The Young Vic and a young audience, giggling every time the fat woman in the thong bends over to answer the phone and exposes her white dippled backside.
Eva and I don't find that quite as funny as the thin blondes in their teeny dresses clutching the arms of their thin, floppy haired, catalogue boyfriends. Give it twenty years dearies and you will be cringing, not laughing, imagining yourselves in a mirror.
All the women on the stage are 'death-by boobs' large - one morbidly obese with breasts pushed up like newel caps at the bottom of a staircase in a keyhole negligee from the Maria Rinaldi for Anne Summers range - all of which perhaps is supposed to add to the comic element of the play, but I can't bring myself to laugh at someone just because she has cellulite and looks like a chisel in red knickers. I'm too busy wondering where the huge actress with the bum that is not merely musical but symphonic, got the fishnets big enough to fit her. Those babies are big enough to trawl the North Sea.
Eva digs me in the ribs and laughs but like all good comedy, it's really a tragedy. Even the largest call-girl, just shy of fifty, is still longing for love. Aren't we all? Even those of us not on the game are in the club. We're all hoping the Prince is going to come. As long as it's not an Alsatian. Though round where I live, even those of us who aren't plus-sized, plus fifty year old women have settled for the dog.
Eva, as yet dogless (though she had to be talked off the leash from that one a few months ago) had spent the weekend with her friend in North London.
'Poor thing, she's so tired all the time. She's training to be a dental nurse."
I turned to look at her. 'What do you mean? Isn't she a lawyer?'
'Yes, but her husband's a dentist and he doesn't have anyone to help him when his receptionist goes on holiday, so he's making her train as a dental nurse and work in the practice so he doesn't have to pay anyone else. Imagine, a lawyer, training as a dental nurse to save money.' We both laughed so much that I thought she was going to fall off the bench.
'"She's not very good," he told me. He says she's too slow.' We fell about laughing again.
But she's not so jolly on the journey home.
'Everyone says the play's very funny, but I just found it sad,' she says in the car, where our conversation would probably rival the dialogue by the time I've finished filling in Eva's blanks.
'I've never heard that before - the "girlfriend experience"... kissing, cuddling and sex.'' She falls silent for a while. 'I thought hookers didn't kiss their clients. It's not so different from dating I suppose. They're just getting the girlfriend experience but they don't have to pay for it, is all. I do it for free.'
'But at least you don't have to train as a ruddy dental nurse.'
'I know, ' she laughs again at the memory. 'Still, I'm not sure I want to ever get married again. Not only is my friend's husband using her law degree to hoover up all his patients' spit, but the two of them bickered all through lunch about stupid little things - "you did this, you said that, you forgot to get mangoes, you didn't tell me to buy them..." It really put me off. Though, we did all go to see a lovely sculpture park together afterwards.'
Dear God. I thought you only had to go to those things if you were single.
What's the number for the Battersea Dogs' Home?
