I'm not sure I can dignify today's column with the word wicked. Wicked has been a favorite word of mine ever since I first heard it coupled with witch at the age of - what? - two, or so? To me, it has always incorporated an element of glee in the carrying out of badness - naturally, a very appealing thing to a small child, even a small child who is now on the AARP mailing list. Wicked queens and witches do not lie glumly on the therapist's couch, wondering what went wrong in childhood to made them want to act in this antisocial way. The wicked simply get off on being bad. They don't suffer fools gladly, but are glad to see fools suffer, especially if they've had a hand in causing the suffering.
There is a certain élan that accompanies wickedness - that air of derring-do that goes along with the curling of the stage mustache and the sneer of, "Now, me proud beauty, you're in me pow-errrrr!" - that provokes a gasp of admiring awe in the spectator. The wicked are both imaginative and creative in their invention of ways to plague humanity, and are entirely unabashed and unapologetic as they go about their evildoing. There is a sense of let-down whenever they're offstage. Think about Milady DeWinter in The Three Musketeers, pretending to be the demurest of Puritans, the better to seduce her religious fanatic of a jailer and set him to murdering the Duke of Buckingham on her behalf, or of Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop, who terrorizes his meek little wife by devouring hard-boiled eggs with the shells still on and then solemnly threatening that he will bite her with as little compunction as he would a hard-boiled egg if she ever asks her friends to tea again, and you'll get the idea.
This morning I was rudely awakened when my dog, whose name is Milady (named, of course, for the aforementioned Dumas villainess - like her namesake, she looks perfectly angelic while carrying out the foulest of deeds and hides the evidence with no compunction whatsoever) but who, I am embarrassed to confess, rejoices in the nickname of "Mrs. Wumples" - Mrs. Wumples, then, decided that 6:45 a.m. was long enough for anyone to lie abed, particularly since her established breakfast hour is 7:00 a.m., and so she jumped on my stomach as hard as she could, after which she sat back and loomed over my face, anxious that I should appreciate her cleverness. My response was to sit up with the same "galvanized corpse" lurch that made Uma Thurman's turn as Mia in Pulp Fiction so memorable, sputtering, "Oof! Miss Wickedness!" At which Mrs. Wumples looked terribly pleased with herself and leapt off the bed, making a beeline for the door to suggest that I should now get up and go into the kitchen to open a can of dog food. I am afraid that I obeyed her; the wicked frequently get their way, because their victims are often too cowed and bewildered by the sheer audacity of the wickedness to stoutly resist and perhaps discourage them from trying that shit again .
So having been victimized by a 37 lb. border collie/corgi mutt who, in the fine tradition of wicked adventuresses everywhere, finagled her way from her humble origins (in this case, the projects of the South Bronx) to a cushy lifestyle of ease and plenty (a doorman building on West End Avenue, with a side of Adirondack vacations every summer - not too shabby!), I feel I have been temporarily worsted in the wickedness department and am not at my own wicked best. I shall therefore apologize for being not being as bad as I'd like to be today, while nevertheless being far from as good as I could be, and I hope you will put the blame squarely where it belongs and accept my excuses, namely: The dog ate my Wicked Wednesday homework.
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