On the Horns of a Quandary or Between a Rock and a Dilemma. Discuss.

OMG I have broken a nail. In a few hours I am to join, for the first time, a very exclusive card club here in the home and the ten nails I've been assiduously protecting with gloves and nourishing with oil each night since I received the invitation to this audition for a permanent seat in the Seventh Floor Whist Club are now a joke. The nail I have ruined, the most noticeable one, ringy on the left, is a jagged embarrassment.

My regular manicurist is in Bermuda this week and his stand-in is working on a sports shoot at Lucas Field House all weekend can't get away. I rack my brain. I have always been a resourceful woman. I know there must be a solution. What shall I do?  

Of course I am capable of filing the ragged edge smooth. And I do have matching polish somewhere around the apartment. But I cannot paint a nail without painting the finger upon which it lives. I have tried. I do my own toes, to save money, but they must afterward be covered until I have bathed and scrubbed the red stains from my feet at least twice. No sandals for at least two weeks. So that's out.

On any other occasion I could wear gloves, but one cannot wear gloves to play cards. One would be laughing stock.

A sling for my left arm? Too extreme, probably.

I practice shuffling and dealing with ringy folded into my palm. The only way I can keep it there is to hold it with my thumb and then I risk dropping the cards. No.

I have it! I will clip it to the quick, dab it with a three dots of black marker, and say it is  a mourning custom in honor of my grandmother's tribe's mothers who died on the Trail of Tears. Yes.

I know I can pull it off. I once told a roomful of women at a dance that my unevenly hemmed skirt was  'all the rage' out West where we had been vacationing. They bought it. And admired it.

So. 

More later.