The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club by Laurie Notaro

and passed out.
    “The whole thing is crazy, I tell you,” agreed Aunt Ida. “Who wants to see the president naked? Now I got all these pictures going through my head. I don’t need that!”
    If Monica Lewinsky had seen naked pictures of Bill Clinton beforehand, I can assure you that this whole thing never would have happened in the first place. I’ve only seen photos of him with his shirt off, and that was enough to make me do the cootie dance. Big nipples, size of silver dollars, on saggy man boobs, and they were purple. The color of eggplants.
    “What kind of girl would keep a dress for such a long time with that . . .
stuff
on it?” Nana said, pointing to the TV. “That pig! She’s never heard of a dry cleaner?”
    I was amazed. My nana, the eighty-two-year-old embodiment of everything good and pure, who has never had a bad word to say about anyone, was getting testy. And, most horrifying of all, she knew what “stuff” was.
    “Ah, she’s a tramp,” Aunt Ida said, waving her hand. “She’s just one of those girls—Laurie, what do you call them, they follow men who do the rock and roll?—”
    “Groupies,” I offered.
    “Groupies!” Aunt Ida finished. “They’ll do anything.”
    “Oh, yeah. A grouper. Like Ava Gardner was to Frank Sinatra,” Nana added, shaking her head and wringing her hands. “He got into so much trouble with her. So much trouble . . .”
    “Don’t play with your wristband, Nana,” I said cautiously.
    “What do they mean by ‘inappropriate relationship’?” Nana asked as the president spoke across the airwaves.
    “It means they were fooling around,” Aunt Ida said. “But in different . . . ways.”
    “Like what?” Nana queried.
    Oh, boy. Now you see what you’ve done, Monica Lewinsky, you stupid, stupid tart, I thought. Because of you, I have to explain to my nana, while she’s in a hospital bed with an enlarged gallbladder, what oral sex is. Do you see the damage you’ve caused? Do you see where your sinful path has led?
    Ever so reluctantly, I bent down and whispered into Nana’s ear exactly how Lewinsky got to know President Clinton “in the biblical way,” and when I was done, she looked up at me, bewildered.
    “I don’t know what the hell you just said,” Nana whispered back. “You know that’s my bad ear.”
    Forced to do the devil’s work twice, I repeated the carnal carnage in the good ear.
    She scrunched up her face. “Oh, that’s disgusting,” she replied, thinking it over in her mind. “I don’t understand why they call it ‘moral’ sex. Was it approved by a priest?”
    “No,” I replied slowly. “Just by Monica’s mother.”
    “This president,” Aunt Ida said, “he wears his privates on his sleeve like they were cuff links.”
    “This is not a nice girl, Ida,” Nana reminded her. “She’s a floozy. Even President Kennedy didn’t pick girls up off the street. What’s this all over the inside of my hand?”
    “It’s your address and phone number,” I said quickly. “We’ll wash it off when you get home.”
    “I think I have the coordinating map on my arm,” Aunt Ida mentioned.
    “Oops,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry, I guess you got too close.”
    A nurse entered the room armed with a shot of Demerol and pulled the curtain around Nana’s bed.
    “Oh, this is really binding you,” I heard the nurse say to Nana. “Let’s take this off.”
    “No, no, no,” I asserted to the curtain. “Leave the wristband on. Nice trick, but I’ve got her marked.”
    “You’re a nurse,” I heard Nana say from the other side of the curtain. “Do you know what ‘moral’ sex is? My granddaughter says it’s dirty.”
    “Why do you have a piece of paper that says, ‘I’ve Been Switched, And I Miss My REAL Family! Call Police!’ taped to the back of your neck?” the nurse asked Nana.
    “I thought I felt something itchy,” Nana said.
    After Nana got her shot and the curtain was pulled back, the nurse shot me a look and