DoN-te's Inferno

I'm sitting in the waiting room at physical therapy, feeling exhausted after a busy day of teaching and feeling sorry for myself because I know that I've hit a wall in therapy and will not make any progress AGAIN. And I've sort of drifted into that danger zone of almost asleep sitting up but yet aware of my surroundings enough to not actually sleep and make noise or drool or anything.

And then the little girl next to me goes into full nutso-ballerina mode and starts pirouetting all over the teeny waiting room while her mother tries to be encouraging yet discouraging. In a foreign language (it sounded like Russian or Ukrainian). And very quietly. So the girl climbs into the chair next to me and begins to do barre exercises on the back of the chair and keeps hitting the venetian blinds behind us, causing a cascade of dust to fall on me. I look at my watch and think, "They'll call me in about 3 minutes. I can take it for 3 minutes."

And then the impossibly tall woman comes in and sits on the other side of me. She roots around in her tote bag and takes out some butterscotch hard candies and unwraps a few and puts them in her mouth. After she rattles them around in her mouth like dice in a Yahtzee cup for what seems like a geological epoch, she begins to crunch them up.

**Inside my head, I have rooted around in my pink Etienne Aigner bag for a hammer and a pair of pliers; I knock out the girl and the woman, then systematically remove all the woman's teeth.**

I look at my watch again. JK is late, I despair. I should have been called back already. At least, I console myself, it cannot get any worse. And then, I hear that the music being softly piped into the waiting area is now "The Pina Colada Song". I grit my teeth. Amazon Crunch Woman starts on some Werther's. Hyper Ballerina flings herself across the room again in a mad spin. I wait...because I know that if they don't call me in soon, the next song will be "Disco Duck" or "Ballroom Blitz." The door opens...it is Amazon Crunch Woman's turn. Why must I wait!? The music pauses demurely...and the next song is...oh. My. GOD. "Margaritaville."

AAAARRRGGGHHHH...............................