Nanny's Les Secrets de Beauté

My four daughters and I know we are not separate from Mama. We are One. So we politely(?) recognize one another’s resemblance to her. Her bedtime routine is one of the reasons why. Retiring for the night (or “getting ready for bed" as she described it)was a purification spell for my Mama. Over the years she practiced her daily ritual, in reality a religion. When she died this 39 year-old trapped in an 88 year-old woman's body had refined sundown rites of her own creation. In honor of her memory I am preserving her ceremony here for her descendents, whoever they may be.

Mama always argued with those "Suns-Uh-Bitches", aka "Democrats/Republicans/Atheists/Communists and Gawdamm sportscasters", on the CBS Evening News. (Occasionally she called me to ask, "What in the hell are they talking about?") Immediately after the news she'd take up residence in her pink tiled, pink toilet, pink bath tub, pink sink, pink shower curtains and pink lights bathroom. It was there she dismantled Miz Robbie.

Her blouse was flung somewhere between the pink bathtub and the pink clothes hamper: her shorts or slacks soon followed. Unhooking her custom made “chicken-shit” rocket launcher required great dexterity and she was often impatient. Once she disengaged herself the launcher followed her blouse to the hamper or hung by a strap on a door knob.

Having served up winning smiles all day her false teeth were then polished and deposited in a secret container. No one knew she had false teeth and she planned on keeping it that way.

Mama's la routine de beauté a inclus a ¼ inch slathering of Avon's beComing UN-FLAWED damage recovery complex with Lumin8TM on her face and neck. She pervaded the domain of intellectual considerations and fibbed about her Clairol black hair, protected at night with an elasticized hairnet. So were her ears. Fibs, i.e. little white lies waiting to cut their teeth, were the backbone of Mama's bag of tricks.

After dousing herself with Avon bath powder she would slip into her sheer “shortie” gown or teddy. It was Mama’s belief that nature had endowed her with beautiful legs for which the “shortie” gown or teddy was designed. This was among her most brilliant feats of philosophical speculation! It is strange that in all the controversy regarding her aversion to mini skirts she did not herself ascribe to what was known to her mother and daughter as “modesty”. However, she did sleep in her “step-ins”.

Next to her bed was a small table dimly lit with an unstable lamp sporting a 25-watt bulb. A sweating glass of ice water prepared for an all night vigil next to a HUGE black telephone with a dozen numbers sticky-padded everywhere except the handset. A loaded 38 caliber pistol with its safety switched off perched on the edge of the table within easy reach. On the floor next to the bed was a "high-intensity adjustable spot-to-flood beam with a twist of the wrist" heavy duty torch with the longest handle I have ever seen. Mama said that flashlight was a more effective weapon than a baseball bat.

With her home's runway security lights on, a smoking cigarette in her right hand and a Dame Barbara Cartland romance novel in her left she curled up in bed to read herself to sleep. The cigarette would be long on ashes and short on smoke by 1:00 am.

And God help the callers if her "Gawdamm" phone, an invention of the devil to abolish some of the advantages of making a person keep his distance, rang after 9:00 pm.

I’m leaving now. CBS Evening News is coming on and the sun is going down.