Evans’ Rag

Vol 1 Issue 15

We’re back to Saint-Tropez.

Three weeks later, a second draft of Saint-Tropez Sketch is done. Later than I’d hoped, so’s the newsletter. Hope you find it better than the first draft. I had some help with this draft - an actual editor who put up with all the crazy stuff. And my sister who told me Giselle wasn’t a particularly nice person. Boy, did that hurt.

I knew someone like Giselle once. But first—

Pay Them!

I’m proud to say I’ve known some kick ass women distance runners. I ran with a few of them, swear to god. Barbara showed me more about sticking to it on track intervals and hill workouts than any man.

Raining? OK. Cold? Your question? We have hill repeats to do so let’s get to it!

She and another woman in the running club jumped into the marathon I was running just to keep me company. Some in the crowd recognized them and seeing as they were the two leading women at eight miles, cheered lustily, perversely cheering me to a near record ten mile time. Which I paid for dearly in the last ten, but that was my mistake. They were just having a good time.

The USA woman’s soccer team rocked last Sunday. Again. That they should play with such killer focus and skill shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially not anyone who’s spent time around women athletes.

My main theory about discrimination of (sex, skin color, nationality) is this: seeing there’s only so much to go around and to those baddest ones go the spoils, er, gold. And seeing we men are the bigger, baddest ones, do the math! We boys don’t always know when it’s time to recognize the even more bad asses.

I worry about a culture that would elevate its athletes to deity, paying them like worship. However, let’s cut to the chase: if we’re going to pay mediocre golfers, PAY THEM!

I watched Barbara in an early triathlon climb out of the pool with the leading men, do a very mediocre bike ride, then still crush the leading woman coming onto the track for the finish. She saw her fading, and ran her down in the last two hundred meters. Such a delicate flower.

This isn’t sexism; it’s blind stupidity. Oh yeah, and discrimination. PAY THEM!

Little girls at fourteen earn Olympic gold at gymnastics to win them a tour or two with Ice On Parade! And then go have babies.

PAY THEM!

“There were so many ways, Giselle knew well, to let time escape. She’d tried them all.

“She suspected artists were the most able to do that, and she was jealous.The ones in studio class who didn’t need money nor even a predictable existence.They thrived on the stress of living close to the edge, something she couldn’t fathom.Giselle envied their willingness to ignore immediate circumstances continuing their arguments with an absent deity.”