The Sweet Taste of...Perfume?

On my lunch hour one day last week, I was about to enjoy my meal in a local sandwich shop when my senses were hijacked by another customer entering the dining area. In her late 50s or early 60s, this woman was a spectacle of what was clearly a lifetime of diet and fashion disasters.

Stretch pants strained to the absolute limit of the polyester fiber's tensile strength. The straps of her orange high heel shoes threatened to burst with every step she took. Her sweatshirt was emblazoned with a giant yellow smiley face, the intended purpose of which was to assure those around her that there was no reason to run screaming for the hills. The poor smiley, however, was grotesquely misshapen by this woman's bulging torso and the expression was more of a grimace than a smile.

A spectacle of this sort could have gone down in my book as a mildly amusing distraction if it weren't for olfactory assault that followed her around the restaurant like a cloud of mustard gas. One can only guess at the price per gallon of this woman's scent. And I say gallon because she had obviously bathed in no less than 2 quarts of the stuff before leaving her single-wide that morning.

Because I have clearly committed some awful deed that has unleashed the most negative form of karma in the universe, this woman elected to sit in the booth adjacent to mine. Her invasion of my lunchtime oasis away from work could not have been more complete if she had intentionally sat on my sandwich and stomped on my chips. For, you see, as I gagged to breathe, I realized that her odor had not only destroyed my sinuses, but my taste buds were ruined as well.

Any pretext of gentleman's manners were quickly discarded in the interest of self-preservation. As my tongue melted in my mouth I tried to explain the problem to her, but she just snorted and went back to munching on the first of her two footlong meatball subs.

Other patrons were coughing and gagging, the windows were fogging up with a yellowish layer of slime, small children were crying and I quickly came to the conclusion that this was an emergency situation. My training kicked in and, as I tried to explain to the police, my actions became automatic. I snatched the nearest fire extinguisher from it's perch on the wall and I let loose. By the time I finished, the fire extinguisher
was empty, the perfume lady was covered in white powder, everyone in the restaurant was cheering and, yes, the odor was gone.

I sat back down at my table, brushed off my sandwich and finished my lunch.