The best dry cleaner in the world !

I fired the dry cleaner my father dealt with for over 20 years. He routinely overcharged him, the clothes he delivered always smelled musty but after my father passed I decided to deal with him a couple of times out of respect for an established customer relationship. When the first thing he did was ask me to give him my father’s old clothes, before offering condolences, I blew up.

This is when I met Madame Dania the competing dry cleaner who is truly a piece of work. The first time I met her she was screaming in the phone in strongly accented English doing what I think was an attempt at an American accent. When she hung up she told me “I’m trying to convince the pharmacy to let me return an expensive box of medicine I bought as a charitable gift to an old man who died. They wouldn’t reimburse me when they thought I was Egyptian, but now they will because they think I’m American and foreigners always get their way in Egypt. I’m a bit of an actress you see.”

This morning as I went in to drop a batch of laundry I saw that she had locked the store door and was inside deeply concentrated. She ushered me in and told me to help her urgently “I’m looking for a song by Julio Iglesias, I have to find it or I can’t open my shop” “but Madame Dania…” “Shhhhhsss listen to Julio! Listen! ” anyways, she wouldn’t let me go until we had listened to Julio but she also at all costs wanted to gift me a crochet dress. I escaped the dress but not Julio.