Fried & True (4 page)

September 2003

LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

WE DID THE CRIME. WILL WE DO THE TIME?

Frankly, I'm stunned. I hardly believe myself what you are about to read. But it's true, I saw it with my own eyes and I herewith report the following:

I'm a common criminal. Actually, an uncommon criminal, since I'm guilty of a charge that few can claim (so far) and of which no one has ever been convicted. I am guilty of this crime in the State of Delaware and what's more, I am subject to a $100 fine or 30 days in the slammer.

And I'm oh-so-guilty as charged.

My infraction? I married my same-sex partner last month in Canada and then went on a glorious Alaskan honeymoon.

But wait, you say! That was Canada. Delaware does not permit same-sex marriage. For pity's sake they can't even get anti-discrimination legislation onto the Senate floor. So what's your Vancouver marriage got to do with Delaware?

Holy matrimony, Batman, not only is it illegal to conduct and recognize same-sex marriage in Delaware, but anybody who resides in the state and goes some place else (Boston, New Paltz, NY, Canada) to tie the same-sex knot may be subject to jail when they get home. If I'd known this in August I could have been worrying about it for the past six months. I'm astounded that there was something to worry about and I missed it.

Not only is this provision on the Internet in the Delaware Code, but it's sandwiched between all kinds of other punishable offenses. Did you know that two paupers can't marry either? Hell, now there are two counts against me.

I'm so shocked that I qualify for an all expenses paid vacation to the hoosegow I might now be eligible for felon-ness under “unsoundness of mind”—another bridal infraction. Oh, in Delaware it's perfectly alright to marry a lunatic, habitual
drunkard, confirmed narcotic user or a diseased person, but lucky for any unsuspecting bride or groom, those marriages are “void from the time its nullity is declared” whatever the heck that means. No jail time, though.

If Bonnie and I are brought in on charges, too bad we're not habitual drunkards or Cuckoo's Nest residents, or we could be annulled and avoid the nasty fine. Don't quote me on this. I'm not a lawyer, I just slept at a Holiday Inn Express on my trip to Florida last week.

Now I don't know if I'm the first person to sound the journalistic alarm about this situation, but I probably won't be the last.

Title 13—Domestic Relations—Chapter 1. Marriage

101. Void and voidable marriages
.

(a) A marriage is prohibited and void between a person and his or her ancestor, descendant, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, first cousin or between persons of the same gender
.

(d) A marriage obtained or recognized outside the State between persons prohibited by subsection (a) of this section shall not constitute a legal or valid marriage within the State
.

102. Entering into a prohibited marriage; penalty
.

The guilty party or parties to a marriage prohibited by § 101 of this title shall be fined $100, and in default of the payment of the fine shall be imprisoned not more than 30 days
.

104. Entering into prohibited marriage outside the State; penalty
.

If a marriage prohibited by this chapter is contracted or solemnized outside of the State, when the legal residence of either party to the marriage is in this State, and the parties thereto shall afterwards live and cohabit as spouses within the State, they shall be punished in the same manner as though the marriage had been contracted in this State
.

Yipes. Now this is pretty scary. While the numbers are not huge, there are several folks I know who have traveled to Canada to get married, both as a symbolic gesture of commitment
and, in my case, the logical conclusion to a 21 year engagement. Do we have to pay up or go up the river? If so, do we have to return the wedding gifts? Does Miss Manners even cover these questions?

And if we are jailed, will both marital criminals be in the same cell? If there are more than four of us in a cellblock will it be a tea dance?

I suppose I could work a plea bargain, what with the state trying to save money and all, and get house arrest. I'd be willing to wear a clunky ankle bracelet and be confined to the house for a month. In fact, given my current crazy schedule and obligations, that sounds heavenly. Oh wait, would the Delaware Humane Society step in, call us unfit parents and remove our Schnauzers from the home? This is a question that needs an answer.

So here I sit, shocked and appalled that my goody-two-shoes reputation is shot. I am police-record eligible. How can I plan my calendar if I don't know if I'll be away at the big house? What's a wife to do? Pay the fine? Not me.

In the interim, I must tell you about my annual parental visit to Florida, where, when we weren't sitting in the sun or dining out with the folks, we spent much of our time watching the talking heads on the tube pontificate about gay marriage.

Happily, my family shares my political ideology as well as our personality genes. Which means we were all screaming back at the TV about the prospect of a Constitutional amendment codifying discrimination. My 85 year old father called Rick Santorum an (expletive delete).

Bonnie and I did take a side trip from Sarasota to North Ft. Meyers to check out the community called Care Free. It's a gated community, with well-manicured grounds, a pool, tennis courts and club house that's home to 500 lesbians. Some live there year round and others buy property as weekend or vacation spots. Folks rent out their units too, like our beach resorts, and lots of folks visit Care Free for a week or two each year.

While it was all very pretty and, well, care free, Bonnie and
I couldn't see living in an all-girls-all-the-time environment like that. We love the diversity of Rehoboth and certainly feel as care free here as we can be. Or at least we did until we learned we're scofflaws and could possibly become jailbirds. (I know, it's waaay too late for jail
bait
) We did the crime, will we do the time?

Which brings to mind more questions. Is Queen Latifah still the warden? Will there be women in prison that look like Charlize Theron? If so, I can take 30 days. Will Martha Stewart be there, decorating my cell?

Gee. Will I be sentenced to time in the prison laundry and have to confront my fear of ironing? Will HBO want my story for The Jacobs Redemption? Can you really dig through a cell wall with a spoon? Being taken away in handcuffs should make a nifty front page photo in
Letters
. In the meantime, just call us Bonnie & Snide.

