Old Woman Perfume

Anyone who knows me knows I love old people. Senior citizens are to be respected, commended even, for living so long and enduring so much. They have defied death over the years to get to their age and left their footprints behind in history in some fashion, magnificently or otherwise. It's a remarkable feat to reach that golden age. Go ahead, be kooky, act crazy, say what you want, hold back for no one -- you deserve it.

It's just that old woman perfume that I question. It's a curious, pungent potion these mature ladies choose to mist or pat on themselves. It borderlines intolerable. But what's comical is that they all wear it. There's some age -- I guess upon your first $1.50 age-related movie ticket discount -- that a woman's cooking skyrockets into greatness and perfume preference is solely and unapologetically "that old woman perfume."

Old woman perfume wouldn't be so bad if it didn't smell like old woman perfume. Not really sure what sort of floral, berry, and antiseptic concoction comprises that liquid scent, but it just smells old. It's about two moth balls and a filled bedpan away from smelling like a "Matlock" night in the den of a retirement home.

These ladies sure don't mind dabbing a few extra drops here and a few extra drops there -- and, heck, just turning that princess-cut, glass perfume vase upside down over their muumuu-garnished bodies. As they walk by, you can be literally overcome with the trail of scent. You can feel your lungs reaching for the panic button as they're trying to make sense of this sudden inhalation of epidermal potpourri and somehow find and absorb any sparse molecules of oxygen.

Makes you wonder how the young key grips and light technicians daily handled being on the set for "Golden Girls" all those years. I guess putting a human being's olfaction in a full nelson for an entire season would build the proper immunity.