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Although I barely knew Tracey Flagler, I miss her now that she is gone. I used to give her a goofy smile when we passed in the yard or on the street. I tried to converse with her, but she had little or no time to spare, perhaps because my conversation tends to run into long, off-the-cuff essays, and she had other things to do than to listen to a monologue. No doubt she had heard every line a man could throw out, anyway. She was, I found out, the outstanding beauty who stood in for Charlize Theron in the romantic movie, Sweet November, about a woman who lures a different man every month into her arms to help him out, avoiding long-term commitments all the while because she is terminally ill. Charlize, we might remember, was once rated the “Sexiest Woman Alive” by Esquire.

It is with that in mind that I clipped Charlize’s photograph from the magazine’s cover and pinned it up on my wall. When I gaze at the image of the sexiest woman alive, I imagine that she is really Tracey, my own nice girl next door, so to speak. After all, if it were not for the slings and arrows of fortune and other quirks of fate, Tracey would be a movie star today, and I could very well say to whoever would listen, “I knew Tracey Flagler well. She was my neighbor,” whenever she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She would tell Oprah that she, Tracey Flagler, was just lucky, and Oprah would disagree with her, just as she disagreed with Charlize Theron in their talk published in Oprah Magazine back in November 2005:

“You keep saying you’re lucky,” Oprah told Charlize, “and I can’t take it. You’re not lucky. You are blessed and graced. Even the word blessed doesn’t capture the bigness of it. When you are in alignment with the divine current of your life, that’s when that thing people call luck happens.”

My dear Tracey would reply, “Oprah, you really flatter me, to think that God has personally graced and blessed me because I became aligned with the Divine Current, just as you did before you got your two and a half billion dollars, while those who fail don’t become aligned with it, even though they believe in it, watch your show, read Abraham-Hicks and Seth and Conversations with God, and pray ever so desperately to the source of the divine current! Thank you! It’s so much better to bathe in the divine current and be graced and blessed by divine being than to be graced and blessed by Lady Luck.”

Ah, if only I had slept with the sexiest woman in the world before she became rich and famous, if only I had taken a dozen tawdry photos of the carnal process, I might have exposed all and gotten myself blessed and graced with a hundred grand....

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