OUCH! Gorgeous Gusty

by Reg Green     

Although it was night when I landed in Texas, it was still hot. Even so, I was surprised when the wake-up call the next morning forecast “another day of highs in the low hundreds.” Wow! “Is that two or three hundred?” I wondered.

Time was too short for musing, however, and I put on what had seemed such a light-weight suit when I packed it and hurried off for the interview I was scheduled to give at one of the tv stations.

Walking in, I was relieved to see the meteorologist who was to precede me sitting at a desk wearing the jacket of a suit similar to mine. Until television tours entered my life, I rarely thought about the nuances of clothing but I have learned that you shouldn’t upset an audience whose interest you want to capture by dressing even a smidgen too formally (and seeming to suggest you think you are talking to a bunch of hicks) or a similar fraction too casually (and seeming to suggest you are taking them for granted).

This time it looked as though it was going to be just right. “Good thinking, Goldfiocks,” I said to myself. But as I waited for my turn, I glanced under the desk and saw the weatherman’s lower half was clothed in the skimpiest tennis shorts I had seen since Gorgeous Gussie Moran scandalized Wimbledon in 1949.

From his shorts — I’m tempted to call them knickers — protruded a pair of delicate white legs that could scarcely have withstood Heaven’s gentlest breeze let alone the hurricanes, pounding seas and earthquakes, footage of which form the background to the reports he and his fellows regularly show. Gone in a moment was the vision of weathermen crouched in bunkers, torn-off roofs flying over their heads, or in sou’westers, clinging to the rigging, like fishermen in The Deadliest Catch. 

But in the studio, his little underpants hidden from the camera, this weatherman sounded like the Old Testament God as he threatened another day of punishing heat and, of course, that’s exactly what he gave us. Since then, I’ve never been able to take any weather warning seriously.