Stories from others...

So I have decided to post some stories that people from my mass mailing list send me in response to my emails.

From my Uncle Marty:
Dear Eliza,
What funny stories! Here's one for you. I went with a healer friend to an appointment he had. His patient's mother was visiting and I was left with her in the living room. She spoke pretty good english and we struck up a conversation. She said she lived in the country outside Vienna on a farm. I asked her if she had any cows on the farm and she said she did. Then she said she was a painter and that she painted cows. I thought this was pretty funny, here is a real country girl I thought, a true Austrian. It seemed even funnier because she was elegantly dressed and obviously cultured and rich. The walls in her daughter's house was covered with paintings but not even one picture of a cow. In fact the paintings were all impressionist.

When her daughter returned we were all talking and I asked her daughter in joking why she didn't have any of her mother's cow paintings. They looked at me wierd and the mother frowned and said "do you think I will paint a cow?" I wondered if she had Alzheimers and told her I must have misunderstood what she said as I was sure that she had said that she painted cows. She and her daughter looked at each other and cracked up. My mother paints chaos, the daughter said like Picasso and Dali.

From a former forestry professor:

Hi Eliza,
Loved the letter...and yes, everything you mention reminds me of times in Germany...including the nude beaches.... where I could not quite understand the desire to play volleyball nude. Just doesn't seem very comfortable. As for the Hash Club I just recently learned about that while I was at the Fernow Experimental Forest in VW. One of the gals (Jane) who had just returned from a 2 week stint on a fire fighting team out west went on her first Hash run in Boise. (It was very popular with the firefighters.) At then end of the race all of the new women had to line up, and as part of their "induction" each was asked to expose a body part. (I am not certain if they were given the choice of which
part.) Jane is a few years younger than I am and was a bit apprehensive, especially when the younger, well endowed girl next to her pulled up her shirt to give the guys an eyeful. When it was Jane's turn she pointed to the girl next to her and said "I am certain that you would prefer to see her boobs again rather than mine, so I shall let her take my turn". And
the girl obligingly lifted her shirt again, the crown roared, and Jane was thus formally accepted into the group on her own terms.

From Jessi:
I wanted to share one from my homestay in Spain..... See i feel your pain on the nudity
thing because one afternoon i wandered out of my room during siesta and looking down the hallway realized my señora was standing nude in front of the bathroom mirror - so i got BOTH SIDES - while she was calmly chatting w/ her 13 year old daughter. very weird to my american mindset and at that point, nude-phobic self. of course I also thought she was lesbian till i realized the strange woman coming out of her room in the afternoon every few weeks was a masseuse not her lover.