Hedy Lamarr, Liz Taylor, and Elizabeth II Meet in the
Ladies Room

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
         — Hedy Lamarr

And refrain from talking about
the husbands, fifteen of them,
although they all do the math.
Old now, they check each other out sideways,
examining the way time has taken
their beauty, their figures, their nerve.
No-one mentions the accumulation of jewels,
worth more than their weight in gold.
So they stand there at the counter
powdering their noses, touching up
their lipstick, and patting their hair, in silence.

A cell phone rings from inside a stall,
and Hedy flinches. If only she hadn't let
that patent expire, she'd be the richest woman
in the world right now. Then she remembers
that she's dead. "Later, bitches," she says
as she turns to leave, but the frequencies
have shifted between this world and the next,
so they don't hear a word she's said.

* Lamarr's US Patent 2,292,387: "Secret Communications System" of 1942 introduced
the technology that makes cell phones and WiFi possible.