“Maybe Ridley was like chicken pox; you could only catch it once.”

“He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.”

“No disease is more dangerous than a bad husband, for if a woman catches that Pox, she'll languish from it her entire life.”

“Why is it that they can only come up with one model of spaceship? You would assume such intelligent creatures could, once in a while, put out something in a nice powder blue and shaped like a footstool or maybe like France.”

“Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.”

“And so whether you were six with the chicken pox, nine with the flu, twelve with a broken arm, or fifteen with menstrual cramps, you could count on sixty solid minutes with the company of that old seventies set, lots of one-dollar bets, and advice to neuter your pet, all crunched into the best sick-day game show yet!”