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This
is a guest feature from our sister paper Women
at that certain age, edited by Prudence Ray
"It's
been a good marriage, but the conversation just stopped
ten years ago. So we took up line dancing, hoping that would
fill the conversation gap. It served us well and gave us
songs to sing in the shower and the breakfast bar..."
That
from Sheryl
Thwachery, a woman of a certain age,
who has discovered a more fulfilling life now she has discovered
the middle aged joys of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.
Sheryl
says she can now express her most intimate hopes through the
medium of Dollyspeak, the front weighted country queen who
wears wigs on her head.
"I
married very young: Jod was my first real boyfriend who
licked back",
said
Sheryl, a friendly, puppy faced, wife, heaving a catering
sized Hagen Daaz from the fridge and eating it straight from
the tub with a small spoon. (She had tiny hands and feet.)
The sugar made her remember how she met her beau, Jod...
"There
were very few people out this way of our age so we just
happened to bump into each other walking down the street
one day. He said, "I kind'a like ya" and I said
"I kind'a like ya too."
"We
got married 2 weeks later."
"At
first we never saw each other much, he was always away digging
for the company, so we didn't really notice that we didn't
have much to say to each other. It was only when he was
promoted to Digger Supervisor that we started to spend more
time together - he only had to turn up to work to start
them digging in the morning and then tell them to stop at
night so he was always home.
We realised that we needed to fill in the good-for-nothing
silences."
"We
started off playing country tracks at breakfast, but soon
they accompanied all our meals until we rarely talked at
all."
"Then
we got into something of a rut, I suppose, and started putting
on certain tracks to show how we felt, or what we wanted
to do."
"A
couplea times we would have an argument completely using
the medium of song, just we put the volume way up high,
and lip synched more tragically."
"That's
when the neighbours started complaining and they were more
contemporary rock type country fans and it was quite easy
for them to out-volume us."
Since
this interview, Sherl and Jod have died tragically in a bizarre
incident involving breast implants and gray hair wigs.
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