No rednecks were harmed in the production of this photo.
Let me tell you about the time I married my sister Thing 1.
No, no—holster the Jeff Foxworthy redneck jokes. I grew up in Kansas, not the Ozarks. Thing 1 married someone else; I just performed the ceremony.
This was a bit of a surprise to my extended family, many of whom I hadn’t seen since my own wedding back in 1988. Most of them didn’t know I had been ordained.
Thing 1 had called me several months earlier to tell me she was engaged and asked if I would marry her. “Sure!” I said without thinking, which is my favorite way of speaking. I’d never officiated a wedding, and it never occurred to me how terrifying it might be to do my first wedding before my own family.
A week or so before the wedding, I purchased a minister’s wedding handbook, with sample ceremonies, vows, and so on. Thing 1 and Hubby 1, her fiancé, said they’d mail me some Bible verses they wanted included, and would I please throw in a little five-minute sermon? “Piece of cake!” I said.
Well, Thing 1 and Hubby 1 got a little busy, and they didn’t send me the verses. Not that I never procrastinate myself: At 3 a.m. the night before I left for Kansas, I sat at my computer, staring at a blank screen and desperately racking my brain for sermon ideas.
We arrived in Kansas City at 1:30 a.m. The rehearsal started at 6:30 that evening, and we hadn’t even started planning the ceremony. Best Half and I went to Thing 1’s apartment at 5 p.m., sat down with her and Hubby 1, and started putting together the ceremony.
The whole thing must have been a little weird for my parents. It’s one thing for your children to participate in one anothers’ weddings. It’s quite another for your son to marry your daughter, especially when, to be blunt, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
My mother had somehow gotten the impression that another minister (ideally, one who had done weddings before) was going to be involved. She was a little nervous when she realized I was flying solo, so to speak.
She came into the room while we were working on the ceremony and overheard me say, “Do I ask everyone to stand before or after I pronounce them husband and wife?”
“Why don’t you ask the other minister?” my mother interjected.
“What other minister?” I said.
Mom turned green.
“Hey, I’ve spoken at a couple of funerals,” I said. “A wedding’s hardly any different. How hard can it be?”
My jokes didn’t help. Later, when my mother popped in again and asked how it was going, I told her we were deciding what color war paint to use during the Native American part of the ceremony. I also said we were shooting for the grand prize on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
She didn’t spank me, but I think she wanted to.
I imagine her feelings were analogous to going to the hospital for brain surgery and having your doctor arrive in your room with one of your own children. You note with horror that your child, whom you clearly remember being unable to cut his meat into bite-size pieces even as a teen, is wearing a surgical mask.
“You’ve got to start sometime,” your doctor says to your child, pointing at you. “Why don’t you try this one?”
The rehearsal, of course, was a disaster. One of the groomsmen didn’t show up, along with two other people in the wedding party. Everyone else waited for me to direct things, which I would have been happy to do if I hadn’t left the wedding book and all my notes at Thing 1’s apartment.
Despite all that, I’d say the rehearsal exhibited all the stately dignity of the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
God is merciful, though; the wedding went off pretty smoothly. Best Half told me my voice only went up two octaves, and that from the back of the sanctuary she could hardly see my knees shaking at all. When Thing 1 came up the aisle with my father, I had to remind myself that preachers are not supposed to cry at weddings.
Hubby 1 said he and Thing 1 were honored to be the first[1] couple I ever married. He was wrong, though: The honor was mine, all mine.
You know what’s wrong with kids these days? I’ll tell ya what’s wrong with kids these days!
When I was a kid, everyone I knew was familiar with the aria “Votre toast je peux vous le rendre” from the opera Carmen, aka “The Toreador Song” (skip ahead to 1:12):
No, we weren’t opera buffs. Bear with me a sec.
Carmen is an unusual opera, given that its libretto was originally in French.
Here are the original lyrics in French:
Toréador, en garde! Toréador! Et songe bien, oui, songe en combattant Qu’en oenoir te regarde, Et que l’amour t’attend, Toreador, l’amour, l’amour t’attend!
And here’s a rough English translation:
Toreador, on guard!
Toreador! Toreador! And contemplate well! Yes! Contemplate as you fight! That a dark eye is watching you, And that love is waiting for you, Toreador! Love, love is waiting for you!
