Festoonage

Okay, so I had a lesson yesterday with a student I've been teaching privately for some time. The lesson went well, as usual. We conversed on a number of topics in her shiny executive office, both of us wearing professional attire. (gack) So the lesson is at noon and I stopped at Subway (in the same skyscraper) to eat a BLT beforehand. Afterward, I stopped at the bathroom and washed my hands and checked the hair, straightened the tie. Then I dried my hands and went down the corridor to her office. When I left her office, I went home as quickly as possible to strip off the "nice" clothes. I noticed a little sensation under my upper lip and so leaned close to the bedroom mirror to inspect the teeth, and this is what I saw.



Now when I give class, I'm on, which means quite a bit of smiling. Smiling, I'll have you know, exposes the teeth to observation. So what the hell was this woman thinking? There I am going on about adverb placement, the importance of it, especially in such cases as "often blown" and "blown often" har dee har har, and what can she possibly be paying attention to but the gynormous piece of lettuce festooning my teeth?

And that's not the first time something like that has happened to me.

About six years ago, I was in San Francisco for the food show sharing a hotel room with my boss, the owner of the company. This is nerve racking in itself, sharing such an intimate thing as sleeping in the same room as her, but wait til you hear what happened the last morning there. We got up and showered and prepped ourselves. I went first and when I shaved, I made a rather nasty rashy thing on my neck and patched it up with a little toilet paper to stop the bleeding. (You can see where this is going right?) Then she took her half hour in the bathroom as I watched the morning news. Once finished, we went down to the coffee shop for breakfast.
Yes, we ordered, were served, ate the food and relaxed a bit with our coffee and newspapers before we headed back up to get our bags. When we got upstairs, I glanced in the mirror to see blood stained toilet paper bits on my neck. Horrified, I whirled around and said, "How could you do this? How could you let me go down there and eat and everything like this?" I was bright red with shame, thinking about the waitress, the other customers. "I thought you wanted it like that. I'm sorry." Okay, so she thought she was respecting my quirkiness or something. But if you take anything away from this story, it's that anytime, anywhere that you see a guy with bits of bloody paper on his neck, please, please mention it to the poor guy. And ditto for the tooth festoonage,

As if this needs to be said, people.