Lisa Scottoline - Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog - The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

In any event, he needed an operation to reconstruct his foreskin, but it came out too big. So he had a second operation, but it came out too small. He just had his third operation, and this time it’s just right.

It’s like Goldilocks, only with, well, you get it.

Why this matters is that after each of these operations, he had to wear one of those plastic Elizabethan collars for dogs, shaped like a cone over his head. He wears it for two weeks after every operation, and with three operations, he has spent six weeks of his young life in the plastic collar, or, as I call it, the Tony Coney.

So you know where this is going.

If you thought it was crazy to have dog face stuck to your night cream when you sleep, try wrapping that puppy in a plastic cone, slapping it on top of your face cream, and trying to catch forty winks.

It’s fun.

The only experience I’ve had like this happened ages ago, when I was in sixth grade, trying to clear up a case of adolescent acne by using Cuticura ointment. Please tell me I’m not the only person in the world who remembers old-school Cuticura. I went online before I wrote this and am astounded that the product still exists, though I’m sure it’s improved.

It would have to be.

Back then, it was a round orange tin full of smelly, gooey, black-green gunk. Somebody told my mother it was good for pimples, but they must have been criminally insane. In retrospect, it was good for greasing axles. Yet I smeared it faithfully on my skin every night, reeking like a motor pool, and every morning my skin looked worse.

In any event, I digress. My fancy night cream is better than Cuticura, even though I get the occasional dog-hair sideburn. Two weeks later, I am sleepless but happy, but there’s not a wrinkle on Little Tony.

So maybe it works.

Now that we have an economic stimulus plan, everybody is trying to figure out how it will work.

Me, I opt out.

I’m trying to figure out how Jennifer Aniston spent $50,000 on her hair during her movie tour to London and Paris.

I’m not sure she got her money’s worth, unless they blew her dry with gold.

Although I admit, there’s part of me that gets it. Hair matters to women. If I won the lottery, I might pay somebody $50,000 for great hair. In fact, I bet if you asked the average woman how much she would spend to get hair like Jennifer Aniston’s, that woman would answer, “Anything.”

So already, it’s cheaper.

Plus, it’s a bargain if you break it down by strand. By my calculations, Jen spent only fifty cents a hair. I got that number by going online and plugging “how many hairs on a woman’s head” into Google. I didn’t bother to verify the information. This is the comic relief department, remember?

Anyway, the computer reports that the number of hairs on a woman’s head varies with her haircolor. Who knew? A blonde has 140,000 hairs on her head, but Jennifer Aniston isn’t a natural blonde, because they’re extinct. They died off millions of years ago in a meteor shower, or maybe they ran out of vegetation, scientists aren’t sure, but either way, nowadays we all highlight our hair and forget our natural color.

People with brown or black hair have 110,000 strands, but the computer says that the average person has 100,000 hairs. I used 100,000 because it’s easier and I hate math.

Therefore, Jen spent fifty cents a hair.

That’s nothing. I can’t remember the last thing I bought for fifty cents. Chewing gum costs twenty-five dollars, and sandwiches are a million. Your basic bailout starts at ten billion, and we owe China twenty trillion, so why split hairs?

Sorry.

By the way, the same week that Jen spent $50,000 on her hair, Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady bought a Rolls-Royce Phantom for $405,000.

He also got married to Gisele Bündchen, and I sense that these things are not unrelated. If you’re gonna marry Gisele Bündchen, you’re not carting her around in a Ford Fiesta.

She’s tall.

The news also reported that Tom Brady put a baby seat in the Rolls-Royce, for the child he conceived with the woman whose name he forgot when he met Gisele Bündchen.

But that’s not my point.

I’m trying to understand how Tom could spend $405,000 on a car. To be fair, men do love cars. I bet if you asked the average man how much he would pay to drive Gisele Bündchen around in a car, that man would answer, “Anything.”

So $405,000 is a bargain.

I went online to the Roll-Royce website and learned that the Phantom has four “coach” doors, which means that the back doors are hinged wrong and open in a counterintuitive way. But they’re only $100,000 a door, so it’s still cheap.

Also the Phantom has a statuette on the hood, which looks like a Barbie doll with wings. The statuette has a name, “The Spirit of Ecstasy,” and if you take into consideration that you’re getting the car, the Barbie doll, and the pornographic name, then $405,000 is more than fair.

Plus the Phantom has a quiet, powerful engine, specifically, “453 bhp at 5359 rpm and 531 lb/ft 720 Nm at 3500 rpm.” I have no idea what that means, but I bet it translates to five miles a gallon.

So you see where this is going.

Buying a car for $405,000 is as crazy as spending $50,000 on hair, and it brings me to my point:

Cars are hair for men.

Conversely, hair is cars for women.

I doubt that a man would spend $50,000 on his hair, and no women I know would spend $405,000 on a car.

Now, here’s the hard question:

Do men care if women have great hair?

No. If I were a woman who wanted to interest a man, I would take the $50,000 and buy the best breasts ever.

And do women care if men have great cars?

No. If I were a man who wanted to interest a woman, I would save the money and mow the grass.

And what have we learned?

The best things in life are free.

Or plastic.

Little Tony and I just completed our first day of puppy kindergarten, and we flunked.

Of eight puppies, he was the worst in the class.

Where did I go wrong?

We were supposed to learn to Sit, but all Little Tony would do was Jump Up. We were supposed to learn Watch Me, but all he did was Watch Everybody Else. When it came to Take It, as in, wait until the command to eat his treat, he skipped the waiting part and went straight to That Tasted Great, Gimme More.

I should have known it would go bad from the beginning, at playtime. How can you flunk playtime? All puppies do is play, chew, and fart.

And he’s very good at two of those things.

But at playtime, while all the puppies chased each other in a circle, nosed tennis balls around, or tugged pull toys, Little Tony sat shaking under my chair, his brown eyes round as marbles. If he was learning Look Terrified, he would have gotten an A plus.