Anne Calter pushed her leather chair back from the big oak desk and sighed. A native of New Jersey, she had graduated with high honors from Princeton and received a law degree from Harvard. You could tell a Harvard man, but you couldn't tell him much. Or woman. After serving as a staff attorney in Washington, Anne had written her popular book, None Dare Call it Mediocrity. A merciless critique of liberal media bias, it had sold well and enabled her to give up the practice of law and focus on propagating her political views.
On shows such as "Larry King Live" and "American Morning," she had argued, loudly and relentlessly, for her point of view. Sometimes, though, as she approached the age of 35, Anne sometimes wondered whether the ideologues of D.C. really meant what they said or merely lobbed verbal grenades for money. It did not escape her notice that many of the standard Left Wing versus Right Wing debates in D.C. had a ritualized, kabuki-like quality.
Anne Calter was a lean, mean rhetorical machine. She ran daily, yet hadn't entirely erased the urge to smoke. Did she contradict herself? Very well, then. She was large; she contained multitudes. Well, she wasn't really large. Just large in the philosophical sense. In reality, she was quite svelte. More and more, her ideological fury was fueled by caffeine rather than fervor.
As Anne Calter's ideological passions waned, other things waxed. Her legs, for example. But she was a true fitness fanatic. Yes, the lure of the unfiltered Camel still mocked her. But she dedicated and rededicated herself to physical fitness. And yet there was a void. Yes, her nights were filled with passionate debates about the nature and reach of foreign policy. Yet, when the hot studio lights were extinguished, she longed for a different kind of passion. When passion's trance was overpast, if tenderness and truth could last. But she digressed.
And so, as she sat back in her leather chair, her eye caught a book title on the distant shelf. An old McLuhan book, The Medium is the Massage. Ah, McLuhan, once billed as another Freud, as the second coming of Newton. The second coming? She could certainly use a second...never mind. A massage, perhaps that would relax her blithe spirit.
But what type of massage? In the last few months, in order to offset the stress of appearing nightly on talk shows, Anne had become something of a connoisseur of massage. She'd had to, as the repeated whipping about of her long blonde hair to express disdain had resulted in chronic pain in the neck, and she dared not to admit this to anyone, fearing puns.
Anne ran over the list of her massage options. She certainly had no need of the structural integration massage, which re-educated the body of its subjects to appear taller and slimmer. She was partial, certainly, to the European Hydromassage. Was there anything better than floating in the arms of a massage specialist as the pulsating hydrojets danced on her skin like tropical rain? However, she'd been detoxified so many times lately by the hydrotechnique that she was beginning to develop permanent wrinkles on her fingers and toes. And the isogei treatment, while exotic enough to pique her interest, promoted cellulite reduction while it toned her body and face. Anne was afraid that if her whip-thin body was reduced any more she'd be down to bare bone.
The peppermint twist reflexology treatment; that's just what she needed. No, it had nothing to do with Joey Dee and the Starliters. Anne made a quick call to her main massage coodinator, Salomon Gonzales-Gonzales, and yes, he was available immediately. Filled with nervous energy, Anne eased out of her leather chair, and sped to the spa. As she drove her carjack-bait Jag down the road, Anne began to sing "I can't get no satisfaction." Then she halted, concerned about Freudian implications.
