I almost dropped the phone last week when I learned I had won several million dollars in a sweepstake. A very nice man congratulated me and then ran through the few simple details for me. I was ecstatic; I couldn’t even remember entering a contest.
He assured me the money was mine as long as I followed the rules and kept it a secret because, he cautioned, relatives and so-called friends would be hounding me for a share of my money; plus there were bad people out there just waiting to trick me. Good advice and such a lovely, sexy voice. I do believe he was flirting with me.
It seems all I had to do was go to any big supermarket, buy a Green-dot money pack scratch card and call him “to confirm the winning number.” I wondered how he could confirm a number I hadn’t bought yet, but he explained it was an “Internet protocol app and all in the computer.” That seemed reasonable. In a couple of weeks when the legal stuff had been attended to I was to have a choice: he would bring me the money “in a very large bag,” he joked (so cute) or I could get it deposited monthly. In any case, he would bring me ten thousand dollars in cash at once as soon as I sent him four hundred dollars for the taxes on that payment.
What a deal! Even better than the Uganda millions I almost won. On second thought, remembering that unfortunate scenario, I got on Google and to my horror learned that although the Green-dot card is legitimate, it is commonly used in a scam aimed especially at seniors because they are so trusting. True, some of my naive friends would surely have fallen for it. Luckily, I was wise to the smarmy s.o.b. from the beginning.
What a scandal!
I hope my briefs in some ways fill the gap between LGBTers of different generations and spark meaningful conversations. We don’t have to discuss serious topics as anything works; for fun let’s try “scandals.”
Currently we read about the famous baby daddies/mommies, cocaine, fights, cheating, rehab, etc., but truthfully, we don’t really care. They mean very little except as titillating headlines in supermarket tabloids.
We seniors had scandals too. Many would be ho-hum today, but we remember the front page headlines and the ruined careers that followed. For example, there was shock and disbelief when Arthur Godfrey fired Juleus La Rosa live, on the air! (Who? Whom? Ask a senior.) For a sex issue, we had Academy award winner and super-star Ingrid Bergman’s scandalous pregnancy forcing her to find work only in Europe for 6 years. Show biz and politics mixed at a disastrous luncheon and 10 years of professional exile in Europe came with lightning speed for popular singer Eartha Kitt. Saddest of all was the destruction of the career of hugely popular comedian and winner of the Grammy Award of the year with the fastest selling album in record history Vaughn Meader who, in a split second, could not find work in America – nor anywhere in the world!
Interested? What happened? Don’t Google. Ask a senior.
