The best e-mail I have ever gotten in my life ever

My little hometown at the beach now has a Harley Davidson dealership. This completely blows my mind because I remember when it didn't even have a Hardee's. I asked my Sainted Southern Mother to please get me a "Harley of Shallotte" tee shirt for a White Trash party I'm going to this weekend.

She did, bless her heart!!! Here's her story of her visit to the motorcycle dealership:

(from: my mama)
(to: me and my facebook friends)

Well, let me tell you about my trip to Harley Davidson dealership.

First of all your father would not let me go by myself - so he goes with me. When I turned off Hwy 17 to enter Harley's parking lot I said, "Oh, please Lord, don't let anyone see me".

We went in and I was stunned. I have never seen so many motorcycles in my life!!! There were so many people in that place and they must have had at least 20 employees. About five dove at me and asked if they could help me and of course I gave them my honey dripping smile and said, "Hon, of course you may". Your Dad pretended he didn't know me and went to look at the 'wheels'.

Oh, good Lord, all of y'all should have been flies on the walls - some of the clothing items blew me away! The young lady asked me if my daughter had a Harley. I gasped and said, "Heavens no!!", then caught myself and honestly I don't know what I said after that.

After my purchase I was asked to go upstairs to the bar, have a drink and play pool. Again, I almost died, looked for your Dad and said, "It's time for us to go".

I really was impressed with the staff and facility. I do wish them a success in Shallotte.

Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble - and by the way I mailed your shirt express mail.

Luv ya!
Ma

p.s. I forgot to tell you, your Dad was the one who selected the shirt we purchased (and then disappeared) and Lord have mercy it is trashy!!!

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How awesome is my Sainted Southern Mother? Seriously. She reads this blog (which is why I don't use "ugly" words or tell "vulgar" stories), so give her some love!

How to make the white people dance

Just play "The Electric Slide," especially at a wedding reception with an open bar. Great-Aunt Gladys might sit around her house listening to Artie Shaw phonograph records and complaining about kids these days, but when the wedding DJ spins the first two notes to "The Electric Slide," she'll jump right over her walker and knock over some little ones to get in the line on the dance floor.

Because I never learned the dance or how to hide my disgust when the song is played, I can't explain this phenomenon, except to say that maybe the white folks feel confident mimicking proscribed moves. Hence, the line dance craze.

This leads me to my point: Wedding DJs are the biggest dorks in the world (followed closely by wedding bands) and they can't be trusted. I have had two -- count them, TWO -- friends hire DJs for their receptions and specifically tell them NOT to play "The Electric Slide," but they did anyway.

So when Steve and I planned our wedding reception at the dive bar three years ago, we programmed our own music. I like to think nobody we invited knew how to do "The Electric Slide," but I wasn't going to chance losing respect for anyone who loved us enough to join us on our big day by trusting my playlist to a DJ.

What clever people we were as we spent an entire week programming four hours' worth of music! For the first hour, when guests would get there before us, we loaded up the AM Gold, delighting our audience with Barry Manilow, Air Supply, Player and Rupert Holmes. From there we segued through classic soul and into 80s ballads up to the point where we got onstage for the speeches before our first dance, to "Slave to Love."

After that, we picked up the pace. I grabbed the mike and yelled, "Hey everybody, come dance with us to our song!" A few people who'd been served enough to start feeling brave came and joined us for Gran Torino's "Moments With You."

That song ended, and only two seconds into the next song, all my friends -- white, black, gay, straight, hipster, professional -- rushed onto the floor. I was dancing with my arty friend Buttercup. My 5-year-old nephew Banyan, whose miniature tux was unbuttoned and shirttails were pulled out, was busting the moves along with us. Unfortunately, Ban's signature move of spinning around with his eyes closed kept causing him to fall on the floor. Each time, he'd jump right back up and do it again, even after Buttercup yelled, "Somebody cut this guy off!"

The song? "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough."


Michael Jackson - Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough (Official Music Video) - The most amazing bloopers are here

I never will forget those nights (and days)

I was out in public with friends the other night in a very loud place. The music these kids listen to today was annoying me anyway, but when I heard the familiar, sacred opening notes to "Boys of Summer" mixed into an insipid dance beat, I gasped. No, really. My face contorted into one not unlike the victims in "The Ring." Time went to slow motion as I spun around and my gaze settled on my friend Maria's, which was set in exactly the same expression as mine.

