Free For Frying Out Loud by Fay Jacobs

our posse, sometimes with folks who started out as strangers. Every elevator ride, cluster of women in a shop, or folks in rows in front or behind us at the theatre provided “Where you from? What do you do?” opportunities.Everybody smiled. Everybody had restless mouth syndrome.
    While most of the fun took place on board, there were Caribbean ports.
    Grand Turk is a small island with a lot of jewelry stores for tourists. But Bonnie convinced me to ride a dune buggy. I’ve been out of the closet over thirty years but that day I actually earned my dyke card. Bonnie (driving) and I (in my helmet and visor) took off speeding in the open frame buggy. Did I mention rain? We rode through puddles and ruts, getting splattered and speckled with clots of mud the size of chicken fingers. After two hours I looked like a Jackson Pollock canvas.
    In Tortola we took a ferry to another island, Virgin Gorda, where we went swimming amid glorious boulders, caves, and rock formations. The surf was so rough (how rough was it?) that on my first foray into the ocean I got sucked up and surfed back onto the beach at 50 mph, flat on my ass. Of course, being a lesbian group, girls came shouting. “I’m a nurse! I’m a nurse, I’m a nurse!”
    None needed. Even the injured pride was fun. And the water was paint chip blue.
    We sampled legendary Pain Killer shots at Pusser’s Saloon with a couple of young gals we met, for an evening of splendid cross-generational story swapping. Luckily, the ship’s crew lined the way back to the boat, so we didn’t stagger off the pier.
    What would a gay cruise be without a theme night? Prior to launch our Rehoboth contingent learned of the Mad Hatter Party. Okay, we’d all need matching hats with a Rehoboth-like theme and which packed easily. One of us found perfectly silly, flat-packable fish hats. We also had matching t-shirts announcing Women of Rehoboth on the front and “what happens on the cruise, stays on the cruise” on the back. While I am telling tales here, my lips are sealed with the really juicy stuff.
    Suffice it to say, that the 1746 other women on the boat took notice of the women of Rehoboth and they all now know of the fantastic gay resort on the Delaware coast. We posed for agroup photo out on deck one evening and did a 54-woman strong fish-hatted conga line in the disco on Mad Hatter Night.
    I hated to dock back in Florida. We had a wonderful, wonderful time. We would have gotten our money’s worth at more than twice the price. Olivia is in the hospitality business and they do it well. So there. I was so very wrong.
    And if you call Olivia and book a cruise, be sure to bring Visine. There’s only so much eye candy you can take without back up.

March 2008
    SHREDDING SOME LIGHT ON IT
    I want to talk about something nobody ever talks about in public. And it’s a dark, messy and dangerous place.
    Get your mind out of the gutter.
    I’m talking about your personal document shredder.
    Right now, mine is upside down, unplugged and glaring at me with an unwanted credit card solicitation stuck in its teeth. I hate my shredder.
    Remember the days when you’d get mail, read it and throw it away? So simple, so Twentieth Century.
    Now that the credit pooh-bahs have convinced us that every unshredded missive is an open invitation to identity thief, I have become a slave to my shredder. I fight with it. I shriek at it. I have been known to wish it was dead. When my first shredder actually died, I had Jewish guilt.
    It wasn’t always this way. Back in the day, when I first took up shredding, I loved my shredder. What fun it was watching unwanted bank statements and old tax returns disappear into the maw to become confetti.
    It was pretty easy, too. Three piles: file, shred, toss.
    Now it’s file, shred, toss, recycle. If the dollar sinks any lower it will be file, shred, toss, recycle or save for toilet paper.
    How did this