Excerpt

One afternoon at the golden age of five, I heard my mother entertaining a visitor in the parlor and decided to surprise them with a new character I had dreamed up. I went into my mother’s room, wrapped myself in her mink stole, clipped on her large, silver earrings, and hung her rhinestone necklace around my neck. I painted my mouth with half a tube of her brightest lipstick and doused myself with her finest perfume which had the delicate scent of pink bubble gum. I then twisted my security blanket upon my head like a turban, placed my Dennis the Menace doll high on my left hip, and looked into the mirror. I was the spitting image of a miniature Carmen Miranda, (a madly exotic woman I saw on a record jacket my eccentric aunt always had sitting next to her record player). My entrance was certain to bring down the house in a gale of laughter.
I tiptoed down the hall anticipating a grand reception. I glanced around the corner of the wall to ensure they faced the hallway. The strange, bald man in a gray suit and horn-rimmed glasses sat on the sofa beside Mother. They were deep in conversation.
I took a deep breath, rounded the corner, and sprang into the middle of the living room with a loud, “Ta-dah!”
Obviously surprised, both their heads jerked up in my direction. As I rolled my eyes up in mock wantonness, the man’s jaw dropped. His eyes were wide with shock. He took in a deep breath and held it so long his face turned purple.
My mother clapped her hands and threw back her head in a display of amusement. (Pleasing one’s mother was always such an effortless task.)
Within ten seconds, man’s expression worked its way through eight stages of stupefaction. He finally released his breath in a gasp of horror, leaning forward for closer inspection. Transfixed on me, he groped for Mother’s hand and tried to speak, but nothing came out of his mouth but little gasps. 
Something had obviously gone terribly wrong. Number one: why did my face feel like it was on fire? Number two: why did I want the ground to open and swallow me? And, number three: why wasn’t this man completely ecstatic over my performance? This had never happened before.
In the space of a single heartbeat, I took the shortest and most treacherous journey of my life on earth: I fell from heaven into the infernal regions of my first neurosis. For the first time in my present incarnation, I felt shame. The look on that man’s face instilled in me a sense of worthlessness and uncertainty that would rule my life from that moment forward.  I pranced into the room as a joyful child of God and, a minute later was left wondering if my decision to reincarnate as a human being was a terrible mistake.