Originally published in the October 1987 Collector and Emitter.
Not long after her performance at the Ham Holiday lingerie show got everybody arrested, your favorite QSL secretary, Tondelayo, met the press.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, Tondelayo is Mrs. Zedd. Formerly Tondelayo Schwartz, blond, nubile, teenage secretary to the great man, the cutest graduate in the history of Harvard Business College is now a settled, proper, conservative housewife and, recently, a mother for the first time.
Let it also be added for the record that she was not naked up there; her costume just didn’t reflect light very well.
The darling girl’s press conference was held at Honor Roll Ranch, just a hoot and a holler south of town, where she lives with Q.R. Zedd, A5A, greatest DXer in world history and a source of constant inspiration to us all.
Tondelayo said she wanted to tell us how she felt about becoming a mommy, and to clear the air about the mass arrests during her performance in Oklahoma City.
“I want to tell you how I feel about becoming a mommy, and to clear the air about the arrests during my dance at Ham Holiday,” the precious thing said.
Tondelayo, fetchingly done up in a candy-stripe bikini sunsuit, wide-brimmed hat loaded up on 15 meters and five-inch silver spikes, had never looked better, in the opinion of veteran starers. She had a very nice tan, and quite a lot of it. Her golden hair lay across her bare shoulders in tight ringlets stirred occasionally by the gentle west wind or someone’s heavy breathing. Her blue eyes sizzled with good cheer and enthusiasm for life. The blue of her eyes and the gold of her hair were a blend of the western sky, and the moonlight beams on —
Sorry. Carried away.
Young Zepp, three months, was along. Zepp looked kind of chunky and rubbery, but all small kids look that way. He was teething and slobbering on a J-38 straight key, and looking kind of far away as he listened to whatever was on the cassette machine plugged into his left ear. (Which proved, on subsequent investigation, to be a code tape from the Gordon West radio school.)
“Well, fellers,” Tondelayo beamed, turning around three times, “as y’all can plainly see, bein’ a mommy did not hurt me any. An’ as to the thing that happened up there at Ham Holiday, all I can say is, there was nothin’ indecent about the outfit I wore or the dance I did, and besides, Andi made me do it.”
After waiting for a SCARS club reporter to climb back into the bleachers (he had fallen off during her second turn-around), the darling girl continued.
“As y’ al can plainly see as well, little Zeppie is a MARVELOUS little guy, a rill chip off the ole block, an’ a joy forever, As soon as he learns what words are, we think he’ll be a rill fahn CW operator in no time. He’s rill, rill smart. An’ he rilly likes to work on electronic stuff. He has already taken two radios apart, and ever’ time we ever, mention W5SQJ’s garage, he gets the slobbers so had we hat to put a diaper on him at both ends.
“So Zeppie is jus’ FAHN!
“Now about the lil deal at the lingerie show, I just wanna say I thought I had approval of my superiors. I thought it was a neat idea. An’ I SAID rill clear what kind of a dance I intended to do, an’ I held my costume right up to the light for everybody to see before I put it on. I remember that rill clear because that was when somebody said you could read a newspaper through it, and we tried it and found out you could only read the headlines that way. Which, as ever’body who ever went to Harvard knows, clearly means it is not in the prurient interest, but might oughtta be avoided if you wear a pacemaker. So I am innocent, speaking in the legalistic sense only, of course. And I think whoever called the police was a lid, an’ that’s the nicest thing I can think to call ’em. Why, if this kind of criticism keeps on keepin’ on, I don’t know if I can do my tap dancing at the club Christmas party this year I mean, I know that’s extreme, but what’s a girl to do?
“Now are there any questions?”
There were several from the assembled press gallery:
C&E: Are the rumors we hear true? Is Q.R. planning a new DXpedition soon?
TONDELAYO: “There has been some talk,., yayus. .but nothing has been decided yet.”
AP: Has young Zepp sent any CW that makes sense yet?
TONDELAYO: “Well, his daddy an’ me think we’ve heard some valid contact signals, but we know parents do dote, so we’re not makin’ any claims for the lil booger jus’ yet.”
CNN: Do you think we’ve seen the last of Boris Badenov, Soviet DX ace?
TONDELAYO: “Mah goodness, I don’t think so! Why, jus’ today we got a rill nasty note from him, an’ a complaint that the Twinkie folks have cut down on the amount of cream they’re twins.”
CNN: Just a fast follow-up, please! We heard that Badenov is back in a Russian hospital.
TONDELAYO: “Yayus, we heard the same thang, an’ we checked an’ it’s true. The way we heard it, ole Boris tried to git … um… rill chummy with Natasha again, after they left here last month, an’ she was still broken-hearted an’ pinin’ for WB5RZX, so she stuck Boris with her knife, rill good.”
REUTERS: Where did she stick him, if you know?
TONDELAYO: “We heard it was over the Bering Sea.” UPI: We heard that the comment from Bill Blast, moderator of the famed Blast Off DX Net, was to the effect that —
TONDELAYO: “Fudge and pooh! Ah mean, pardon me for talkin’ rill nasty, boys, but it jus’ makes me SO mad when guys like Bill Blast or Cappy Sator say mean stuff about my darlin’ Q. They’re jus’ jealous, that’s all, and that’s my final word on it!”
The press conference ended soon thereafter. Tondelayo went to town in the pink Toyota Land Rover, taking Zepp along. As to the great man himself, he was snied through a side window to the walk-in linear, bent over a work table, studying maps of remote sections of our planet. It appeared a good omen for the DX world.
— KU5B