Dear, dear, dear. The next time Miss Mild Manners takes a lengthy European rail vacation, she will make sure her errant younger sister, Miss Wild Manners, has no way of rifling through her affairs and finding her account logins.
While happily travelling abroad, Miss Mild Manners happened upon a newspaper article claiming that Tom Cruise is rather upset with his wife, Katie Holmes {dear sweet thing}, for taking up smoking again. Truthfully, Miss Mild Manners was shocked to the very core to imagine that winsome, charming young lady risking her good looks and health by succumbing to that most scurrilous of habits. Not that Miss Mild Manners did not once flirt with the devil's weed in a brief experimental phase during her adolescent years, but near discovery in the Young Ladies' Rooms at the local Lacrosse courts during one's youth had visions of Miss Mild Manners' carefully groomed reputation and perpetual position as Teacher's Pet flashing before her terrified eyes and indeed, was the epiphany that caused Miss Mild Manners to turn resolutely onto the path of all that is well-behaved and becoming in a lady.
But we digress.
Upon her recent arrival home and tending to affairs, Miss Mild Manners was mortified to discover that certain correspondence intended for herself had been intercepted in her absence and responded to by naughty Miss Wild Manners. Read on and you will begin to understand the horrifying nature of this transgression. Miss Mild Manners sends her abject apologies to the recipient of this ill-conceived advice {while secretly hoping it works}.
Dear Miss Mild Manners
Please help me. My husband seemed like the catch of the century when I first met him but more and more each day, I'm feeling like he's on the last train to Kooksville and I don't want to meet him at the station. I'm tired of being told what to do. My friend from Cali suggested I contact you. Would you have any advice as to how I can get my life back?
Yours in hope and desperation ~ KH
Dear KH
This is your lucky day! Boring old Mild Manners is dressed in her best gloves and stockings on some moth-eaten Magical Mystery Tour overseas but you really need my help, not her prissy preachings, so it's all good.
The best way out from under Tom's Thumb is to make him want to leave you. This disfunctional way of dealing with relationships has provided many an unhappy spouse with the perfect way to bail out while retaining a huge chunk of community property; all this with the blessings of the spouse who mistakenly thinks he or she has instigated the break up, thanks to overwhelming guilt for being the breaker-upper instead of the breaker-uppee.
The answer to your question is simple.
Start pretending to smoke. He'll think it's a filthy, disgusting habit. You will become tainted and impure in his eyes and no amount of Scientology Sparkles will remove his nicotine-stained judgment of you. Whatever you do, don't really smoke. You don't want to replace one unhealthy addiction with another. Just light up any time you expect him to enter the room, then act as guilty as hell and watch his attraction to you decrease in direct proportion to your perceived cigarette-fumed transgressions. Do not under any circumstances give in. If you should start to weaken, if you should start to falter in your resolve, remember the immortal words of Winston Churchill:
We shall fight on the Longbeaches...
We shall fight in the Chesterfields and in the Bond Streets;
We shall fight in the Dunhills;
We shall never surrender ...
Go get 'em, Tiger!
Miss Wild Manners
