Scooter Envy

It's official.

I have one monster case of scooter envy.

I see all these UW-Madison college students back again for the fall semester, cruising along on their Vespas and Yamaha Vinos and Honda Metropolitans and I positively ache. That should be me, I think, with the wind making my trouser-cut jeans legs flap, ruffling the small sprigs of hair sticking out from beneath my little helmet. I should be the one zipping in and out of the bike lane, waving jauntily like I was Eddie Izzard on Dressed to Kill, saying "Ciao" and smiling at everyone. That should be me getting 90 to 100 miles per gallon of fucking expensive gas, piling incidental groceries into my front scooter basket, or stowing my purse in my little secret under-the-seat storage compartment.

Life would be better on a scooter. It would be better now and would have been better 12 months ago, when I was still managing a Curves (for women) gym. Instead of stumbling out of bed at 4:30 every morning and wobbling out to the used Subaru to make my miserably early commute, I would have hopped out of bed and bounded down the stairs. After settling on to my zippy little scooter (covered in mounds of reflective tape and beaming its very bright, perky little light into the half-darkness of pre-dawn), I would zip away from our apartment, out of the hood, through the ghetto, and into middle class suburbia. I would whiz past those early morning walkers in their wind suits and track pants, ducking and weaving at my top speed of 45 miles per hour through all the quiet little streets, thrilling in my position as lone vehicle on the road.

The women who worked out at my gym would be envious. They would know that my happy and carefree demeanor was a direct result of owning a scooter. They would become disgruntled with their own positions as kid chauffeurs or head-errand-runners. They would sell their mini-vans and Chevy Suburbans and Volvos, trading in trunk room for scooter bliss. They would start making their husbands drive the kids to math club and tennis lessons. They would all ride to Curves on their scooters. Other women at other Curves would see what was happening at my Curves and they would trade in their kid-mobiles for scooters, too. All of Madison and the surrounding areas would suddenly be overrun by these middle-aged women on scooters, running their errands in cute helmets that they appliqued at the Scrapbook Shop. Together, we would become Scooter Nation, like Red Sox Nation, only we would be banishing the Curse of the the SUV instead of the Curse of the Bambino.

People would notice. Gary and Diane Heavin, those unfortunately conservative Curves founders, would start marketing a limited edition Curves Vespa, which you could only purchase with Curves bucks that you earned at the gym by exercising three times a week. Women would become more fit and more independent, setting better examples for their kids in terms of health and fitness, and establishing themselves as equals within the home, not just as errand-runners and laundry-doers.

Slowly, steadily, we would start a revolution, not just for women, but for the environment and for the world as well. Just imagine what would happen if all those soccer moms traded in their SUV's for earth-friendly mopeds. Emissions would go down, the hole in the ozone layer would start to heal itself like the lungs of a smoker who quits, and the wild weather in the tropics would calm down such that the hurricane center would only get through the letter 'C' in the alphabet. The oil barons would rent their clothes and tear their hair. Italy would become the world's new super power, borne to greatness on the back of Vespas.

George Bush would be impeached for calling scooters "unAmerican." A woman would get elected president--a nice forward thinking liberal woman. With a scooter and a Curves membership. And at the close of her inaugural speech, she would look into the cameras and say "And I want us all to remember that this is not my victory. This is a victory for the American people. This is a victory for the world. This is a victory for Scooter Nation. And this would never have been possible without that one woman with courage enough to ride her scooter out of the hood at 4:30 every morning to open that door for women everywhere."

And off in the distance, as the sun melted into a bright red shimmering puddle on the horizon, you would see the silhouette of one small woman zipping off into the great unknown, scooter basket full of incidental groceries, sprigs of helmeted hair blowing like her pant legs in the breeze.