You Will Hate Me For Telling You This.

Steve told me yesterday that he read that the average person farts 15 times a day. Mind you, I have never farted once in my life, but if I had I would hate him for making me uncontrollably start counting.

No.

Here is an e-mail I got today:

I had purchased your model #1511 [Bottlenose Dolphin] , for my girlfriend, back around Xmas time.

The cap/switch has broken; is it possible to get a replacement ?

Thanks

Thank God! It's a Chain Restaurant!

At the risk of starting a fight, I read on someone's blog a couple of months ago that the blog author thought that restaurants such as TGIFridays should be burned down to the ground because of their obnoxious decor and their shitty food, and besides, the only people that eat there are parents who are trying to train their small children in the art of restaurant dining. If you want your child to be able to eat at the Ambria, take them to the Ambria, is what this blogger believes.

I can't remember who you are, Ms. Blogger, but cow holy, is that a stupid thing to say, and reminds me of my favorite sayings: The Best Parents Are the Ones With No Children.

First of all, picture the Ambria, or Charlie Trotter's, or whatever restaurant in your town that you can't afford. Now picture it being overrun with children under the age of five. You know you only take dates there when you want to get laid later. Don't lie. Swarms of toddlers will destroy every shred of the "Let's Get It On" ambiance those restaurants have going on, and you know it.

TGIFriday's harbors no illusions that their clientele is attractive, glamorous, and horny, as the recent full page addition of diet food to their menu indicates. No, they are dedicated to serving the baggy-eyed, love-handled, thirty-something Suburbanite who is just too tired and/or broken-spirited to give a shit what they're shovelling in their mouths, but just in case there's any part of their soul left that isn't numb, they also offer a separate menu devoted to alcohol.

So while you're sucking back your Mudslide and gnawing on your Atkins-friendly Spinach Dip, you've got the problem of your rugrats to contend with. At your finer restaurants, your time would be spent like this:

You: Sit in your chair! I said Sit Down!

Your child: BWAA BA PA DO DAH! BEE DOO DAH DAY!!!

You: Shhhhhhhhh!

Your child: I throw fork!

You: No!

Your child: (throws fork)

You: Hey! That is not okay!

Your child: WAHHHHHHHH!

You: Shhhhhhhhhh!

And so on. At TGIFriday's all this is drowned out by the 80's music relentlessly pumped through the speakers and the sound of the exact same conversation going on at all the tables around you. The edge that TGIFriday's has over the five star restaurant is the knowledge that this sort of horrid dinner conversation makes the people with the credit cards desperately want an alcoholic beverage, yet at the same time are unable to enjoy drinking one. Wisely, in an effort to boost their liquor sales, they provide crayons and paper; Etch-A-Sketches; and a decor that is, yes, wretched, but provides the goods for a rousing, attention-diverting game of I Spy. "I spy with my little eye - A canoe! A hockey stick! An alarm clock!" Nicer restaurants are designed for the clientele to gaze only at each other. And face it: you may never be tired of looking at your child, but I can guarantee he's tired of looking at you.

Now, the food: At the 5-star, you get avocado pate with poached quails' eggs. Your average toddler would not deign to empty the contents of his diaper on a meal like that. At TGIFriday's, the food is designed for them to strap on the feedbag and shut the hell up. And they do! Hot dogs, french fries, ice cream and cold milk make for harmonious dining, and who cares what you're eating? Avocado pate and poached quails' eggs, on the other hand, make for a riot.

Lastly, let's have a word about service. At your 5-star, meals come in many courses, each with its own wine. Before-dinner drinks are consumed, as well as after-dinner drinks with coffee. The staff is quietly unobtrusive and respectful, giving the lovebirds plenty of time to ponder whether the bra unhooks in the front or the back or whether his lower lip tastes as good as it looks. At TGIFriday's, they want you out of there as badly as you want to leave, and they'll happily drop the check off with your meal.

And in a couple of years, you've got kids that can hang in restaurants with more individual personality, with slower service, with fewer bells and whistles hanging on the walls. You've got kids that can stay in their seats throughout the meal, and can "Please" and "Thank you" the food server with the best of them.

Seriously, y'all, you'd best to be thanking TGIFriday's for providing this training ground for the under 3-footers. But if there's anyone out there who disagrees with me, the boys and I will be happy to meet you at the 5-star restaurant of your choice.

Random Stuff and Links.

1.) Antigone over at XX Blog posted a link to the ALA's top banned books for 1990-2000. The books from the article that Antigone mentioned specifically were all written by women. Out of curiosity I counted the number of banned books on the entire list that were clearly written by women (I didn't count initials unless I was certain of the author's gender, like J.K. Rowling, or gender neutral names like Pat or Chris) Out of the top 100 banned books, 45 were written by women. Then I found a list from 1999 from the ALA that listed their choices for the top 100 English language novels of all time. Number of female authors on the list: 8.

Insert your own Glenn Reyolds-esque non-comment comment here.

2.) Sheelzebub from Pinko Feminist Hellcat wrote this post announcing the tasty new blog What She Said:

Where are all the male bloggers? I checked out What She Said!, and could find precious few male bloggers. This is a question that needs exploring--where are all the male bloggers? Since none of my friends link to them, and since WSS doesn't list them, they must not exist.

Heh.

3.) Amp pointed me in the direction of this must-read post by Juan Cole called If America Were Iraq, What Would It Be Like? (September 22nd entry)

4.)Eric Zorn wrote a deliciously polarizing column about North Shore resident Hale DeMar shooting a burglar in his home. The article, plus the massive amount of mail he received after its publication, is fascinating. My favorite comment of his on the whole bruhaha was this:

A police officer who fired at a suspect in such a circumstance would almost certainly lose his badge.

But John Birch, president of Oak Brook based Concealed Carry Inc., a gun-rights group, said in an interview Monday that gun-toting citizens should be held to a lower standard than police officers.

"I see nothing morally wrong with shooting home invaders," he said. "If it makes it the criminals' turn to be afraid, I see nothing wrong with it at all."

Birch and his fellow advocates have long extolled the virtues of licensed law-abiding citizens packing heat. But implicit in their visions of a heavily armed America is that good people bearing arms will show restraint and good judgment--that bullets will fly only as a last resort, never a first choice, in dispute resolution and the prevention of very serious crime.

But the jut-jawed glee in so many of the letters I've received about DeMar's dubious decision-making belies this soothing vision.

I read in most of these letters a desire to define our notion of "necessary" use of lethal force all the way down to "optional" in order to create a culture of frontier justice.

In other words, I read exactly the caricature of the zealous gun nut that has so long haunted the gun-rights movement.

Kill property criminals preemptively because you never know when one is going to go Ted Bundy on you or if the police will ever show up. Not only do bad guys lose all their rights when they cross your threshold, but you lose all your responsibilities.

The message is not reassuring to those who have yet to be convinced that guns are the answer.

The massive amount of e-mail he received that strongly disagreed with his position indicates that what should work (law-abiding citizens exercising control and restraint with regard to fire arms) often doesn't.

