The Making of a Mistress
A Comedy in E-Mail
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Chapter One: What does Cancun have to do with it?
10/28/98
e-mail from: mlooo@fairmount.
e-mail to : hotlcun@cancun.
ATTENTION: JENNIFER HOOSIER
Dear Jen,
I am sure the night manager will get this e-mail to you. As I am your sister-in-law and as I am a respectable married woman, I must advise you to come back to Fairmount, Indiana, immediately. You are unable to see that these people are not for you. You are unable to see that they are compromising your reputation. You are unable to see that you were not raised like that in Indiana. You were raised proper!
You were not raised to open hotel doors to witness molestation between married people who are married to other people and who are not married to the people whom they are molesting. I was so ashamed of your e-mail I deleted it. Your brother, Al, is driving himself crazy looking for it all over the internet.
How did you get to Cancun in the first place? I thought you were cooking in Los Angeles until your play was produced.
What does cooking in Los Angeles until a play is produced have to do with going to Cancun to witness people molest each other when the molester is not married to the molestee?
It is bad enough to imagine people who are married to each other molesting each other. But the other way is unimaginable.
Get on the first plane to Indiana. Remember how you were raised!
Your sister-in-law, Maryloo.
10/28/98
e-mail to : mloo@fairmount.
e-mail from: jen@hotelcun.
Dear Maryloo,
Getting to Cancun in the first place, as you asked, is because I went to the Hollywood Bowl with Clint, my boss in the restaurant, and Mint, the girlfriend of Clint, and Ben, Clint’s friend. It was fireworks night.
Did you ever see eighteen thousand people in a semi-circle of stone seats watching an orchestra play Tchaikowsky?
Then they had fireworks and the amazing thing to me, Maryloo, was that every spurt of the fireworks was on a downbeat by the conductor. I still can't figure out how the conductor knew when to put the downbeat to the sparks.
But he was in rhythm all the time. He sparked to Stars and Stripes Forever by John Phillip Sousa. You know, we used to shake the pom-poms to that one in high school.
We also met Mr. and Mrs. Ziggy.
Ben said Mr. Ziggy would be in Cancun and if I cooked for the group, I would get to talk to Mr. Ziggy about backing my play. Mint said this is what networking is all about: being where the backers are. Funny, Maryloo, the only backer I ever heard about in Indiana was a line backer.
So, you can see, the reason I am in Cancun is to find backers for my play. And the way to get friendly with the backers is to cook for them, which Mr. Rory told me I would be doing in Cancun.
So, I am not leaving until I cook.
Love, Jen
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Book Details
About the Book
Not since Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has America had such a stunning, cunning heroine. Jennifer, from Indiana, is trying to produce her play in Hollywood. To do so, she thinks she has to cook for a living, dress as a bird for Halloween, make friends with a group of mistresses, travel to Cancun with some rich guys, and use her frying pan as a weapon. During all of these romps calculated to produce her play, she is being reminded by her pregnant sister-in-law from Indiana that "No one in our family was ever a mistress." Does Jen succumb to the L.A. non-moral climate? Is it mistressing over marriage or the other way around? Does Jen get her play produced? What is her play anyhow? And why is she writing it? Read: The Making of a Mistress for the answers to all of these questions.
About the Author
Marcia Baltimore lives with a guy in a house in Beverly Hills with a drive-through garage, which requires that the cars go around the block to exit. Ms. Baltimore will tell you this explains why all the people in Beverly Hills are always driving around the block. Prior to this lifestyle, Ms. Baltimore was a doctoral candidate at U.S.C. and wrote original government research for Sesame Street. She won an NEA award for a multi-media presentation about Energy (both Potential and Kinetic) in which two 35mm projectors and an 8mm camera were driven by a telephone dial. Her classmates were G. Lucas and R. Kleiser. They made the movies, she only wrote. Her late husband once told her, "You can take the girl out of Scranton, but you can’t take Scranton out of the girl." Keep that in mind while reading this book in which all the characters are fiction and do not reflect anyone living or dead. Since Ms. Baltimore is learning e-mail, she wrote this book in e-mail-ease.