ICE CREAM

If you were ice cream, what flavor would you be?

Sounds like a Barbara Walters question, doesn’t it? But no.

This evening, She Who Must Be Obeyed, the Mistress of Sarcasm, and I were enjoying a Beefy Repast. The Mistress is between quarters at school, so she was getting her dose of Home Cookin’ before heading off to visit friends in Texas. She was describing some friends at school that were going out with each other despite their being dramatically different in habits and temperament.

The young lady is exactly that: the quintessential Southern Belle, genteel, well-dressed, courtly of manner, eschewing vulgar language. By contrast, her boyfriend is a Northerner: sloppy, with machine-gun speech that can spray a room with extreme vulgarity in no time flat.

But for some reason, they’re an “item.” Maybe opposites do attract - for a while, anyway, before the novelty wears off.

The Mistress was relating how this couple had gone out to get some ice cream. Southern Belle asked her boyfriend, “If I were ice cream, what flavor would I be?”

Northern Boyfriend considered this briefly and, in a languid Savannah-style drawl, responded, “Pralines and Dick.”

So: what flavor of ice cream are you?