I used to enjoy playing Doctor when I was younger.\u00a0 As a parent, playing doctor takes on a whole new meaning, and usually involves more blood than I remember from my youth.\u00a0 This past weekend, though, I had a new experience – I got to play Dentist.<\/p>\n
Now, the Reigning Queen of Pink has her share of medical issues, by which I mean that her file is larger than mine and she’s had tests and surgeries and whatnot that I’d never heard of, and among these many and varied conditions she happens to be missing a few teeth here and there, by which I mean most of them.\u00a0 In an effort to correct this, over the course of many years and thousands of dollars, she currently has braces on her top teeth, with springs to move them around her head like tiny masticating bumper cars.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Or she did, until Sunday when one of the damn things came loose, teeth I mean, and fell out.\u00a0 The Reigning Queen of Pink reports for the record that having a tooth that is no longer connected to your mouth, yet\u00a0still anchored in place by your braces, is not comfortable.\u00a0 And by “not comfortable,” she meant, “please call the emergency orthodontist number Right NOW.”\u00a0\u00a0 Calling the 17 numbers needed to get to a human on a weekend, I was finally offered this sage advice:\u00a0 “Well, can you cut the wire?”<\/p>\n
Wut?\u00a0 I’m sorry, first, don’t you have to go to school for something like 6 years for that?\u00a0 And second, didn’t we just pay for that wire?\u00a0 I thought they were expensive or something.\u00a0\u00a0 Nevertheless, there I was sterilizing my massive boltcutters and needle-nosed pliers and laying her under the big lights, Open Up and Say Ah.<\/p>\n
The wire on the far side was straightforward, if hard to see.\u00a0 The second cut was to the wire on the front side, easier to see but with a big spring coiled up on it.\u00a0 I clipped the wire not knowing how much tension was on the spring.\u00a0 I was NOT prepared for the wire – tooth and all – to bounce off up at me and go flying across the room;\u00a0with the bloody stump of the\u00a0tooth and the\u00a0wire and\u00a0spring attached,\u00a0it looked like something out of Steven King’s The Dentist<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Tooth Fairy agreed that since she only has 12 teeth in her whole head, they ought to be pro-rated, and that having the Flying Loose Tooth Of Doom was a lot to deal with, and so they settled on a new bathing suit.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So today when I called home to see what the actual orthodontist said or did, they were still out with the followup Tooth Fairy visit (which bodes well for how it went), and I got to speak to the 13-yr-old Human Tape Recorder.\u00a0 She let me know that SOBUMD and the\u00a0RQoP were still out, and then announced:\u00a0 “I was listening to AC\/DC in 5th period today!”<\/p>\n BUMD:\u00a0<\/strong> What?\u00a0 Why were they playing AC\/DC in school? We hung up, with her still humming snatches of Big Balls, some of which are held for charity, and some for fancy dress, as I’m sure you, too, Gentle Reader, remember all too well.\u00a0 AC\/DC, still corrupting the youth of America 36 years later.\u00a0\u00a0 She’ll be humming that for weeks.\u00a0 Rock on!\u00a0 \u00a0
\nHTR:<\/strong>\u00a0 No, just on my headphones.
\nBUMD:<\/strong>\u00a0 You found the 5th period lecture to be, perhaps, less than scintillating?
\nHTR:\u00a0<\/strong> No, we had speech arts, and we didn’t have a studio, and so I had nothing better to do.
\nBUMD:\u00a0<\/strong> I doubt that, but we’ll let that slide.\u00a0 Do I want to know which song?
\nHTR:<\/strong>\u00a0 Oh, it was great!\u00a0 I put it on a random selection from a random album, and it was called “Big Balls!”\u00a0 I was rolling on the floor laughing, and I wondered if anyone else could hear it…\u00a0 It goes like this…
\nBUMD:<\/strong>\u00a0 No, no, thank you, I remember *very well* how it goes, thank you.\u00a0 I’ll talk to you when I get home…<\/p>\n
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