I have a dermatologist named Dixie.
I like having a “Dixie” for a dermatologist, because I
believe no “Dixie” could deliver seriously bad news.
“You have a life-threatening skin disease.”
“Says who?”
“Doctor Morton Fishbein.”
A “Dixie”?
“You have ‘Winter Rash.’”
(You can see why I prefer to believe this. “Winter Rash” is gone in the spring.)
The following occurred during a routine “body check”, an
examination in which you stand in your underwear wearing a clothette smock and the dermatologist checks you over, looking for anything growing on
you that could kill you.
From the start, Dixie and I have had a playful, platonically
flirtatious relationship, less because I’m in my underwear and she’s a female
doctor than because she’s Dixie and I’m me.
And, partly, I believe, because she’s trying to make me forget that she
doesn’t take insurance.
As with all doctor’s examinations, he paranoidically
observed, there is some uncontrollable “Spin the Wheel” lottery-element in the
process. In this case, you come in with
the skin you currently have, and you spin the wheel, hoping that none of your
body’s moles and weirdnesses resemble the “Red Flag” illustrations in the
dermatological textbook.
You do not want to hear,
“Hmmm.”
Or the question,
“How long have you had that?”
When I hear that latter, I inevitably lie and say,
“I was born with that.”
Hoping she will move on, and I can go home without anything
being snipped off of me and Fed Exed
to a lab. Dixie invariably catches me,
because I can’t lie. And because, in
reality, I do not want to go home in possession of a ticking time bomb of a
mole.
So here it comes. The
Exquisite Comedic Moment, more special in my books, because it actually happened.
I’m sitting there, trying to look dignified in my paper
smock, though I will settle for “not ludicrous.”
Dixie enters.
Let the playful banter begin. And it does.
My angle
invariably involves how quickly things will now move, as – and this observation
has been confirmed by a cousin who is
one – dermatologists have this unconscious clock in their heads, pressing them
to get out of one examination room
and into another one as quickly as humanly
possible.
While still providing exemplary dermatological surveillance.
Now watch carefully.
The Moment passes in a flash.
Dixie drops onto a stool in front of me. She affectionately squeezes my exposed right
knee. Then, in the blink of an eye, her
visage turns concerned, and the next thing I know, she is examining the knee she
just recently squeezed with a magnifying glass.
It was an amazing, and to me, hilarious transformation. Fueled, somewhat, no doubt, by the apprehension
that the situation had instantaneously become “Uh-oh.” (Though it turned out it was nothing.)
Mostly, however, I luxuriated in the comedic juxtaposition. It was a quintessential comic moment,
unpracticed, but executed with the precision and timing of a Chaplin, a Keaton
or a Lloyd.
An affectionate
squeeze on the knee.
A BEAT.
Then, suddenly
concerned,
“Wait a minute! What’s that?”
For me, a moment like this is the four-leaf clover of comedy,
a perfect snowflake, a miraculous sunset, more spectacular because it was
generated by life, rather than confected.
As country singer Brad Paisley sings in his rapidly-growing oeuvre,
“I live for…
Little moments…
Li-i-i-ike that.”
I am seeing Dixie on Friday.
I cannot count on this happening again.
The best I can hope for is to keep her in the examining room for more
than five minutes.
Not because she found something to snip.
But because my inestimable charm slowed her down.
Just a little.
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