It’s Raining Men

by | Mar 25, 2019 | Chick Stuff, Lemonade out of Lemons

I went to a male review this weekend. The word review has a bad connotation for me. I think of my former job and the dreaded performance reviews that were meaningless and painfully boring. The feeling that comes along with that word has not changed – I still feel a little nauseous, and now maybe like I need a shower. I’m also a little confused about why these shows are called a review. I didn’t get any score card to fill out. Maybe it is more of a review for the audience about what the correct body parts are or what a guy is supposed to look like naked. Either way, review is not a word that makes me jump up and say “I want to go to that!” Yet I did.

I have never been to a male review so I didn’t have a reference point. I haven’t even seen the movie Magic Mike, but I have seen quite a few memes with a bunch of half naked dancing dudes, so that was pretty much what I expected. This particular show was a group of touring performers, so I assumed the guys would meet a certain standard. None of my expectations were met. I felt like maybe the club owner walked onto the street and stopped random guys leaving the gym to see what they were doing that night. By gym, I mean the local YMCA. Oh, and he only found four guys. That’s fine though, the audience/performer ratio was still 5 to 1.

The audience consisted of a very drunken bachelorette party, a group of gay guys and their fag hags and us. The bachelorette and her posse were all wearing tight white dresses, and one of them was roughly the size of half of our group. She turned out to be the only member of the audience who really appreciated the attention from the dancers – so much in fact that she ended up on the stage with them more than once with her cell phone recording all of the incriminating evidence. The stripper/comedian on stage referred to these ladies as the “wasted white wedding” and us as “the sober divorce club” since we were the only patrons still able to stand up unassisted. He had no clever name for the gay guys which surprised me because I had about twelve. One of the gays was wearing a flannel shirt and what appeared to be a toupee. I had a half hour commentary about that guy alone before even looking at his companions.

Maybe the best part of the night was that we actually watched these yahoos setting up for the show. We arrived an hour after doors opened, right as a group of guys was hanging up a giant blanket on the back of the stage. This blanket was the highlight of the show. It was covered in dancing lights that mesmerized me for a full hour while half naked smarmy guys in cowboy hats danced around. It was magical. I spent the better part of the night trying to figure out how to remove this masterpiece from the stage and get it into my car without getting tackled by a shirtless guy with half a boner. I decided the odds were against me and left empty handed.

At one point my girlfriend turned to me and asked “where do you think they get these outfits?” My reply was “Walmart. Definitely Walmart.” They fit right in with the venue though. It was like a VFW hall outside of a trailer park. At one point I reached under my chair to move it and stuck my hand in something sticky. The makeshift bar may or may not have been on wheels and the ladies room was right outside of the dressing room for the dancers where they could be heard getting changed. At least they had a professional sound system or we may have missed all that witty banter from the guy with crooked teeth and cornrows. He announced he was from the south. No really!?

I was surprised at how many dances occurred with less than a half dozen men performing. They had group dances, individual dances, costume changes and even a few props. I think it was as entertaining as it could be given what they had to work with. From my understanding, a male review is supposed to be somewhat fantasy inducing, and my mind was definitely wandering. Unfortunately, my mind was reeling with questions like “I wonder how adonis ended up here, did he want to be a Juliard trained dancer but just couldn’t cut it?” or “I wonder if any of these guys were actually in the armed forces. Does putting on the military vest cause them to suffer PTSD?” or “who the hell picked this music? I heard the same songs at Drag Queen Bingo!” I mean seriously, when the song that is played repeatedly is pretty much the drag queen anthem, you have picked the wrong music to dance to.

When the country song came on, it was time to leave. I can only endure so much. Unfortunately, I think half of the audience was just waiting for someone to make the first move. I didn’t have to be asked twice. As soon as one of my friends made the “let’s bolt” face, I was at the door waiting. As we exited, the bachelorette party stumbled out behind us. A few other stragglers followed as well.The dancers were left with the gays and their crew which I think was right up their alley.

The woman who planned this event apologized profusely as we walked to our cars and we all assured her that the comic value made it a worthwhile night. She ended with saying “maybe we should stick to the arts and crafts…” Somehow I think we are going to end up in some DIY studio and they will also be playing “It’s Raining Men”.

**Photos have been withheld from this piece to protect the innocent.

There are only a few guys I want to see sweaty on a stage and Henry Rollins is one of them

 

Daredevil

by | Jan 24, 2019 | Life, Parenting

We took a little trip with my parents this weekend. My mom decided it would be fun for Riley to have an adventure every month, so we started out the year with a quick trip to Splash Village. It’s only about an hour away, so we can all pile into the car and get there quickly. My family is all about adventure, but the less time we have to spend getting there is always good. My daughter asks “how much longer until we are there?” within 5 minutes of us being in the car and when we haven’t even made it to the airport yet that question can make for a long trip. I have told her often how much I loved family trips as a kid and how being in the car with my parents was half of the fun, but she isn’t buying it. She was born into a world of instant gratification, where everything she wants to do or see is at her fingertips, so she wants everything right now. I’m trying not to take it personally, because honestly, I think my husband and I are just lovely to travel with.