Also interesting was the persistent belief that because Zorn criticized LeMar's actions it necessarily meant he was supporting the intruder (He wasn't.)

5.) Defective Yeti's September 22nd post is a must-read for everyone who was a fan of those Encyclopedia Brown books.

6.) My new favorite blog is Todd Levin's. I have to write an article today for a very pushy, very mean editor (not Trish). It's a restaurant review. I was all set to write it this weekend until I read Levin's ""How to Have a William Carlos Williams Moment" (from 8/11) and became so overwhelmed with my own inferiority that I could not write my own piece. (to which the very pushy, very mean editor snapped, "I don't have time for that shit." But more on his terrible attitude at a later date.

7.) It is time for me to update my links, which I think I plan to do as soon as I put this half-assed post up. Look for Levin's site, World O'Crap, Sisyphus Shrugged, What She Said, One Good Thing's own hussy Dr. B at Bitch Ph.D., des Femmes, Frum Dad, Respectful of Otters, Spinsanity, and Dooce. And I told Roger I'd link to him, too, but then lost the link so you're going to have to resend that, Roger, m'kay? Plus, I've been waiting for Anna to turn 18 so I can link to her because I feel squicky about 34 year old sex toy shop owners linking to or communicating with the underaged in that on-line kind of way. "Who's linking to your blog, Anna?" "Just some old pervert in Chicago, Mom." "Oh. Okay." Is this a valid concern or am I worrying too much? Her blog is quite good.

8.) Advice from Christine Cupaiuolo needed: Today I caught a man trying to steal my brand-spanking new copy of Ms. off the counter. Should I have let him go ahead and take it? What do you think?

9.) For those of you who remember my on-going war against the light bulbs in my house, another one burned out yesterday. However, it was one of the ones I'd already replaced, not the evil unfrosted ones. Satan rules my electricity.

10.) Finally, a woman shopping in my store cut a truly hideous fart just now as I was typing about light bulbs. I heard nothing but we both know it isn't the incense making the store smell like that.

Reprieve.

Despite the mountain of evidence pointing to the fact that housecleaning was a SUPERbad career choice for me, I decided to give it a brief go a few years ago with one of my neighbors. As far as jobs go, the driving around the city when everybody else was cooped up in an office was pretty good. So was finding out that most people, even people with kids, do a shitty job of hiding their porn. In fact, with one notable exception, all the aspects of housecleaning that didn't involve, you know, cleaning houses, were pretty good.

The exception to all the Pledge-scented joy lurked inside a bungalow in Oak Park. From the outside it looked just like you'd expect a Chicago-style bungalow to look: all red brick sturdiness with a white cement front porch and an upstairs that had more of an attic-y feel to it than you get in your suburban subdivisions. The inside of that house, man, that was some bad news. Because in that house lived Puff. Puff, the most evil creature I have ever met in my life.

Thank God (seriously, thank God right now. I'm not kidding) that Puff was a Persian cat and not a human being, because I honestly can not fathom what kind of menace to society it would have been otherwise. Bundy? Dahmer? Gacy? Amateurs.

Quiet as mice, we would turn the key in the lock and step inside, our eyes doing an up-and-down sweep of the living room while we brought in the cleaning buckets and the vacuum cleaner. Once inside, we'd pause to listen. Silence, always silence, but I was always convinced that once we crossed over the threshhold I'd hear an inhuman shriek clawing its way up out of a bloody ruined throat, howling "MERRIN!!! MERRIN!!!"

We'd then split the upstairs and the downstairs, doing a careful sweep of each room. If we were lucky, we'd find the brutal little beast stretched out on a rug in the sun with little squiggly lines of contentment interspersed with threads of pure evil radiating from it. We would then shut the door as swiftly as possible, and leave Puff shut up in that room for our entire cleaning session. With the owner's blessing, we would refuse to clean that room that day, and hope that the next week would find the fucker asleep in front of the radiator on the bathroom mat.

If we were unlucky, we wouldn't find her at all and would have to begin cleaning with one foot in the grave. We never knew when, and we never knew who, but at some point, Puff would strike. One moment you'd be dusting a Hummel figurine and the next minute you'd be wearing what felt like Jesus' crown of thorns lodged firmly under a coonskin cap and the air would suddenly be filled with flailing arms and legs and the quiet peace of the home broken by explosive howls and spitting and the sound of your own screaming voice crying "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELLS YOU! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELLS YOU" and your partner would be beating it with a broom pleading, "COME INTO ME! COME INTO ME!"

The owner paid us well.

When I think of Puff, I hope she's firmly lodged back in the asshole of Satan where she came from, where she belongs.

Crowder Pea, my cat, may have solid black fur, but she's never had a black heart. She's twelve and sleepy and pukes every single day and the anti-puke medicine she took didn't work. The vet and I both know she has cancer. Crowder Pea got a reprieve from the Death Row she's been on for the past month, as the vet told me to give her steriods, one last desperate act before the final curtain falls. We both know it's useless. I thought today was going to be the last day for her, as I was not yet hip to the doctor's plans to put her on Prednizone.

I drove to the vet's office not looking into the cat carrier.

"It's Puff. It's Puff in there," I said over and over. "Let's go kill us some Puff!"

That tactic failed miserably, and hey, has anybody had to say the words, "We can't afford to treat her; I think it's time to put her down?" How hard was that? It has to have been hard, because I wasn't able to form the words that I knew - I know - I'm going to have to say. I didn't prevent myself from having to tell the vet to put her down, I didn't prevent either one of us from having to do that. I just put it off for two weeks.

My first cat, a lady to the very end, was a cat who knew when to leave a party, dying in my arms on Christmas Day on her own accord. It isn't going to be that way with Crowder Pea.

Christ. If I have to kill an animal, why can't it be Puff?

Wonderful News for Thrifty Nursing Moms!

Mothers, where is your old breast pump? In the garage? The attic? In the bathroom closet high up on the top shelf? Don't you hate that you spent all that money on a product that a) you felt ridiculous using, and b)has such a fleeting, limited purpose?

With breast pumps you get what you pay for. You can spend thirty bucks and buy one that manages to keep all the milk inside your breast and yet still tear the nipple off, or you can get the fancy one that the hospitals use that gets the job done but sucks a couple of hundred bucks out of you as well. And that still doesn't solve the depressing problem of you being attached to a milking machine like Flossie the cow. Even worse, La Leche League (referred to by my sister-in-law as the "Tit Nazis") frowns on women borrowing each other's pumps and will not help you replace worn out parts of the pump if they know your neighbor has loaned you hers.

To sum up: Expensive and humiliating.

If you think about it, though, you will agree that there are men out there for whom expensive and humiliating is a big turn on.

Mistress Diana, a dominatrix at a local S/M club here in Chicago and mother of two, stopped by the store to get some supplies and chat with me about she and I organizing some (mild) workshops about games couples can play, tells me that she often uses her breast pump on men who enjoy humiliation and "nipple torture".

