Baked Alaska

There's something very humbling about being confined to the air-conditioned house, car or frozen food section. Control freaks from the Midwest to the East coast are scrambling to realphabetize their soup cupboards and refluff all the accent pillows in the house because this heat wave is about to knock their totally matched socks off.

But, despite the chafing on my inner thighs and the symmetrical lines of Bobby Brown's "Summer Glow" blush flowing down my cheeks like toffee/mauve lava, I'm kind of enjoying this little bit of oppression.

It gives weathermen the opportunity to use catchphrases like "death-dealing heat." It gives old people a free ride to the meat-locker cold mall when their AC craps out. It provides all of us--men and women--the license to use the phrase "schwetty balls" without fear of being fired or sued by SNL. City kids get to do the age-old city thing of busting open a fire hydrant and splashing around in the lukewarm water. We just hope they're not still holding onto their PlayStation 2 controllers while they do it. This heat wave is something to talk about besides what we see on the news.

Tonight I might sit on my porch with only a glass of iced tea to keep me cool and play backgammon with my neighbors on the next stoop. Talk about how the Yankees are leading the division. How Old Man Jenkins opened up the Sip and Slurp for one hour today and let the kids make their own sundaes because everything was melting. I'm not going to read the paper but instead I'll read a book. We'll say, "Ooooo, but it's hot," but we won't go back inside until we've seen a dozen fireflies. We'll turn off our cell phones and turn on some "Prairie Home Companion," and we'll lean back in our seats and fantasize about Lake Wobegon in February.

Or May.