Reel Around The Corporation

I nearly ran over the last remaining patrician gentleman. So busy was I with my plebian, cellophone walk-n-babble that I about smooshed a genuine White Man Of Power in the revolving door of the giant corporation I was seeking a foot in.

Damn, if he wasn't a site to behold too, even with the glare of his startlingly beautiful, aged face aimed right at me. I instinctively lowered my eyes. Might as well have been walking in Calcutta.

I'd thought such a class of ruler was long gone dead, but there was a live one in the flesh, a six and a half feet dinosaur, dressed for boardroom battle in the finest custom-fitted suit imaginable, woven it seemed right on to his WASP-thin frame of a fabric so intrinsically wealthy I couldn't help but glance up again from my moment of meekness and double check that I wasn't just getting loopy from cell phone emissions.

Whomever he was, and whatever era he stepped out of, he was the only thing I've ever encountered in real life one could call "titan." I'm certain there's an oil painting of him hanging in a long, muted executive hallway as we speak. And me without panty hose on.

Yep, I'd sashayed off to a very serious job interview with a very serious Atlanta company with no panty hose on my bod. I'm such a rebel. I know it breaks every rule in Corporate Land to go on a job interview without dressing the role of elementary school principal, but I don't even own panty hose anymore. I thought they were obsolete, and that my skirt, the one that screamed Mega-Nondenominational-Church-In-The-Burbs look, and the one I must immediately burn in the morning (least it be seen by someone who actually knows me), was long enough to cover the sin.

God and potential bosses see all, as I didn't get out of the interview chamber without the dress code of "business casual with panty hose for women" being mentioned. I allowed myself a moment of feminist fury with a silent protest alone in the elevator on the way back down to Street Level. Other than the naked legs, which are quite nice looking, thank you very much, and with no small effort on my part, thank you very much again, I think I did pretty good with this interview.

We shall see if my semi self-sabotaging effect of refusing to wear the freakin' panty hose will win out in the end, or be kindly ignored in the light of such a gregarious personality and an oddly sincere ability to be sincere about all things corporately benevolent.

It's a toss-up. But my five years of growing the most astonishingly best of all baby girls into a kindergartener are up. That's all I've been given, or can afford rather. The account's about to close; thus the chapter of being Mostly Mom will soon close on our little world.

My little one has no clue that mommy's out selling out her time to the highest bidder. I can't bear to bring myself to tell her that her I may not be there to pick her up after school when kindergarten starts in the fall, or that I won't be able to sit through another yawner ballet class again to "watch me Mommy" while I smile and nod periodically as she beams my way after a perfect arabesque I usually miss 'cause I'm reading CL in the back of the classroom instead of watching as I should.

I was mostly busy denying such days would ever end, when I should have been searing it all into my head, every pointed little soft, pink-footed step, like that tuna I wish I never had at the networking op the other day.

Oh baby-angel, I had to do something to steal another day with you. And all I can do is tell you that there really was a pair of panty hose in my bureau this morning. But your mom just could not bring herself to do everything by the book today. For all the reason in the world. Will they even note the crime?

Oh Atlanta, so much to answer for.