Posted August 17, 2008

The other day I was trapped in my dentist's office by Olga, a pleasantly large Swedish woman whom my dentist recently hired to work the door after that rash of client defections, inspired in part by that awful business with the hygienist and her Hannibal Lecter fetish.

With all hope gone of dashing from the office while muttering the excuse (which I'm sure the staff has heard before anyway) that I needed to plug my parking meter (in my dentist's home town of Beverly Hills, it should be noted, unplugged parking meters actually gush money), I resigned myself to selecting something tolerable from the stack of magazines on the coffee table at the center of the office. (I am reasonably certain there has not been a drop of coffee on that table in several millennia, yet no one would dare call this imposing piece of furniture by anything but its name in the Restoration Hardware catalog, certainly not in Beverly Hills.)

I carefully nudged aside the "National Geographic" and "Style" and casually, for Olga was watching me with the practiced eyes of a vice cop, began leafing through a copy of "Cosmopolitan." My decision to pick up this particular magazine was driven, I assure you, as well as Olga, by an overwhelming interest in the articles and had nothing to do with the picture on the cover which, if I recall, was of a woman, a "cover girl" as they say, though "cover" seemed only appropriate for the lower two-thirds of her body.

While leafing through the articles I came across a staple of this type of magazine, which indicated to me that I was only half way through. So, I picked up my pace, rapidly turning past the staple towards the back of the magazine, where I found the feature I was looking for, the Cosmo Quiz.

Surely you've seen them. Or, perhaps heard about them from my dentist.

They pose questions such as "Does He Love You?" or "Can You Trust Him?" or "Have You Got What It Takes to Be His Mistress?" I have to admit to reading these quizzes with a certain amount of pleasure. As a happily married man (much I like to believe, to the disappointment of the two-thirds cover girl), these kind of articles transport me, however briefly, on a flight of fancy that only married men can truly enjoy.

They take me to a world where questions actually have answers.

Thus, they provide a respite for the poor traveler caught between dental apparatus the CIA has long since rejected as dehumanizing, and the kind of conversation I had with my wife a little more than an hour earlier.

ME: Should I wear the red tie or the blue tie to the dentist?

HER: Which one do you like?

ME: I was thinking the red tie makes me look important.

HER: You don't like the blue tie?

ME: I like it.

HER: So why don't you wear it?

ME: Okay. I will.

HER: I thought you wanted to look important?

It's enough to make a man want to strangle himself with his own necktie. (Hint: the red one, unless you want the police to think your death is unimportant.)

I confess I am a big fan of answers. Answers endure long after everyone forgets the questions. What schoolboy cannot recite the opening words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address? Yet, I challenge you to find me anyone, living or dead (and I'll pay a bounty for the latter), who remembers the question that the Gettysburg Address answered.

As my old Latin professor would say to the class, "Q.E.D." (quickly followed by, "Mr. Douglas, you're late again").

Without wanting to offend anyone, especially women, some of whom might know my wife's email address, I have to confess that my image of the person writing these quizzes is a man, hunched over a computer keyboard in a windowless basement office.

"Talk to me, Smedley," his boss yells at him through his cell phone.

"I'm working on some interesting questions," Smedley says in his own defense.

"I've got questions, you fool. I'm a married man. I need answers, Smedley. How many times do I have to tell you this?"

Not nearly enough. In Smedley's defense, I have to say that Cosmo Quizzes are not the kind of thing a woman could write without getting caught up in a rat's nest of tangled questions.

Here's an excerpt from an actual quiz, written, I'm sure, by Smedley while using the nom de plume of Holly Eagleson.

Question: At the gym you spot a guy with a ripped body in the weight room. What should you do?

(a) Hightail it to the locker room and vow to chat him up after you've taken a shower and put on some makeup.
(b) Say,"Hey, there, would you mind showing me how to use that machine when you're done with your sets?"
(c) Grab his biceps and exclaim, "Someone's been working out."

Clearly the handiwork of a man, with its descriptive, unambiguous answers (the correct one of which is (d) Don't tell Smedley's wife about his fantasies.)

Imagine if Smedley were off nursing a bruised ego one month, and the quiz fell into the hands of his faithful assistant, Olga (my dentist was never very good at checking references, I'm afraid).

Question: At the gym you spot a guy with a ripped body in the weight room. What should you do?

(a) What do you think you should do?
(b) What would you like to do?
(c) Does he own a red tie?

The thought alone is enough to make me gnash my teeth. Somewhere my dentist is sharpening his apparatus in anticipation.

©2008 Jay Douglas