought that she was pole dancing at a senior citizens’ home in Great Neck. This entire apparatus was held together by a frayed rubber band.

Also in the purse? More loose receipts, hundreds of jokes written on napkins from airline lounges (both paper and cloth), a box of Altoids, eleven loose Altoids, a large makeup bag, a full-size box of Kleenex, three pairs of glasses (none of which were the ones she was looking for), one and a half screw-top splits of wine stolen from airplane carts when the flight attendants weren’t looking, a half-eaten piece of cheese, and random one-hundred-calorie snack bags (usually partially eaten).2

They also

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