My friends and I didn’t have the first clue about Carmen, much less opera in general. We just knew a fragment of the aria with (at the time) mildly risqué alternative lyrics; a few years later we knew the aria with some other amusing lyrics we saw on TV.
You are now about to date yourself with one of three reactions:
You’ll recognize the aria by its quasi-risqué English lyrics
You’ll recognize it by the funny TV lyrics, or
You don’t recognize it at all, in which case I would tell you to get off my lawn, but you already got bored and are watching pimple-popping videos or something instead.
Here are the mildly risqué lyrics:
Toreador! Don’t spit upon the floor! Use the cuspidor! That’s what it’s for!
That’s not very naughty, you’re thinking. But this was a long time ago, when anything with even the most oblique reference to anything scatological or burps or farts or spitting or whatever was hysterically funny because they’d get you in trouble.1
Now, here is the TV version I mentioned: It occurred in an episode of Gilligan’s Island titled “The Producer.” In “The Producer,” a film producer crash-lands on the island, so the castaways create a musical version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
As one does.
So they cobble together a mashup of various operatic fragments with (sort of) the plot of Hamlet. In this case they mashed up Lord Polonius’ speech to Laertes (and here are the funny TV lyrics I mentioned earlier):
Neither a borrower nor a lender be Do not forget! Stay out of debt! Think twice, and take this good advice from me: Guard that old solvency! There’s just one other thing you ought to do: To thine own self be true!
(Skip ahead to 3:30 in the video):
Shockingly, Gilligan’s Island didn’t rack up lots of awards. But “The Producer” snagged a spot on TV Guide’s list of the top 100 TV episodes of all time.
“The Producer” reminds me of some of the best material from Warner Brothers’ cartoons or Sesame Street: They can produce high-quality, hilarious entertainment that both children and adults love. Not because it appeals to a lowest common denominator with fart or poop jokes (don’t get me wrong—well-executed fart or poop jokes can be a pleasure sublime).
No, it’s because they can appeal to children at their level and adults at their level2 (I could get into a similar comparison of The Rabbit of Seville, or “What’s Opera, Doc?” (same here), for instance, both of which should have won Nobel Peace prizes).
Like every generation ever, today’s kids think they invented everything cool—sex, f’instance. Or more specifically in this case: Memes.
A meme is a little snippet of a cultural fad or joke all the cool kids know. But kids these days didn’t invent memes. They just dumbed them down.
And since the Internet has given most people the attention span of a hummingbird on crack, I guess that’s nothing to sneeze at.
But again: They don’t go anywhere. With memes, the name of the game isn’t to suss out where they came from and who started it and where they got the idea from and other interesting trivia. With current memes, the goal is to acquire photographic memory of the words or photos accompanying the meme so you can toss them out there online so everyone will chuckle at how smart you are.
And how does one acquire this encyclopedic knowledge? Simple: By staying online and plugged in 24/7/365.
While No. 1 Son and The Chowder were growing up, Best Half worked Saturdays for a few years; a bit later I worked as a freelance contractor with super-flexible hours.
I had the privilege of spending many priceless hours with my kids at museums, bookstores, the library and so on.
But sometimes when I was busy with contract work, we hung out at home and watched movies. For Christmas one year, First Sister gave me a set of all the Warner Brothers cartoons ever made; I already owned all of Mel Brooks’ movies on DVD as well, along with most Monty Python movies, and the unrivaled kings of spoof movies: Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, producers of Airplane, Airplane II, Top Secret! and the Naked Gun flicks.
Memes are the cultural equivalent of trivia quizzes. These days “spoof” movies are just strings of loosely related trivia facticles, but truly great spoofs are more than trivia quizzes. If you want to produce truly great spoofs like Blazing Saddles or Airplane!, you have to love the genre you’re spoofing, love it enough to turn it inside out in a way true aficionados of Westerns or disaster movies will recognize instantly.
Old-school memes like The Toreador Song are funny and viral, yes, but if you get interested in where they come from, you won’t see info like “This meme started when Bender the robot said ‘Oh, you were serious? Let me laugh even harder’ on Futurama.”
That’s what I think, anyway. YMMV. Get off my lawn.
So this just happened: I’ve got a bit of a stuffy nose today, which is good, because The S.O. has been suffering with adult croup all week and that means I probably haven’t caught it.
So I said, “Hey; where’s the Mucinex?” Meaning, of course, the brand name of the popular decongestant. Except that’s not what I said—I actually said, “Hey, where’s the Memorex?”
