Once upon a time… No! No! Not once upon a time but February 14, 2002.
Hope became barren after a miscarriage with injustice on Valentine’s Day. Nineteen-year-old Hope Zapinsky, daughter of Baby Boomer Republicans, Steven and Sarah, ran away to find milk and honey on Rivington Street and found love at a local café.

She wasn’t the image of the American Beauty Rose but of one grown out of grunge and punk. Her short spiked hair was colored black for her Gothic attitude. Her brown eyes searched for forbidden touch. She wore her Ché tee like a hair shirt. She didn’t want the white picket fence around a suburban tombstone decorated for a family of four. She preferred decorating her body in tattoos and piercings. A butterfly for freedom graced her left shoulder while a garland of rose thorns formed a bracelet on her right ankle. Her
earlobes displayed an assortment of .925 silver. Stainless-steel studs marked her left eyebrow, tongue and navel.

Hope did find love at a local café with Charlie and Jill. She shared her ying and yang needs in un ménage à trois. She was a mathematician in her approach to sex and her partners were her students. Instead of Sixty-Nine, she tried Ninety-Six. She did multiplication, division, addition and subtraction, and used algebra, geometry and calculus with physics for creative formulae.Einstein’s E=MC2 best described her bedroom antics. She exemplified the Big Bang theory and she expanded her universal love to include Charlie and Jill.

But she became barren after a miscarriage with injustice on that chilly February night – not in the actual sense but in a situation that turned fruitless. Charlie announced his engagement to Jill, hence putting an end to their three-way affair. He convinced his fiancé that he was doing the right thing and planned to move out of their tiny walk-up to a swanky condo on East Seventy-Fifth Street with the financial aid from his Daddy.

It was alleged that Hope tossed two Abraham Lincoln greenbacks at Charlie before exiting the café in tears. She stood on the corner of Rivington and Clinton Streets, sobbing profusely until her tears froze into black ice on the sidewalk. She slipped on it. Like Mrs. Fletcher, she fell and couldn’t get up. She was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital with several broken ribs and two bleeding kneecaps. That was four years ago…

Hope was laid out in missionary position on her hospital bed, watching soap operas and Oprah. She slit her wrists after the election and had to undergo extensive psychological tests. Doctors fed her Prozac, Zoloft,Symbyax, Centrax, Librium, Paxipam, Zyprexa, Artane, Benadryl, Ambien, Seconal and other drugs ending in in, or, ox, ax, al, il, ine and ane as if they were ice cream flavors at Baskin-Robbins – a taste of Orwell’s 1984 circulated throughout her nervous system.

After a dozen electric shock treatments, the copper wires in her brain cells were harnessed. Her mind was washed squeaky clean and sanitized. All tattoos and piercings vanished through laser surgery. Her hair was styled into an acceptable blond bob. Her Ché shirt found its way to a landfill near New Jersey.
Her condition improved over the weeks, enabling her to be released and returned to society. The treatments were so successful that she became a born-again Republican and married an oilman. She’s expecting her first child by next summer, much to the amazement of the medical community.

The couple is building a seaside summer cottage with a white picket fence. The points of the fence are razor-sharp, the better to keep out unwanted characters with tattoos, piercings, funky dos and Ché shirts. And they are living happily ever after in the American Dream…

No! No! Not so! This is what we’re being told to believe for the next two years.