October 2003

LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

AMNESIA? I FORGET WHAT THAT MEANS…

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa. I can no longer keep up the charade. My fear of being found out and thoroughly humiliated is giving me the vapors. So I've got to come out of the closet. The truth is, I don't know your name.

Now it's true that I've never been formally introduced to many readers of this column, so of course, I'm to be excused for not knowing everyone on a first name basis. But quite frankly, when I see some faces around town, day after day, season after season, and I know we've been introduced a couple of quadrillion times, it makes me positively nuts that I can't remember people's names.

And while there's a certain amount of slack to be cut for waiters I see occasionally—before, during and after Cosmopolitans—I'm talking about people I see all the time. People I've had dinner with. Sometimes at my own house. I mean I know who they
are
, I just can't remember what to call them. “Hi, Hon” only works if you're in Baltimore.

I realize that I'm not the only person in my age bracket having this problem. But, by virtue of my mug being in a magazine (okay, I know it's a picture from one of my sporadic thin days, but people on the mailing list from Idaho don't know) a lot of people stop me around town to say hello. I love this, and it's great to meet
Letters
readers, but the problem is that I never know if I've actually met the people before or they're asking about the dogs, Bonnie or some issue I'm in a lather about from reading my column. Half the time even the initial conversation doesn't give me a clue to the person's age, rank or serial number.

Mostly I just sweat and stress out, hoping I can horkle up a name from my hard disk before somebody else arrives and I have to do introductions. Failing an identification, I just stand
there like an etiquette moron, while introductions swirl around me. When I do hear a name, it circulates in my ears for about two seconds and then
bang
, it's sucked up into my cerebellum never to be heard from again.

When you think about it, remembering names may be tough everywhere better baby boomers are found, but it's even harder in Rehoboth. I mean out there, in the rest of the world, when you meet couples at an event or party, many of them are heterosexual. Hell, if you can remember that they're Fred and Ginger or Scarlet and Rhett, it's not hard figuring out which is which. Pairs of Toms and Tims, Sues and Debs, and Gertrudes and Alices are a knottier problem altogether. In fact, some couples become proper nouns, like FayandBonnie, SteveandMurray, RobertandLarry. Lots of people remember the couple, but who's who gives them fits. I call it couples dyslexia.

Now all this wouldn't be so totally bothersome if it weren't for the latest research which shows that stress causes memory lapses. I can't remember a name so I get stressed so I can't remember a name so I gets stressed…it's a chicken/egg thing.

But why is it I can remember the complete lyrics to “Jubilation T. Cornpone” from the Broadway bomb
L'il Abner
but I can't remember the name of the maitre d' who gets me the great eight o'clock reservation?

I'd take some of those over-the-counter dietary supplements, but I can't remember which ones to take. It reminds me of the old Carol Burnett gag “Amnesia? I forget what that means.”

It's like the friend of mine, who, having MS, gets asked by her doctor if she's having memory lapses. She says “How would I
know
?”

What's a person to do? Short of encouraging people to provide name tags at parties (thank you, thank you, thank you, those who do…) there has to be a way to improve my memory.

So I turned to a computer search.

The dragnet turned up the Cognitive Enhancement
Research Institute, where I found out that a substance called GHB seems to be all the rage for improving memory, but drat it all, its' use is being
criminalized
nationwide. If I landed in jail how would I remember my lawyers phone number?

If carburetor additives aren't the answer, maybe mnemonics is. Whew. If you can remember how to spell that one you're halfway home. Mneumonic systems are mind tools to help remember things. According to lots of people on the internet who want to sell you stuff, linking names to vivid images makes you able to remember all sorts of complex things.

It works by associating one thing with another. You are advised that associations can be made by visualizing yourself being placed on top of the object you want to remember. Whoa. When it comes to remembering people, this gets into a whole different set of techniques, and, frankly, as a permanently partnered woman, I'm not supposed to be going there.

So we move to the next memory tool: the Roman Room Mneumonic. Here, you're supposed to be able to remember whole lists of unstructured things, like a shopping list, by picturing a room that you know very well. Then you assign each item on your shopping list to a thing in, say, your dining room. When you recall the objects in the room, you recall your list.

Sure. Not only couldn't I remember my shopping list, but I forgot whether we had six or eight dining room chairs. All it did was give me a headache and I couldn't remember if we had Excedrin.

At this point I started to explain to Bonnie the memory tricks I'd been describing. She suddenly stands up, taps her head, points to her chest, slaps her behind, smiles and points to her crotch.

“That's it,” I said, “You've finally gone round the bend.”

“No,” she says, “don't you remember the old joke where the woman does these things in the grocery store and when she's asked what in the hell she's doing she says ‘Shopping list' and does the routine again saying “A head of lettuce, jug of milk, buns and a little Joy.”

Um, not a helpful system.

Let's face it, until scientists come up with some magic solution to memory malfunction, I'm destined to wander throughout Rehoboth bluffing my way through sticky situations. Although I did feel somewhat better this afternoon when I had lunch in the CAMP Rehoboth courtyard and two different people (one I've known for a while) came up and called me Bonnie. It really did make me feel better. I'm sure they know that Fay is the one who writes the column and Bonnie is the one who yells at her for publishing some of her most embarrassing moments, but making an I.D. these days is just not as easy as it used to be.

So at the next party, or beach day or stroll through town, if you say hello and a panicked, quizzical or vacant look crosses my face, help me out here. I promise you, I know who you are. Or I want to know who you are. And you can be sure that I never forget a smile, a kindness or a favor. Now your name may be a different story altogether. Mea Culpa.