I recently met a woman who would seem to be a walking, breathing oxymoron, with the emphasis on moron: Against all odds, she is a public relations professional with no people skills.

Isn’t that sort of like a surgeon with the shakes, or a limp-wristed lumberjack? Can you actually make it in PR with no people skills? Obviously you can, because she has.

I met the PR Beast From Hell at the Ragan Public Relations Conference two weeks ago (yes, I’m a bit behind in my blogging, because I just spent five magical days in Barcelona, attending a conference there; more on that later this week).

But before I tell you about The Beast you need some background.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am an Alopecian.

That means I have Alopecia, a somewhat rare disease that makes you lose all of your hair. There are several degrees of Alopecia, and I have the most severe—the kind where you lose everything: all body hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, nose hair, everything.

As I’ve mentioned out here before, I’m like a big, slippery baby seal. Completely hairless.

Well, when you’re an Alopecian, you do your best to pretend you’re normal. In the back of my head, I know that my lack of eyebrows makes me look at little odd . . . because the eyebrows are the fence line between your head and your face, and without that fence line, your features tend to swim in a sea of flesh.

Most days, you just try not to think about it. You tend to avoid mirrors, but you do that if you’re fat, too. Or just ugly for more natural reasons than Alopecia. But still, you’re always aware of it, even if it’s tucked way back in the corner of your mind.

Anyway . . . on to the Beast.

I was about to give my second presentation at the PR conference, and I stepped out into the hallway to gather my thoughts.

When I stepped out of the room, there was a woman leaning against the hall. And she was staring at me. Hard. Finally, she spoke.

“You look exactly like my brother-in-law,” she said.

Now, you should know that Alopecians live in constant fear of any sentence that begins with the words, “You look exactly like . . .”.

“My brother-in-law” is actually not that bad, when you consider that in the past I’ve gotten “Uncle Fester,” “King Kong Bundy,” and “Curly from the Three Stooges.”

But still . . . what do you say to someone who says that? I, of course, tried to fill in the uncomfortable silence with a joke.

“Oh, is he very good looking too?” I said. Ha ha, right? But she had her own punchline.

“He was, until he got Alopecia.”

BIG emphasis on the was.

I left quickly, before she could say: "Yeah, I bet you weren't half-bad looking either before Alopecia turned you into a hairless, hideous looking freak."

Can you even imagine? And this woman is in PR! A PR woman with no social skills! A PR counselor with no filter between her brain and her big-ass mouth!

Can you imagine the things she might say to her clients?

“Excuse me, I didn’t hear what you said. I was distracted by what appears to be a small piss stain on the front of your trousers.”

“Have you ever thought about braiding the clumps of hair you have growing out of your ears?”

“You know, you’re just like my brother-in-law. He has zackly disease, too. His breath smells zackly like his ass.”

And if you can believe it, this wasn’t even the worse thing that has ever happened to me, as an Alopecian. And the other incident involved a woman in PR, too!

The worst incident happened about eight years ago. I had just lost all of my hair, and I hadn’t come to grips with not having eyebrows yet. For a while, I would wear fake glasses with clear lenses, because they could serve as that all important facial fence line.

But after I lost 44 pairs of glasses in less than six months, I gave that up. Couldn’t afford it.

Then I started drawing on eyebrows every morning. Yes, that’s right. Every day, if you were to come into my house, you’d see a large bald man with crippling ADD and the attention span of an amphetamine junky standing patiently at the bathroom sink for 20 minutes, drawing on fake eyebrows.

Anyway . . . my fake eyebrows and me had just finished the first day of a seminar in Boston, and we were having drinks with about 10 people in the hotel bar.

One woman, whose face I’ll never forget, asked me:

“Why do you shave your head? Because it’s trendy?”

“No, no,” I was quick to respond. “I actually have Alopecia. I don’t have any hair on my entire body.”

“Yes you do,” this pesty woman persisted. “You have eyebrows.”

“No, those are fake,” I said.

“Really?” she said . . . . and then she did the unthinkable: Without asking permission, she licked her thumb, reached over, and smeared one of my eyebrows, to see if I was lying.

“Oh, you’re right,” she said, sitting back and cleaning off her thumb with a cocktail napkin.

So there I was, sitting in a bar with 10 people I barely knew, with my left eyebrow smeared almost down to the bridge of my nose. I wanted to cry.

I know what you’re wondering, and the answer is yes. I did finish my martini, then I got up and left.

Like a lot of people, I’m mad as hell at Mark Foley.

But not for reasons you might believe.

I’m not mad at him for disrupting the Republicans and making that human semen stain Denny Hastert look bad. I’d like to buy him a beer for that, when he gets out of rehab.

