Green Mountain Incumbent

By D E Fredd

Mae A. Gallagher is running again for the Vermont State Senate. She's the Green Party's candidate for re-election. There is a large fund raiser at her quaint twelve room farmhouse just north of Townshend. Over two hundred people are expected. I've been invited because I designed her political web page. Lesley Gibbons, her campaign manager, asked me because I might hook some new contacts. The unspoken plan being that, if any new business comes my way, I might forgo my fee and consider it a donation.

When I pull my 1999 Ford Explorer into the cropped hayfield which serves as a parking lot, the first sign that I don't belong at this soiree is quite apparent. There are other SUVs, this is Vermont after all, but they proudly display their Lexus and Cadillac Escalades logos amid the Toyota hybrids.

I am welcomed on the wraparound front porch, my name checked off and a name tag issued. I don’t know any one so I head for the food table. Even by homeless shelter standards, it is pathetic. Admittedly it is after seven and most have probably eaten, but there is nothing but small cubes of cheese, soda crackers, grapes (organically grown or so the card says) and a huge punch bowl containing ice water from the Gallagher artesian well. There is a pasty yellow dip, possibly curry in nature, but all the crudités have been scoffed up.

Armed with a cup of water and a few grapes, I begin to circulate. The only people on Mae's staff that I've met are schmoozing so I stand on the edge of a dining room gathering and listen in. The center of attention is a tall, thin gentleman with an Adam's apple that dominates his features. It bobs up and down like a fishing lure as he speaks. He has a collegiate, professorial air. His subject is recycling urine, yellow water as he calls it. He rattles off statistics as to how inefficient it is to process yellow water along with grey and black water sewage. Separation is the key. Right now we waste 65,000 gigajoules of something or other a day. Sweden has addressed the issue with a new toilet design, the NoMix, where urine goes down one tube, solid matter another. The only drawback is that men have to pee sitting down to effectively use the correct drain. This draws a gaggle of laughs and several witticisms from the assembly.

I move on. The background music has switched from Enya to pips and pings of whale language. I bypass a solar panel discussion which has the tone of a religious sermon on coveting thy neighbor's ox and find a mildly interesting, fifty year old man who is passionate about his recumbent bike. He is dressed in the latest, day-glo, high tech biking outfit. The bike is worth over $3000. I gather this is Hugh Gallagher, Mae's husband, in whose stately home I am a guest. He gave up a lucrative law career some years ago to help Mae's political causes. His hobby of designing and building specialty bikes has turned into big business with clients all over the States and Europe. His goal is to have everyone use a bicycle just like they do in the Netherlands. A woman asks him about the Vermont winters, and he admits that it is a big issue but managed peddling to his manufacturing shop ten miles away for an entire week last February.

The main dining room empties significantly so I'm forced to join five women in the living room around and on a large leather couch. The focus is on Sarah Beckham (by her name tag) who proudly wears buttons proclaiming the commercial value of hemp and the stupidity of banning it. She has brought along items made from the product. Yarn is picked up, felt and commented upon. Sarah explains that I am holding a skein of 100% Chinese long fiber which has been wet spun. She hands me a scarf knitted from such a yarn.

A grey-haired woman with a walker is amazed. She had no idea hemp was so soft. You can wear it right next to your skin like lamb's wool. I give back the scarf and skein and look for a way to exit the all female group. Sarah reaches into a large shopping bag and pulls out some rose-colored material. A few hazard a guess as to its function, and then whoop in surprise when she reveals that it’s a pair of panties. Racy comments abound. A plump, forty-something woman, who joined the circle just after I did, observes that she does not wear underwear at all. There is a moment of silence. It is late September, but she is wearing a sundress. The brightly colored flowers clash with each other. It looks like a child's refrigerator painting.

"I used to have yeast infections and took prescriptions that gave me rashes and threw my body chemistry off. One day I read an article on the internet and immediately went cold turkey. That was three years ago and I haven't had a single infection since then."

There are female hygiene questions for her, but I do not stay to listen. I wend my way out to the diminishing wine tasting line. Most varieties are free except for an ice wine which costs a buck. I pony up a dollar and find it very sweet. The lady behind the table says she pours it over homemade ice cream. I thank her for the tip and sample a blueberry-apple vintage. It's enjoyable, but nothing I would buy.

I step off to the side and watch the wine aficionados go through their paces, cleansing palates with Vermont soda crackers, smelling the bouquet and making liberal use of the spit bucket. Publicly they are polite to the wine lady but out of ear shot they declare that fruit wines can't match the new California reds or what the French, especially in the Alsace region, can offer this year. I am about to call it a brief evening when the no underwear, gaudy sundress lady comes up to me. "I hope I didn’t embarrass you back in the other room."

This is not a handsome woman. She has a spiky hair style that is ineptly dyed jet black. She is wearing over-sized, dark rimmed glasses which she continually adjusts. Bracelets jangle. Pendants and earrings dangle. It may be that she attended a jewelry making class, the kind given at summer camp. Her "above the knee" monstrosity of an outfit reveals that her leg shaving expedition ended at the calf. Her breasts, like two beagles tied to the front porch, meander aimlessly within the confines of her top. If this were a blind date I would immediately begin thinking up medical excuses to cut the evening short. Yet, given all this, the idea that she is wearing nothing under her dress is highly sensual. I am not exactly smitten but highly aroused.

"What is your connection to Mae?" I ask.

"I'm really more a friend of the Gallagher family. I used to baby sit their kids, now all out of college and married, which really dates me. I used to cane chairs for antique dealers but recently became an herbalist. I do consultations and go to homes and put on demonstrations. I was going to do that here but you need people's undivided attention so I just brought myself. I'm hoping to convert Mae when she has the time. How about you?"

I start to tell her when she spots someone over my shoulder, excuses herself saying her ride is here, and she needs to use the lady's room. I give my best "nice to meet you" line to her back and watch her rear end roam free as she zigzags through the crowd to the stairs.

I kick myself for acting like a high school sophomore. I can't get over the erotic effect this rather plain woman is having on me. It was all I could do not to ask her out the minute she revealed her no bra and panties philosophy.

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