"It was sitting in our garage for years," she said, "I didn't know what to do with it and I hated throwing out something that cost so much money. Then I got the idea to take it to work. My clients love it. I hated using it when I was nursing so I used it for pumping as little as I could get away with. But now it's totally paid for itself."

This is my Sunday gift to you, nursing mothers of the world. You're welcome.

Question for the Men.

Steve took Alex and Christopher to a classmate's birthday party last weekend and came back with the following story:

Steve: George had a pinata at his party, too, but it was one of those old-fashioned kinds that you hit with a stick instead of pull on a string to break it open. And none of the kids could hit it hard enough to get it open. So the moms started doing it, and they couldn't do it either. After none of them could get it open, they asked the dads to do it, but there was no way any of us were going to do that. Finally, North's mom broke it open. Man, she really cracked the shit out of it with that bat.

Me: What do you mean, there was no way any of you men were going to get it open?

Steve: A man swinging a bat at a pinata at a children's party? No way.

Me: But why? Do you find it emasculating somehow?

Steve: No...I don't think so. We just all agreed that was something we as men weren't going to do.

Me: I don't understand what the problem is.

Steve: Me either, exactly. I just know that none of us were about to beat a pinata to death after the kids and the moms couldn't do it. We just weren't.

Me: This isn't over yet. I want you to think about this and figure out exactly why you refused to do this for mysterious masculine reasons.

Steve: Okay.

As of this date, he has yet to get back to me on this puzzling aspect of male behavior, so I feel compelled to turn this over to the four of you who actually read the blog: What the hell is he talking about? Would you beat the shit out of a pinata at a children's party? Would you not? If not, why not?

Back in the Land of the Luxury SUVs.

In June I was asked to do a private toy presentation for the board of a women's group in one of the wealthier suburbs. I ended up staying there for 2 1/2 hours, talking away, and I guess they decided they got their money's worth for my (free) presentation, so they invited me back this week to do it again. This time they decided to make a big to-do of it, publicizing the event and charging $15 a person to get in. About 30 women showed up. The youngest one was in her mid-thirties, but most of the women were in their late fifties to early sixties.

The week before, the group's organizer was busily e-mailing me with suggestions and product requests. The pile of stuff I had planned to take became huge. Usually I just pile everything into a suitcase and roll on in, but this time I was bogged down with 2 suitcases and three plastic bags full.

I stopped by the store on my way to the event to pack and print up order forms and hobbled around the store for a couple of hours in my three inch heels that I never get to wear anymore, ever. It's been so long since I got dressed up for anything, in fact, that when I got dressed and came downstairs Christopher saw me and gave me a puzzled look.

"Wuzzat?" he asked, pointing at me.

"It's called a dress," I said sourly.

Alex came running into the room. "Mommy! You're wearing a dress! Why are you wearing a dress? Daddy! Mommy's wearing a dress!!"

"Do you like it?" Steve asked him.

"No. She should be dressed like a baseball player."

I don't get it either.

I feel strangely compelled to defend myself re: dressing like a girl. I wear skirts to work at least twice a week, but they don't seem to merit the attention that a dress does. Dunno.

So, me, the dress, the stockings, and the heels were dragging all this crap out the door of the store and hoisting it all into the air to throw into the trunk. Everything was packed and loaded, the alarm was reset, the store was locked, and I was off. As I was about to slam the trunk shut, I heard this: Bzzzzzzz. Oh no.

One by one I pulled everything back out of the trunk and opened the suitcases, trying to find the rogue vibrator that had set itself off. That taken care off, back into the trunk it all went and I took off.

I ended up getting there an hour early. I pulled into the downtown area, thinking I could walk around and check out the shops, but evidently they roll up the sidewalks at 5:00 or so, leaving only the Starbucks. I pulled up in front of the post office and turned off the car. Bzzzzzzzz. Fuck!

In the city, one can freely dump out a suitcase full of activated vibrators and butt plugs out onto the sidewalk and nobody notices. Not so much in the suburbs, you can't, not even if you're me. Not even if you have a special invitation from les grandes dames of the city, which I did. I doubt I would have been arrested or anything, but I simply could not bring myself to hunker down in front of a wildly buzzing suitcase, flinging butt plugs and ben wa balls everywhere and rooting through a mountain of hissing silicone to get to the problem. That little shit, which ever one it was, was just going to have to run itself out of batteries. I climbed out of the car. If you were listening closely, you would think the car had a bee trapped somewhere inside. I reconsidered my decision briefly, but no. No way. Better to go get coffee and go over notes for the presentation.

When I came back, the suitcase was still buzzing. It buzzed all the way over to the site of the event. It buzzed half a block down to the door. It buzzed while I unloaded the rest of the trunk. Finally, I could not take it anymore, and stood outside in the secluded area and opened the case and rifled around inside. I had just removed the offender when a woman walked by with her young daughters. I immediately went into ostrich mode, feeling sure that if I just didn't make eye contact, nobody would see me standing there holding an 8" blue penis. It seemed to work. By now I was getting sweaty. I climbed the few steps to the front door and reached for the handle, trying to think of the best way to prop the door open so I could move everything else in at once. Locked. I looked at the clock on my cell phone. I was right on time. The lights in the building were on, but I could not see anyone inside. I went back down the steps and sat on a stone bench, trying to figure out what to do.

After a few minutes, a man in a red polo shirt came out of the building. I leapt up.

"Hey, could you hold the.." Click. "Never mind."

"Oh, do you need to get in?" He had a key.

"Yeah, I'm doing a presentation here tonight."

"Oh, right! We knew you were coming. Wow, you're wearing really high heels. Why don't you let me carry your suitcases upstairs for you? The event's on the second floor."

I had wanted to get there early and get everything set up before the women arrived, but evidently people had been eagerly anticipating the event because everyone showed up early, and I got slowed down because they all surrounded the table where I was putting out the toys and started picking them up and asking questions. Finally, the organizer came over and shooed them to their chairs, and I could get finished.

Again, they were a great group. In my experience, the older the women, the better the party. In general, they have more money to spend, and, more importantly, they don't give a damn anymore what their friends think of them. They want to know what they want to know, and to hell with worrying about it.

Last time I gave a presentation with this group the Ben Wa balls, to be used as kegel muscle exercisers, were a big hit. Word of mouth had travelled, and I sold all the ones that I brought. I also sold all the vibrators shaped like tubes of lipstick, because evidently not everyone's husband was happy that their wives were at this particular event. On the other hand, some husbands couldn't push their wives out the door fast enough, because at least two women came with shopping lists put together at home. After the presentation, women were overheard murmuring into their cell phones, "Hi honey. Listen, would you wear a cock ring? A cock ring. Cock ring. No, you wear it. Oh come on."

Most of them said yes, I guess, because I sold all that I had brought and had to mail extras the following day.

They all wanted to know who was cooler, younger women or older women. Of course, I told them they were (which was true), and they smugly told me they had put up a flyer at the local day care to bring younger women to the event, and were asked after two days to take it down.

