Typing With a Bird Claw

I am not one of those feminist ladies who will stab you in the groin for calling them a chick, though I will peck your eyes out if you confuse an open can of tuna fish for my vagina. The reason you can call me a chick is simple: I am part avian – that is, my left hand is a bird claw. Still I insist on typing this ad using both extremities, which means that the left side of my keyboard is a mess, looking more pockmarked than the face of Tommy Lee Jones after being jabbed a thousand times with a dart.

But, please, men, don’t hate me because I am capable, while making love, of scratching your back so deep that a skateboarder could use the gash as a half-pike; or because it is always a little creepy to reach across the table during a romantic dinner and hold a rubbery talon; or because I feel just as comfortable sitting in a chair as on the branch of a tree.

Nay, having a woman with a bird claw at your side has many advantages. If we are enjoying a stroll through East L.A. at 1:00 AM on a Saturday night, and are accosted by a gang of Crips or Bloods (Is the really a difference?), I can freak them out be brandishing my mutant avian weapon like a four-pronged switchblade. If you need to take a leak in cold weather, my talon can hold your flesh cylinder as if it were a perch and go to work spelling your name in the snow.  If you have a chronic dandruff problem, we can blow a fan on your head while I dislodge the white stuff by running my keratin-enriched bird fingers over your scalp.

Yep, I can be your chick – and you know what else? To call me that would actually be politically, as well as anatomically, correct. Hence we could remain in the Democratic Party, the Audubon Society and the American Medical Association, though we would probably have to cancel our membership to Blockbuster Video.