I tell you, those two girls, they have outdone themselves this time. You've just gotta laugh, or that's what I figure, even though I know damn well Miss High-and-Mighty Velma Kelly would no sooner hear one little giggle before she'd sue my ass off for defamation of character. Not Miss Roxie, though. Tell the truth, I still think she's a little too slow for that kind of action. She'd rather let her latest boytoy, that sweetheart stockbroker there, invest her cash for her than piss it away on lawsuits for fun. That's about all the good that stockbroker is to her anyway, and I'm here to tell you that flat out. She's funny as hell, trying so hard to make Vel jealous, when she wants it as bad as Vel does. And I don't think they ever stopped fucking. It's all for show. Everything they do is all for show, and that's the truth.

But I'm getting ahead of myself - you'll have to excuse me, I was never much of one for writing. I just figured with both Vel and Roxie out there publishing memoirs, both of them packed to the rafters with lies, it was time for someone to step in who actually knew what was what. Reading those things, you'd be wondering how the convents of Chicago ever managed to cope with losing two saints like those. Oh, they both know how to lay it on thick. But I figured that since people are buying up those memoirs like mad, there'll be a few people here and there who are gonna notice a few things wrong, like how neither of their stories makes any damn sense at all and if you put them together you might as well be reading ancient Egyptian for all the chance you'd have of figuring out what in hell really happened.

That's where I come in. See, I was the prison matron over on cell block east - Murderess Row, we used to call it. Ooh-wee, the women I saw come through that place! Oh, you've got mind-pictures of all the worst scum of society stabbing each other in the toilets, but I'll tell you straight that's just not true. You get all kinds of high-society broads stabbing each other in the toilets. Not with knives, of course: don't you believe I'd let that slip by me. Those girls are like children to me, and I'm not planning on having them killing one another on my watch. But you'd be surprised, the things women like that can find to fight each other with - and the reasons they can find to fight. I'll tell you another thing about the women who pass through Murderess Row: they never do anything halfway. They're all in there for what they call "crimes of passion" - you don't off your husband without what we like to call a passionate temperament. And that goes double for loving, too. These women, when they're not fighting they're fucking, and vice versa. Sometimes I think there just isn't room in their heads for anything else.

And that brings us around to Vel and Roxie. Whatever you could or couldn't figure out from their memoirs, you had to have figured out that they were screwing each other, right? They both admitted it - that's why they did it in the first place, you know. They were both writing a tell-all about the other one being a lezzie, and then Roxie caught wind of Vel's plans and they had to scramble to see who could get them out first. Then the publisher got wise and decided to put them out on the same day, and, well, it's been pretty nuts. Anyway, so the point is they were frigging around on the wrong side of the sheets, as my dear old mama would have put it, for a good six months there in jail. (Not just the sheets, either - bent over toilets, flat against walls You didn't hear that from Momma, though.) And no one could have proved my little theory better than those two, because when they weren't fucking, they were fighting, with each other, day and night. Man, the two of them would act like little five-year-old kids. "She stole my garter!" "Yeah, well she copied my hairstyle, Momma!" "Now she's smoking like me, Momma! Tell her to get her own life!" Sometimes I think it would have made no difference in my life if I went and worked in a day care.

So you'd think that's all you'd need to know, wouldn't you? They were in a block together, they fought, they fucked, they fought, they fucked some more. Oh, but you'd be missing all the juicy details, and isn't that what every redblooded American wants? Sex, lies, and more sex - that's all we care about.

Well, I can tell you about that. Knowing Vel and Roxie the way I do, I can tell you about that better than almost anybody. Just don't listen to a word either of them says.