The Best Of The Bimbo, Part One:
JACOOZ DISCOVERS THE AGE-OLD PRACTICE OF BUNDLING:
A SEXY SEX-LESS YANKEE DATING ENTERPRISE
2005
(Note: A version of this column appeared as a feature story in the Berkshire Eagle some time around the winter of 2000. Juliane, in a fairly schizophrenic episode, writes here about her “friend” Jacooz, and her budding romance with the now well-known handyman Ben.)

I had an interesting e-mail today from my friend Jacoozey. She was on the verge of uncontrollable mania (what’s new?). She had just been on a first date with her hunk-du-jour Ben, the handyman with the ENORMOUS HANDS (Jacoozey’s caps, not mine). As you might remember, Jacoozey recently bought a house in the Berkshires. For the past few months, she has had workers breaking down walls, exposing beams, searching dumps for 200-year-old bricks and nails, trompe l’oeuing and even scouring the Maine seashore for perfectly smooth stones for her fireplace. One of the workmen happens to be a young, muscular brute named Ben. (Jacoozey has actually invited girlfriends up from New York City to watch this poor guy work.) The chap apparently asked Jacoozey, after several weeks, if she liked to cross-country ski. And of course, the woman who sleeps in an electric blanket, wears polar fleece head-to-toe 24 hours a day when in the Berkshires, even in summer, and who bought a 50-thousand-dollar SUV just because the steering wheel and seats were heated (she justifies the purchase by saying she suffers from “Reynaud’s Phenomenon”) – this same woman uttered the words “Yes, Ben, I’m a nut for cross-country skiing.” They officially had a date.

Ben picked her up one early evening and took her to a place called Maple Corner Farm in Granville, Mass. for a moonlight ski tour. This full moon event starts in the big red barn with food and live entertainment. Then at about 8, people ski-up and hit the slopes by the light of nothing but candles and the full moon. It sounds awfully romantic. Jacoozey said she lost feeling in some of her toes, but that the sight of Ben in snow pants was well worth it. “Anatomically gifted” are the words she used to describe him.

Jacoozey had done her best at the outlet mall to prepare herself for the skiing. (Her idea of a contact sport is post-Thanksgiving shopping at an outlet mall.) She was in head-to-toe pink polar fleece and, as she described, she still managed to “radiate an aura of glamour.” Thank you, Ralph Lauren, thank you, J. Crew. I saw the outfit. I thought she looked more like the Energizer Bunny with c-cups.

Afterward, apparently, Ben took her back to his house. He lives in a small cape, circa 1786, at the end of a winding dirt road that is so remote it almost looks like a cow path. At one point on their ride home in his “hunk-mobile” (a pick-up truck to the rest of us) pack of coyotes barred the road and wouldn’t move until Ben opened the door, walked out and threw them some barbecued pig’s ears he keeps in the glove box for expressly that purpose. Ben chuckled and said he tracked them home to their den once and found a big pile of about fifty cat collars. Jacoozey shuddered – what a stud. Jacoozey was sure he could probably survive for a month on a glacier with a toothpick, a match, and a candy bar. For the rest of the ride, her head was filled with images of what she imagined Ben’s house to look like: bear-skin rugs, crackling fires, half-empty bottles of Hennessey Cognac laying about and furniture made with Ben’s own enormous two hands.

But then they walked inside. Jacoozey was immediately met with four eyes staring back at her. Two belonged to Ben’s mother, a very lively, amiable woman named Kitty. “You must be the Miss Jacoozey we’ve heard so much about,” she said. Are you hungry, dear? You look faint.”

Kitty poured four glasses of hot cider and while Jacoozey tried to come to terms with the fact that she was feeling romantic toward a man who still lived with his mother, she noticed a huge, grandfather-clock-sized woman lurking in the corner of the room. The one that the other set of eyes belonged to. This was Ben’s Aunt Jerusha. “Aunt” is what they called her, but Jacoozey swears this woman was at least 150 years old.

“I told Ben that physical exertion out of doors in the wintertime is no way to court a young lady,” said Kitty. “A couple hours in the cold and look at you. Your lips are cracked and your cheeks are like flint.” Jacoozey looked in the mirror and almost fainted as Kitty gave her some bees wax and almond balm that Aunt Jerusha makes herself and uses on her face and feet each morning. Kitty went on, winking, “The only proper winter sports are indoors.”



