Roberta Swipe R.I.P.?: a beloved sister to me and a colleague and friend to all of us....
Dear Swipesters,
We are receiving unconfirmed reports that our entertainment USA correspondent Roberta Swipe has been involved in a tragic air accident that occured in the early hours of this morning. Details are still hazy, but it is believed that a hijacked plane crashed in US airspace at around 9.15 a.m., EST and that our bubbly colleague and friend is though to be one of those seriously injured in the incident. Paramedics at the scene have worked for several hours on resuscitating Roberta and, although we cannot confirm yet that her injuries were indeed terminal, as more and more data becomes available to us regarding the scale of the disaster, we are increasingly fearing the worst.
Firefighters struggle with the blaze from one of Roberta's shoulder pads...
We have attempted to piece together a timeline based on the few fragments of information we have in the hope of retracing Roberta's (possibly) final steps:
8:45 a.m. Armed Terrorists board an American Airways flight bound for Boston from Newark.
8.46 a.m. Roberta Swipe rises in her Lower East Side apartment. Realising she is late, she douses her face with cold water and finishes the remainder of the nightcap she left undrunk when she fell asleep on the sofa at 3 a.m. Refreshed by the three bottles of brandy, quart of Amarula and Rolling Rocks chaser, Roberta lights the cigarette she fell asleep with in her mouth and begins to extricate herself from the foreign language student she somehow became entangled with the night before. Dispatching Leung-Chi to the drugstore for a package of Kent and a set of replacement shoulder pads - "a girl can never have too many shoulder pads", she no doubt mutters to herself under her breath - Roberta quickly dresses herself ready for her 9.30 appointment - an interview with a Slovakian silage consultant who has recently finished an epic solo performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle on a comb and paper from a sewage duct beneath Gramercy Park. With little time to spare, Roberta throws on a gunship grey satin blouse, her favourite tangerine ankle length pencil skirt and - perhaps fatally - her 14 inch platform soled sling backs. Snatching the change from the hand of the returning Leung-Chi, Roberta gives him a friendly slap to the jaw and whispers "see you at 8 - and don't be late you Oriental wunderkind...mwah!", before embarking on her tragic final undignified waddle downtown.
Roberta's tragically high soles.
9.00 a.m. Barely halfway through the flight's schedule, and ignoring the shrieks and cries of the terrified passengers and crew, the hijakers force the pilot to turn tail and head Flight 505 right back towards NYC...
Leung-Chi & Friend: Roberta's current beau dazzles in his tiara and pink tutu while some far eastern fella gives it with the peace sign....
9.02 a.m. Roberta Swipe picks herself up from the bottom of the steps leading up from the Subway at 14th St, dusts herself down and repositions the 15 layers of her carefully arranged bra-padding. She bats away a persistent admirer who has somehow mistaken her for a street walking trollope claiming that the last time he hired her, she ran off with his collection of autographed Jim Reeves sta-presseds and $350 dollars worth of Lubbock Texas lottery scratch cards. As the crazed lunatic's screams of "I love you Donald, even if you are a lowdown cheating sleezeball" subside, Roberta prepares to take her final one-finger-saluting jaywalk....
The Sta-press trousers of a country legend. The inscription reads: "I still love you Clifford, in spite of all the lies - love Jim"
9.05 a.m. The hijackers - members, it transpires, of a bizarre Masonic sect whose political aims are to gain Clarence the Cross-eyed Lion his own slot on daytime air-your-dirty-laundry-in-public T.V. or Independence for Rhode Island, whatever... - alight upon their target - what appears to be a 200 storey tangerine building topped off with a badly combed man's wig and three hundred-weight of shoulder pads glinting like a satin-clad diamond in the sun....
Clarence: "...I think you owe Nathan an apology Britney for sleeping with his Grandpa like that.....er. no... sorry, I think you owe Britney an apology Nathan...aaahhh!! Dang these boss eyes of mine!!"
9.10 a.m. As the smoke lifts a little, New Yorkers get their first sight of what will become a haunting absence in the city's skyline. Fuelled by a lethal combination of highly-flamable silicon pads, all-over lycra body stocking, and a mansize hipflask of brandy and amarula mix, already a fire risk from the residuals in her blood supply, on contact with Flight 505, our friend and colleague must have gone up like a recidivist AA convention in a wharehouse full of synthetic fibre cardigans. A small child's jaw trembles as he looks on before his mother places a palm over his eyes to preserve his gaze from the terrible sight of Roberta's finest yak's hair mullet gently fluttering in the cold January breeze....
We will be bringing you regular updates throughout the day, but obviously, all our hearts and prayers go out to plucky Roberta and her poor, suffering family and friends. It's at times like this that we all need to pull toget....I'm sorry - I can't go on....
God speed y'all,
Bob
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