I know the kids, with their superstar producers, are mining the "oldies" for songs to sample or remake, because kids these days .... But don't mess with "Boys of Summer."

Seriously. They don't love boys of summer like I do, and I don't approve of their blasphemy.

I grew up in a small, Southern town that happened to be at the beach. My Sainted Southern Mother (SSM) took us out every day in the summers to burn off energy, and each day went a little something like this:

* My SSM would spend an hour preparing a picnic of sandwiches, Bugles and Coca-Cola products, herding the three of us into our bathing suits, then putting on the perfect finishing touches on her hair and makeup before loading us into the wood-paneled station wagon.

* Once we got to the beach, SSM would slather us down in the harsh 1970s sun creme I can still taste and feel stinging my eyes.

* SSM would set up the chairs and the food, then arrange herself delicately and attractively in the sun. (My mama was a knockout, btw.)

* One of us would take a bite of a sandwich, get a mouthful of sand, and start crying.

* While my SSM tended to the crying child, the other two waded out into the ocean and got carried a hundred feet eastward by the drift tow. As they bobbed up and down, one would inevitably get knocked over by a wave, scrape her face on the bottom and stagger out of the surf wailing from her near-death experience. And the other would get yelled at laughing at her sister's misery.

* Now with three crying little girls, my SSM would pack up the station wagon with its searing-hot vinyl seats and drive over the bridge back to our house. 

* Once home, my SSM would line her three daughters up in the backyard and spray them down with the garden hose before letting them in her house.

That's when we were small. I think it was around age 10 for each of us when my Sainted Southern Mother wised up and just dumped us off at the beach with our playmates for the day.

And that's when I started making friends with the summer kids from faraway places like Raleigh and Charlotte, whose families owned houses they only lived in during the school break. The ones my age all just happened to be boys.

We started out splashing around in tidal pools and digging up sand fleas. Before long, we were pirate twins in the dunes. We were absolutely fearless, with our skinny bodies tanned and our hair streaked blond. We ran races up and down the shore, our feet splashing in the salt water. We screamed our hearts out with glee out there on the beach, where nobody would admonish us for not using our inside voices, and we all whimpered and squirmed as our parents pulled us apart to go home for dinner.

Each school year started and we sent each other letters, counting down the days until school would be out for summer. I missed them so much during the winter, when there seriously was nobody on the road or beach.

We got older and started hanging out in the arcade, playing air hockey and Galaga, plugging quarters into the jukebox to hear Def Leppard over and over. Then, before we knew it, we were getting together after dark, sitting on the beach, listening to "The Boys of Summer" on a boombox, drinking wine coolers someone's older brother scored for us. The next summer, we were always piled up in someone's beater car with the windows down and sunroof open, riding up and down the island, the Cure blasting on the radio, elaborate 80s hairstyles getting ruined and feeling more young and alive than ever. 

We always ended up back on the beach, looking at the stars and wondering what life after school would be like. And we couldn't imagine that we'd ever be apart.

Then it ended, our childhoods on the beach. I moved away for college and never came home for good again, they became grownups who didn't vacation with their parents, and we all lost touch.

Still, all these years later, they will live in my memory as the boys of summer.

Don Henley |MTV Music

(for Bernard)

The best ad copy I ever wrote in my life...

... got me no raises, no Addys and wasn't even printed.

It only appeared on match dot com. I was searching for an intelligent, silly person. My perfect match saw it, paid $19.95 to respond, and the rest is history.

Mr. Sweetypants travels constantly for his job. This was never an issue for us the first few years; my most successful relationships in my youth were long distance and, at the tender age of 35 when we got together, I was accustomed to living alone.

But lately, I've had nothing to dread -- er, do -- during my unemployment and I rely on Mr. Sweetypants to keep me entertained, so I miss him when he's gone for days on end. Dave and Eudora are here, but they don't break into improvisational song or hurl lightning-fast insult comedy quips.

Truth be told, I've gone a bit feral here on my own with no mandated routine. I wear comfortable clothes and don't put product in my hair, let alone putting on makeup. I eat when I'm starving and sleep when I need to, which happens to be for four hours twice a day.

