I am so not the type to do this, but I have just found myself involved in a duel-to-the-death auction on eBay.

And I hate to admit this, but it’s all for a tube of lipstick.

That’s right. My life has ground pretty much to a halt, and I’m not even doing this for porcelain figurines, or glow-in-the-dark jelly bracelets or even a Richard Nixon bobblehead–all of which are equally available to the discerning eBay user.

All I ask is a chance to once again wear the lipstick color that Cover Girl used to carry in every single drug store in this country–you could just walk in and pick it up off the shelf, carry tubes of it out by the handful, in fact–and then one day, the gremlins who work for Cover Girl, the marketing geniuses, said, “Hmm, this color is just too great! Just for the fun of it, let’s suspend manufacturing of it for a while and see if women all over America start rioting in the streets.”

I personally was all for rioting in the streets, but my friends weren’t interested. They all seemed to have their own lipstick problems. Everybody I knew had some sad story about their only possible lipstick color being discontinued.

A woman in CVS explained the facts of life to me: “Honey, lipstick companies are just evil. They do what they do, and no one can stop them.”

Clearly, this is a crisis in our country that no one is paying enough attention to. Cosmetics giants indiscriminantly trashing our favorite lipstick colors! And we can’t make them stop! Really! Ask the woman next to you. She will tell you her sad story of Lipstick Discontinuation. Everybody has one. Some people have had their heart broken multiple times. They have healed and moved on to a new shade–only to have that shade then discontinued by the cosmetics giants.

So one day a friend of mine said we should start buying our lipstick on eBay. “They have every discontinued color imaginable there!” she said. And so I found ONE TUBE of the Best Lipstick in the World there, and I bid on it, and I won the bid, and the lipstick came to my house a week later…and now I have nearly used it all up, and so I went back on eBay and found yet another tube of it…but this time with a three-day bidding process.

What is UP with having to wait three days? And nobody had even bid on it. So I placed my bid for $5, one cent over what the asking price was. The days passed without event. This lipstick was mine, baby.

And now, tonight, just one little tiny hour from bid’s-up time, somebody came on and bid $5.25! 

I don’t mind telling you that I am stunned. Hurt, even. Who else, I ask you, wears this color? And where exactly was this person when we needed women rioting in the streets, demanding its return to the shelves?

So now, not being an auction person or a eBay person, I have been perplexed. Better to up my bid immediately, or to wait until 5 seconds before the thing closes? I have asked my eBay-savvy children, and they mentioned that I could become a sniper or something. But that does not sound like me. And how do I know if my bid would get through in time? Besides, I can’t sit around, knowing that there is a screen on my computer that says to me: YOU ARE NOT THE WINNING BIDDER.

We are talking lipstick here!  Bobblehead or the jelly bracelers–okay. Easy come, easy go. But Cover Girl isn’t manufacturing this lipstick anymore, and God only knows how few of them are still out there in the world.

I upped my bid to a whopping $6.

Sixteen minutes left…and I’m still the high bidder.

Oh, my God. Three minutes and 58 seconds.

I just know this woman is waiting to jump in at the last second.

But–wait. She didn’t do it, and eBay just said that I won the auction. I won!!! The suspense is over.

Maybe my co-bidder had to go to bed. Or maybe she was writing her novel (like I should be doing) and she was so focused on her writing, which is going so very well–she’s had breakthroughs in her characters and with her plot, and she actually forgot to come back on and re-bid.

Or maybe–this is the likeliest possibility–maybe she didn’t really care that much after all. She’s not whining and desperate like I am. She’s probably found another shade that the two of us would like so much better.

I wish I could call her. Just to see what’s up, you understand.

She and I could talk over the problems of keeping ourselves in Cover Girl Outlast  #612…the way it’s really a great color when you’re healthy and feeling just right, but how sometimes it really can look too pink or too orange. You have to apply it just right.

Maybe we two #612ers could call up the company together, or start a two-person letter writing campaign to have it brought back.

When we get our novels done, of course.