Old News
Today I was out having lunch at Dunn's - a pretty bad restaurant on Elgin Street in Ottawa that is neither cheap nor good but which has a reputation as such. Anyway - it's downtown Ottawa and downtown Ottawa really is quite small. My smoked meat sandwich was thick with fatty awful smoked meat between too small two small slices of rye that for some reason reminded me of Tonya Harding. "Remember Tonya Harding?" I asked around the table. One of my dining companions - also of the smoked rye "too two" selection - said, "Oh yeah. Didn't she whack a guy?"
Lard in haven. How soon we forget.
"No", I exasperated - "She had her boyfriend hire a goon to whack a competitor!"
This led us into a conversation of my second favourite figure skater - Nancy Kerrigan. See, it's always been my contention that Nancy Kerrigan is the Betty Davis of figure skating. (Tonya Harding being more like the Baby Jane...) She was supposed to be America's Sweetheart - especially after the whacking - but no sooner had she won our hearts, then she dashed them for her coach - with her coach's wife shrieking into the wind, "That little bitch stole my husband!" Ah, Nancy.
And that voice. Olive Oil with a hint of Popeye. "Look, I'm not Snow White in real life." Yikes! No kidding. You're like a cross between Jezebel and... and... I don't know... somebody who gets whacked in the knees by some goon and goes on to win a silver medal at the Olympics and be in the parade in her hometown standing tall while her coach's wife runs along the parade route screaming, "That little whore stole my husband!"
And the Horatio Alger part of her story. O. Mi. Gawd. Her blind mother who sacrificed everything so that Nancy could skate? Sitting blindly in the stands? "Watching" Nancy win the silver?
Anyway, it was a funny lunch because nobody could really remember the facts of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan saga - Nancy being, to my mind, the completely innocent benefactrice of Tonya Harding's pyschosis. Except that the men at the table felt a certain "frisson" at the mention of Tonya. A certain "shrivellon" at the mention of Nancy. And yet it's the total opposite for me.
Men. Even in the retelling of half memories of trashy women, they will always, it seems, go with the right memory of the wrong woman...
Have the rib steak, medium rare, with mash potatoes. Apparently - it was very good. (But that's a man's opinion.)
