Maybe even on Oprah

We had a new security guard at work today. He let me in the door because I was carrying my giant purse, my extra bag with my laptop and other necessary stuff, my lunch bag and Jojo Kitty in his traveling case. “You guys have a cat?” he said with surprise in his voice.

“No.”

“Isn’t that a cat?” He pointed directly to Joe’s pink canvas case.

“No.” Joe helpfully meowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“In that bag. That’s a cat.”

I just shook my head and walked into my office with the cat.

That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Ava came into my office later and plunked down into the chair on the opposite side of my desk and stuck her face in the kitty’s belly. She gave him a good nuzzle before coming up for air. “How much trouble – really – do you think we’d get into if we stole a panda?”

Oh come on! He can’t even be real.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. If we get caught in China we’ll probably go to prison forever. But if we’re here, probably not much. You know how those kind of crimes go.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “I mean really, what would they do to us?”

“I suspect we’d get a book deal out of it and go on Letterman.” I stared at my coffee cup and wondered if I wanted more. “You know all the husbands in the country would be watching the news reports and saying, ‘Oh my God. Look at those crazy women’ and their wives would be gasping and wondering how we did it.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “And even if they took it away in the end, we’d still have had a baby panda for a couple of weeks.”

We’ve really got to stop writing about this on the internet. Eventually the FBI is going to get wise.