POURING HONEY INTO A FINE SWISS WATCH (COMMENT).

POURING HONEY INTO A FINE SWISS WATCH (COMMENT). Lee Bryant in his comment recalls an unfortunate event from my past. Years ago, I saw Kurt Vonnegut’s play, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE. If you like Vonnegut’s novels and short stories, see the play if you have the chance. One of the characters was a misogynistic buffoon who was based on Hemingway. One of the buffoon’s funniest lines was: “Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch.” From time to time, in conversing with my wife, I would make allusion to this line, always with heavy irony and implied quotation marks. Imagine my horror when she came back from her book club one day and announced that she had quoted me (not Vonnegut’s character!) and that the quote had made her friends very angry.