"Fresh and sexy?" Clarissa asked.

"That's what Puff Daddy said to J.Lo."

"I guess he wasn't fresh enough in the end. Passed his use by date," Lonnie joked.

Jacqueline snorted so loudly Clarissa jumped in her seat. "Fresh and sexy. What the hell does that mean? Are we back to wrapping ourselves in Saran? This is how far we've come?"

Clarissa realized with mixed feelings that she wasn't necessarily going to miss some of the people she'd worked with.

"Oh, hell," Jacqueline Smith continued, "Married men don't care about fresh and sexy. They care about blow-jobs. Blow-jobs never get stale...what? What did I say? Okay, tell me one thing men prefer to a stark-naked woman and a blow job." She looked from one side of the room to the other.

"Two stark-naked women and a blow job?" the college youngster offered helpfully.

The pretty blonde administrative assistant who made certain to reassure everyone periodically that she was still a virgin turned white and pushed her cake away.

Mary, a sushi pal from marketing stumbled into the conference room balancing a wholesale size package of toilet paper. "I've got extra toilet paper for games if there's time after the skit!" Two male network administrators wearing toilet paper wedding dresses trailed behind her.

They looked like grotesque little troll brides with hairy legs and the sort of garish makeup you end up with if you accidentally get snared by one of those department store cosmeticians who've majored in Prostitute Chic. Clarissa sighed and tried not to look directly into the train wreck. She'd have nightmares for months.

Being somewhat shorter than the toilet paper tower, the unfortunate Mary was apparently unable to see from the hastily made adjustments, that things had not transpiredÑso farÑas Clarissa had planned.

The geeks noticed. One said, "Dude. The wedding's off? Does this mean we don't get cake?" He fingered his woolly black beard and adjusted his flopping toilet paper veil. The second geek elbowed his friend hard, then poked his enormous rectangular amber-lensed truck driver glasses back up the bridge of his nose, accidentally smearing his lipstick on his hand.

Kate Washington suddenly appeared behind them, and Clarissa breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, a little support. She, Kate, and the third member of their best-friend triumvirate, Delilah, had met at the beginning of the high-tech boom at one of those flashy networking events for the young and unreasonably wealthy. They'd hit it off in the sort of way one does with people who understand how you got where you were, exactly what it is you do and how much you make doing it, and Clarissa always felt a little better when one of them was around to handle this sort of unpleasantness - even if they were responsible for creating the unpleasantness in question.