She said, quite reasonably, “What?” I went to the replay, as I so often have to do, to figure out what I really said. “Oh, I meant the Mucinex.”
“It’s under the sink in my bathroom,” she said. “What’s Memorex?”
“Ah!” I said. “You did not have to fight in the Great Car Stereo Wars of the ’70s. There was all sorts of debate about stereo and recording equipment, but it got most vicious when it came to car stereos. Which was a little silly, because every right-thinking person knew the correct answers: The very best car stereo was the underdash Pioneer SuperTuner; the very best speakers were Jensen Triaxials, and the ONLY cassette tapes that should be allowed in anyone’s stereo were Maxell cassette tapes—in short, precisely what I had installed in Charles the Deep Breather.”
That whole “Stairway to Heaven” thing? This is what they meant.
She wisely stopped listening at that point, so I’ll just tell you what I meant:
See, if you were around in the 1970s, it came down to this: If you liked Memorex tapes, you had to get behind their lame commercial with Ella Fitzgerald singing a high note that broke a wine glass, then the recording of Ella Fitzgerald doing the same thing.
“Is it LIVE—or is it MEMOREX?” the commercial smugly asked.
Well, lemme think: I’m in my car listening to music. Is it live? A quick glance at the passenger and back seats confirms: There are no musicians performing here. None of my windows are shattering. Conclusion: It is neither live nor Memorex BECAUSE I’LL SET THIS CAR ON FIRE BEFORE I USE MEMOREX TAPES!
There were other worthless tape brands out there, such as TDK (aka The Dick Knnnnnniggits3, favored by wimps who listened to smooth jazz) or BASF (aka Barf and Shit Farts,4 which your younger siblings used to record, directly from the radio, whatever bubblegum dreck was popular that week, and you made it known across the land that a slow, painful death awaited he who dared even think about using in your car).
On the other hand–Maxell. MAXELL, baby. They got more famouser even than Memorex with a single print ad: It was a fantastic, iconic image; the kind of advertising Apple is always grasping at.
On the left is a hulking, monstrous speaker, the kind Dr. Dre wishes he’d replaced with the Beats Pill. On the right is a deep leather armchair in which a guy wearing a leather aviator’s jacket and scarf is hanging on for dear life. His scarf is snapping and fluttering like he’s a Florida reporter standing outside for no reason during a hurricane. Behind him, on his right, a lamp is about to blow away. On his left is a small side table upon which a martini glass has slid to the edge and is about to tip over; the martini itself and its olive are spraying over the edge of the glass.
The guy in the chair quickly become known as The Blown Away Guy, and the ad OBLITERATED Memorex. It was on billboards for a while during my senior year of high school–just the photo with the word Maxell down in one corner. That’s all they needed. If you were a faithful Maxell user you would just shout “MAXELL!” and high-five your passenger. If not, you would turn your stereo way down in abject horror and misery, wondering if you could ever aspire to redo all your mix tapes and albums on Maxell tapes.
When they finally decided to make it a commercial, they did Apple before Apple was Apple: All you saw was the guy hanging on, teeth and toenails, against the oncoming tsunami of–not Led Zeppelin or KISS or The Who, but Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries.”
It’s been 20 years since even seen a cassette tape, much less listened to one. But having accidentally spoken the Cassette Brand That Must Not Be Named, I still feel the need to apologize to Maxell and anyone old enough to understand what the hell I’m talking about.
♬ Hello my honey ♬ Hello my baby ♬ Hello my ragtime gaaaal! ♬
I like frogs.
Not real frogs, in a terrarium as pets. They aren’t exactly cuddly. I do like frogs’ legs, though. They aren’t cuddly either; just delicious.
It’s just something I like collecting. Frog stuff: Frogs on T‑shirts; Far Side cartoons that feature frogs; ceramic frogs. Some folks collect Matchbox cars; some folks collect comic books. I collect frogs.
I was in Topeka, KS—my home town—last week. And there’s a sports bar in Topeka called Jeremiah Bullfrogs. They have a cool frog statue at the door and framed Far Side comics and lots of other frog stuff. So whenever I visit Topeka I have to visit Jeremiah Bullfrogs.
JBs recently moved to a much larger building, which I was glad to see, what with all the locally owned businesses around the country driven out of business by the pandemic.