I love that my parents are always ready to do anything with her. They are the kind of grandparents that loved being parents, even when it wasn’t easy, so I think part of their joy comes from watching me try to share the same kind of childhood with my daughter that I had. It let’s them know that they did a pretty good job raising me. Even better is that I married a man who likes to have them around as much as I do. The five of us have a lot of fun together.

We had never been to this hotel/water park before and really didn’t know what to expect. I loved the fairy decor from the stained glass windows in the front to the fairy paintings above the beds in the room. Even the water park had flowers and toad stools around the lazy river. My mom got to take her place in a good lounge chair and read a book while we all ran around like little kids going down water slides and getting buckets of water dumped on our heads. She often comments that she watches two kids in the afternoon, my daughter and my dad, but on vacation it’s more like four kids. She always says she wanted to have a big family and it didn’t work out that way, but it kind of did.

As a family, we have been to a lot of water parks because that’s what the littlest one wants to do. We have gone down slides into a shark tank, tubes in the dark and ones that gave us wedgies. We love them all. This park had a slide none of us would touch. It required you to stand at the top in a box and the floor dropped out from under you and dropped you down a shoot. This slide did not mess around. We watched a handful of people get on as we stood in line for the giant family tube we were waiting for and my daughter looked fascinated by it for a little bit but ran back to us after seeing the faces of the people dropping down. I give her three years before she’ll be begging me to do it with her. I think just watching the other people was giving her anxiety though. She is usually pretty excited as we stand in line and all of a sudden she was getting really scared and clinging to me like a scared cat. I’m pretty sure I still have some claw marks in my neck. By the time we were ready to climb on the raft I had to shake her off me into her seat.

The guy putting us on the raft must have been able to read our personality types by looking at us because my dad and I were facing backward and my husband and daughter were facing forward mostly on the way down. My dad and I are more the type to leap without looking and be surprised by what we get whereas my daughter and husband want to see every little bit. It was about the perfect ride for all of us. The next few times we went on were not so great for my husband who ended up backwards and motion sick by the bottom of the ride. He ended up having to sit down for 15 minutes while my dad and I went back up again with the little and down a few other slides in between. The kid can really wear you out if you aren’t careful. We ended up getting dinner, taking a second trip to the water park and blowing a weeks pay at the arcade before the night was over.

Of course when bedtime rolled around we all had a sugar buzz from the ice cream we just had to have before bed so nobody could sleep and we all played musical beds since Riley wants to make sure everyone gets their fair share of getting kicked in the head and kneed in the back while sleeping. We of course woke up to a foot of snow on the ground and all prayed for our life on the extended tip home. That’s pretty much par for the course when we travel. It takes about twice as long to get home just so we can hear the question “are we there yet?” twice as many times. Now we just need to wait for whatever adventure my mom plans for us in February. I’m sure whatever it is will have me ready to spend a few hours in the gym upon returning home and ready for a nap.

*I wrote this blog while listening to Rat Boy

 

 

Holiday in the Sun

by | Dec 4, 2018 | Being Awesome, Life

Since my daughter was thirteen months old we have vacationed in Atlantis. It’s been a few years since we have been here because my husband has this crazy idea that there should be a direct correlation between my income and the number of vacations we take. He worries about money more than anyone I know. Maybe it’s because I am capable of spending $1,000 while walking through the airport. There is a candy store in the resort that I have been known to spend upwards of $300 at. In my defense, the bulk rate is $5 per 1/4 pound. When the whole family tags along on vacation I go for a run every morning to pick out our spot by our favorite pool just so I can stop at the candy store and Starbucks on my way back to the room. I return sweaty, awake and ready for fun. My family, who are all eating breakfast, never questions why I’m not hungry. I am actually pretty proud of myself for only spending $90 at the candy store this week. You know you have a sugar problem when you can make that kind of statement.

Over the years our activities have changed based on the age of my daughter and if the old folks are traveling with us. Six years ago we started at the shallow, zero entry pools and beaches. We worked our way up to the kids pools, smaller slides and beaches with bigger waves. We have finally graduated to the big slides and dangerously rough waves. My little adrenaline junkie was running out on the closed beach demanding to jump in the waves and dragging me up the power tower to fly air born down a slide on a two person tube. We literally were air born for the first drop. The two of us combined weigh about as much as the average male so we bounce around like a pinball down most of the slides. Fortunately for me her favorite slide is the one that spits you out into a tube in the shark tank. You get to float through as sharks swim all around you. To me, that shark tank is one of the happiest places on earth. My husband joked that if I were super rich I would be one of those lunatics that buys exotic animals. Instead of tigers and llamas I would have an enormous tank of sharks. I would be at parties where people like Kanye West and his giant-assed wife talk about their Ferraris and Maseradis and I would be like “Yeah, that’s cool. I have a nurse shark, a reef shark, two blacktips and a hammerhead”. Thank God I’m not super rich because I am enough of an asshole already.

