Cranky leftie that I may be, every time I read the Village Voice, I find myself throwing it across the room in irritation. When they cancelled Sylvia Plachy's photography on the letters page, I was annoyed. When they cancelled Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies, I was appalled. When they cancelled their sports pages, I had the sinking feeling that the back page would become a vacuum. But it was when they cancelled Cynthia Heimel's column, Tongue in Chic, that I knew that this paper had nothing for me anymore, nothing. Cynthia Heimel is a goddess, and I have adored her ever since the publication of her first book, Sex Tips for Girls, in 1983. (Last year she published Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It's Personal, which is full of great stuff, including "The Hobag Manifesto," an incendiary, hilarious piece that answers the question "what happens when punks hit menopause?" She is also the author of the best-titled book of the '90's, If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?, and of 1986's But Enough About You: Avoiding Fabulousness, which is out of print, thanks to the shortsightedness of her publisher, and which contains what I think is her best essay, "When in Doubt, Act Like Myrna Loy." I want to quote this entire essay, right here, right now, but I feel squeamish about doing so, so until I get her publisher's permission, I will have to content myself with a quote here, a quote there.
Our starter quote comes from Sex Tips for Girls, about the problem with the IUD:
IUDs are okay until they go wrong. Well actually they start right off being horrible...They say it's easier to put an IUD in after you've already had a child, but they're nuts, and the treatment of actual pain is a boring reason to become addicted to Percodan.
Plus they tell you to check the string each day to make sure the damned thing is firmly in place. Not one girl I know who has had an IUD has ever been able to feel the string after the first six weeks. Somehow, some way, they get hopelessly lost in there. The only good thing about the string business is that if someone catches you unaware when you happen to be in the throes of masturbation, you can laugh airily and say, "Just checking for the string, doncha know. Have a pecan." Of course, you don't actually need an IUD to pull off this ruse.
But honey, it took me almost a full half-hour to write that, and half of it was someone else’s writing—so I wasn’t even writing, I was transcribing! And I just ate an enormous bag of potato chips! (Yes, we have graduated to Non-Sequitur Theatre here.)