Born to be Badly Behaved

Alexi may have declared that we were both supposed to be gofers (see last blog). But I knew better. I was born to be naughty. This I had realized on a recent retreat the guru had sent me on when I was supposed to do mindfulness walks at 6 a.m. through the desert. I was also meant to sleep in a tent in the women’s camp but had refused outright and marched up the hill wrapped in my sleeping bag, and spent the week sleeping in the meditation hall with a monk in a long frock. Each morning at 5 a.m., he would ding a bell over my head, asking if everything was okay? He gave up after day three and I slept until noon. Still, that week, I had two of those epiphany thingies. The first was that I was not born to sleep in a tent. (I was in fact a diva!) And the second was that I had been born to be badly behaved.

And so it was upon boarding the plane to Timbuktu (see The Guru and The Runaway Giraffe) that I first waited for the stewardess to turn her back and then scuttled quickly along the floor to the first-class toilet. I stuck an “Out of Order” sign on the door and strapped myself onto the seat with some tissue paper for take-off. I was a frequent flyer, and had read the safety instructions many times! I had a plan. One of the girls at dance class had shown me how to practice those twirls using a bathroom mirror, after I had told her that I had done them turning all along the shoreline, starting at the Venice Boardwalk. I had decided to practice all the way to Timbuktu. But about half way, I began to feel a little dizzy. So I crawled into one of those large chairs in the first class part and had a little nap. After dinner, I wrote a letter to Alexi and then one to Hillary Clinton. I addressed the first to, “Alexi The Ukrainian Surfer, Australia, and handed it to the stewardess. I was sure that he would get it just fine, “I am no gofer!” I said. Signed, Lilly. And then I wrote one to Hillary, which was all thanks to the yoga teacher who had filled us in on the week’s news between teaching belly dance moves, as she was bored of downward dog. I had resolutely refused to read the newspaper since the New York Rhymes had cancelled that section I had written for three months ago, so I was rather glad to hear about something other than the temperature of the pool. Hillary was going to liberate the women of the Third World and have them all skip into the future, she informed us. To make the point, she had us skip around the room one by one. So I wrote Hillary a letter asking if she might need some help. I was a little worried in case I couldn’t find the giraffe. And what if the guru found out about me sharing a hall with a monk? I addressed the letter to President Obama, The White House, and asked him to kindly pass it on.