Archived Romans de Kate & T (and that's french!)

Chapter One: Karen

Shh! We have been forwarded in time to invisibly observe
Karen Kwok, at home in her marital palace, 15 years in the future. Let's
listen in.




Karen paces the hand-laid tile floor in front of the Carrera marble
fireplace. The last of the organic pine logs smolders ominously.Karen is clad in a soigne cocktail dress. You wouldn't think she had aged a day past 24, if not for the unmistakable worry which makes her sad eyes only more beautiful.

Karen sips from a martini glass purchased from socialitelife.com. Her husband of 10 years, H. Marshall Smither III, is not home. The time is 1 a.m.


Without warning, he lurches through the door. The unmistakable scent of 20-year Glenlivet wafts through the air as Karen takes him in: his handsome
profile running to jowl, blazer sadly askew over the manly shoulders, perhaps--could it be--a schmear of MAC Lipglass on the collar? Karen stalks forward and hurls her martini glass into the fireplace. Words burst uncontrollably from her elegant lips.


"Dammit H.M .! I don't have children!!!"


No one knows what the H. stands for.

No, he wouldn't give you the children you so desperately yearned for. Your ovaries are as fertile as they ever were, except for that unmistakable sadness around the fallopian tubes.


But fear not! It all turns around one day when in your sexless derangement you decided to take BabySoft(TM) to Antiques Roadshow. There you encounter a dashingly liberal executive producer with a background in riskmanagement and a thing for choral music. (As it turns out, he also knows Christie, who with her tenured professor's salary donates at the "Benefactor" level.) To top it all off, his last name is Slaf (Easter European extraction by way of Oxford.) You fall into one another's arms and we are all so excited to celebrate that now Karen will be a Slaf forever . . .

"An aged but leonine presence in the latter half of the 21st century, Eckehard Slaf had been consumed with unquenchable grief after the loss of his beloved wife of 49 years, Ewellonda. He tried to overcome his sorrows by writing obsessively, publishing his least understandable work, 'A metric for calculating financial accruities of Allegri's "Miserere,"' seven months after his wife's tragic end.

Despite his age and deteriorating mental condition, however, he stubbornly refused to relinquish his job as executive producer for the popular public television series "Antiques Roadshow." It was while traveling with the Antiques Roadshow, however, that Mr. Slaf met the woman who was to ease the pain of his last years. Karen Smither, notoriously beautiful wife of the wealthy Wall Street baron H. M. Smither III, espied Mr. Slaf during filming.

The affair that followed was extensively chronicled in the nation's tabloids and gossip columns. The papparazzi's enthusiasm only increased after reporters from this newspaper discovered Mr. Smither's longstanding connection to underworld European art traders trafficking paintings formerly owned by members of the Nazi party.

After Mr. Smither's arrest and subsequent incarceration, Mrs. Smither and Mr. Slaf married, living out their golden years in an affluent suburb of Miami."

Followed by the Theme Song:

Ta
The way
The British thank
Bert
A Muppet who is gay
Ro
A chick
Who got knocked up
Kwok
I dream of her all day . . .
Phil, plays music on the Web!
Slaf, what I am all the time!
T, a drink with jam and bread (and so much more!)
Ewellonda, that's a crime
crime
crime
crime
hummmm. . . .