All Hail...

...the Queen of Crap!!!!

A while* ago, Cranky Boss Lady was cleaning out a closet at the back of the shop and found a bunch of truly hideous dried and artificial, um, stuff--you couldn't call it flowers exactly, they were more like twigs and most of them were spray-painted white or black or hot pink or some other shockingly hideous color. They were jagged, pointed, angular in all sorts of threatening-looking configurations.

I joked that it was the stuff of nightmares--you could easily imagine any of it coming to get you! For my efforts and imagination, Cranky Boss Lady said, "You're full of crap! You've never even seen this stuff before [duh! that's the imagination part!!!!]! You're the Queen of Crap!"

So I did what any superheroine would do in a moment like that--I ran with it. We have rhinestone tiaras tucked away in corners around the shop--for prom or weddings or, say, when CBL calls me the Queen of Crap or the Queen of anything else for that matter. I wore that damned tiara every day for two weeks. I made myself a scepter by attaching a plaid bow to a long grabber thingy we use to get things off high shelves. I eventually hung a Squidward figurine from the tiara's rhinestone-studded curlicues like a talisman--something to ward off Everyone Else's Crap ('cuz we know I've got more than enough of my own).

After a while, the tiara had to be put aside for reasons of practicality--the danger of forgetting to take it off when a customer comes in, for example, especially if said customer is coming in to order funeral flowers--but I will occasionally bring it out on days when the Crap (my own and everyone else's) seems deeper than usual.

Prom Week is just such a time. Mix hormonal adolescents with dresses in every shade of the rainbow--and some shades that aren't in the rainbow: magenta, fuschia, puce--listen, if it's not in the Crayola 8-box, I have no idea what color it is--and high school intrigue ("they broke up three days before the prom and now he's taking her best friend and she's goin' with his cousin!") and you've got the recipe for the Perfect Storm of Crap.

Some--like Cranky Boss Lady--see my tiara as useless affectation, just a pointless addition to my wardrobe with no magical powers at all. But I'm here to say it works, it really, really works--because as crappy as Prom Week was, I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been wearing my tiara, it would've been worse.

Someone would've actually rented this tux:

A PS to Youngest Sister and Great White Hunting Brother-in-Law: when it's time to renew your vows, you know where to find me! Maybe we should reserve one now!!

*When my boys were little, they thought of "a while" as a set amount of time--like a minute or an hour. So if you said, "It's time to clean your room." They might say, "I will in a few whiles."**

**Alternate answers would include, "No!" and, "Why?" and, "Awww, Mom!" but none of those seem quite as cute.