“Terry? Terry Lynn? Gosh, girl, I haven’t seen you in ages! How are you?

“Oh, hi, Susan. I’m doing okay, I guess.”

“You guess? That doesn’t sound too convincing.”

“Yeah, well, I just lost my job. Plus, I’m still trying to get over my marriage breaking up. Irreconcilable differences, you know?”

“You want to talk about it?”

“I suppose I should talk to someone about it. I thought I had a great marriage, but it all boiled down to that age-old problem.”

“Concerts, eh?”

“You got it. We could never see eye-to-eye on which shows we wanted to catch. I’d want to see Pere Ubu and he’d want to see Low and Eddie Palmieri. We could never agree on anything.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Uh, uh. Like that time he came home with tickets for John Tesh. I mean, I told him I wanted to see Slayer instead, but he just didn’t pay attention.”

“What did you do?”

“I did what anybody would do. I flicked my Bic and set his beard on fire.”

“Really? I’ll bet that taught him a lesson.”

“I wish. Because the next day I told him I wanted to go to the Supertramp show, but did he listen? Oh, no. Instead, he went out and bought tickets for Maxwell playing on the same night. That’s when I flicked my Bic and tossed a Molotov cocktail in his car. Ha! You should have seen that sucker go. Whooosh!”

“I got to admit, I’ve wanted to do that to my husband Herbie at times.”

“Take it from me, it’s good for the old self-esteem.”

“I’ll bet. Is that when he moved out?”

“No. That didn’t come until later. You see, for the last few months I kept telling him I wanted to see the Vans Warped Tour. In fact, that’s all I talked about. The extreme sports, the bands like Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Bad Religion and Reel Big Fish. So what did he do? He went out and bought tickets for Ozzfest. I mean, if I wanted to see Ozzy, I’d watch MTV.”

“That must have been hard to take.”

“That’s when I sneaked down to his office one Saturday morning before sunrise with a can of gasoline. One flick of the old Bic and the sky lit up for miles.”

“Gee, Terry Lynn, that sounds like a terrible marriage.”

“But that ain’t the half of it. Then he had the gall to write me a letter. He said that he’d take me to any show I wanted, including Galactic and Patty Griffin. But I wasn’t buying it. I had enough of his lies and deceit. So I took that letter and -“

“You flicked?”

“The Bic. And watched all his empty promises go up in smoke.”

“Sounds like you’re better off without him. Wait a minute. Didn’t you say you just lost your job? That’s terrible. No marriage, no income. I’m so sorry for you.”

“It’s okay, I guess. I’ll pull through like I always do. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

“That job I had with the U.S. Forest Service wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”