Three in Cedar Key
	The three of us were on our way to Cedar Key. It was an impromptu trip, just for the weekend. It was my best friend, Sharon Carroll, a writer, Ed Brown who was a fellow artist at the Tampa Tribune, and me. Cedar Key was a sleepy little fishing village on the gulf just below the bend in Florida, near the panhandle. All the houses, stores, and restaurants were up on stilts, except for one, The Island Hotel. It had been there forever. That's where I always stayed. It was a big, two-story, wooden hotel constructed in 1861, with an open porch that wrapped around two sides of the top floor. There was a porch swing, and sitting out there at night doing absolutely nothing but enjoying the gulf breeze and peace and quiet, overlooking the moonlit rooftops, was magic. During the day you could drive around the island or visit the art galleries, antique shops, and restaurants. It was perfect for artists and writers to immerse themselves in their work. Every year there was a giant sidewalk art festival on Main Street. It went from one end of town to the other. I always looked forward to exhibiting and selling my paintings there. Then about six months after that, Cedar Key celebrated with its big seafood festival. Other than those two events, you'd just relax and let the rest of the world go by. A lot of the townspeople didn't even wear watches. This was the first time for both Sharon and Ed Brown to visit Cedar Key. Not only that, it was the first time they'd meet. To be honest, I had tried to keep them apart. They were two of my best friends, both geniuses with mindsets at opposite ends of the spectrum. Ed was a self-proclaimed chauvinist, by words, not by actions, and Sharon was a feminist to the core. She was recently divorced and would definitely stand her ground. What were we in for? That night, as we were driving up the coast, it didn't take long for them to get into it. If I hadn't been driving, my head would've been going back and forth like I was watching a tennis match. They didn't let up. I knew Ed was smart but I'd never known anyone that was a match for Sharon. She had a mind like a howitzer and a mouth, vocabulary, and wit to match. She cut him to ribbons. By the time they were through his final response to her was sticking his tongue out and making that raspberry sound to which she responded, "Yeah, that's what I thought." We reached the The Island Hotel fairly late and knowing that the kitchen would be closed, we had stopped and picked up some potted ham, a loaf of plain white bread, drinks, and I think a bag of cookies. The desk clerk signed us in. Our room was on the second floor. Terrific! The swing was right outside our room. We took our sandwich stuff and drinks out on the porch and put them on the little wicker table there. The night was beautiful. It looked like there were thousands of stars or fireflies or both. Sharon cut the crusts off of our bread because that's the way she liked it. Ed, of course, liked that she did that for him. She actually did like him because she loved a good debate and he had fared pretty well earlier. I was glad to see them getting along better. I guessed that it was the enchantment of the hotel. I let the two of them have the swing. From my chair, and by the light of the moon's slow progress across the sky, I could see Ed Brown's hand slowly sliding in Sharon's direction. Soon, he was softly rubbing her inner thigh just above her knee. That's as far as it went. I pretended I hadn't seen it and just talked about the hotel and the moon. The next morning I mentioned to Sharon that I was surprised to see how well she and Ed were getting along after having locked horns the way they had earlier. She said, "He thinks we got along a lot better than we did." "But I saw him rubbing your thigh in the moonlight." She smiled, "I put a slice of bread there. He was rubbing a piece of bread. I loved knowing that he thought he was rubbing my leg. Genius, indeed." We laughed about that for years. Even Ed Brown laughed when he finally found out. When I'd tell the story about that weekend sometimes I'd punch it up a bit by adding something that actually didn't happen. I'd say: When the three of us got to the hotel, the desk clerk checked us in and said that the room was $30 for the night. We each gave her $10 and went up to the room. After we went upstairs she told the bellhop that she had overcharged us. She forgot that that room had a broken window and the price was $25, not $30. She gave the bellhop five $1 bills and sent him up to our room to refund it to us. On the way up, he thought, "It will be hard to divide $5 three ways, so I'm going to give each one of them back $1 and keep the other $2 for myself," which he did. So, if we each gave $10, and got back $1, then we gave $9 each. Well, three times $9 is $27, and the $2 the bellboy kept made $29, what happened to the other dollar? Lash Out Loud