On Being A Saint
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I read a fascinating article a while back on the mating habits of Brazilian women. Apparently every Tuesday young ladies looking for a husband drop by Rio’s St. Anthony’s Church to ask the saint to send them a man. Although that’s not quite correct since the girls aren’t all teenyboppers; some of the prospective brides are getting a little long in the tooth. I suspect the odd one may even be 25 or 26, long past the age when a girl is still considering marriage.
I find once a young lady reaches her mid-twenties the poor dear has pretty well given up finding a bozo of her own and is usually satisfied with a granny night gown, a cat and a lifetime subscription to the Harlequin Book of the Month Club. When I was an eligible bachelor, I found that most women actually preferred reading romance novels to going out with me. I even tried showing up at their door with no shirt on and wearing a Fabio wig, but for some reason it didn’t seem to turn the ladies on. If you remember Fabio you are too old to book a flight to Rio to find a man. Anthony is a saint not a miracle worker. Well I guess he was but not that good.
Now I am certainly not against lonely women asking for divine help in their search for a mate, things are tough out there in the singles world, but I’m sure this must put undue pressure on St. Anthony. There are more women than men in St. Anthony’s congregation so it is slim pickings in Brazil for a gal without divine help.
I don’t know what a saint does all day, but I suspect going through the Rio de Janeiro phone book looking for available men isn’t his idea of a heavenly reward. To top it off, some of the ladies get downright ugly if the man he selects is not quite up to her expectations. Their revenge is quick and rather unpleasant. They stick their little statue of Anthony upside down in a bowl of rice or headfirst in a glass of water and lock him in a dark closet. That’s what the article said. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Can’t you hear the late Ben Hogan calling St. Tony to see if he wants to play in the All-Saints Invitational Golf Tournament and Mrs. Tony says, “Sorry, Ben, he can’t come out today, he’s upside down in a bowl of Chicken Fried Rice.”
Some of the Brazilian hopefuls are even fickle enough to get one man, discard him like an old shoe, and then have the nerve to ask Anthony to dig up another. Now that is just being plain greedy. Finding her a man was probably a tough job in the first place without having to scare up a replacement. What if she is one of those girls with three-coloured hair, a Harley-Davidson tattoo on her bum and a ring through her tongue? How in the world is he going to get her another man? Tony was lucky enough to line her up with a blind man who wasn’t all that picky on the first go-round, now he has to go looking for a man who’s into the freaky scene.
These girls are not looking for a casual fling by the way. They are looking for the whole marriage thing, the wedding dress, church bells and a man who has more than a pair of jeans with the bum out and a one-size-fits-no-one beer shirt in his closet. They are after a clone of Brad Pitt only one with a bit of class – an almost impossible task for St. Anthony now that I’m married.
Women ask too much of saints these days. They want him to find them some guy who washes occasionally; a man who can eat back ribs in a restaurant without having to change his shirt and pants before dessert; a man who doesn’t have to watch every James Bond movie three times because it’s the Fifteen Days of Bond festival on PBS once again. Well, forget it girls, that man doesn’t exist. If he does, he must have some other bad habit, like trying on your underwear when you are grocery shopping. So don’t go bugging St. Anthony to find you one.
One more thing – if you don’t stop putting all this pressure on the saints, I’m going to write to Rome and ask them to take my name off the list of hopefuls. So there!