"We had worded it very discreetly," they insisted, "and even so those kids are too little to read, anyway. But the mothers were shocked! Shocked! And these are women with jobs! It's not like they've never gotten out of the house before! We don't know what's wrong with them."

At the start of my presentation I had confessed to having two small children, and gave the standard answer I give when asked if I want another one: I want a girl, but my husband says no more.

So after the presentation I got a series of lectures of my own, lectures titled: Just Because You Want a Girl That Doesn't Mean You're Going to Get One - You Might Get Another Boy; You'd Better Have Another One Now, Don't Wait; Fifteen Is the Worst Age; College Is the Best Because They're Gone; I Climbed a Glacier Last Week; and finally, We'd Like You to Come Back, But Don't Think You Have to Get Dressed Up for Us.

The last lecture morphed into a contest about who had gone the longest without putting on a dress or wearing pantyhose, and I was done.

Everybody was asleep when I got home. I looked in our empty refrigerator, found nothing, and went to go turn on the tv for a minute to unwind. Sitting in the tv room just like they'd always been there were two full length couches. Couches! I ran to the garage and looked in. No big boxes. I ran upstairs and stared at Steve, willing him to wake up. It is a true testament to my excitement that I did NOT shake him awake yelling, "Hey! Where'd these couches come from!?!" That's how grateful that I was that after 7 months of sitting on the floor we had COUCHES!

I was so excited that I forced myself to go to bed at midnight, only to wake up thinking COUCHES! and couldn't get back to sleep.
Christopher woke up at 5:30 and I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs with him. We can sleep together on a COUCH now! But here's the thing: floors may be less comfortable, but they're roomier. You can spread out more on the floor. Within 10 minutes of draining his bottle, Christopher had sprawled out across the entire width of the couch. After blocking his fall off onto the floor twice, I finally realized that if I wanted to lie down, I'd have to lie somewhere where I could break his fall. Which is why the first night we had a new couch, I was lying on the floor in front of it, using a stuffed monkey as a pillow. Ten minutes later, Christopher rolled off the couch and on top of me. He continued sleeping. As I lay there, one arm pinned under him like I was caught in a bear trap, Crowder Pea came downstairs and leapt onto the other couch. There was silence for a few golden seconds. Then with the stomach-buckling sound that I've become all too familiar with, she emptied the contents of her stomach onto the couch.

It turned out that our next door neighbors had gotten new couches and offered us theirs. They have two children and a dog, and there was no hair or puke or pee stains to be found on those couches at all. Freaks.

Show and Tell.

On Fridays Alex has Show and Tell at school. I don't remember having Show and Tell at my school when I was a child, an absence that I'm sure my own mother appreciates greatly. What a pain in the ass it is to come up with something to Show the class every single Friday, not to mention bringing whatever it is back home.

Alex lobbied all summer long for the chance to take Gilbert, his pet pillbug, to school. Admittedly, Gilbert is a very special pillbug and the greatest pet ever. He lives outside and takes care of himself. When Alex feels like playing with him, he goes out to the back patio and looks around on the ground. Eventually he'll see a Gilbert trundling by and scoops him up.

"Look! Here he is!" he shouts excitedly, a tiny grey armored ball in his clenched fist.

As resiliant as Gilbert seems to be, I have my doubts that he'll be able to navigate the long drive to school, not to mention the hour and a half of doing whatever it is they do before Show and Tell time.

So Gilbert is out, but we're running out of options. I caught Steve putting poker chips and a deck of cards into a Ziploc back on Friday.

"What are you doing with that?" I asked.

"Show and Tell," he said, not looking me in the eye.

"You can't send him off to school with poker chips and cards! Are they the cards with naked people on them?"

"No! They're cards from United Airlines," he said defensively. "I've been teaching him to play poker, so I thought he could show the other kids."

"You thought he could show the other kids how to gamble? I really don't think that's a good idea."

"See," I continued, "this is what happens when you let men raise the children."

Steve laughed.

"What are you going to send him to school with next week? A box of cigars and a fifth of scotch? At the end of the month he can bring Daddy's special friend Trixie that he met at Hooters?"

"Shut up," he suggested. "Give me a piece of Tupperware and I'll go find Gilbert."

Expository Magazine.

The new issue is out.

Thanks to my editor, Trish, and publisher, Tina, for enabling me to cheat on today's blog entry.

Paint Thinner, Part 2

ed. note: I went back and rewrote and re-edited part one to make more sense. I had to quit writing abruptly on Friday when Christopher woke up early from his nap. It think it reads a little better now.

The female cast members were locked up in a mental hospital. And yes, the doors were locked at all times. The nurses had a curfew they had to adhere to at night time. If they came home late, they were locked out and had to take their chances with the patients. Theoretically the actors did not have the same curfew; however, if you arrived back at the dorm after midnight there was no guarantee anyone would be available to let you in. After a series of trial and error, the night owls had to rely on those actors who stayed in for the night to get up out of bed at a certain time and drag down 5 flights of stairs to open the door. For the most part, this worked, and after we discovered that every time a male patient escaped after lights out he'd make a beeline for the nurses dorm, we approved of the locked doors, at least on principle.

The window in Kelly's and my room was directly above these locked doors, and we watched on three separate occasions the breakouts, then subsequent attempted break-ins. The last one was the best one, when a man stood outside and yelled up to the dark, blank windows, "Let me in!!! I want to show you God's love!!"

The dramatic story of the Waldensians quest for religious freedom paled in comparison to this kind of theatre.

John and his wife, a pregnant 22-year-old who was also choreographing the production, stayed in a rented house for the summer with the assistant director and her boyfriend, who played the male lead.

As is usual in historical outdoor drama, these are the adventures of men. The women are relegated to roles of wives and widows. From This Day Forward turned out to be one of the more female-oriented story lines in the outdoor drama circuit, with three strong female roles. Even so, the male roles outnumbered the female roles 5 to 1. As the first readthrough I realized that Mike, who had gotten the role through a kinder version of the casting couch, was the only professional male actor. The rest - 15 men or so - were all locals. For some inexplicable reason, there were 15 professional female actors. 15 professional female actors, one professional male actor, two local child actors, and everybody else bore an astonishing resemblance to either Larry, Darryl, or Darryl from the old Bob Newhart show. This was because no housing could be found for that many men, they said. Due to this casting of convenience, we had a range of talent that sprayed wildly all over the stage like buckshot. Anne, a student at the competitive North Carolina School for the Arts, was paired with Darryl, whose voice could not be raised above an unintelligible murmur. Kelly, a Tulane graduate with a 4 octave vocal range, was paired with Larry, who could not remember even the simplest of lines.

John approached the whole debacle with a sense of humor and optimism. "They'll pull it together, you'll see. Besides, our audience will be so happy to get off the tour bus that anything will look good in comparison. Don't worry about Darryl's voice. They'll just blame it on their hearing aids."

And they did pull it together, at least well enough to where the show went up every night, the cannons fired when they were supposed to, the stage was well lit, and nobody impaled anyone else on a bayonet. With the show taking care of itself, we were left to figure out how to entertain ourselves Monday through Wednesday - dead days even in towns that allow alcohol.