With the added space came more frog bric-a-brac, including an amusing sign for Gooch’s Best Bullfrog Feed, and this movie poster:
Yes, you read that right: It’s a movie titled Frogs, and it stars Sam Elliott and Joan Van Ark.
What kind of movie would you expect based on this poster? We’ve got a couple lurid taglines: “TODAY—The Pond! ; TOMORROW—The World!” and “It’s the day that Nature strikes back!”
We also have a frog with a human arm dangling from its mouth like a cigar.
An even more turgid poster for Frogs reads “A TIDAL WAVE OF SLITHERING, SLIMY HORROR DEVOURING, DESTROYING ALL IN ITS PATH! A terrifying story of times to come when Nature strikes back!”
It looked like a really cheap horror flick to me, and when I looked it up—yep, it’s a bad horror movie released in 1972 with a budget of about $37.
Based on the posters you’d expect giant frogs to be running around eating people, like Night of the Lepus with frogs instead of rabbits:
Or frogs hijacking an airport control tower and making planes crash like Die Hard 2. Maybe frogs killing people and assuming their identities, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or stabbing women in the shower à la Psycho, or even zombie frogs.
Shoot, they could have gone for a microbudget horror flick with some interesting new ideas, even if it was dirt cheap: Like Phantasm, with the flying brain-slurping metal balls and the extremely cool Hemi ‘Cuda; or Evil Dead, with Army of Darkness and the S‑Mart boomstick, both of which spawned franchises despite budgets that wouldn’t even fund a high school cafeteria for two days.
They clearly weren’t interested in breaking any new ground on this, and anyone they plagiarized would be too embarrassed to sue. So I expected Frogs to be so bad it was fun to watch.
Alas, Frogs was instead so bad it plummeted WAY past “so bad it was good” territory and was just really, really bad.
I found the whole movie on YouTube for free. Apparently none of the streaming services will touch Frogs. Maybe they’re embarrassed by it, but I think it’s more likely they’re incapable of scruples or embarrassment; they just realized they’d never make a penny by streaming it.
So I watched it. Now you don’t have to. No, don’t thank me. I’m just doing what any selfless hero would do.
Here’s the “plot”: Sam Elliott plays Pickett Smith, a photographer paddling around a swamp in a canoe and taking pictures of trash in the swamp. (Here’s how brainless this movie was: They missed a perfect chance to have a Native American guy standing there crying, but they blew it.)
His name was Iron Eyes Cody. Meeting President Carter ruined Cody’s career: He couldn’t stop smiling.
Pickett Smith is the only character name I can remember, and that’s only because, while I was struggling not to slip into a coma, I thought his name was Wilson Pickett for a minute, which reminded me of “Everybody Needs Somebody” from The Blues Brothers, which in turn gave me a few seconds of fond nostalgia before I realized I was totally off-track, which led to the kind of bitter disappointment we all felt when George Lucas was smart enough to hire Lawrence Kasdan to write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and part of Return of the Jedi, so we were all pumped to see The Phantom Menace until we discovered Lucas decided he could just write all the screenplays without Kasdan’s help, which led to ghastly abortions of dialog like Anakin Skywalker, trying to suave his way into Padme’s pants by saying “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere” and WHAT THE HELL WAS LUCAS THINKING?!?
Sorry. I swear, by Crom’s crunchy crotch croutons; so many fond hopes and dreams scuttled by a badass Jedi knight and heartstoppingly powerful and evil Sith lord who whines, literally, about sand in his boxers.
Where was I? Joan Van Ark plays a simpering airhead who does nothing. I mean that literally: For the entire movie she just stands around doing nothing. Nothing at all. I suspect they paid her enough to show up but not enough to make her want to do any acting.
There are some other characters, but they’re all as lifeless and useless as Joan Van Airhead.
Anyway, Elliott comes across a family living in an old antebellum mansion on an island in the middle of the swamp. I’d say it looked like an old plantation house, but in a swamp? I mean, if you’re running a plantation you need to have cotton or tobacco or something to harvest. What would they harvest in a swamp?
The minute Elliot shows up, weird things start happening; from there on out they apparently couldn’t decide between ripping off a teen slasher film, with idiot teens being murdered one by one, or ripping off Hitchcock’s The Birds, except with frogs.
I say that because there were dozens of cutaway scenes of the lawn outside the house swarming with frogs, which were obviously being thrown in front of the camera by offscreen frog wranglers.