Speaking of assholes, I never encounter as many as I do on vacation. I remember the very first time my husband and I traveled to Atlantis and a group of twenty-somethings came walking through the aquarium with a boom box playing something awful like Pitbul or Lil’ somebody or other. I thought it was the cast of Jersey Shore but nobody was falling down drunk or taking their clothes off so I think it was just some other random idiots. I also thought this was a one time thing that I would never again see in my life. Sadly, I was very wrong. We encountered several groups of people walking around playing music on their phones. Strangely, they all had the same hair as the guys on that Jersey Shore show. I am beginning to think maybe this is a New Jersey thing. It must be loud with everyone walking around with their phones blaring. My husband overheard one of the women in one of these groups talking about being somewhere that was too classy for them so they had to come over to this pool where it was more relaxed. She was wearing a bathing suit that said “Barbie” on the front. I have far too many things to say about this, so I will just not say anything.

The second type of asshole we encounter on vacation is the woman who feels the need to wear full makeup and false eyelashes to ride on water slides.Seriously, who does this? At least a few dozen women from what I saw this week. My favorite part about watching these women is seeing them at the bottom of the slide with their makeup running and eyelashes hanging half off one eye like a little caterpillar jumped on their face as their tube made it’s way down the slide. One woman stood out even among these clowns. She wore hot pink eye shadow with gold polka dots, false eyelashes that looked like two barbers combs taped to her eyelids and a red swimming cap. Yes, a red swimming cap. My seven year old couldn’t stop laughing when she saw this woman standing a few stairs ahead of us getting ready for the tallest slide at the place. When children are laughing at you it might be time to evaluate how you have become a caricature of yourself. I never saw if she actually made it onto a slide. Somehow I think she is probably still standing there talking about her weave getting wet and asking the attendant why she can’t wear her thirteen bangle bracelets and layers of gold necklaces down the slide. Some people just want to be seen. Others want to be seen from space.

My all time favorite of the vacation assholes is the drunken train wreck. I don’t know what it is about water that can turn your average heavy drinker into a total shit show but it happens. There are a lot of people sitting around the pool enjoying fruity cocktails of the alcoholic variety. They are relaxing on vacation and having a drink or two while they watch their kids play in the water. Then there is the middle aged woman who can hardly keep herself upright making a spectacle of herself. A few days ago my husband came back from a slide with my daughter trailing behind him. He told me a drunk woman almost fell on top of our daughter. My only response to this was it was probably best that he was the one with her when it happened or the woman may have quickly become a toothless drunken mess. I don’t care what you do to yourself, but don’t put my child in danger. An hour later we were standing in line at the bar behind a couple of women ordering drinks very loudly and promptly spilling half of them when they arrived. I pointed at one of the women and asked my husband if it was the woman and he laughed that I could pick her out so easily. It wasn’t that hard considering she was having difficulty holding herself upright at the bar. As we ordered our virgin pina coladas she slurred loudly “Virgin? No, you need alcohol!” to which I loudly replied “You clearly don’t need any more alcohol. You are already embarrassing yourself”. Had she not almost taken my kid out I probably wouldn’t have said anything but I really couldn’t help myself. I don’t think she heard me, but her friend did. I watched as she danced off to a group of cabana boys and started high fiving them. I was mentally preparing myself for when she started stripping because it looked like she might start taking off her clothes any minute. As we walked away, a guy walking behind us commented on how trashed the woman was. He said he watched her almost fall in a pool earlier. When he said he hoped she didn’t hurt herself or anyone else my response was that I hoped she didn’t hurt anyone else, but her hurting herself wouldn’t be the worst thing. Knocking out her front teeth or almost drowning could be the rock bottom she needed to get herself some help. But who am I to say? I’m just happy she was the only person we encountered in our week stay that was that drunk. I don’t drink and I don’t have a lot of patience for people who are too drunk to take care of themselves. That probably makes me an asshole, but I’m okay with that. I’m sure I made someone else’s list of vacation assholes.