Kimber, my assistant, entertained herself by beginning a torrid affair with one of the locals. We had all exclaimed over Kimber's wedding photos at the beginning of the summer. She had been married for 6 months before accepting the job.

"How could you leave your husband so soon after your wedding?" asked Kelly.

"We have a pretty strong marriage," replied Kimber. Not so strong, however, to be able to withstand the attentions she received from Shaggy, nicknamed so because of his strong resemblance to the hippie star of Scooby Doo. Put him in a green tee-shirt and give him a Great Dane and Matthew Lillard would have been out of a job had Shaggy been able to audition for the live action Scooby Doo movie. The night Kimber ran off with Shaggy, we had been invited to a party at the home of Ken, one of the locals who was playing the King. None of the other locals had been invited.

Ken was one of the quieter locals. During rehearsals he seemed removed from the rest of the cast. Physically, he looked just like them: heavy beard, stocky, baseball cap on his head, drove an American made truck. Unlike them, he shyly tried to befriend the female cast members rather than attempt any macho flirting or posturing that several of the others did.

The women sat around Ken's wood-panelled den, quietly uncomfortable and holding a beer in their hands. After he'd served up grilled hamburgers and the party had somewhat relaxed into small talk, he made his move.

"Hey, would anybody like to go to a dance club? It's in Hickory."

"Which dance club in Hickory?" asked Claire, a UNC grad.

"Uh, Club Cabaret."

After a moment of blankness, Claire's face melted into understanding.

"Does anybody know?" she asked.

He snorted. "God, no. I can't tell anybody here I'm gay. You know what will happen. When I can, though, I go into Hickory. When I'm here, though, I've got to dress in drag. Doing this play - I look forward to playing the Sun King all year long. Not just because I can wear tights, heh. It's just nice have people in town I can be myself around."

"That sucks," said Anne flatly.

"Naw, it's okay," he reassured us. "I run my daddy's business, and I've got a nice home. And I'm a Christian, too, you know. Nobody's life is without struggle. I just struggle less in the summertime. Oh, hey, wait a minute," he said and disappeared quickly into the kitchen. He returned with three Mason jars. Two were full of a clear liquid. The other one was three quarters full.

"Have y'all ever had moonshine?" he said, his eyes glittering.

"Oh my God, that's not real moonshine!" exclaimed Sarah.

"Oh yes it is, Yankee Girl! You show me a dry county, and I'll show you a county with at least one good still."

"Where did you get it?" asked Jennifer.

"I have my connections," he said smugly.

There was a slightly electric pause, where everybody waited for someone to be the brave one. It was me.

"I'll do it!" I sang out with more bravado than I felt. Ken unscrewed the cap and handed the jar over to me. I accepted it and inclined my head toward its open mouth.

"I wouldn't do that," Ken warned. I froze. "Best to just tip your head back and sling it down there. At least, until you're too drunk to give a shit."

I nodded curtly and jerked my head and the jar back and, in one swift movement, sucked back a large swig. Almost right away it seemed like the moonshine had gone into my mouth and burst out my eyes. I could feel the tears streaming down my burning cheeks and could feel my eyes bulging out of my head. I have no doubt that this is the closest I've come to ever looking like a Warner Brothers cartoon character. It would not have surprised me at all if my head had started leaking steam.

"Jesus, it tastes like paint thinner!" I gasped.

"Yeah, smells like it, too," said Ken. "That's why you shouldn't smell it until you're already drunk."

I remember passing the jar to Kelly. I remember Ken opening the remaining two jars. We never made it to Club Cabaret that night. The next thing I remember is waking up in my dorm room, fully dressed and smushed together with Kelly in her bed, while Sarah and Kris were tangled up in mine. Two more girls were on the floor. The door was wide open, and a trail of toilet paper rolled from our room and down the hall to the community bathroom. My mouth tasted like a cat had used it for a litter box. My eyes felt like I had cried every tear there was to cry, and could no longer lubricate themselves. Kelly's hair looked like a burned-out bird's nest. The dorm supervisor was standing in the doorway, glaring at us. She pointedly sniffed the air.

"You are aware that this is a dry county, yes?"

This didn't seem like a question she really wanted an answer to, so we all did her the courtesy of not moving. She continued. "Furthermore, I do not believe that ANY of you are of an age where drinking is legal, yes?"

Kelly was, but she didn't seem to be up for arguing the point. Nobody did.

"Very well," snapped the supervisor, "I'll be taking this up with your superiors. Who is in charge?"

Slowly, painfully, I raised my hand. "Me," I croaked, my eyes still stuck shut.

"Well. Isn't that wonderful example you're setting," she said sarcastically, then shimmered off.

Using my thumb and index finger, I pried open one of my eyes. The first thing I saw was a Mason jar. It had about a quarter of an inch of liquid in it. With shaky hands, I reached for it and, for the first time that I can remember, I smelled it. It still reminded me of paint thinner.

P.S. - Here's a photo of the cast that year. Kelly is sitting on the front row wearing a full length skirt. Don't look for me, though. During the time of the photo shoot, I was playing hooky in order to have sex with my boyfriend at the time. Look at everybody's facial expressions. I guarantee I was having a better time.

I Can't Talk About Moonshine Just Yet.

I have other stuff I have to get out of the way first.

Vengeance!

Many thanks to the people who picked up the slack when the Chicago Sun-Times let me down. Jodi found a copy in the Washington Post. Here it is:

Big mystery man crashes birthday party

CHICAGO, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- Chicago police are looking for a 6-foot tall, 275-pound bearded man who crashed a child's birthday party, apparently just looking for cake.

Deputy Police Chief Nick Sparacino said the mystery man drove up to a home in a red 1988 Cadillac earlier this month and entered the home, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Monday.

The homeowner asked who he was, to which he replied " I am vengeance. I am the knight. I am Batman."

He then went into the kitchen, cut a piece of birthday cake, took it into the living room and ate it.

The nervous homeowner continued asking the man questions, but he simply got up and left in the Cadillac.

If police can locate him, he will be charged with criminal trespass, the newspaper said.

"I've seen a lot of weird stuff, but nothing like this," Sparacino said.



When Funnie originally sent me the link, she suggested he might be in cahoots with the squirrel that attacked our guests during Alex's birthday bash at the park. Chicago parents, beware!

Contest Winners!

Picking the winners of the Selfish Hedonist contest was a remarkably difficult decision. Clearly my readership is built of filthy, filthy people. What is also clear is that I really am the only person on the planet who has never had a three-way. But that's okay, I suppose. I must be too busy selling filthy things instead doing filthy things.

Thanks very much to everyone who sent in an entry, and special thanks to everyone who ordered something in the name of Alan Keyes. Extra special thanks to the man who used the KEYES discount to order the Bend Over Boyfriend DVD series, a dildo, and a dildo harness. You, sir, are a gentleman of many colors. Now, onto the winners!

