B. U. G. S.

I met my future bride in South Africa. She had immmigrated there from Austria when she was eighteen years old.

ALONE.

I like gutsy women. I like smart women.

Which was a mistake. She was smart, so after some years she divorced me.

SIDE NOTE:

The problem is that if you marry somebody you have to LIVE with them. Even I have had opportunities for living with enormously sexy women who had the IQ of a turtle. In fact, such women tend to fall in love with intelligent men. I couldn’t do it.

Back to our story. My wife was a legal secretary in Jo’burg, so when we went to DC we cound that legal secretaries there got salaries we couldn’t refuse, so she took the job again. It had been some time since she had been on that job in South Africa, so she had to buy all her clothes and cosmetics from scratch.

The bill, back in 1972, was two THOUSAND dollars. That’s at least ten thousand now. To start in my job I had to buy Brooks Brothers suits, but that was a pittance compared ot outfitting HER. And not one penny she, a right fisted German, spent was for ego or show. It was all essential to a legal secretary in a major legal firm in DC, and it paid off handsomely.

But it taught me something. Every time I go into a store and walk by the cosmetics section, I am dazzled. We men are all impressed when we walk into a hardware store or a golfing shop and see all the tools we do not understand.

Compared to a cosmetics section, that is amateur stuff. Row on row on row of things no man (outside of San Francisco or Paris) has any concept of. I have heard the term “eye liner” all my life, but it occurs to me I don’t really know what it is, much less how a woman uses it.

We men are all deeply impressed when a carpenter comes into a tool shop and assesses things that are a mystery to us.

Meanwhile, every twelve-year-old girl knows everything in a hundred-foot-long cosmetics display. Her oly problem is that her Mommy won’t let her USE them.

When a woman agrees to date you, she may be wearing the Modern Uniform of long pants that is designed to make her look as much like a boy as possible. But she has spent a long time on details you don’t notice, because she is artful enough to make it a part of the general picture we take for granted. She has spent a lifetime learning how to use all that stuff.

When she appears, it is TAH-DAH! moment. For God’s sake, man, don’t tell her “You look nice.” LOOK at her. SEE why she looks so great. And SAY SO.

The Strong Silent type is great for cowboy movies.

But he ends up kissing his HORSE.