the smartest woman

the one and only,  24"x16", oil on canvas

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the following story is an excerpt from the everyday superstars section of the new york times sunday edition.  these stories typically profile the unsung heroes and heroines of our day to day life.

the smartest woman in the world
new york times, pp 3, march 3rd, 33 ad.
by: sir such jest

the smartest woman in the world lives above the subway heating grate at 11 west 53rd street. she wears a black plastic raincoat with white polka-dots that she found on the ground after the welfare riots of 1999. it has blood on it but she doesn't care. if someone from csi looked closely at the blood under a microscope they would discover the dna of st. caterinina, the self-declared true wife of jesus.  st. caterinina wore jesus' foreskin on her ring finger as proof of her holy matrimony to the son of god. the smartest woman doesn't know those exact facts but she does have a hunch, a woman's intuition, a sixth sense that it is a relic imbued with a little somethin', somethin'. the smartest woman in the world doesn't know she's smart, she just acts with clarity under any circumstance.  for example: one day,  the ground floor of the building on 11 west 53rd street was on fire, everyone was trapped. the firetrucks couldn't get there, a car accident had blocked the streets, preventing access.  the smartest woman in the world climbed up on a wall and shouted an announcement. this is what she yelled to the people in the burning building:

"quickly, everybody shove rags, paper, anything to block the toilets then flush them over and over and over until they start to overflow".

the people did exactly as she said and soon the water from all of the toilets poured down through the steps, the ceiling, the stairs and the fire was quickly reduced to smoldering, steaming smoke. 

on that day, the smartest woman in the world had spared 1,000 lives.


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