The Funniest Thing Ever

If you ask a group of people what the funniest thing ever is or was, usually they will each have different answers. However, if you ask the group that was standing in front of the big window, they will probably all agree on what it was. The lady, the local librarian no less, went out to go home from work and that is where it happened: the funniest thing ever.

Stereotypes die hard, they say, and this is a doozy. Imagine the word "librarian" and you can picture her. She is everything that the word implies and then some. Beehive hairdo, stiff with so much hairspray that you could drop a brick on her head and she would never know. Cat's eye glasses that sit at the tip of her nose, perched there like magic. Her dresses are invariably flowered, high necked and tend to end about mid calf. Her hose are the thick, supportive variety and her shoes are black, clompy and sensible. I don't know how we missed it, the group of us in this office building, but we had never seen this librarian come to or leave from work. I think we may have all assumed that she lived there, stored in the back room like just another dusty and largely forgotten novel.

The lady, resplendent in her white pearls and flowery dress, walked out into the parking lot and past the sedate sedan without so much as a sideways glance. Strike one. Past the sensible two door. Strike two. Past the outside chance, a racier little red number. Hmm, strike three. She came to a stop in front of the big honking bike and we all looked at each other in shock. She popped open the saddle bags and pulled out black pants, kicking off her sensible shoes and sliding them up under her dress. She slipped back into her shoes and then the funniest thing ever: she tucked that flowery dress into her black jeans, shimmied into her leather jacket and fired that beast of a bike up. She rode to the end of the lot, circled back, pulled in front of our window, flipped us all off and rode away. We giggled and snorted the rest of the day.