Natasha Fatale vs. Valerie Plame

Posted by: BonnieBlueFlag

I no longer have daily access to Barry Farber's radio program, and I really miss hearing his soft deep voice while he told such wonderful stories, and taught me with the retelling of his own life experiences. So I am always quick to read whatever he has written.

I found this recent column to be a nice change of pace, and very interesting, even though he has invoked the name Valerie Plame in his narrative.

"Bernie and the Valerie Plame Look-alike"

Written By: Barry Farber

Friday, Nov. 4, 2005

"Did she look like Valerie Plame? Grant me the freedom to imagine that she did. And surely Bernie, when he glanced at her across the room at that left-wing party in the mid-1950s, could have sworn under oath that she was the most attractive woman he'd ever seen – in person or in pictures."


Rene Russo as Natasha Fatale in Universal's The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle - 2000 (Sorry Barry, but when I think of a 1950s foreign spy, Natasha comes to mind. We'll have to let the readers choose between an image of Valerie or Natasha as they enjoy your story.)

"Not that Bernie had a grandstand seat from which to observe and judge the firepower of many beautiful women. His being and his lifestyle sharply limited his chances of ever seeing, much less MEETING, a woman of that level of cyclotronic sex appeal.

Bernie was an unfortunate person. He was forty, unmarried, undated, un-flirted with and unloved. His potbelly gave the impression that he was smuggling a small accordion. He was balding. His face appeared to have about the same familiarity with a razor as Osama bin Laden with a pork chop. And his T-shirt, when clean, emblazoned the logo of his union with a labor slogan, something like "Solidarity Forever." He got it in the mail when they finally got around to unionizing the mailroom employees of the ad agency where he worked.

Bernie probably could have taken his eyes off that woman if he'd been ordered to by Moscow, but he saw no reason to. He was smart enough to know that's about as close as he would ever get to romantic glory.

And he was wrong.

With no more than five minutes to fantasize what life would be like with a woman like that, Bernie saw her peel away from the little group she was talking with, plow her way through the crowd of men not altogether different from Bernie and women who cared more about Lenin than lipstick, and come on to Bernie like a heat-seeking missile.

"Let's get out of here," she said to Bernie. "I can't stand weak wine-spiked punch in little paper cups. Come on! Let‘s go to your place."

Bernie didn't have to pinch himself to see if he were dreaming. He knew he must be. But it was all real. Bernie lived four blocks away, in New York's East Village before it had that name. It was just "Too bad. Too far east to pass off as Greenwich Village!" Bernie hoped she wouldn't be turned off by the five flights of stairs. She wasn't.

When Bernie opened his front door, however, and she saw chaos, clutter, disarray, unwashed plates in the sink, socks on the floor, and little Alps of old and recent copies of the Daily Worker and New Masses, she refused to take one more step into Bernie's environment.

"How about we go to my place instead?" she suggested. Bernie seconded the motion even quicker than Senator Dick Durbin seconded Senator Harry Reid's motion to have a secret stunt-session of the Senate on November 1, 2005.

Her place turned out to be a duplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a view over Central Park that made the dimmest visitor want to sit down and write a poem. She ordered filet mignon for two from a nearby restaurant that did takeout only for valued customers. She had chilled champagne to make the wait for the steak less onerous.

Bernie, sitting there on one of her designer sofas, was not spiritually inclined or developed, but he did seriously wonder whether he'd died and gone to heaven. As they savored a gourmet crème brûlée for dessert together, Bernie was still too liquefied by her come-on to haul off and try anything.

He didn't have to. "You're not going back to that dump of yours," she said. "You're staying here with me!" And there was only one bed.

The crisply uniformed doormen looked undisguisedly askance as Bernie left for his mailroom job early the next morning in his union T-shirt. And they continued looking that way through the days, weeks and, yes, MONTHS as she insisted Bernie remain as her guest. And the cuisine and the one-bed-edness persisted throughout.

Does the pauper who wins fifty million dollars in the lottery feel something like Bernie felt during those months? No. That's only money. Everybody is allowed to live in expectation of money. Few – few like Bernie, at least – are allowed to live in expectation of that kind of romantic ecstasy.

One day, about five months later, Bernie came back to her place after work and was every bit as thunderstruck as he was when she'd cut through the crowd and dragooned him in the first place. The apartment was empty. EMPTY. The venerable comic Jimmy Durante said it best in a 1940s movie. "She didn't leave a note on the pincushion. She didn't even leave a PINCUSHION!"

She was gone. The furniture was gone. Everything was gone. And the superintendent informed him that without an immediate deposit of a month's rent plus security, which exceeded Bernie's annual wage, he was gone, too.

Bernie slinked back to his old apartment and his old life wanting, most of all, that fabulous woman back, but SECOND of all, an explanation. He never got his first wish, but eventually he got his second.

A few months after his dream life came to such a mysterious, abrupt end, Bernie got an asthma attack. He stayed home from work one day and watched television.

All of a sudden, THERE SHE WAS! Her full frontal face was not just flashed but fixated on national TV at a Senate hearing on subversives and communists in government. If the building had suddenly caught fire, Bernie would not have left.

The presiding senator ticked off name after name. Whereupon that gorgeous woman went into deep detail about the communist, socialist and otherwise suspicious connections she'd learned about each one as an FBI agent working under cover. (No pun intended!)

This one was a direct communist agent under instructions from Moscow. This next one belonged to a Canadian communist cell. The next one was an Algerian leftist who'd been given a scholarship to the University of Moscow and was overtly trying to destabilize the government of Algeria. This next one was the most dangerous of all. He was on the executive committee of the Teamsters Union and through a mail drop in Oslo, Norway, maintained an ongoing communication with top communist officials in Moscow.

This being the 1950s, the word "sex" was never mentioned. The senator congratulated her, as an undercover American agent, on finding out so much about possible and potential enemies of America through adroit utilization of her "personality"!

Bernie remained transfixed. Then the presiding senator mentioned his name. HIS NAME. Bernie's name on national television!

"Oh," she said. "We wasted taxpayers' money on that one. He was worthless. He had no importance whatever to any communist movement whatsoever. He was worthless. Sorry, he was just worthless."

Let's leave it to the philosophers. Is it better to be worthless than never to have been vamped at all?"

Barry Farber