I found it! There you go:

<Don't stick peas up your nose. And burping grace doesn't count as a prayer.

She may be 38 years old, but Jillian Venters of gothic-charm-school.com makes no apologies for her goth attire.

Some things are easy to know for sure.

But why should you smile in family photos when all you want to do is mope in a corner and consider dead kittens?

Can you still be brooding and mysterious when you have two screaming kids clinging to your black skirt-tails? And what about your friends who treat you badly because you're not a vampire, like they are?

AT LEAST SAY MORNING

These are just some questions mothers will have trouble answering. So for almost a decade now, Jillian Venters has been "Miss Manners" to the goth subculture.

Between 2,000 and 4,000 times a day, the dark masses click on to her online advice column, which often points out that you can be as sulky as the undead, but you can at least say "good morning" over your Count Chocula.

For goths torn between their often saturnine world and the rest of a milder society, Venters, Gothic Charm School (gothic-charm-school.com) gives regular instructions on how to be black and nice at the same time.

Every month she fields an estimated 2,000 e-mails.

"I get a lot from parents, saying, 'Thank you. Now we're not as freaked out,'" she says over the line from Seattle.

Venters, a 38-year-old program editor at a software company, considers herself to be among the second generation of goths, who rose from the post-punk era of the late '70s.

Married, with no kids, she still wears her gothic clothes and dark locks to the office — answering the same round of questions with every new work team she's put with.

"I do get the 'Are you in a play?' and 'Halloween's over, you know.' But I'm polite."

Just as she was when lawyers for legendary "Miss Manners" — syndicated columnist Judith Martin — asked Venters to stop identifying her site in a similar way. Since then, she's run her Gothic Charm School, and calls herself, simply, the "Lady of the Manners."

"I'd like to improve the perception of goth," she says. "Just average people, who are members of a subculture.

"No different than NASCAR fans. You don't think of them as dangerous, do you?"

IS IT TIME TO RETIRE?

Lately, she's been getting letters from aging goths, with one mom writing: "I'm having difficulty being mysterious and foreboding with two little ones tugging at my skirts.

"My lady, is it time to retire my dark ways?"

Being goth, came the reply, is not about age.

"Being a goth means that you have an appreciation for the beauty that can be found in darkness or decay; that you have a healthy sense of the absurd, an appreciation for whimsy, and are not afraid to be your own person," Venters wrote.

"In the Lady of the Manners' eyes, those seem like very good qualities for a parent to have, too.">