Waltz of the Washingtonienne

I suppose I should be writing posts about my crazy sex life and all the middle-aged balding men I've slept with in the past 24 hours. Unlike the Washingtonienne, however, my life is nowhere near as riveting. Unlike her, I have some self-respect. Between $400 and a nice dinner, I'd take a nice dinner. You'd have to pay me a lot more than $400, or nothing at all. $400 is such an insulting sum.

Instead I choose to envision the young lady in question attending a ball in the years before the French Revolution. I see her in a borrowed gown, trying to hob-nob with the aristocracy, invited to attend by a lecherous syphilitic old count, thin of purse but long in pedigree. She is a peasant, and like all other peasants, she is a sans culottes. This is why she is here. In exchange for a quick bang in the servants' stairwell, she gets a chicken. And back to the sewage-filled streets of Paris she goes, to gossip with her peers about her 'success' in that magical kingdom of wealth that belongs to the aristocracy.