I woke up from my most recent nap, glanced at the clock on the cable box, and saw that it was 7. Sleepy and groggy as I was, I couldn't remember what time I'd gone to sleep and panicked because I honestly didn't know if it was morning or evening. So I turned on the TV to see if Jeopardy or Good Morning America was on. GMA. Problem solved.

Needing to share this hysterical bit of stupidity on my part with the person who would most appreciate it, I e-mailed Mr. Sweetypants. He called two minutes later from his hotel room.

"What are you doing up this early?," I asked, "Aren't you in a different time zone?"

Unsure of what time it was because the room didn't have a clock, Mr. Sweetypants decided to rely on his trusty companion, Mr. iPhone. I heard him shuffling around before he said, "I can't find my phone."

"You mean the one you're speaking to me on?" I replied, ending a sentence with a preposition and dissolving into laughter.

We agreed that we were even and started talking about time zones, trying to figure out what time it was there. Mr. Sweetypants, the scientist and geography buff, started quoting latitudes and longitudes while I thought about TV listing times for the Central, Mountain and Pacific zones.

"Yes, but Iowa is west of here," I said, proudly figuring out that west is behind.

"I'm in Maine!," he reminded me.

Oh yeah. Oops. I really need a job, but that's the only thing I need. I've got my Mr. Sweetypants and two surly, nonplussed cats to round everything else out.

As girlie as I was in the 80s...

I just could not stomach unicorns.

Seriously. My sister, my best friend and I made fun of the subculture of girls who bought unicorn figurines and fantasy airbrushed posters from Spencer Gifts. We called them "purple girls," as they usually wore purple unironically and we weren't that good at coming up with subtle cracks back then.

My daddy took the three of us to see "Legend" at the movie theatre and the showing was filled with purple girls. "Oh, come on," I said way too loudly during the unicorn scene, when the poorly affixed horn wobbled on the horse's -- sorry, the "unicorn's" head. "SHHHHHHH!!!," the purple girls in the audience hissed at me. There were way more of them, so I piped down.

A decade or so ago, when I was in my late 20s, I found the greatest tee-shirt ever at Hot Topic (because I was totally underground at bought clothes at the mall Goth store): It was purple, had a picture of a unicorn shooting a rainbow from its horn, and the words "Unicorns are stupid."

I freakin' loved that tee-shirt. My Sainted Southern Mother saw me wearing it once, asked me to stand still so she could read it, and replied, "Yes. They are stupid."

Because I have been lucky enough in my career to never be beholden to a dress code at work, I wore it to my job. I was trapped in the elevator one day with an example of the Peter Principle who was way higher up the food chain than I was and she commented on the shirt: "Well, they aren't around anymore." And I could only smile politely.

Around that time, I had decided that the funniest thing in the world was to give myself fake names at delis as I waited for my order. "Leigh Ann," after all, though it is only two simple syllables, can be spelled 15 or so different ways and spelling it out is tiresome. So I renamed myself the funniest name I could think of. "Brandi, with an I," I always told the person at the counter. Comedy genius, I thought.

My grownup best friend invited me to a party in his neighborhood one night years ago, and I wore the shirt. It was a huge party, so we had to fill out name tags on the way in.  I wrote "Brandi" on mine and we made our way into the party, passing through the den, which featured a very elaborate, bone china unicorn as the centerpiece.

"Oh, shit," we both thought at the same time. I stuck around long enough to have a couple of drinks, crossing my arms over my chest while dodging the host and hostess, then ducked out, claiming babysitter problems (for the children I did not have).

Still. Unicorns? Really?

I am extremely proud to write that our disdain for them runs into three generations of my family now. Two Christmases ago, my darling nephew Joshua used his Christmas shopping money and picked out the best present ever for me:

Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?

I am from a small town in the South and my co-conspirator, Mr. Sweetypants is from a factory town in Engerlund. I've written before about how we talk different. (That's not a typo, it's vernacular.)

We celebrate our diversity and each other's heritage and background. Not regularly; we usually just sit around making fun of each other. From time to time, we play the "How do you pronounce this?" game, wherein one of us writes a word, asks the other to say it and then ridicules his or her laughable mispronunciation.

So I was sitting here at the computer, minding my own business last night when Mr. Sweetypants thrust a piece of paper in my face. It read: Controversy.

"Con-TRO-vers-y," I said. "Not Cahn-trahv-ers-y, you silly person."