Here’s where the fun starts: The characters start disappearing and winding up dead. The frogs are here! TODAY, the World!! A TIDAL WAVE OF SLITHERING, SLIMY HORROR!
Wanna know how many people the frogs kill? I kept track. Here’s how many people the frogs kill:
Zero.
Oh, the movie does have a respectable body count: About a dozen people, plus hints about this being a worldwide frogpocalypse. Here’s how the idiots die:
Idiot 1: A guy goes fishing and gets killed by a rattlesnake.
Idiot 2: Next a guy looking for the first dead guy gets offed by—I’m not making this up—a rattlesnake bite, followed by fronds of Spanish Moss on a weeping willow: The fronds come to life and strangle the poor bastard. This is followed by him being devoured by scorpions (scorpions? In a swamp?), a bunch of lizards and baby crocodiles, and finally tarantulas, which set about eating him and covering him with webs.
Idiot 3: A matronly old ninny wanders around in the swamp trying to catch butterflies. She also gets a rattlesnake bite followed by other critters devouring her.
Idiot 4: Meanwhile, one of the other stupid adults is wondering if the missing matronly ninny is in the greenhouse. While he’s looking around in the greenhouse, a gecko starts knocking things off a shelf like an ornery cat.
It goes beyond cat mischief, though: Someone has thoughtfully left a dozen or so large, fragile glass jars of various poisons stored on flimsy shelves. They ooze all over the place, dissolving stuff faster than Alien blood and filling the room with toxic gasses; the dumb guy in the greenhouse dies about 3 steps from the door, through which he makes no attempt to escape.
Idiot 5: Another idiot takes his boat to a marina across the lake. He stop to gas up the boat, whereupon a Komodo Dragon (in an American swamp?) bites the rope tether, making the boat drift off. The idiot jumps in to swim out to the boat an gets attacked by Anaconda-size snakes, which, unlike Anacondas, live in an American swamp and which also, unlike Anacondas, are venomous.
Idiot 6: Idiot 5’s wife sees him leaving, runs down to the shore to beg him to come back, gets her feet stuck in the mud, and winds up feeding alligators.
Meanwhile, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, a couple of useless kids and an old fart in a wheelchair barricade themselves in the house. Elliott says, “We should leave.”
The old fart in the wheelchair says, “I ain’t leaving!.”
So Elliott and Van Ark and the useless kids paddle Elliott’s canoe across the lake. There they discover what happened to the plantation house’s servants, who fled earlier:
Idiots 7 thru 11: Well, actually, they just find a couple of suitcases in a parking lot, so we don’t know what happened. This must have been scary back in ’72, because when they spot the suitcases the soundtrack plays a scary crash sound thingy like King Kong just showed up.
Idiot 12: And finally, we see the old fart in his wheelchair looking around in terror as the off-screen frog wranglers start throwing frogs through the windows instead on the lawn outside.
So the old fart keels over dead, even though none of the frogs touched him.
Thus endeth Frogs.
Most actors have an embarrassing commercial or short-lived sitcom role in their past that they’d rather forget. Sam Elliott has been in a couple bombs and weird movies, such as The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (I’m not making that up either).
I bet Sam Elliott wishes he’d been in a cheap porno rather than Frogs.
Here’s the whole movie if you’re a glutton for punishment:
And now, children, hear and remember the tale of me, Billy Paul, Mrs. Jones, my friend Rob, and my dog Meatball:
Long, long ago, in a little state named Kansas, which no one wants to admit coming from except the classic rock band Kansas and possibly Bob Dole, two young men and a dog were tooling around town in the legendary muscle car Charles the Deep Breather, which probably sounds silly because you weren’t there, but which would make perfect sense if you were there, because Charles breathed very, VERY deeply indeed, and communicated in a subsonic, almost heavenly, rumble that made fans of glasspack mufflers sneer, fans of turbo mufflers weep tears of pure joy, and everyone else say, “That car! It—it spoke to me! It made my panties moist and/or my jeans tight “(depending on their gender)”, and I want to run after it to hear and understand and remember its teaching, but I can’t because I have nothing but two legs, while Charles the Deep Breather boasts 8 cylinders and 318 wholesome, part-of-this-nutritious-breakfast Detroit cubic inches (plus a .30 radius of bored-out glimmery smooth cylinder walls, rebuilt 340 heads, a 60,000-volt Mallory racing ignition coil, graphite ignition wiring, an aluminum Edelbrock intake manifold, a 600 CFM Holley four-barrel carburetor, a bunch of other racing parts no one gives a shit about, and the most important component of all: the storied underdash Pioneer Supertuner pumping its juicy American-made stereophonic DNA through a 60-watt graphic equalizer and finally into the Holy Grail of mobile tunes: a pair of 6x9 Jensen triaxial speakers!”
