A View From a Broad by Bette Midler Page A

words, did not come up to standard, and was, thereby, a perfect target for everyjoke, practical and verbal, that kids could dream up.
    Angel did have one thing going for him though: beautiful hands. And he put those hands to very good use. He was the best bass fiddler our high school ever had.
    Unfortunately, the sight of Angel carrying around a bass-fiddle case twice as big as he was proved irresistible to some of my more sadistic classmates.
    One day, during a break in orchestra rehearsal, some of the bigger boys, led by Jojo Sagon, a Filipino with a chip on both his shoulders, picked Angel up, threw him into his empty bass-fiddle case, and locked him in. They thought the whole thing terrifically funny. When our teacher, Mrs. Kiyabu, called everyone back and, noticing that Angel was missing, asked where he was, the boys opened the case, to everyone’s great amusement.
    Yes, the joke was extremely successful. Even Angel smiled a little when he was finally let out of the case, although I remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t a smile of amusement exactly. For the rest of the day, Angel didn’t say a word to anyone, which just confirmed everyone’s feeling that Angel was at heart aloof and unlikable and deserved whatever he got.
    Angel didn’t go home that afternoon or that night, nor was he anywhere to be found the next morning. His parents, who together could barely speak a word of English, came to the school to find out what had happened, but in a stirring display of school unity no one would tell them the truth.
    Finally, about a week later, Angel was found, hanging from a eucalyptus tree about ten miles out of town. On the trunk of the tree, he had tacked up a little sign: I’M TIRED OF BEING THE PUNCH LINE.
    I thought a lot about Angel in Germany, where not so long ago I wouldn’t have come up to standard. In fact, I was thinking about him when Miss Frank came bouncing into my room one morning and threw a little guidebook on my bed.
    “Get up!” she said in that tone only mothers usually use. “We’re going.”
    “We are? Where?” I asked, squinting my eyes in the sunlight that was suddenly flooding the room.
    “To Salzburg, of course,” said Miss Frank as if we had planned it for days. “It’s beautiful. And it’s in Austria.”
    So the cagy woman was reading my mind again. I watched as she busily laid out the clothes she decided I should wear. I thought about the punishment she always said was coming. Well, I still didn’t know about that. But I knew as long as I had Miss Frank, I surely had my reward.



• CONFESSIONS OF A HASH EATER •
    “I don’t take anything. I’m high on life.”

• CONFESSIONS OF A HASH EATER •
    I had often heard it said that God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland. Well, at least God rested on the seventh day. The Dutch never do. I don’t ever remember seeing a town so on-the-go as Amsterdam. In fact, the Amsterdammers are as industrious when they i play as they are when they work. Maybe when you live on land that by natural right ought to be sea, you take everything very seriously, even pleasure. In any case, the Dutch go at their fun with intense determination. And for the weekend of the 16th of October, they had determined that their fun would be me.
    The fact was that I was better known in Holland than anywhere else on the Continent, and expectations were running high. There was too much to live up to. I like to whip the crowd up myself rather than have them all whipped up before I even get there. When an audience is that excited, there’s no place left to take them. And then what’s a poor girl to do? Well, I’ll tell you what I did. I ate hash.
    Mm, boy, was that a big mistake! For despite any rumors to the contrary, I am, except for an occasional salt pill, essentially drug-free. I used to do a little routine in my act that went like this: First I’d say in a real Scarsdale voice, “Harry! Where does she get all that energy from? She