Carnal Thoughts

It's business time!



I'm in the Admiral's Club Lounge at JFK, about to embark on the Manager Mom 2008 West Coast Business Tour. THREE cities. FOUR airlines. Infinite airplane misery. (Hi there, Herbietown! I'm feeling your pain, my brother.)

As I left my house at 4:30 A.M, (yes, I said A.M., because that's what I had to do to get the cheapest airfare, and I hope those sadists in our Travel & Expense Department get a horribly disfiguring skin rash) I saw that our local Greek Orthodox church was setting up their summer carnival.

Naturally, this makes me think of having illicit sex with random strangers.

Er, from a THEORETICAL, not a PRACTICAL, point of view, said the happily-married-for-nine-years mother of two who will spend the next several days attending an "innovation conference."

Why is this the case? Because in my late college years, when my friends and I got tired of getting groped and thrown up on by drunken frat guys (which more or less resembles my experience at a typical kid birthday party nowadays), we started having movie nights.

We'd gather in someone's apartment with a few cases of Schaefer Light, a fine brew whose 24-pack at $1.99 pack price point made their marketing tagline ("When You're Planning On Having More Than One, Make It A Schaefer") more of a personal challenge. Then we'd pop This Is Spinal Tap into the Betamax and spend the rest of the evening eating Tastykake Cupcakes and reciting lines of dialogue along with the TV.

But one day, my best friend happened to bring over a movie called Two Moon Junction. It stars Sherilynn Fenn as a proper Southern debutante who gets swept away by her passion for a brooding, mysterious carnival worker. This was definitely a Hollywood fantasy world because this guy looked nothing like the greasy toothless track-marked workers that staff, I don't know, EVERY SINGLE CARNIVAL I've ever experienced in my lifetime.

But with the Schaefer flowing, and all of us between boyfriends, this movie quickly moved into heavy rotation. Eventually, the novelty wore off and we realized that Richard Tyson is actually pretty gross, a fact later confirmed by his performance as Cullen Crisp in Kindergarten Cop.

And so in the spirit of love, and with visions of carnys dancing in my head, I'll leave you with another heartwarming piece of family exploitation - one in which my daughter, after having her Electra complex go from zero to 60 in under ten seconds while watching the movie Enchanted, created a little book in which she writes about the mating habits of adult humans.

Again, purely from a theoretical point of view. Certainly not by observing the mating rituals of her parents.

I posted it over here,and I hope y'all enjoy it as much as her art teacher did.