In the straight division, the prize goes to Dr. B of Bitch Ph.D. She sent me a few links to her blog as proof of her degenerate ways, but the real reason she won was this: when I clicked onto her blog to have a look, she was busily defending herself against a libertarian who decided that her disgusting sexual proclivities were going to cause him to pay higher taxes, and therefore she needed to cut it right out.

Not one other person who entered the contest had a sex life that inspired the lunatic fringe to panic about a tax hike.

Congratulations, Dr. B, you are indeed a Libertarian's worst nightmare.

On the lesbian side, Anna Phor is the winner. Why? Because she's so utterly greedy that she entered both contests. That's pretty darn selfish, and again, she was the only one who did that.

Congratulations, Anna Phor, you incredible glutton.

That's Dr. B and Anna Phor, One Good Thing's resident loose women. They will each be receiving a Tongue Joy vibrator and a piece of trashy lingerie. Please e-mail me at my NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, flea@westerncom.net and tell me what your jean/dress size is, whether you prefer red or blue, and an address I can mail your prizes to.

I Think I Drank Paint Thinner.

I have never been what you would call driven or goal-oriented. I am almost 35 years old and do not have anything even remotely resembling a resume. This is probably because I've never had anything remotely what the average person would call a job. I spent my entire adult life floating along, taking job opportunities wherever they came up and floating off again when I got bored. Every major life change I've ever made has been a result of thinking "Eh, why not?" That's how I ended up in Pennsylvania, walking behind a horse with a shovel and a burlap bag and wondering whether I should let the manure hit the ground or if I should hold the shovel under the animal's anus and catch it as it came right out of the tap. It's how I ended up married and living in the suburbs with two children, a situation that I still sometimes feel like running like hell floating away from but mostly don't, and how I ended up in a mental hospital in a dry county in North Carolina, drinking moonshine out of a mason jar.

My decision to major in theatre was made when my parents drove me to North Carolina to look at the university that had offered me a scholarship if I would attend. The freshman advisor that was showing me around asked me what my major was going to be right as we were walking past the drama department on the campus tour.

"Theatre," I muttered, looking at the building.

"Oh, an actress!" trilled the advisor. "Let's go right in and see if one of the professors is available to show you around the building and tell you what the department has to offer."

And that's how I found myself in the office of the technical director while my parents, reacting to this news with startled faces, were whisked away to the cafeteria.

Paul, the director, showed me around the building and gave me tickets to their current production* before pawning me off on a chipper senior named Mary Anne, who led me down to the registrar's office and filled out my class schedule for me, packing it with 8 hours worth of theatre classes, leaving just enough room on my freshman schedule to accommodate English and P.E.

My mother was furious when I showed her my schedule. "'Introduction to Acting?' 'Phoenetics?' 'Elements of Production'? That's a four hour class, scheduled right during tennis practice! You can't take that class; you're on a tennis scholarship. You can't miss practice!"

"But it's a required class," I protested.

"What is it?"

"Well, it's where you learn how to build things. Sets and stuff."

"YOU'RE TAKING A FOUR HOUR SHOP CLASS?"

"I think so."

"No. Nu-uh. You're going to have to change it. You're not missing tennis practice for something that silly."

I never did. I picked my college major because someone thought I was answering her question when I was, in reality, talking to myself.

But why not? Nothing else appealed to me, and as everyone knows, you can cruise through four years of college in a drug-addled stupor and still graduated cum laude as long as you know what to major in. Now that I had gotten that pesky problem of studying out of the way, the only thing I had to worry about was making sure I was sober enough to keep my scholarship. And since I had accepted a scholarship in small conference and opted to play #2 singles instead of #1, keeping my win/loss record on the positive side wasn't difficult, either.

In November of my freshman year, my acting professor announced that summer stock auditions would be held in Chapel Hill in April. I inserted myself into a group of students who were making plans to ride to the auditions together, badgered my dad into giving me money for the admission fee, and off I went. The auditions required a headshot, a resume, and a one-minute monologue. This is what I gave them: a black and white passport photo blown up to 8x10 size, a resume:

Leigh Anne Wilson

Age: 18
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Green
Height/Weight 5'6/115

Stage Experience

The Cherry Orchard......................Dunyasha..............UNC-A Theatre

Technical Experience

Cinderella...................Assistant Stage Manager......UNC-A Theatre



and a monologue I hadn't even rehearsed, much less timed.

Shockingly, I didn't get one callback. Everybody else that I had gone with had. While everyone else was in their second round of auditions with individual directors, I wandered around the halls looking into conference rooms and crashing the ones where the directors were alone and introducing myself.

By five o'clock, I was getting ready to walk out the front doors to join up with my more successful classmates. The door to the last conference room was open. Two men in their mid 30's were sitting on the desks, shuffling through piles of headshots.

"Did we get everyone we need?" asked one, a gentle-looking man with wild bushy eyebrows.

"Everyone but a production stage manager," replied the second.

I stuck my head in the door.

"Um, excuse me," I said, "but have you already hired a stage manager? I'm looking for a stage management position."

The kind looking man's head jerked up as he looked at me and smiled.

"Yeah! Hi! I'm John, this is Tony," he said, nodding to his partner. "I'm the artistic director of From This Day Forward, an outdoor drama in Valdese. Have you ever heard of it?"

"Well, no. But I'm from out of state."

"Oh, well, let me tell you all about the riveting story of the Waldensians," he said dryly, tossing my resume face down onto the pile without looking at it.

And that was how I got my first theatre job: $250 a week, plus housing.

"There's a lot of fun stuff to do here," Tony, the managing director, wrote me later on that month in a note attached to my contract, "bring hiking boots and your tennis racquets, and don't forget a bathing suit!"

When school let out I packed up my swimsuit, racquets, a ziploc bag of pot and a how-to book on Stage Management and drove to Valdese, North Carolina, a spot on the map in between Asheville and Chapel Hill. The outdoor theatre was located on the far east side of the town. As I entered from the west, I saw a huge billboard behind the Welcome sign. The billboard looked like it had been drawn by Jack Chick. Blackened stick figures writhed in pain as they were consumed by orange-red fat tongues of fire. Above the flames sat a dark prince wearing a golden crown and a gleeful expression.


BEWARE ALL YE SINNERS THAT SHALL PERISH IN THE FIRES OF HELL!

the sign admonished.

There was a matching sign on the east, right next to the turnoff road to the theatre.

"Oh no," I thought.

John met me at the office door and greeted me warmly. "Hey, glad you made it. Let me show you the theatre before I give you directions to the housing."

The theatre was very pretty, a proscenium stage with a dirt floor, surrounded by two hundred year old oak trees.

"We play mostly to senior citizens on bus tours, but at least they're a generous audience. I think they're glad to be let out of the home," he said. "By the way, how old are you?"

"18," I said.

"Good, then you shouldn't mind that this is a dry county. I, on the other hand, want to bleed from my eyes."

"I saw the signs," I told him, "those signs with the people flipping around in flames."

"Oh, those signs," he groaned, "Yeah. This is a pretty religious area. They really only tolerate the actors because we're doing a play that flatters their ancestors."