And I’m not even mad at him for sending sexed up e-mails to underaged kids . . . because it wasn’t my kid. If it was my kid, there would be no talk of congressional hearings and subcommittee investigations.

There would be only one investigation: The investigation to find Mark Foley’s missing body, which disappeared one day after I found out that he was e-mailing my kid, and 12 hours after I bought a chainsaw and a bucket of lye at Menards.

No, I’m mad at Senor Foley for completely ruining one of the great PR strategies of all time: The Rehab Apology.

For years, the Rehab Apology was a slam dunk PR tactic, and taught at PR conferences everywhere:

If your client screws up and, more importantly, gets caught, check him into a rehab clinic and blame everything on the booze. Recently, Mel Gibson used it when he got caught in an anti-semitic rant. Under advice of his PR counsel, Mel just checked into the rehab clinic and announced it to the world. Turns out, he only hates Jews when he’s drunk!

It also worked for Pat O’Brien, the TV “entertainment reporter” who got caught leaving perverted, harassing messages on a woman’s answering machine. What did he do? Checked into rehab! And, of course, we were all willing to believe he was a drunk because what sober person would voluntarily become an “entertainment reporter”?

A local columnist here in Chicago recently beat his wife, and the lady called the cops on him. Guess what? Rehab! Now all his journalist buddies who no doubt are dying to ask him the age-old journalism question: “Are you still beating your wife?” can’t do it, because he’s not really a wife beater . . . just a raging alcoholic. And so are all his coworkers, so nobody can tease anybody.

I mean, the Rehab Apology was a lock. Set in stone. Guaranteed to quiet the press and win the public back to your side. If the Pope would have checked into rehab after insulting Muslims first with his speech and then with his non-apology, the entire Muslim world would have put down their Molotov Cocktails and small arms and said: “Oh . . . see? He just fell victim to the temptations of the West.”

And then Foley has to come along and use it . . . and the damn thing got overexposed. Too many people have used it lately, and now everyone is on to it. It is now useless as a PR strategy.

Now, maybe I shouldn’t blame Foley. Maybe the very next person to use it—no matter who it was—would have ruined the Rehab Apology. I mean, with everyone using it, even a moronic American public that watches shows like "Survivor" and listens to Dr. Phil would have eventually caught on. Maybe.

But somehow, I think part of the reason that Foley is responsible is because he used it even though . . . he doesn’t drink! I mean, not really. That’s what a report in the Chicago Tribune said yesterday. They interviewed a bunch of his colleagues who said they never knew he drank, or saw him have, at the most, a glass of wine at a function.

Now, maybe he would have a glass of wine at a function, then guzzle a quart of vodka in the car on the way home, smash his car into the garage door because he forgot to open it, urinate in the cat box and then fall asleep naked in the bathtub.

But I doubt it. If you’re really a boozer—the kind of boozer that needs to check into a rehab clinic—people tend to know.

For example: If I were to murder Dr. Phil by cutting him to shreds with a dull steak knife, and then I got caught, and I told the world: “I was drunk, and I’m checking into a Rehab Clinic,” the reactions from my friends would be things like:

“Well . . . yeah. That makes sense.”

And,

“Saves us an intervention, anyway.”

But now . . . now I can’t use the Rehab apology if I ever Kill Phil, because Foley queered it for all of us real alcoholics.

My great pal and long-time drinking buddy David Murray is just as upset about this as I am. This morning, he e-mailed me a New York Times headline that said:

Assertion by Foley Angers Victims of Abuse by Clergymen

And here was his comment:

“Well, who's going to stand up for the alcoholics? I mean, where does this asshole get off claiming to be a boozehound without having suffered hundreds of head-splitting hangovers, frequent gnawing fear of arrest and constant family scorn? Alcoholism is a disease. But as you have often pointed out, it's also a part-time job. And if we see it on your résumé, brother, we're going to be checking references.”

God damn right.

Either that, or the next time an alcoholic behaves badly, he should get to stand up in front of his AA Chapter and say: “I’m sorry I’m such a shit. I’m going to run for Congress.”

First, I want to apologize for not posting out here for a while . . . and also apologize to all the folks who have been trying to comment, but haven’t been able to. It seems the blog was hijacked.

I have no idea what that means. But the IT folks at Ragan told me that hackers or spammers or hackers and spammer together first hijacked the comments section, then the entire blog . . . which was why for a while you saw content from 2005 up there.

But it’s fixed now, and I have two weeks worth of stuff to write about!

First, you should know I’m in London . . . after three wild days in Warsaw. I’m writing this at about 4 in the morning, and have to get ready soon to go down and do the second day of the Master Class.