“Actually, Ma’am, I’m not one for sports, generally, if you really want to know the truth,” Jacoozey said. “Ben asked if I liked to ski and I fibbed a little.”

Kitty grinned a wide missing-toothed grin, then seemed to have an inspiration and ran out of the room. The house was very drafty, and Ben got busy filling the corners of the door to the outside with tiny bits of fabric and cotton and cardboards to keep the cold out. The old house seemed like it hadn’t been updated in terms of insulation or much of anything else. Kitty returned a moment later with a fiddle.

“Play us a song, Aunt Jerusha”, Kitty chided. “We’ll have a kitchen junket.”

Kitchen junkets, as Jacoozey described to me, are a very old Yankee wintertime tradition, “dating from the time when Jerusha was young in the 18th century.” One person generally played a fiddle or sang, and the rest danced around the kitchen where the house was often warmest back then. Ben whisked Jacoozey out of her seat and promenaded around the kitchen table. Kitty slapped her knee and sang a warbly old song. Jerusha, stiff as a statue, and not uttering a word the entire time, did apparently play a mean fiddle. They carried on this way well into the night.

Meanwhile, a slight flurry had turned into a full-blown blizzard outside.

“Jacoozey, dolly, you’ll have to stay over,” Kitty said gently. “I’ll not have you and Ben out on these roads in this storm.” And just as the antique cuckoo clock on the wall struck midnight, Jerusha uttered a deep belly laugh that almost shook the floorboards. It was the first sound she had made all night. “Time for the bundling,” Jerusha said in her deep dark voice. Jacoozey was alarmed. Ben turned red and looked embarrassed. Kitty pulled the fiddle out of Jerusha’s hands and whispered into Jerusha’s ear. “I’ll need your help sewing the young ones up!”

Ben hung his head and squeezed Jacoozey’s hand with an embarrassed schoolboy’s wet palm, and led her up to his bedroom, in procession behind his mother and aunt. Jerusha entered the bedroom a few minutes later holding a nightgown for Jacoozey made from white linen and adorned top to bottom with silver hooks and black leather loops. There was a second outfit, a pair of pajama bottoms for Ben, that looked similar to riding chaps, all strong leather loops and silver buckles.

Jacoozey was horrified. “What are those for?” Jerusha laughed again and Kitty grinned. Jacoozey hadn’t worn a piece of clothing without a designer label in quite some time

“If you’re sleeping in the same room as Ben, honey, you’ll have to be bundled! Both of you! Otherwise, it’s not proper! Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of bundling!”

Jerusha started singing a hymn-like melody. “A bundling couple went to bed, with all their clothes from foot to head, that the defense might seem complete, each one was wrapped in a sheet. But O! this bundling's such a witch, the man of her did catch the itch, and so provoked was the wretch, that soon of him a bastard catch’d!”

Kitty explained, “This song was written in 1785 during the time of the great New England bundling wars. Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts led the moral fight against bundling. He said it was an outrageous and immoral practice, that no two unmarried persons should ever lie down together in the same bed, bundled or no. Bunch of uppity city folk arguing about country ways that didn’t concern them, is what I think. But Jerusha and I are too good at tying up Ben and his women friends to ever have the problem of bastard children being born by our boy. You have nothing to worry about.”

Once Jacuzzi and Ben were in bed, a set of sleigh bells were hung around Ben’s neck, and several more hung on the four corner bedposts. These would alert the elders of any “strange movements.”

Jacoozey, despite her initial feelings that being bundled was degrading, says now that it was one of the most romantic experiences she ever had. She and Ben stayed up all night talking. They snuggled the night away, kept each other warm, and somehow found a renewed sense of childhood innocence.

Jacoozey said she wishes she could have been safely tucked into a bed in those horribly awkward dating years as a teenager with the protection of a steel hook and some sleigh bells and her parents’ proximity instead of fending for herself in a cold, smelly backseat of a car. I can see her point.

Jacoozey is now on a crusade to reinstate bundling as a wintertime sport for young dating couples. She has already set up meetings with Eddie Bauer, LL Bean, the North Face, and Land’s End to pitch them her new concept for the “polar fleece bundling jammie.” She said it could be next year’s Christmas present craze. Polar fleece meets the lace and silk teddy – meets the chastity belt – all with a sexy bondage theme thrown in. She already had a designer doing some drawings.