Cruisin’

by | Sep 2, 2018 | Life, Parenting

The Woodward Dream Cruise is an annual gathering of grease monkeys, old timers reliving their glory days through metal and rubber and muscle car junkies. What started as a one day event has slowly turned into a week long series of events and traffic nightmare. People line up lawn chairs along the curb for miles waiting for the pageantry as mustangs and bitchin’ camaros burn rubber. Lime green hearses and airbrushed vans also cruise up and down the avenue as well as the occasional 1978 rusted out pinto. It is a giant pain in the ass for everyone else traveling within five square miles of the ten mile stretch for a week.

We are a car family. Fast cars. I have heard stories about my dad’s mom racing anyone who pulled up next to her in her Chevelle. Years later I did the same thing in my mustangs and porsche. I vividly recall my dad waking me up to watch the car race scene in Bullitt when I was a teenager. The rumbling of a big block engine elicits in me the same response as the aroma of chocolate chip cookies coming out of grandma’s oven.

Needless to say, my dad is all about the dream cruise and all it entails. He has rented hotel rooms for the day to have a place to keep snacks and have easy access to a bathroom for his friends and family as we sat under tents watching cars roll past for hours on end. This year he bought VIP tickets to an event at the beginning of the week called “Road Kill” which was drag racing at the northern most part of the Dream Cruise stretch. He spent an entire day with his friends watching cars peel out. He brought home souvenir foam fingers and back packs which my daughter has been carrying around for days.

He has been trying to get her as excited about cars as he and I both get with little luck. She doesn’t quite get it yet, being only seven and not having actually put the petal to the metal. She is a late bloomer in my family. I was on my first motorcycle ride at six months old and wearing my first helmet by age three. I was also driving a motorcycle by this age. This is the first summer that my kiddo has actually started to feel the need for speed. She has driven her dad’s car a few times and the wave runners on the lake.

And this year she went cruising with grandpa during the dream cruise. He picked her up on a Wednesday night in my mom’s convertible and they went driving around checking out cars for a few hours. She even took a few pictures and chatted up some of the drivers. She came home with her first dream cruise t-shirt and has been asking me to tell her stories about all of my old cars and racing. I think she has finally been inducted into the family tradition. Watch out world, here comes another little thrill seeker.

Get in the Van

by | Apr 8, 2018 | Being Awesome, Life

One of us had a custom plate…

My friend texted me the other day that she got a new car. She didn’t notice her new license plate until she was approaching her car from the rear at Costco. The license plate began with “BJ” which made her want to drive right back to the dealership and return the car. I told her it wasn’t that bad. Well, unless it ended in “QUEEN” or started with “FREE”. She kept the car.

I have seen a lot of interesting vanity plates over the years. I have never had one, and I have a feeling that they wouldn’t print anything I would want my plate to say. I remember spending some time in Washington DC and being amazed at the amount of vanity plates. It made sense with all the politicians and their over-inflated egos. Of course people had to know who they were, even if it took  a license plate to give them their proper recognition. Maybe it is trendy with the transplants. Some of the plates I had to look at for a full minute before I could decipher what they were trying to convey. None of the plates were comical or ironic like the ones I like to see. I didn’t even see a single “POLILOSER” or anything similar. Boring.

In the city I live in, I don’t see very many vanity plates, but when I do they are actually pretty helpful to me. I can pull up next to the plate that says “Shriya” and yell “Hey Shriya, congratulations on your first time driving a car. It only took you two and a half minutes to navigate that turn and you almost missed that mailbox!” I feel it’s nice to call people by name when you can. A thumbs up is also appreciated. Sometimes they even return a hand gesture, but that is usually from a driver with the “MYTOY” or “VETTEGUY” plate.

He’s creepin’

I was behind a car a few years ago that had a vanity plate that read “HOTTIE2”. I guess “HOTTIE1” was already taken. I thought I was behind a beauty queen runner up but when I pulled up beside the 1998 Cavalier, there was a 90 year old man peering over the steering wheel. Hottie 2 indeed. Maybe he meant Hottie World War 2. Either this old guy had a wicked sense of irony or he had borrowed his granddaughter’s car. Either way, I liked him. His granddaughter probably got that plate thinking it would prevent people from asking to borrow it. Well played old dude. He got a thumbs up which immediately caused him to swerve into the curb.

My family was driving a month ago headed north to go visit my Grandmother. We pulled up next to a van with  a plate that read “CREEPEN”. It was a dark van with tinted windows in the back. All it needed was a sign on the side that said “FREE CANDY” to complete the look. It would have been funnier if it wasn’t in mid-Michigan where the movie Deliverance could be considered a documentary. The van was full of a group of college guys. Now I am really hoping the plate was meant to be ironic. If not, it is at least a great public service announcement.

It got me wondering if “CREEPER” or “CREEPIN” were already taken. If not, I may have found my vanity plate. They are going to love me when I pick up my 7 year old from school!

Not surprisingly, I wrote this piece while listening to some punk rock. Die, Die My Darling by the Misfits of course!

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