Grandma Freteluco: Enabling cross dressers since 1922

Grams Freteluco was buried yesterday in the small Northern Arizona town of Flagstaff, home to many a woman with flowing locks of underarm hair and avid John Denver listeners. I left Flagstaff in 1988 so my experiences with my Grandmother after that were lessened but I always had a memorable time whenever I was with her. Years later I would come to realize that limitless youthfulness of hers wasn't fueled by an uncontainable exuberance or lust for life, to quote Iggy Pop, but rather good ol' fashioned brandy in copious amounts. She was a great grandmother. I'm not sure if there's a rating system for grandparents or if the quality of a grandparent is contingent upon how much slack they give up to the grandchild, but Katherine was pretty good. At age five, I took up the hobby of cross dressing and my efforts were met with a wrinkly thumbs up from Grams. I preferred her pearls as they really completed the "granny motif" I was going for, not Ru Paul or Milton Berle drag as I didn't want any of Grams' elderly neighbors getting any ideas in their senility addled minds. When I realized that enormous bras and panty hose weren't for me, I quit. Eventually I would resume dressing in drag, but only for Halloween as when you're a cheap bastard of a teenager as I once was, the prospect of buying a costume seems silly compared to wearing a female friends clothes for a night. Anyways, Grams was the sultan of the soup, the proprietor of the endless old folks home block party and could be counted on to send me five dollars for my birthday. She's buried in the vicinity of my grandfather Nicholas and while they divorced forty something years ago, they now have plenty of time to catch up on missed episodes of the Simpsons together (assuming there's tv, electricity and basic cable where ever they are) and bone up on their abilities to craft a wicked haiku. Or whatever it is you do when you're dead. Hail hail Katherine Freteluco.

Oh Billy Ray, why did you reproduce?

After opening a birthday card the size of an LP record, I seriously believed the crew of To Catch A Predator was going to come through the door as I felt pervy just holding a birthday card with Miley Cyrus' 13 year old visage on it. To hear the 20 second loop of "The Best Of Both Worlds", searing the eardrums of the unsuspecting victim, reminds me that yes, the hell spawn of the man that blessed us with the Achey Breaky is hard at work polluting the pop culture waters, but also that somewhere there's a little girl that really digs this music. And that's all that matters.

So a pregnant woman, a spider bite victim and a shoplifter walk into a bar. Stop me if you've heard this one.

Upon realizing my eye wasn't going to return to normal without medical assistance, I found myself waiting for CAT scans and thus, in a CAT Scan waiting room. Waiting in this room were 3 individuals: a man in a wheelchair, his female companion and a white girl in a shirt long enough to obscure what short shorts she had on. They all looked at me and assumed I had been beaten severely, it was just a matter of who was going to voice this observation first. I tried to make small talk with the white girl who was fidgety and twitchy as all fans of meth are. Unfortunately, she was sitting to my right and my right side was most certainly my worst side at that moment so to entertain any sort of jailhouse-esque "What are you in here for?" conversation was probably not what she wanted to participate in with someone looking like I did at that moment. Surprisingly though, she responded with a sinister and creepy "Ho ho ho, female problems." Then she turned her head to resume watching Jay Leno. Then she turns back to me and says "What the hell happened to you?" Spider bite I say. Enter wheelchair bound man. He had not said word one up to this point when he says "Hell no that's not a spider bite, it looks like someone beat the fuck outta you." I assured him that that wasn't the case and that some bug assaulted me in my sleep. He said he'd seen his fair share of spider bites and what I had looked like a case of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person and not a spider out for vengeance. I had to wonder what brought this wonderful man on wheels into the hospital and he explained that he was running towards a wall, jumped over it not knowing the ground on the other side was significantly lower and broke his foot when he landed. I was curious as to who or what he was running from to necessitate leaping over the wall in the first place. He declined to elaborate. He then told me that he initially felt terrible for having to visit the hospital after an exercise in such stupidity, but he felt much better after he saw me. He actually told me that. His female companion chuckled at his every witty remark like Wheel Chair Man was with the bastard son of Richard Pryor. My favorite moment was when a nurse came into the room to explain to the girl with the short shorts that the hospital would be unable to perform any x-rays on her on account of her being pregnant, This was news to the girl and the rest of us in the waiting room. I smiled a big toothy grin, so happy I was for her. If only she could have seen the twinkle in my eye from beneath the huge shiner resting on it.