Free Belle Weather by Celia Rivenbark

hard so she can get into a good college.
    “But you didn’t go to college and you turned out OK,” she says.
    “You call this OK?” I shriek. “I should’ve gone to college! The other night on Wheel…of…Fortune! I missed every single puzzle, even the before and after one, and I always get that one. Remember how I got ‘Shaving Cream of the Crop’?”
    “Yeah, I remember,” said Soph. “You called everybody we know to tell them. But so what? All that was left was the ‘m’ when you got it. Besides, I don’t think college is meant to help you with a game show. Maybe you should read more and watch TV less.”
    Whaaaa?!?
    I made the age-old and oddly annoying gesture people make to indicate that they’re talking on an imaginary telephone.
    “Hello. Orphanage?” I said a bit too loudly. “Yes, I have a charming fourth-grader here who might like to go live with y’all on account of there’s no frikkin way she’s related to me !”
    Soph rolled her eyes and returned to reading the latest exploits of the bespectacled junior wizard.
    At night, with thoughts of writing tests and the disappointing lack of college degree swirling through my dreams—along with an oddly erotic dream involving Ned Nickerson and me doing unspeakable things in the back of his roadster—I realized that perhaps I was overreacting out of insecurity.
    Weren’t there on-line college degrees available for people like me? People who just want the degree without the pesky homework and grading experience and inevitable encounter with the devil’s spawn, er, Young Republicans Club?
    Perhaps I needed an on-line degree. I Googled some the nation’s finer fake universities the very next day and that’s when I learned about Trinity Southern.
    A little more on-line research revealed that TSU might not be the best place to go to make my dream degree happen. Turns out a deputy attorney general, suspicious of the school’s degrees, submitted an application for a doctorate for his six-year-old housecat, “Colby,” based on the cat’s life experiences.
    TSU agreed that Colby Cat sounded like a fine candidate for a Ph.D. but was rewarded for its generous interpretation of life education with a nasty charge of fraud.
    Not to worry. I hear there’s a very qualified Pomeranian hoping to earn a TSU law degree someday soon.

11
Rugby-Playing Lesbians Torpedo Beach Day
    As the parent of a young child, you have to be prepared to handle a variety of situations in life, everything from explaining why the kid can’t just sit around all day eating Marshmallow Fluff and watching cartoons (“It’s good enough for Daddy”) to why Bad Things Happen to Good People to one that’s, uh, perhaps a little more unusual. Naturally, I’m speaking of how one handles a gaggle of naked lesbian rugby players making out on a public beach in broad daylight.
    What? This hasn’t happened to you? Well, aren’t you the lucky frikkin’ duck. Duh-hubby and I had taken the Princess and her little friend to the beach for the afternoon and just as we were settling in for a remarkably wholesome afternoon at our favorite spot, we couldn’t help but notice a reenactment that had nothing to do with the usual ones we get in our small Southern city. No, no. This wasn’t the usual pack of obsessed Civil War reenactors who whine if someone shows up in polyster, instead of a 100-percent wool uniform, or didn’t make their own eyeglasses by hand.
    No, no. This was a reenactment of a familiar scene in the surf in From Here to Eternity where lovers grope and fondle and kiss in the breaking surf. It’s pretty hot, for an old movie starring dead people.
    Apparently the rugby-playing lesbians had seen it a few times and were determined to bring it to a family beach in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
    Now I have nothing against rugby or lesbians. In fact, had it been heterosexual tennis players cavorting mere feet from our SpongeBob beach towels I would have been equally freaked