Now that Hollywood has almost exhausted its plastic surgery possibilities, the market has become progressively more focused on the everyday woman. And though I’ve known many self-respecting ladies who’ve proclaimed that they’d do anything for a little bit of surgical assistance, I’ve never known one who actually put her money where her mammeries are.

There was something uniquely American about how Cynthia Sommer got her hungry hands on better boobies. It’s stiff competition out there and a girl has to keep buoyant in order to compete. Before you know it, the battle between gravity and your body has begun and, inevitably, gravity wins. Surgical procedures don’t pay for themselves, after all, and desperate times require desperate measures.

 So, Sommer did what she had to do, taking the age-old (and rather unoriginal) route to solving a fiscal dilemma such as this—namely, poisoning her hubby with arsenic and collecting the insurance money. Sort of a hostile takeover, if you will.

Of course, Sommer is just a suspect at the moment. She has yet to be convicted of any crime. There is always the possibility that her late husband enjoyed a little splash of arsenic in his bourbon to take the edge off after a long, hard day. Prosecutors in San Diego are trying to get the augmented widow extradited from Florida. She had moved there with a new boyfriend, shortly after her husband died at his post at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

Posthumously, Sgt. Todd Sommer, was a generous provider to his wife’s vanity. The $250,000 in insurance money and the monthly survivor payments of almost $1,900 ought to keep her renovations fresh. It’s always so sad when an implant loses that new silicone smell, but luckily Sommer will still have plenty of cash available for an upgrade. It’s just unfortunate that she may only have her cellmates and prison guards to show them off to.

Happily, the merry widow had almost three years to enjoy her new-found voluptuousness before further investigation revealed that her husband hadn’t died of a heart attack after all. Evidently, it took that long for the authorities to do a thorough toxicology test. And by golly, when they did, there was the unmistakable evidence of foul play, though no one could have guessed it by the widow’s convincing display of utter loss and despair.

Certainly, the wild parties she threw, after his death, were only a valiant effort to press on in the face of such emotional devastation. The celebrations also afforded her a convenient venue in which she could show off her plastic jugs in honor of her late husband. He would have wanted her to have them and, if he were alive, he would have insisted that she share them with the world. Also, moving across the country with another man was all she could do in an effort to put her pain behind her.

I’m not sure what disturbs me more: a woman who murders her husband for the insurance money, or a woman who does it in such a painfully stereotypical way. Not only was she a predictable American female who wanted new hooters, she was also a predictable American female who killed in the stereotypical fashion of the passive-aggressive woman.

In the 19^th century, a woman could get away with poisoning any number of disappointing husbands, burying them in the backyard with the satisfaction of knowing they would never again criticize her meatloaf. But these days, a lady has to put a little more effort into it than that. Should she be found guilty, she needs to be punished for, if nothing else, being so unoriginal.

The only thing that might save Sommer from being remembered as just another dull and tedious black widow is the possibility that her main goal all along was to get herself a new set of knockers. Maybe she just snapped one day while flipping through the pages of Cosmo, deciding that her husband was standing between her and her dream bazooms. Or, perhaps the surgery was just incidental, a sort of, “Hoorah! My husband’s dead. It’s time for a new me,” thing.

When you find yourself with a hefty life insurance policy in hand, there are plenty of more ridiculous ways to spend the money. And even if the cash won’t help her at her execution, she will die knowing that she’ll be taking her beautiful boobies to the grave, and that they will remain there as a monument to her life long after the rest of her is but ashes and dust.