“Once the principals in their party are seated, with those lower on the totem pole left to grumble and move on to find another table, our once-cozy booth transforms into a damp fusion of vacuous wretchedness, with the three women all complaining alternately about their wet hair/clothes and their respective distance from Talon, while the man himself is trying to maneuver his Paul Bunyan frame way too close to me.”

“Must be the hair then. And the name change. And your new piss-poor attitude. Because every once in a while, I look at you and I don’t see a Baby Doll anymore. I just see Alice Faye Dahl, Poker Champion Badass. With obvious, heavy influences from Ronald McDonald, of course.”

“I look around briefly at the other players like I always do before a game. Other than Queenie, Bill, and Talon, I don’t know any of them (and I don’t care enough about them to know them). But if there’s going to be any cordiality, any forced politeness or ‘Aw, shucks, let’s all just try to have a good time here tonight’ kind of blather, then now’s the time to get it out of the way before I get down to the business of screwing everyone out of their hopes and dreams.”

“So you went back to your friend’s next donkament two weeks later, and this time you just laughed right along when they gave you that framed picture of the poker hands. And when they called you ‘pigeon,’ ‘fish,’ and ‘muppet,’ you just smiled and batted your eyes and said stupid things like ‘Does a straight beat a crooked?’ And while everyone else was throwing a party, you just sat there acting like a tourist with your kill stack until you were in the money. Those poor dills…they didn’t know what hit ‘em, did they?”

“Alice, it took big, dumb Talon Dodo thirty seconds to get you so pissed about a poker hand pun that you were about to beat him to death with your cane.”

“Well, the gondola operator—whose name was ‘Happy,’ I might add—failed to inform me that about sixty seconds into the trip, the floor under the section of car I was standing on was going to slide away.Turns out it was a really useful way of finding out which of the passengers suffers from acute acrophobia.”

“I grimace, thinking someone should come up with a new phrase for 'I left the ocean without a kiwi-sized chunk of my lower-left butt cheek' to replace the rather nebulous term 'exploratory bite.”