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Making Preparations for the Tour In the movie Miss Congeniality there is a scene in which Michael Caine, who is attempting to pass Sandra Bullock off as a beauty queen, suggests to her that she use Preparation-H to reduce the prominence of the bags under her eyes. Bullock just gives him a look as if she’s saying, “You’re bullshitting me.” But he assures her that he’s not, that it works. I appealed to my wife, who was watching the movie with me one night, and she said simply, “Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t, but I’m not putting that stuff under my eyes.” Well, somehow or other this issue came up in my creative-writing class a few weeks later, and a couple of my female students averred that it does indeed work, though they hastily added that they had not tried it themselves. “It reduces the swelling,” one said, and the other agreed. None of the lads had anything to say, reasoning, as they must have, that it was an arena that they did not feel comfortable in. “So,” I said, “you just squeeze that stuff out of the tube, smear it on the bags under your eyes, and the bags will go away?” “Not completely,” the first girl said, “but it’ll make you look like you’ve unpacked.” “Unpacked?” “The bags. They’ll look like bags that have been unpacked.” “Oh, OK,” I said. “A metaphor at work there. That’s good.” “You can use the suppositories too,” the other girl put in. “Just like a tube of lipstick. Stroke it all underneath your eyes and the bags will just about disappear completely. I mean, I haven’t actually tried it myself, but. . . .” Now, whereas I do not fully trust everything I am told by my students and almost nothing I hear in the movies, I decided that the matter needed further study. I had a book tour planned to Mississippi, specifically to Columbus and Starkville, where I have kin and many old friends and former students Making Preparations for the Tour 35 and teachers, etc., and I got to thinking that it might not be a bad idea to try to do something about the bags under my eyes, since it’s there that I show my age more than anyplace else. I mean, these bags are not Coach or Gucci, not fashionable at all, and in the mornings and late at night they do look like they are crammed full and ready for a long trip. So the boy thought, Self, why not? Well, I went out to Walmart, where anonymity is more likely than at Walgreens, and found the aisle where that stuff is kept, sorta sidling along like a dog, you know, studying the shelves out of the corners of my eyes. It was like when I had to get, uh, pads for one of the ladies in the house—I want to sneak up on them, seize’m quicker than a snake striking, bury them under a case of Castrol GTX, and hope like hell nobody I know is right behind or ahead of me in the checkout line. Don’t ask me to explain my aversion—I’ll bet it’s universal among men. At least with those things, I doubt that anyone would believe that they were for me. I went so far as to pick a tube up and look at it, even began reading the fine print, expecting it to say, “Apply nightly beneath the eyes for bag removal,” like they’re going to be tossed out with the trash bags from the kitchen. Using the vernacular, it don’t say nothing about the eyes. Hell, I know what the stuff is for—Daddy kept cords of it on hand. So there I was holding this tube of Preparation-H when a woman I knew from the university rounded the corner of the aisle. I’ll bet you that the security camera, even in slow motion, didn’t pick up my hand. Don’t know where the tube landed—maybe in the parking lot, I just don’t care—but I’ll bet she didn’t even see a blur, I jettisoned it so fast, spun around, and smiled like I was passing through to the toothpaste. I felt pretty foolish on the way out of the store, realizing how close I came to actually going through the line with...

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