Many years ago, I made my glorious television debut. It was artfully done and it made me into the star that I am today. I played the part of Redneck Bystander #3 describing the fire.

I stood in front of the charred, smoking remains of a building with a baseball cap covering my unwashed hair and wearing a giant sweatshirt from a catfish restaurant stretched over my pregnant tummy. I was most proud of the fact that my sweatshirt only had one stain on it and it wasn’t from food and that it actually came down far enough to cover that little stretchy panel on maternity pants…it’s really tacky when you can see that weirded out drawstring bag at the top of the preggo jeans. And if the wardrobe department hadn’t completed the look for me, I think I even knocked out one of my front teeth for this appearance, but I could be wrong about that last part.

Now I just really, really wish it had been made up for a movie or a TV show or something, instead of the local news channel.

Yup, I became THAT WOMAN. Every time something in my part of the country either a) burns down, b) gets blown up by a tornado, or c) is a farm animal born with two more legs than it should have, there’s undoubtedly a woman in curlers and a stained wife-beater tank top describing it. Usually, she’s using a few made up words. Like pandelirium. Or screecherous. Or ungodawful.

And I am now afraid it’s genetic. My daughter had to get her first ever vaccination last week. There’s a long story about how she got to be a full nine years old without ever having someone pin her down and poke her in the butt cheek with a sharp needle, but it is what it is. So I sat her down and had a talk with her about what exactly was going to take place at the doctor’s office. And she was oddly at peace with “getting a shot” because she was under the impression that “shot” meant “sling shot” and she was actually going on some kind of bungee-induced carnival ride.

I cleared that up, then explained what “getting a shot” meant. She was nonplussed by my explanation, but she was brave. I asked her to tell me what she thought an appropriate reaction to getting a painful shot might be and she replied, “I will have to yell, ‘CATASTROPHE!’” And so she did: