I Slept with My Beau Last Night

Since Kathy Shaidle posted my threat last night to change my tagline from, “A Newly Conservative Lesbian, ” to “A Newly Conservative Lesbian with Really Big Breasts,” — I’ll explain soon, I promise — I couldn’t resist teasing you with the headline.

My “Beau” is my darling Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, III, who is named after the Southern beau, Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, Jr., from the movie Auntie Mame, who rescues Mame and marries her after she has lost all her money in the Obama stock market crash. No, wait, the stock market crash of 1929, the one that was broadcast to Joe Biden’s television.

I rescued Beauregard and his two brothers and sister around Thanksgiving 1996 as feral kittens (and got their mother spayed). The 1958 film version of Auntie Mame with Rosalyn Russell was being played a lot that December and Margaret and I must have watched it every time. When Beau, played by Forrest Tucker, finally finds Mame on Christmas Eve after becoming charmed by her when she sold him skates for children in an orphanage, he said, “Why, it’s a miracle. It’s a good old-fashioned Christmas miracle, that’s what it is!”

So when MY dear Beau gave his first sign of crossing the line from feral to tame, which was exploding into a purr as I stroked his ear, I said, “Why, it’s a miracle! It’s a good old-fashioned Christmas miracle, that’s what it is!” And then I realized that he was dressed in Confederate gray and so incredibly handsome that the only logical name for his was “Beauregard.”

And last night, he wanted to sleep with me. So, that is how I slept with my Beau last night.

Beauregard
Beauregard

Beau played an important role in my starting this blog. I got a cancerous tumor removed from his left cheek last August — note to animal lovers, a bald spot on your cat’s cheek is a bad sign — and found another bare spot at near the old spot on his lip in December. I started this blog in the wild hope that I could make money with it promptly and pay for his surgery. Stop laughing! So far, no money, although I’m working on changing that, and I borrowed the money for Beau’s surgery. Good news! This lump was benign and his good looks are pretty much intact now that he’s healed up.

“Mr. Applewhite, what are you doing in that hole with Mr. Gutterman? … Mr. Whitterman, there’s no such place as San Francisco!”

(Give credit where credit is due: while Mame was a social liberal, she was fiscally conservative enough to get a job as soon as she’d lost her fortune.)