And on this long ago night, my friend Rob, my dog Meatball, and I were engaged in the…
Anyway, Rob and Meatball and I were—okay, now what? Oh, you think it was cruel to name him Meatball? Look here: People should not name animals. We should instead listen to our animals and use the names they choose. Meatball was named Meatball because that’s the name he wanted me to use.
So! We were observing the time-honored tradition of getting drunk via a cooler of beer in Charles the Deep Breather’s back seat as we drove around, which also sounds silly (if not downright irresponsible) if you weren’t there, but if you were there it made perfect sense that two friends, a dog, one car, and some beer all had to be enjoyed simultaneously, because that’s just the way it was and get off my lawn.
Rob, Meatball and I had been drinking, driving and rocking out for a couple hours and had just finished listening, on cassette, to Queen’s 1975 album “A Night at the Opera,” with punishingly high decibels, and for some reason we couldn’t agree which cassette/band/album we should listen to next, so I just flipped the Supertuner’s switch from cassette to radio and we started listening to KDVV, aka V‑100, to see if anything good popped up.
And it did. To an exponential degree, it did.
The moment we switched over to V‑100, Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” had just started. And Rob and I (and, I am convinced, Meatball), we all loved “Me and Mrs. Jones.”
Meatball generally showed his approval by wagging his tail, while I, carefully and wisely, avoided trying to sing along with music if anyone else was present, even if it was just Meatball. To do otherwise would probably violate the Geneva Convention.
Rob, on the other hand, was and is an excellent vocalist. Meatball and I were both delighted to delegate the mouth music to him.
Billy Paul had just finished the first stanza from “Me and Mrs. Jones,” and was gathering his strength to explode into his famous refrain: “Meeeyeee aaaayaaand… MISSUS! Mrs. Jones Mrs. Jones Mrs. Jones Mrs. Jones! We got a thing going on!”
And Meatball and I were happy to be The Pips to Rob’s Gladys Knight, reasoning that with Rob bellowing out the chorus along with Billy Paul’s ear-shattering voice hammering out of the Jensen Triaxials, we could add to the overall volume without drifting too far off-key.
And the moment arrived: Billy Paul’s thundering “Mee-yeee aaayaaand MISSUS! Mrs Jones!” plus Meatball and I uttering an unreasonable facsimile thereof, and the other cars and traffic sounds and other urban background noises, all setting the stage for and pumping up Rob’s better-n-average contribution, and the whole world screeched to a halt and cocked its ear to see what Rob’s contribution would be, and he did not disappoint:
Verily did he openeth his lips, and he sang with all his might, and he utter—uttereth, no, utteredeth… SHIT! Okay, he proclaimed to the heavenly skies above and the rest of us mere mortals, and he sang:
“Weeeyeeee aaaaayand MISSUS!” and then he paused, realizing he was having a little pronoun trouble exacerbated by beer, because “Meeeyeee” and “Weeeyeee” are radically dissimilar, even as I was wondering why he paused, and then Meatball whispered to me “Who’s this ‘we’? You got a mouse in your pocket?” and I blurted out “ ‘WE?’ Ooh! Menage a trois!”
And Meatball started laughing, as did Rob, and I started laughing as well but then belatedly realized hey, maybe I shouldn’t veer left and kill us all.
In conclusion, we all got home in one piece even though we all laughed so much no court in the nation would have convicted us for being unable to drive, and then I ran away and got married to an unreasonably beautiful and amazing woman who by all rights could have landed Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt but instead she chose ME, and had two kids, and somewhere along the way also Rob got married and had a kid, and I bet him feels the same way about his wife and son too, so I’m pretty sure I don’t need to threaten him with telling his wife about our stupid juvenile behavior and hey Rob, I love you and thanks for giving me so much of your time way back then.
JBs recently moved to a much larger building, which I was glad to see, what with all the locally owned businesses around the country driven out of business by the pandemic.
