Dial M for Makeup

First of all, congratulations to the Harvard Class of 2010! You guys graduated! Welcome to the real world! Would I relive this year for any money you could offer me? No. But do I think I learned some valuable lessons? Probably.

On to the purpose of the post. Since relocating, I've been reminded of many things about my mother. Some are good, like her french toast. Some are interesting, like her names for things (she cannot remember a store/person/place's name to save her life). Some I cannot mention for fear of her wrath. But some are undeniably awesome. Such as her penchant for library DVDs. Her current taste is for BBC series about feisty British ladies. Possibly the most amusing of which is Rosemary and Thyme, which is sort of like if the two fat ladies lost weight, took up gardening, and solved murders on the side. The idea of gardening consultants turned crime fighters may sound ridiculous, because it is. But it is also AWESOME.

So as my mother began the third season of R and T, as I like to call it, I began musing on the other unlikely sleuths of fiction. There's my mom's other favorite new-to-her series which the DVD covers call A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery. But there are three of them. So it's deceptive. Anyway. In them, Harriet Walter plays Harriet Vane, a 1920's mystery writer who gets accused of poisoning her lover (she's acquitted at the eleventh hour). Then she finds a body on the beach that disappears after she finds it (it resurfaces eventually though). And, in my favorite episode, she is called in by the dried up old ladies at her Oxford women's college alma mater to solve a series of increasingly creepy pranks (the offenses include burning a dummy dressed up as a professor in effigy, leaving Latin notes quoting Virgil in inconvenient places, and scaring a lady playing an organ). Throughout it all, she's got her trusty member of the upper class, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Then of course, there are my favorites: the Sookie Stackhouse novels, about a vampire-dating, mystery-solving cocktail waitress, the Stephanie Plum mysteries, in which an awesomely teased Jersey girl stumbles onto murders while chasing bail hoppers, and the indomitable, invincible, incomparable Veronica Mars. (By the way, did you know you can watch almost every episode of Veronica Mars and virtually every awesome WB show at TheWB.com? Oh, did I just make your summer for you? You're welcome.)

So this got me thinking: this could be a new career for me. I mean, what is more attractive than a blend of makeup and murder? I can see it now: Olivia, the charming but misfit makeup consultant who stumbles upon bodies in the back halls and trash compactors in the depths of Alderwood Mall. Clad in a slightly Star Trek-y jacket and armed with a brush belt, this brassy blonde solves the cases that leave even mall security stumped. A strangled store clerk in a parking lot planter? Could it be a torrid Build-a-Bear love affair that met a fuzzy end? The charred remains of a loss prevention manager? Was it to burn the evidence of a heist at Yankee Candle? The possibilities are endless, people. Endless.

I'm just waiting for Hollywood to call. Any second now...