Miss Manners believes that an elegant
dinner party is not the venue to mention
your cancer, especially when Dr. Henry
Kissinger is the guest of honor. Miss
Manners is positive the other guests
are more interested in Mr. Kissinger's
views on the Mideast than your little
problem. Miss Manners must also
point out we are dealing with your
prostate, hardly a fit subject for
dinner conversation. She also wonders
if an account of your regimen
of daily radiation might dissuade
the good doctor from expounding
on his world views.
Miss Manners is reminded of the motto,
For God, for Country and for
Yale and wonders if you want to
be lumped with such anticlimactic
pronouncements. Miss Manners suggests
you beam quietly, listen avidly to our
esteemed guest, pass the rolls and,
in the spirit of the holidays, radiate joy.
Edmund Conti has had over 200 bios published but hasn't figured out he should make a boilerplate and use that rather
than making up new stuff each time. OK, he's not making it up. He really does have a book out called Quiblets. He
really did win the Willard R. Espy Foundation prize for light verse early in this millennium. And he really (really!)
read before an audience of over 50 for poetrySpark in downtown Raleigh.
| This was
inspired by daily radiation treatments for prostate cancer. (For
those of you keeping score at home, it seems to have
disappeared.) I attended a lot of elegant dinners parties with
the good doctor Henry Kissinger. At least in my mind in a weekly
column I wrote for the Summit (NJ) Herald. The imagined dinner parties
were a good way to make points with the townspeople. Or would
have been if the townspeople had actually read my column. So what
is the point of this poem? If it is that no one wants to hear
about radiation or cancer, then why did I write it? |
