Mary Lou Rutenberg painting of my stunning mother, Evelyn Duke, 1960’s

I posed nude, you know.  Several times.  Me and my two good buddies.  All three chicks, totally naked.  In a bathtub.  It was for an artist who thought this would make a great painting.  Or, perhaps, it was a commissioned painting.  Either way, I was asked, and I was in.  It got cold because we sat in that water for hours.  Or did it only seem like hours?  The two friends of mine were sisters, Lori and Lesly.  I slept at their house a lot.  We were kind of inseparable.  Only, secretly, it was Lesly, the younger one, who I was closest to; she looked up to me because I was older.  Lesly rocked herself to sleep in this crazy, enviably violent manner that totally intrigued me.   I guess I should reveal that I was nine years old, though I was trying to figure out a way to tell the whole story without saying how old I was, to make it funnier.  However, it’s probably not all that funny to imagine an adult woman after you hear the tale.

 Here is what happened, one fateful day, in that water-filled tub.  I farted.  Yep.  As a kid, I was pretty much constantly constipated.  Truly, I spent my whole childhood blocked up, because I ate no fiber and consumed mostly mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread (which you would know, if you’re following my blog), so it’s not a surprise, really.  There we three girls were that day, and when their mother, the artist, told us to get out of the bath, I looked back at the water and saw a turd floating about.  A little rabbit sized pellet of a thing, just like the one that I was used to expelling — to use a polite word.   I’m trying very hard to keep this polite and not say shit.

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