STRANGER THAN FICTION: HAPPILY MARRIED COUPLE MAGICALLY TRANSFORMED INTO ROOMMATES

One day we were inseparable. The next: "My HUSBAND? What are you talking about?

Before anything else, let me wish you a happy Income Tax Filing Deadline Day. Don't forget to participate in this day's traditional activities, like toilet papering your local Internal Revenue Service office and placing flaming bags of dog doo on your local congressman's porch.

We had our taxes done at a discount place this year. I spent the last several months looking at my paycheck stubs and thinking, "MAN! With all this income tax I'm paying, there's no TELLING how big my return is going to be. Should I get a new stereo or a new recliner? Stereo, recliner. Stereo, recliner."

So imagine my surprise when I sat across the table from an elderly man in a sweats (that ALONE should have tipped me off) who very calmly said, "You owe the government $450 this year."

He said it like he was announcing his choice of pizza for lunch.

Maybe $450 isn't a lot of money to some people, like, say, the people who passed tax laws that are the equivalent of a 40-year wedgie for the middle class. But it is for me. So, when I was back in Missouri recently, I went to the NON-discount accounting service where my taxes were done last year.

"These are all wrong," the accountant said, pointing out several errors. "You'll owe $28. Now, should I save these tax forms the other guy did or just throw them out?"

"Save them," I said. "They may end up being evidence in a murder trial."

And speaking of murders, let me tell you about The Other Half these days.

He just took a promotion that requires him to work from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. I work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. See any problem here? Of course! We've become roommates with a marriage certificate!

Ah, I remember my last female roommate before I got married. I wasn't sleeping with her, either. But she cooked London broil and let me have the leftovers. She vacuumed the house three times a week. She didn't leave unsightly armpit hairs all over the bathroom floor and fixtures.

It seems bizarre to me that some couples work the same hours. They have coffee and read the newspaper together in the mornings. They go through the mail and watch the 10 p.m. news at night before turning in. They bear children. They SPEAK!

Meanwhile, my friends keep asking me how my husband is doing. "Husband?" I ask. "You mean I'm MARRIED? When did that happen?"

And now, in my time of crisis, I find out that George Michael is a pervert.

An April 11 article from the Associated Press explains that George, the love of my teens and early 20s, says he is sexually "ambiguous," his little solo experience in the Los Angeles park bathroom wasn't his first and he currently is involved with a man.

My best friend Lynn knew it all along, even back in his Wham! days.

"Nobody with hair, teeth and skin THAT perfect can be straight," she said all those years ago. I pooh-poohed her allegations, staring lovingly at my Wham! album cover. I dreamed of the day George would wake me up before he went-went.

Now, come to find out, he wants to have relations with a man. Himself.

Talk about shattered innocence. I guess now that George is out of the picture, I'll HAVE to make things work with Mr. Half.

P.S. This week's Idjit Award goes to a television journalist at one of our local stations, who covered a memorial ceremony for Florida's only recognized female Confederate veteran. I covered it, too.

"She later settled in Pensacola and was buried here in 1930," the journalist reported.

Unfortunately, said veteran didn't actually die until 1939.

~Heidi Nieland is a former Southeast Missourian staff member who lives in Pensacola, Fla.