Except I didn't say "person." I said (sang, actually) another word, one from "Sexy MF" because I have been in love with Prince since I was a tween and "Controversy" is the best. song. ever.

Prince. He is one sexy person. "1999" came out when I was in the 8th grade and I got weird feelings every time I saw the "Little Red Corvette" video.  The next year, when I was 14 and too young to see an R-rated movie on my own, I got my aunt to take me to see "Purple Rain." Then I swooned at dances in the school cafeteria my freshman year in high school when the dj played "Purple Rain" as the slow jam.

It only got better. "Sign o' the Times" came out when I was old enough to drive and I tore that cassette up in my bitchin' Camaro. My girlfriends and I, during our freshman year in college, ran squealing onto the dance floor at the club every time "Hot Thing" was played. And we did the same thing four years later, when we were official young professionals, when "Gett Off" came on.

In 1997, Prince announced a tour of "surprise" shows, wherein tickets went on sale seven days in advance. I was shocked -- SHOCKED -- to hear one of the shows would be in Raleigh. So I called my best friend Michael and we agreed to buy two sets of tickets, like we'd always done for Lollapalooza, and sell the lesser seats whichever one of us ended up with.

At 10 that Friday morning, in the days before online buying, we both called and got tickets. I called Michael afterward. "I got 7th row!!!!" he proclaimed jubilantly. "That's cool," I said calmly, "But I got FRONT ROW!!!!"

That's right. We sat in the front row for Prince on a greatest hits tour. No "Here's one from the new album" giving us a reason to go to the bathroom or concession stands. It was Prince, feet away from us, performing the songs we grew up with and loved. When he slapped Michael's hand, our other friend grabbed Michael's hand and put it on her boob. 

So, vicariously, Prince touched my girlfriend's boob. And she gets to think about it every day for the rest of her life when she's getting dressed. I too, took home something Prince touched, and it's been on my refrigerator ever since.

I was there. I saw it.

During my junior year in college, my roommate Kathy and I were f-l-a-t broke all the time. So we watched a lot of TV. 

We saw a commercial for Dollywood, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, two or three times a night. And we made fun of it, and Dolly Parton and the sort of people who would go there, every single time it ran.

Being the too-cool-for-school, ironic hipsters we thought we were at the time, along with the young girls who loved amusement parks we actually were, we decided it would be freaking hysterical to go to Dollywood and make cracks for a day. Fall break was coming and we both had fabulous Discover cards we'd gotten along with some free Tupperware we badly needed from the nice guy in the mall who didn't think our lack of tangible income was an impediment to getting credit.

We (and our best friend Rex) set off in Kathy's Hyundai (it was much nicer than my '77 Mazda GLC) on the six-hour journey to the Tennessee mountains. We checked in to the cheapest motel we could find (one bed for all three of us) and snickered about our plan.

First thing at 11 in the morning, we rallied, gorged ourselves at Duff's Smorgas, then set off to Dollywood. At the gate, we were offered two ticket options: one for the park only and one for the park and a Ray "The Streak" Stevens show. "As if," we sniffed snottily, purchasing our park-only tickets on our Discover cards.

We rode rides until the late afternoon. Because it was the off-season, there were no lines, so we did them over and over. 

Eventually, we got done with all the adrenaline rushes and settled back into our mission. We went to the Dolly museum.

"Bahahahaha, this is going to be so funny!" all three of us each said at some point as we waited in the longest line we'd encountered all day. 

We stopped making jokes once we got inside the exhibit. We saw pictures of poverty none of us could begin to imagine: a family of 12 children whose parents had no money in post-war Appalachia, but did the best they could.

I was starting to feel like the world's worst person around that time. But then we moved forward a few feet to the next exhibit.

There, behind the glass, was the coat of many colors. It was tiny and patchworked. The cuffs were frayed. It had grass stains. The story was written on the pane in front of it and the song played on a loop.

My friends teared up, but I wept like a baby. My nose started running and I had nowhere to blow it. I got the little kid wind-sucking sound because I couldn't catch my breath from crying. Kathy and Rex gently guided me back out into the sunlight.

We don't talk much about it, but we all changed that day. We were never the same again. 

I think I can speak for all of us, though. If you laugh and make fun of our Dolly, we will cut you up pretty bad.