I didn't mind that it was a dry county. I had discovered a long time ago that it was much easier to get illegal drugs than legal ones, so I was fully prepared.

After a brief look at the backstage area and the booth, John and I went back to the office and he gave me a copy of my contract and a key to where I'd be staying.

"It's a dorm room, really, but it's very clean and nice. It's a nurse's dorm at a hospital in Morganton. They've been nice enough to let us stay there. Nice place. Very scenic."

And it was lovely. The hospital, set back from the road and surrounded by a black iron fence, was a series of genteel red brick buildings. The lawn was lush and green, and was dotted with gorgeous old trees, sycamore and oak. It was also dotted with what appeared to be several patients staring off into space. As I pulled into the driveway entrance I passed the sign: "Broughton Psychiatric Hospital."

Oh my God, I thought. Oh my fucking God.


My new roommate, a lovely ingenue named Kelly, had already checked in and was curled up on the better of the twin beds, reading a book.

"They've sure put us in the right place, haven't they?" she greeted me. One by one the rest of the female cast members trickled in, each getting her half of her dorm set up before stopping by to say hello. Later that night they sat with me on and around my twin bed, and we smoked pot and cigarettes and stared through the bars of our windows, wondering what in the hell we'd gotten ourselves into.

to be continued...

*The play was called Still Life, and to this day ranks at the top of my list as the most boring play in the history of humankind. My father fell asleep fifteen minutes in and blissfully snored away, while the rest of us watched a brooding young man re-enacting the emotional struggles of a Vietnam veteran and the concurrent emotional struggles of his wife and his mistress as they dealt with his whiny, self-absorbed behavior. I thought maybe it was the production that was bad, but my friends Dan and Lisa performed in it a few years ago, and my God, it was STILL HORRIBLE. (But, Dan and Lisa, YOU were very, very good.)

Aaron.

A couple of weeks ago I got interviewed by Pioneer Press for an article they were doing on bloggers. John, the interviewer, asked me why people read blogs that aren't political, what interest people have in reading about the minutiae of some stranger's life. Same reason people read fiction, I responded. If someone writes with a clear, strong voice, with intelligence and wit, then people will enjoy reading it regardless of the subject matter. Read long enough, and you develop an affection for the writer. You feel like you know them. You're excited for Atrios when he gets to go to the DNC. You're worried about Dooce. You're angry on Lauren's behalf when people write her hate mail telling her she's a bad mother because she's young and unmarried and are thrilled when she proves all her naysayers wrong by buying a house and becoming a success.

See, Lauren's new house made me happy. Via her blog, she let me into her life and gave me the privilege of sharing her happiness. I'm attached to her. I'm attached to Heather at Dooce. And I'm attached to Aaron at Uppity Negro. A lot of people in the blog world are. I wish that attachment that so many of us felt for him out here had been enough to keep him going.

Thanks for writing, Aaron. You'll be missed.

News.

Chicago Sun-Times, why do you suck?

Funnie, who is both blog reader and blog fodder, sent me a delicious article from the Trib's competition about a 275 pound man who crashed a child's birthday party in Oak Forest, stole and ate a piece of cake while shouting, "I am vengence!" Astonishly, this piece of news has already been put into the Sun-Times' archives, and I am unable to find another source for it as well as unwilling to pay for the privilege of unearthing it. If anyone can find another link to this article, please e-mail it to me.

Meanwhile, in the Chicago Tribune, a paper that clearly knows what news is worth hanging onto, we see an example of boomerang karma that is breathtaking in its perfection: Dog Wiggles Paw Free to Shoot Florida Man.

A man who tried to shoot seven puppies was shot himself when one of the dogs put its paw on the revolver's trigger.

Jerry Allen Bradford, 37, was charged with felony animal cruelty, the Escambia County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday. He was being treated at a hospital for a gunshot wound to his wrist.

Bradford said he decided to shoot the 3-month-old shepherd-mix dogs in the head because he couldn't find them a home, according to the sheriff's office.

On Monday, Bradford was holding two puppies -- one in his arms and another in his left hand -- when the dog in his hand wiggled and put its paw on the trigger of the .38-caliber revolver. The gun then discharged, the sheriff's report said.

***********************************

I Have Sold Out.

I have a sponsor now! A business is actually giving me cash money to put up a link to their site. Admittedly, it's my friends Laurie and Dejan's theatre company, so their decision possibly may have been made out of love for me rather than love for the blog, but I'll take it anyway. Everybody click on the the Tinfish logo (or, as the case may be, the little red x where the logo should be) and make them think that it's going to be worth the money they spent on me.

Shopping.

Today was Alex's first day of school, and as usual we were running very late. If he didn't go to school in an office building that also housed a paint store and a pediatrician's office I might have been tempted to kick him to the curb and let him make his own way to his classroom.

No, not really. With Alex, it's best if I take him by the hand and walk him right up to his teacher and say, "Alex, here's Jack. Say hello."

Otherwise I guarantee he'd spend 2 hours horsing around on the back stairs leading up to his class, flipping the lightswitch on and off and hanging upside down off the handrail until he got spotted by a teacher and dragged into class.

It's nice to dream of what might have been, though, especially today, today when I needed to get to the Porn Superstore before I opened shop for the day. Usually Steve is the one who gets to go shopping at the Porn Superstore, but not today. Today it was all me and oh, do I love the Porn Superstore. It's like WalMart, but with all-anal action. I walk through the aisles with my shopping cart, thinking of those horrible commercials that feature those heavily permed, plump women whose religion isn't specified but you know they're Southern Baptist, women who spend every waking moment devoted to meeting the needs of their family. Whether it's peanut butter cookies for the marching band or ham for Sunday Dinner, these women shop at WalMart because WalMart takes care of them so they can take care of their families. That's the Porn Superstore and me, only with lubricant. And I try to leave my family out of it completely. Other than that, there's no difference.

On Sunday a man came into the store with a white plastic bag and a large pervert aura. He asked me repeatedly how much this postcard was, how about this one, how about that one, after I'd told him all postcards were a dollar. He asked me if lubricant was like a condom. He asked me about the specific price of one DVD, and when I told him, replied, "So all the DVDs are 19.95?"

Is this a vibrator? Yes. What about this one? Yes. What about this one?

Please go away now.

And he did. Then he came back. I ended up taking a large office chair and putting it between the entrance to behind the counter, so if he tried to come back to where I was he'd have to get past the chair first, thus giving me the necessary time to flee out the back door, if need be.

This is what the Porn Superstore people have to deal with all the time. As a result, you need more clearance to get in there than you would a nuclear power plant. Steve finds the Porn Superstore to be creepy because of the element of low-grade paranoia in the air. This is because the staff has been conditioned to treat men they don't know like criminals.

