The social metronome slows
in silly season

And so we move into silly season -- the quiet time in which the big bashes are but distant memories except for those who haven't found a permanent home for the big dresses. If you thought they were big on the floats, you should see them in your living room!
The hotter it gets the harder it gets to scare up a good party in our provincial little burg. I have made every effort here to be obtuse and inoffensive so that I may be invited to every festivity worthy of newsprint, especially those at summer's end bidding farethewell to the young ingenues whose Mams and Paps can afford Ivy League educations for them.
Tammany Hall, Jiminy Cricket! You ain't nothing but a straw boss at your new home, and that's what all your friends worked so hard to try to make you understand, mijo. If only consejos from friends had figured in to your decisions to move so quickly in love.
Sweet William or Stinky Billy? Depends on whether you're getting your info from his British mother or his Scottish wife.
The Sword of Damocles is easy to spot at these family gatherings. It's the older sibling who views all non-relatives as interlopers who might make off with the family's ill-reaped treasures. Though outwardly welcoming, it is rather easy to pick up on her preternatural lack of trust, something spanning now more than her own generation.
At this recent fiesta, I was so reminded of Sybarites and Crotons playing the pipes to which their trained horses kept pace. It was all a bit much, too big a show for so humble a venue.
Our young batch has taken to the tall timber, that suggestion coming from law enforcement itself, such that it is in our hometown.
The lady in waiting, and waiting, and waiting wishes her beau would stop talking through his hat and start talking turkey about the wedding, business, family, kids.
It would behoove us all to understand why a little pig accompanies St. Anthony.
She was caught in her terminological inexactitude and the lie she thought was little and white caused a good deal of harm.
Absolut! What a buffoon! He argued and couldn't back down from the origin of the 10-gallon hat. He said his hat held 10 gallons -- ridiculous if you consider the size of a five-gallon mop pail. I told him the name had its origins in galón, the Spanish word for the braid that usually decorated the wide brim of cowboy hats.
Like it or not, he is to us what Thersites was to the Greeks at Troy -- maldiciento and audacious. We are waiting for Achilles to deck our boy wonder.
Not a good basis for deciding on matrimony. He's thinking, there ain't no horse that can't be rode; she's thinking, there ain't no man that can't be throwed.
There's many a slip twixt cup and lip. Careful what you plan and be sure to examine your motives for coming clean, which casts you in such repentant light but throws everyone else to the lions.