She Looks Too Pure To Be Pink

(July 02, 2002)

I don't know what I expected him to say. I know I didn't expect him to look up my ass and go "Magnificent. Nurse, get my sketchpad!"
(Jon Stewart, comedian and Daily Show host, describing a visit to a proctologist)

So I went to the gynecologist the other day. Since I, your Royal Highness of Procrastination, missed my 2001 yearly appointment, they made me fill out the medical history forms again. Those things are a trip, huh? There's SO MUCH that can go SO WRONG. Thankfully, knock wood, I can answer "No" almost all the way down the sheet. Heart disease? Thyroid? Epilepsy? No, no, no. Pneumonia? Pleurisy? Ulcer? No, What the hell is that, No. Depression? Emotional problems? Mood swings?

Had to think about that last one.

Asthma?

Damn. Stupid asthma. Check.

My regular doc wasn't in that day so I saw the nurse practitioner. That's just as well, because Dr. Ingrid is very good, but kind of severe and businesslike. Not that I want to get into a whole warm and fuzzy area with the medical expert staring into my hoochie, but you're kind of vulnerable in that position. Any conversation had whilst on your back, ankles airborne, should be at least innocuous, if not a little bit comforting.

Leslie, the nurse practitioner, is a natural at knowing where the line is between, at the one extreme, making me feel like a vivisected lab frog and, at the other, getting too personal. Plus, she looks a lot like Stockard Channing. Why that adds to her appeal, I have no idea. I promise I harbor no fantasies about Rizzo probing my labia. What it must have been, I think, is that her amazingly Stockard-like features simply put the soundtrack from Grease into my head. Show tunes, to me, are soothing.

"Your cervix looks excellent," she said, swabbing for the PAP smear. Tell me more, tell me more, was it love at first sight?

"Um, thanks." Well jeez, what do you say? Yes, all the cervices on my mother's side are award-winners. My grandmother's cervix was Look Magazine's Cervix of the Year in 1938.

"What kind of powder do you use?" she said, one finger inside me feeling my vaginal wall and one hand pressing my abdomen. Born to hand jive, baby.

"Johnson & Johnson's," I said. Then she told me something I didn't know-- apparently there's a link between talc and ovarian cancer. So girls, if you love the post-shower baby powder like I do, use cornstarch, not talc, says Leslie.

Womp bomp a loo bomp? Ba womp bam boom.