🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug15.103819.3052@cco.caltech.edu> ajm@wag.caltech.edu (Abner J.
 Mintz) writes:
>   Mr. Churchill was very drunk at a party.  The hostess, outraged, exclaimed:
>   "Mr. Churchill, you are drunk!"

Yes, that was Bessie Braddock.  She gave good parties.  I remember in
particular she always served some sort of Dutch gin that everyone was
ater, but she never would reveal her sources.

Now of course Bessie would never have said such a thing under ordinary
circumstances, because no matter what you think about the English, it is
not true that they are so stupid or naive as to be surprised when a
person becomes drunk at a party, and particularly not when the person is
a vulgar, sensual man like Winston Churchill.    In fact he was drunk,
and the last time he had been drunk at one of Bessie's parties he had
behaved very badly.  He abused the servants, I think, and had to be
restrained from striking the Lord Chancellor.  (I wasn't at that party,
so this is second-hand.)  In any case, the story he and his friends told
the following day was that he replied:

> "Yes, Bessie, and you are ugly.  But in the morning, I shall be sober."

It does little credit to Winston that this was what he wished he had
said, because once you get past the idea that it was a clever thing to
have said on the spur of the moment (which it would have been had he
said it on the spur of the moment and not made it up the following day
while hung over) you realize just how devoid of real wit or quality the
remark is.  Beauty is only skin deep, and although Bessie Braddock
wasn't beautiful, she certainly wasn't deformed either, and she was a
particularly astute and forceful woman, a clever speaker, and a talented
politician.  If she was ugly (and I do not think she was) then in any
case it was not her fault.  On the other hand it most certainly was
Winston's fault that he was so drunk at a party that he inconvenienced
and embarassed his host.
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                And for to see, and eke for to be seye
Mark-Jason Dominus 	  			    mjd@central.cis.upenn.edu