Ora Does New York!

by Ora Shay

MIDLAND, TX- Darlings, your Ora is just back, exhausted but thoroughly enervated from doing her part in making the world safe for America!

Is it true what they say about Gotham? After a week of conventioneering there, Ora replies with an emphatic, "Botta-bing, botta-boom!"

Just a few of the many moments that will live forever in yr hmble crrspndnt's memory:

Wined and dined to a fare-the-well at the Waldorf (that little girl-what's her name? Kitty? Marlene?-plumb chose the wrong hotel to have her goings-on in, let me tell you), we would set off every day, well fortified calorie-wise, to do the nation's business. My hats off to that cuddly Mayor Bloomberg and his police force. We'd come back late at night, turn on Fox News, and sure enough, there'd be all those ragtag protestors, but thanks to Mayor Bloomberg and New York's finest, we never encountered one bit, not one single bit, of that unpleasantness in real life. Oh, sure, there was that toothless person of color rapping on the limo window one morning with his tattered squeegee, and there was the person of indeterminate sex who gave me the fish-eye as I was crossing the sidewalk on 42nd Street to see The Lion King, but those things-sort of-happen even in Midland. For the most part we Republican patriots (is there any other kind???) were well protected from the impolite, impolitic, and wholly unwashed riff-raff. "Let them eat Big Macs," as my best friend Suzie Ray Quisenberry here in Midland says.

One of the high points of the week-of yr hmble Ora's life!-was the reception Monday evening in which friends and supporters rented-you ready, West Texas?-the ENTIRE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, one of the truly great museums of the world! We walked through what seemed to this Ector County girl miles and miles of truly magnificent works of art (though often with a bit too much skin showing for my taste, if you get my drift) and wound up in this huge room with a wall of glass and containing something called the Temple of Dendur (I hope I got the spelling right-I didn't have my Treo with me to make notes in) which, our guide explained, was 5,000 years old and had been transported intact from Egypt and reconstructed exactly as it looked the day it was built, and there, welcoming hand out-stretched, in front of this monument to the enduring greatness of man, stood Texas's own other power-center, Mr. Tom DeLay his own sweet self! Truly a picture for the ages.

More than a few West Texas tears were shed, my dears, when we made the long, dreadful trek "downtown" (as they say in Manhattan) and stood on the Ground Zero viewing platform contemplating the cruelty of man and trying our best to find forgiveness in our Southern Baptist hearts for those misguided young men who so skillfully manhandled control of several airliners and aimed them right at every one of us True Believers on that dreadful 9-11. I couldn't even bring myself to click off one shot on my Nikon 5200 Coolpix to pass on to you, Dear Readers, but the scene of utter devestation is indelibly imprinted on this heartfelt Republican's memory, let me tell you.

My all-time fave, among so many unforgettable moments-what a great party we have: Arnie with his True American Success story, Dick who could teach used-car salesmen a thing or two about how to close a deal, the Adorable Twins going for the 18-30 demographic, Zell Miller who's seen the error of his liberal, left-wing, progressive ways and has come back into the free-market, God- bless- us- all- but- especially- the- rich- who- must- bear- the- terrible- burden- of- keeping- everything- working- and- safe- from- spoiling- the- less- fortunate- with- endless- handout, -the best memory I brought back to Midland with me was late one night in the Waldorf when I woke up with a splitting headache (I think it was all those martinis-it's so hard to get good Texas branchwater in Manhattan) and I desperately rummaged through my suitcases but for the life of me couldn't locate my bottle of Vicodin.

What was I to do? When these headaches come over me back home I just pop a couple of V's, down them with a swallow (or two, or three) of the above-mentioned branchwater and I'm fit to go, but here I was trapped in one of the great luxury hotels of all time in what The N-Y--- T---- daily assures us is the greatest city in the world, and NO VICODIN.

I dressed hurriedly (though I had no idea where to go at 3 a.m.) and, heading for the elevator, staggered out into the hall, where no sooner had I opened my door, when I virtually bumped into this sweet young chambermaid or hall-person or whatever you call them who, judging by her epidermis, was not long off the boat from somewhere quite southerly. I blushed, and I know she was embarrassed too to thus encounter one of her well-off patrons stumbling about in the middle of the night in one of the great luxury hotels of the world (though of course these people can't really blush, but the sensitive encounterer knows when another human being feels embarrassment, doesn't she?). "Missee need help?" Oh, my dears, such sincere concern I say in those lovely almond eyes!

'Missee need help' indeed! I clutched my head and made a pain-filled face. My little Filapina or Chinese or Amazonian or whatever her roots smiled and said, "You wait, Missee" and went scurrying off some hidden hutch where chambermaids await the bidding of their clientele. In a few moments she was back. She held out her hand. In it was a bit of folded translucent paper that looked like the way the BC Headache Powders used to look that my mother used to take all the time. "Here. You take now," she said and forced the little package into my hand.

She held my eyes and something passed between us that overcame my strong, in-bred urge to rush back into my room, get my purse, and reward her handsomely for her kindness. Her fingers closed my own over the little package and, more softly, she said again, "You take. Go sleep. Nighty-night," and went off down the hall.

Well, my dears, I went back inside. I take. I sleep. Boy did I sleep. And that's my you may have noticed me the next night in the front row of the Texas delegation at George W. Bush's very feet, full of vim, vigor, and vitality, mysteriously renewed by who knows what ancient wonder drug, yelling my lungs out over and over-"Four more years! Four more years!"-as our Midland-boy-made-good painted a picture of the American future such as few of us had ever dreamed could be possible! Botta-boom, botta-bing!

END

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