The Agony and The Ecstasy

"It was a dark and stormy morning..." (to paraphrase Snoopy's famous line). It has been pouring rain for over an hour here. I think the sun came out for ten seconds earlier this morning, giving us a little tease for a pretty day. Then it got dark and the sky opened up and it's been raining ever since.

I forgot to mention one of the highlights of our Halloween party. Our next-door neighbor V, whose eccentricities have brought smiles and head-shakings to everyone who meets her, had an interesting clue to act out on Saturday night. The answer was "The Agony and The Ecstacy." In order to get the rest of the ladies to guess this title, V proceeded to grab her throat, throw herself down in the middle of our living room, and writhe uncontrollably in front of the fireplace.

Picture this-- her arched back, her stretched neck, her legs flailing in the air and pointed up towards our ceiling. And she was wearing black shorts and a black blouse decorated with orange pumpkins. Her shoes (always a cause for head-shaking) were some sort of Mother Earth creation made out of cork and non-animal material. Those shoes were hanging from the tips of her toes as her legs contorted in an east-west direction and her arms windmilled north and south.

All the ladies were laughing so hard we were nearly crying. The men were sitting on the edges of their seats, probably wishing that we wouldn't guess the answer and V's display would be carried out for the entire guessing-time of three minutes. Personally, I kept my eye on V's shoes because I thought that one of them would soon be flying through the air and sending the candlesticks on the mantel smashing down to the hearth.

In the midst of all the laughs and screams of "Go, V!" one of the ladies yelled out "The Agony and The Ecstacy!!!" As nimble as an acrobat, V jumped up off the floor, screamed out "YES!!" and then calmly sat on the sofa as if she had been there all along and said "Are there any more of those chocolate mice left?"

We had guessed the correct answer in less than a minute. (Three points for us instead of just one.) The men insisted that we cheated somehow. One of the ladies told them all to grow up. V went into the dining room and came back with a chocolate mouse. She held the mouse by its cherry-stem tail as she bit its head off.

(And there are people out there who think I make this all up. Why would I bother? The real stuff is better than anything I could conjure up in my mind!)