He was considered by most women as above good looking and by most men as “athletic.” His ‘do is always done. He is always valiantly suave with an overdose sprinkling of bravado … just enough for his conversation to be spicy.
He keeps his grooming stylist near by. He shares the stylist with a certain well dressed high profile notable, yet Derrick won’t reveal the name (often). His only comments are that on their last apparel viewing trip “across the pond,” his seatmate bragged about discreetly dating “an actress” AND that he wanted to take the bullet train to Belgium to “look for stones.” Derrick, whispered to me later that “I don’t like to boast, but that cheapo Tayz-ER complained that it cost him a bundle.”
Derrick gets around.
Recently his photo was on the party page of a newspaper and he was spotted in an impromptu snapshot with the “the actress” on the front of a chit-chat magazine. Very late that night, we overheard his cell call to his assistant asking her to get the number of one of his favorite night spots. He likes to keep his options open. He drives her crazy.
You may be thinking, “Man, does he have it all? What happened? What he was thinking?”
One day while Derrick was opening the mail, a disturbing thought suddenly rose up like a wisp of smoke in the wind. He ignored it.
Then several days later it happened again, this time the wind blew and the thought turn into a smell of something so enticing he stopped for a moment. It smelled like a home-cooked meal after a long day in grade school.
He went on and then immediately asked someone, anyone to book a reservation at his favorite restaurant. “And do it now!” The next day he was stopped cold. He felt sucker punched and had the wind knocked out of him.
Suddenly his head was spinning as if he was in the middle of a strong wind. It felt like a tornado. Everyone was going around him faster and faster. Some people were rotating closer inside so the pull was stronger. Still some others were whirling up and flinging out wider around Derrick. It had to stop.
He had to stop it. How though?
Derrick was the center of his world, and it wasn’t pretty.
His first thought was to “get somebody, to get anybody … and now!” He tried to remember when it began and who was to blame. He did remember the first time it happened he knew something was off. The second time he had a good feeling, a humble feeling, yet it was quickly dismissed.
Finally, it hit him like a brick in the window.
Like a well-balanced home-cooked meal, he considered what his mother taught to keep him grounded. She always said: Talk about people, as if they are listening … do unto others … want a friend be a friend … mind you’re manners!
You maybe thinking, “What does this have to do with Etiquette?”
In the words of my Etiquette mentor: “We obey the rules of law, so we don’t kill each other. WE OBEY THE RULES OF ETIQUETTE, SO WE DON’T DRIVE EACH OTHER CRAZY.”
©2008 Madolena Key, Mannerisms LLC, www.mannerismsllc.net (636) 398-6267