French restoration nobleman who makes a game of robbing women of their virtue by using his charm, good looks and cunning tongue, sans correspondence, bien sûr.
I’d also build flying machines and difference engines.
I have to go with:
The southern belle, attending balls and traveling all the way to South Carolina and Savannah, dancing and flirting with all the men who find my coquettish charm irresistable
OR
A wealthy lady, living in a great mansion, like Carlotta…educated far better than most men I know, and not afraid to get a bit dirty.
Of couse, the closets HAVE to be crammed with big dresses, hoop skirts and parasols.
Iwould be Mr. Wilkins Micawber, always evading my creditors, and finding time to invest in every crackpot scheme.
I would also look just like WC fields!
I’d be the grizzled old prospector, wandering the desert, looking for that one big strike to set me up for life. I had a middlin’ sized find a couple decades before but got cheated out of it by my lyin’ ex-partner, dad-gummit!
DD
The British soldier, serving the Queen in some godforsaken part of the empire. In my pith helmet and handlebar mustache, I would lead my squad in battles against the heaten natives.
Amalthia St. John-Smythe, bluestocking, ward of Lord Alton St. John, the slightly daft curmudgeonly scientist who has seen to it that I’m horrendously over-educated and over-endowed. An heiress to tens of thousands of pounds a year, I am sought after by the poorer member of the tonne, but these admirers soon fall away when faced with my towering intellect. I have the distinct inability to suffer fools gladly and my doting Uncle Alton sees no reason to change me. He despises the aping gold-digging wippersnappers of today. One of his collegues from the House of Lords has lately taken a bit of a fancy to me, the Duke of Amalfy. The Duke says that I’m the only woman that has ever made him think and laugh at the same time. We shall see how this progresses, but I’m in no hurry.
The outspoken, sufragist member of a royal family in the 1880s who wears all the latest clothing and is wildly beautiful, but is the despair of her relatives because they’re afraid she won’t make a good match because of her sharp tongue.
My dialog would consist of lines like:
“Mandingo, why de massa’s wife don’t leave you be? Don’t dey care we’z got a family to raise?”
“Here is de wader fo’ you massa, with sumpin extre special floatin’ innit.”
“Mandingo, you lien’ field nigra. You tole me this here railroad had sleeper cars.”
I would be the very rich, much loved and slightly eccentric widow who lives on that beautiful and profitable estate just in the next county. My estate is so large that it **is **the next county.
It is rumored that I killed my husband of 20 years, but as I am so well beloved, no one really believes it, and he deserved it anyway.
I throw the party of the season, know the scoop on everyone, and recently started the trend of wearing mens trousers and smoking cigarrettes while at home. This fashion is currently sweeping Northern England and Scotland, and I am being hailed as a visionary.
My servants are all extremely loyal, and most have been with me since my birth. The Queen and I are on first name basis. My children are brilliant, quick witted and well mannered, and are sought out by those both high born and low.
Biggirl, don’t you feel bad that you made me snort diet coke all over my monitor? Man, carbonated beverages do terrible things to one’s nasal passages.
I guess I’d be an eccentric spinster with enough money to live by myself, spending all my available time at the library, pissing off all the self-righteous matrons who poke their noses into everyone else’s business.
I shall have parties in my salon and affairs with handsome men who aren’t of royal blood.
Who wants to be invited?
Dammit! Did I mention I build flying machines?
Biggirl you owe me a new esophagus.
OK, we have entirely too many eccentric Modern Women here. So I guess I am going to have to rethink, and be the Wealthy, Imperious Dowager: the one who makes her relatives marry people they don’t want to; frightens orphans; socially snubs people; and–of course–says, “well really!” while glaring through her lorgnette.
I’m not really an eccentric modern woman. More of a spoiled brat of princess from some obscure German province that was swallowed up by those hated Prussians. So I’m a Princess of Hesse-Fursternberg, and at one point there was talk me of marrying the Crown Prince Rudolf, but of course, he went off with that Belgian frump. So, my family wants me to marry some horrid Prussian, or perhaps a possible match with a Russian Grand Duke.
But I don’t want that. I only want to marry for love. I’m liberal, and shockingly socialist, but I’m also fashionable and gorgeous and very romantic.
Once up north I keep me, Mandingo and the kids in grits by going on tour showing off my amazing Hottentot ass. After the war I go into business selling inflatable ass panels to the flat-assed white women. There is also a very lucrative side venture that we call Renta-Man’s-Dingo.
We buy a new brownstone in Striver’s Row, do heroin and usher in the new century with a two page obit upon my death in The New York Freeman and The Amsterdam News.
I would want to be the ghost of the enigmatic, much discussed beautiful libertine whose murderer has never been found.
Instead, I am the well off country matron with nerves. Diagnosed as hysterical, I’ve taken to my boudoir with my two Russian Wolfhounds, my cordial of remedy and a good supply of writing paper. I write detailed, occasionally exquisite letters of complaint.
I would spend most of my life inventing the BLT sandwich.
Biggirl, you and Scylla should get together and submit some funny threads. I swear, the both of you together would make most Dopers (myself included), stock up on Depends.