You’ve seen them, women driving with their windows down and their heads hanging out in the middle of the winter.  Women peeling off layers of clothes on the elevator, on the bus, while sitting in the audience watching Tina Turner, Barbara Streisand, or Cher who are themselves peeling off layers.

Although there are some times and places when a menopausal woman can be fairly sure to have a hot flash, they, for the most part, come when they feel like it.  The menopausal monsoon can happen anytime, anyplace, and it just has to run its course, anywhere from five minutes to five years if the heat valve jams, otherwise known as stuck in a hot flash.

There is, however, a misnomer at work here.  First, a hot flash isn’t hot; it’s blazing.  It isn’t a flash.  It is a slow burn, a flaming creep, a fiery crawl that starts smoldering at a woman’s core then boils up to the top of her head where it erupts in sweat that pours down her face like hot lava to create molten rocks out of her shoes. 

Although the hot flash knows no bounds, nothing makes a woman break out in one more quickly than getting into bed.  She can be assured of putting off at least 1000 BTUs within 15 seconds of turning off the bedroom light at night.

Nothing makes a woman break out in a hot flash more quickly than stopping to talk to someone in public.  She would like to politely point out to them that if she were any hotter, her clothes would ignite.  If she were any hotter, telephone lines would spark and sizzle. Bushes would erupt in flames.  Instead she tries pulling a little at the neck of her shirt to let the heat escape.  This, in turn, creates an updraft that nearly melts her eyelashes like hot plastic.

Nothing makes a woman break out in a hot flash more quickly than running into an old sweetheart. The term old flame was coined with a menopausal woman in mind.  To the middle aged woman, sweetheart becomes sweatheart as she works to get through the awkward first few moments of “how are you, fine, how are you fine” small talk while the dike breaks and the deluge begins.  No amount of dabbing does it.  No amount of mopping does it.  There isn’t a gutter, rain barrel, aqueduct, levee, dam, or wet/dry shop vac that could ebb that flow. 

On the bright side, though, the hot flash is the moment when a woman is producing more heat than coal, gas, and nuclear energy combined, and this is the time she could do the most for her country.  While fuel prices soar, we are ignoring one of our most abundant and environmentally friendly sources of thermo-energy: menopausal women. Forget other alternative energy sources. We are talking about a fuel source who can put out more energy from one of her armpits than an atomic reactor, and she does it without producing any dangerous by-products.

Harnessing this untapped energy source, this mid-life inferno, would not only produce energy, it would reverse global warming.  According to Dr. Cyril Sanders, professor of meteorology, “There are more than 900 million middle-aged women worldwide in the early stages of menopause who are experiencing what is commonly known as hot flashes on a regular basis . . . That is why the Earth is warming at an increasing rate, and there is no end in sight.”  

So, it’s not crazy to think we can keep and encourage corporations and industries that ignore environmental protection laws and regulations, that we can drive two ton, four wheel drive, gas guzzling mountain trucks in the city, that we can keep our thermostats on tropical settings in below zero weather when we have this ready made, easily tapped source of energy at the smoldering fingertips of our menopausal mid-lifers.

Here is what I propose:

1.      Change some terms—from having a hot flash to producing energy, from menopausal woman to energy provider. 

2.      Place hand held energy collectors anyplace an energy provider is likely to produce energy: boardrooms, podiums, parent-teacher conferences, grocery stores, elevators, pick up bars.

3.      Subsidize the purchase of heat-paneled pillowcases and fitted sheets.

4.      Give tax breaks to energy providers who heat their homes using natural flash air.