Sit down, shah, you ready? You got your tin can going there, you want to make a test, make sure my voice is good, everything is working all right? OK, so now I'm gonna tell you a story, a story I never told nobody. Why I'm telling you, a stranger, I don't even know, but all right, eppes, it's time.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, around the Stone Age it was, takeh, I was a young maidl, and quite a looker I was too. I know what you're thinking, you look at me now and what do you see? A fat old lady wrinkled like a prune danish with hair like cotton candy. But, nu, I had quite a shape in those days, my hair I wore in a braid down my back thick as a man's arm, my skin was smooth as a baby's tuchus. You don't believe me, but you wait, mamela. Gravity ain't got no favorites; it catches up to everyone, eppes, someday even you.

So my childhood ain't nothing to talk about. An ordinary girl I was, I went to school, I came home, I helped my mother with the housework. Sure, five children she had, four boys and me, so who else is gonna help her? I had friends, too, boys and girls, no one special, there was a group of us that stuck together, to the movies we went, and to get a nosh at the diner, dancing once in a while, you know we did all the things young people do.

And then, when I was 16, a new girl moved into the neighborhood, and that girl, I had such a feeling for, I just couldn't take my eyes from her. You know the expression "love at first sight," sure, who doesn't, well of course that's what it was, but what did I know, we was two girls; girls don't fall in love with girls, who ever heard of such a thing? I just knew I wanted to be her friend, help her out, you know, show her around. It could be overwhelming, such a place, to a person who first walks in and don't know from it, eppes, it takes a while to get used to, it was a very big school.

Look, here's a picture of her, my Evie. You see, here we are both in the last row. That's our class picture from 11th grade, we was both tall girls; now I'm all stooped over like an old turtle, but back then my spine was straight as a Shabbos candle, from my

Amazon.com Review
The 11 short stories and one novella in Girls Will Be Girls may satisfy, for the moment, Leslea Newman's large, enthusiastic readership, who will relish her arch humor in stories like "Eggs McMenopause," in which a woman of a certain age decides that the only way she can grasp the fact of her many shed eggs is by buying several hundred chicken eggs at the grocery store, a few dozen at a time, and distributing them around her small apartment. In the titular novella, Newman turns her attention to infidelity, hovering between the comic and the tragic as she describes the breakdown of a long and stable (read: static and dull) relationship between Gwen, a therapist, and her artist girlfriend, Didi, who "couldn't have asked for a more considerate lover. No, what she wanted was a less considerate lover.... A lover who didn't care if her teeth were brushed or if she was going to rip Didi's dress or ruin her brand new manicure." What happens when Gwen's handsome new client gets a look at Didi comes as no surprise, but Gwen's quirky revenge will keep the pages turning. --Regina Marler