The Morning After

Well, the late morning, anyway . . .

If you hadn't gathered as much from my last post, it turns out I was really lit up last night. In fact, things got so bad that at one point I was out on a corner of the Patio, mashing pretty hard with a chick that I thought was the spitting image of Flora Pachado (the Most Beautiful Girl I've Ever Seen in Peru, if you remember).

Now I'm told that the Object of Last Night's Misdirected Lust ("OLNML") was in fact a giant stuffed panda that we had raffled off to the kids earlier in the day. The girl who had won it had (thankfully) gone home to bed with her grandmother, but her parents were still at the party and were planning to take it home later that night.

PePe's got a bottle of Woolite and is cleaning the OLNML off right now — this wouldn't be that big a project, but apparently I had a mouthful of Oreos when I moved in for the kill. I'm all for just getting little Juanita a new panda bear, but PePe thinks this one is still salvageable.

I've written up a blog post on this because I think there's some wisdom in this story, and I want to draw it out for you. So here goes: if I were some lesser form of being — say, a politician — I'd be trying to cover up this Incident. But as you all should know so well by now, Brothers and Sisters, life is all about having Incidents — and the number and nature of my Incidents are what make my life in particular so rich. Persons (note that I didn't write "men," Sisters) who are truly Great don't need to cover up their foibles, their indiscretions. They lay their lives open for the world to see, because they know that when all the assets and liabilities are tabled and calculated out, they're still Great.

So I got to third base last night with Somebody Else's Stuffed Panda. What of it? Some years down the road we'll not only be laughing about this: I'll have commissioned some world-renowned artist to recreate the scene in oils for the Capitol Rotunda. Count on it, People.