To enter the Porn Superstore, you must park in a fenced in lot. The store itself is unmarked and set back from the street, a small white building with a completely unassuming, unsexy name: Capitol News. It's easy to miss even when you're looking for it. Once you park, you have to ring the bell to be let in, first explaining to the receptionist who you are and what you want. If you don't already have an exisiting account, forget it. They won't let you in. But if you do, they'll buzz you in and allow you to walk five feet to another locked door, where you have to wait for someone to poke their head out to size you up. Then the sales rep asks you what you want and they escort you to the correct aisle. All of the products are in endless rows of cardboard boxes on army green metal shelving. It's enormous, all this smut in one place, and totally overwhelming.

To be fair, if you didn't already know where the Astroglide was, you'd never find it without help among literally tens of thousands of identical cardboard boxes. The sales rep allowed me to browse and buzzed off pretty quickly. As I was wandering around through the aisles, large men with light blue t-shirts that read SECURITY kept walking past and greeting me politely.

I didn't get nearly the intense scrutiny Steve did, but as the staff pointed out, I'm much less likely to get caught in a dark corner beating off over the magazines. I moved from the old fashioned spank it section (lube and magazines) through the endless toy section and over to the movie section, where I was stopped by another sales rep who would not allow me to take a cart into the DVD section. The staff keeps a tight rein here, relentlessly tailing all the customers. No browsing here, no zoning off to the mountains of silicone - the employees will not allow it.

My escort started showing me Jenna Jameson videos that he felt were suitable for women. "This one is fetish. Sort of, but it's really light. Actually, I suppose they all are, since you can't have a bondage scene with penetration," he said matter of factly.

"What do you mean, you 'can't'?" I asked.

"It's against federal law to film someone tied up and being penetrated with a penis."

This was news to me.

"Yep," he said. "Ronald Reagan made that against the law."

"Isn't that a violation of First Amendment rights?" I asked.

"If you'd like to fight it in court, be my guest," he said.

"No, I think I'll leave that to Larry Flynt and pick another battle," I said.

My phone rang. It was Steve.

"What were you saying about the Waldorf Schools and gnomes in the woods?"

"Oh, yeah, evidently the Waldorf people believe in astrology and gnomes. And they're not too keen on modern medicine, either."

"Let's go back to the gnomes. What do they do with the gnomes?"

"Oh, I guess at one school before they go on field trips in the woods, the kids have to ask permission of the gnomes to enter. Can we talk about this later? I'm still shopping."

"What about the gnomes?" asked the sales rep, so I repeated my newfound knowledge of the Waldorf-Gnome link. "Man," he said, shaking his head, "that's twisted. I have a daughter who just turned three, and we're looking into different types of schools. I guess we're not going to do the Waldorf school."

"Where are you looking?" I asked, and he launched into the pros and cons of public school versus private, Montessori versus religious schools.

Three years ago I never would have envisioned having this conversation standing amid posters advertising the movies Great Big Fucking Tits! and Busty British Babes, but clearly a job's a job and steering your kid clear of educational gnomes is going to be more personally interesting than One Night In Paris.

After I paid for the inventory I bought, I stood at the counter and watched them put everything in a box for me. Behind the counter, the wall was lined with dozens of baby photos and Dilbert cartoons. One lone photo of Halle Berry as Catwoman, pulled out of the newspaper was stuck among them. It looked oddly out of place.

Nobody Fucks With the Jesus.

I'm taking the Labor Day Weekend off.

Do you have a problem with that? Take it up with Jesus.

Contest Update.

THE CONTEST IS CLOSED.

Yesterday's contest rages on, but as per Steve's request, if you want to order something from the store other than the Tongue Joy, type "KEYES" into the Coupon Code and get 15% off.

Also, in the interest of accomodating everyone, if you are not eligible for the first contest, and would like to win a Tongue Joy, send me an e-mail telling me why your straight ass is as much as a selfish hedonist as any old lesbian, and you, too, will have the opportunity to win one. Please use the subject line: Those Lesbians Have Nothing On Me!

That is all.

THE CONTEST IS CLOSED.

Calling All Selfish Hedonists!

THE CONTEST IS CLOSED

Actually, that was a situation in which I described what's involved in a gay sexual relations (sic), and described it quite objectively. Sexual relations with no other objective than that the parties involved some should derive pleasure from this use of the organs intended for sexual purpose. That is selfish, that oriented towards one self, hedonism which is the pursuit of pleasure.

--Alan Keyes, explaining why he refered to V.P. Dick Cheney's daughter, Mary, as a "selfish hedonist".

Isn't Alan Keyes great? Seriously. He literally has Judy Baar Topinka, Illinois' Republican Party chair, hiding behind potted plants in order to avoid coming into contact with him. I actually like Topinka a lot, too. I even voted for her in the last election. But I'm telling you, I would have paid good money to watch her dive behind a ficus. And, as Lucia from Alas, A Blog says, "I simultaneously feel amusement and sympathy when I hear her trying to avoid saying negative things about Keyes, while also avoiding lying!"

Lucia also got this great quote to the press from Barack Obama, his opponent: "I miss you all. Everybody's following around the other guy all the time. He's so much more fun."

It's true! He totally is! In a roundabout way, he reminds me of Chris Rock's stand up routine where he says that people have two options: good relationship and boring, or bad relationship and exciting.

"You gave me crabs?!? How exciting!! Wonder what's going to happen tomorrow?"

Alan Keyes is the GOP's bad boyfriend. "He just directly insulted the Vice President's daughter?!? How exciting!! What's he going to say tomorrow?"

It's not only thrilling to me as an Illinois voter - it's also thrilling to me as an Illinois resident who makes a living encouraging people to have sex for fun.

It is in that spirit that I bring you this month's contest:

Ladies, are you a selfish hedonist? Do you have orgasms solely for the sake of having orgasms? Are you a lesbian? If not, is your partner? (Ha! Get it? Ha!) Is your mother? Sister? Cousin? Best friend? If you answered "Why, yes!" to these questions, then this contest is for you!

Send me an e-mail telling me why Mary Cheney has nothing on you (or your lesbian loved one) in the Selfish Hedonist department. The winner will receive The Tongue Joy, a vibrator that is designed for the express purpose of oral sex. Oral sex of the girlie kind. You will also receive a completely hedonistic piece of lingerie in sassy Republican Red or slutty Liberal Blue. Clearly we are on the honor system here. No reason why selfish hedonists can't be honest.

The contest will run until Friday, September 10th. Please use the subject heading "Yes, flea! I am a Selfish Hedonist!" otherwise you'll be swept into the spam pile, and I don't think anybody wants that.

As for everybody else, I suggest you have a moment of silence for Alan Keyes, who feels that having sex for pleasure is wrong. This is a man who obviously has never had a blowjob.* If that doesn't bring a tear to your eye, nothing will.


P.S. If you'd like to read a more complete transcript of Keyes' comments, check out Eric Zorn's notebook. Zorn was a bit chatty today, so you'll have to scroll down. It's at the bottom of today's entries.

And for those not eligible for the contest, if you're interested in the Tongue Joy, you can have it at a discounted price - $49.95. When you check out, under the Coupon Code, type in "BLOG" to get the discount.

*Observation courtesy of Frog.

THE CONTEST IS CLOSED.