To give you a sense of place, allow me to describe my hotel room in the Kensington Close hotel.

It’s small. And I’m big. It’s a horrible combination. I now know where Jonathon Swift got the inspiration for the Land of Lilliput in Gulliver's Travels. He must have stayed in the Kensington Close hotel. I feel like a troll in a hobbit hole.

My legs and arms are covered with bruises because I keep banging into the corners of things.

When you open the door, it hits the desk. You have to squeeze by the desk to get to the bed. When you sit on the toilet, your legs touch the walls on either side. Everything is tiny . . . even the water glasses in the bathroom are just a tad bit bigger than shot glasses.

When I took my alka seltzer last night, after a wonderful meal with Marc Wright and his merry band of British colleagues, I had to take it one tablet at a time, because that’s all the glass would hold.

And you know what? I love it! Because I’m in London! I’m quaffing ale and eating bangers and mash and mushy and we had a great crowd for the Master Class yesterday and another one lined up for today.

I have so many stories to tell you about Warsaw and London, I don’t know where to begin. But let me start with how I got my new nickname: Mr. Proper.

It happened in Warsaw. My hosts there, the GFMP Management Consultants group, were fantastic people. And fantastic drinkers. There are only ten people in the company, and they’re all young and smart.

Their operation made me think of Rolling Stone magazine back in its heyday, in the late 60s. And the owner, Bogdan Dabrowski, is the Polish Jann Wenner. He’s smart, charming, and wickedly funny.

I was lucky enough to have two dinners with Bogdan and his crew. Both lasted more than four hours. I think there was an unwritten rule that nobody at the table, including me, could leave until Bogdan was ready to leave.

And Bogdan never wanted to leave. He just kept ordering bottle after bottle after bottle of wine. It was beautiful.

At one point, about 2 in the morning during Dinner #2, I remember arguing with Bogdan about Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. He hated Hemingway, who is one of my literary heroes. Thus the argument.

Although he spoke fairly good English, he liked speaking in Polish better, so the argument was done through one of his employees, the great and beautiful Dominika, who translated for us.

Arguing literature with a fiercely intelligent man through a beautiful translator after you’ve had sixteen bottles of wine is a truly magnificent, scary experience. It went something like this:

Bogdan: (Talks rapidly and excitedly and a little bit angrily in Polish for three full minutes, gesturing at me. The only words I understand are “Hemingway” and “Fitzgerald,” which sounds like Faisgeroh.)

Dominika: “Bogdan says Hemingway was an alcolohic and he shouldn’t have betrayed Fitzgerald by writing about him the way he did in “A Moveable Feast.”

Now, the man had spoken for three full minutes, so I know he said a lot more than that. I imagine the real translation was something like:

Bogdan: “Tell our fat little American friend that Hemingway was a drunk, a fraud, and a son of a bitch. In order to compensate for his own feelings of inadequacy, he killed innocent animals with guns, cheated on all his wives, drank himself nearly to death, and when he couldn’t live with his own cowardice anymore, he betrayed all his friends by writing personal things about them, then blew his cowardly head off with a shotgun and left his family to deal with the mess.”

But Dominika probably didn’t want to get into all that.

Anyway . . . before the Hemingway debate, Bogdan and were talking, through Dominika, about the state of employee communications in Poland.

Bogdan was struggling to find the exact right word for something, and Dominika said to me:

“He is looking for a word close to proper, but he doesn’t want to say proper because it might insult you.”

Insult me? Proper? That wouldn’t insult me, I told her. It wouldn’t describe me, but it wouldn’t insult me, either. I was confused.

“Why would saying proper insult me?” I asked.

“Because there is a brand of cleaner in Poland, and it features a big bald man with bulging muscles, named Mr. Proper, and he doesn’t want you to think he is calling you Mr. Proper.”

I finally figured it out: Poland’s version of Mr. Clean is called Mr. Proper!

I am Mr. Proper!

So let it be written, so let it be done. From now on, I will only answer to Mr. Proper. And I will only refer to myself in the third person from now on as well.

My wife Cindy is winging her way to London as I write this, and she lands this morning. I can’t wait to unveil the new nickname and the new way of talking to her. I’ve already got some things planned:

“Mr. Proper would like to have sex, and then go see Big Ben.”

“Mr. Proper thinks you should sleep in the hallway, as this hotel room is only big enough for Mr. Proper.”

“When you’re in London, Mr. Proper expects you to ride the Tube constantly. And maybe take the subway, too.”

This is going to be great fun.

Oh, by the way, I have tons of stories about Warsaw and London . . .and many of them actually have to do with employee communications. I’ll be unloading them here starting later today, so check this spot frequently