Grab tickets to Overnight Sensation’s Fall Tour before we sell out.
I knew the game was changing, in my late fifties but the truth came home to roost one day when I was at the cash register at the pharmacy, when I looked at the receipt, the clerk had given me 10% off. This is the conversation that followed.
What’s this?
Oh actually, that’s the senior’s discount.
Oh, actually I’m not a senior. I’m ONLY 54!
“Actually, at this store, we give it to you earlier.”
“Actually, that’s ridiculous. What if you did that with the drinking age? 19 one place 18, another?
Then she rolled her eyes at me, the eye roll that all of society would be giving me once I took that discount.
It’s a lot like when you’re in the Bay and they ask you to go to the PLUS section.
I’m sorry mam. Your ass is scaring the petites. Security will escort you down the escalator to the basement- to the land of stretchable waistbands.
When she offered me that discount that day I felt I was being culled from the herd.
So, I said to the clerk, “Take it back.”
Have you ever tried to give back a senior discount?
Cashier: “Actually, I need my calculator.”
Me: “Actually-It’s ten percent- all you have to do is move a decimal point. “
Then she started crying, “I’m only the manager on Fridays. I have an urban planning degree from U of T.”
By the time I got to my car, I felt so ashamed of myself.
She was a nice gal just trying to get by in the service industry and just trying to pay her rent for $15 bucks an hour, and I could give her a little respect. After all, we were two sisters of the travelling pants.
So I go back in and she’s now talking to herself.
‘I’m 30 and I am still living with my parents.”
I go up to her and say, “Look I’m sorry. I was rude. I just feel more and more invisible each day.
And then she walked off like I didn’t exist.
That’s called ghosting.
Ghosting, you know when you text your kids and they act like they didn’t get it?
I know about ghosting,
I’ve been a comic for forty years.
I was in comedy in the days before women were funny.
In a business, with 10 men to one woman, we were apparitions.
If they hired us at all, they couldn’t see us as more than a foil or the butt of their jokes.
Guys were constantly ‘mansplaining’- my own joke to me, all the while they were dry humping me.
Aw, the good old days.
—-An excerpt from Downward Facing Broad— the new podcast coming this fall—–
After taping CBC Debaters next week, I will be taking the next month off for the summer holidays and finishing a big project I am working on. Have a great summer and don’t forget to grab tickets to Overnight Sensation this fall before we sell out.
It will be coming to Kingston and Peterborough in the fall of 2023.
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