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One summer it was especially hot in Chicago. I decided to go to the driving range during lunch and hit a bucket of balls into the retention pond. I put on my shorts and my T-shirt and I went to take a few swings. I could barely finish the bucket because it was so hot and humid. I got back into my oven-on-wheels and drove back to work. As I was walking up the stairs to the corporate offices, Lisa came racing down the stairs to greet me.
“Frederique is at J.C. Penney’s!!”, she screamed. J.C.Penney’s was only a couple of blocks away at the Woodfield mall so I turned right around and drove over to the blazing hot parking lot outside Penney’s. I could not find a parking space anywhere near Penney’s so I parked in the distant lot and I made the mistake of running the four hundred yards across the burning asphalt to the store. Now the sweat was dripping off of me as if I was standing under a faucet and I was soaked.
“Where is Frederique?”, I asked a sales clerk. She told me that she was upstairs in the lingerie department. I ran up the escalator and I wondered how long I would have to wait in line to see her.
I didn’t have to wait at all because no one was there to see her. There was a circle of men in tuxedos and she was sitting in a chair at one end of them in her underwear. (She was modeling her new line of underwear for Penney’s). I walked up to the entrance of the circle and the two tuxedo-clad men ushered me in. Frederique watched me walk across the circle toward her and I said, “Hello, I’m Ray.” I was sweating profusely and I was very embarrassed. I am not sure if I was embarrassed because I was sweating in front of a supermodel or because this beautiful woman was sitting in front of me in her sheer underwear. She smiled at me and held out her hand. I shook her hand and she laughed. Was I supposed to shake her hand or kiss it? I asked her for her autograph and she pulled out a black and white glossy and signed it, “To Ray, Love Frederique”. Just before she handed me her photo she pulled me close to her and said, “You smell like a man.”, and she said it like it was a good thing! She grew up in Holland and they like sweaty men there. In that case I was probably the best part of her day because no one was sweating like me. I thanked her, and for some reason or other I walked backwards out of the circle of tuxedos. I waved goodbye to her and I went home to take a shower because I work with Americans, not Europeans
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