Really, Dolly?

Not entirely sure I get this one. Granted, there usually isn't much of anything to "get" about most of what this family gets up to, but in this case, i can't tell if Dolly is supposed to have the dress on backwards, or if it's one of those dresses that buttons up the back. Maybe Jeff Keane doesn't know there are dresses that button up the back, and thus didn't realize the potential ambiguity?

In any case, the Exorcist-y image is rife with parody caption potential, but I'll leave that to someone else, as i disapprove of such things.

I Could Live Without A Parade

As a lil’ lady growing up in  Manhattan (Kansas, the Little Apple), I sometimes spent time with family friends who lived on some farmland in Clay Center, a rural town about 45 minutes away from our college town. I don’t remember much about the family – I  cant even recall their names – but my memories of them mostly involve watching a  lot of taped episodes of Full House with the mom and daughter, a show I wasn’t allowed to watch at home.

Anyway, maybe it was Memorial Day, or possibly the anniversary of Clay Center’s founding, but the daughter was going to be in a parade. And I was going to be in the parade too! But just as all the kids were being rounded up to sit on the rudimentary float – which,  as I recall was some sort of large slab on wheels, covered in white fluffy fabric , on which children would sit and gently wave red roses in the direction of the crowed – I decided that the whole being-in-a-parade thing really wasn’t for me.  

I’m guessing my refusal involved casting my eyes downward, abandoning all but the most basic verbal communication, and possibly squeezing out a few tears (this, I’m sorry to say, is not entirely dissimilar to my current go-to approach to getting out of things).  I was offered the chance to ride in the bed of the pickup that was going to pull the float along (which seems pretty dangerous, though I suppose it would have been traveling at a relatively safe parade pace), as well as the option of riding inside the cab of the truck.  But I wouldn’t have it.

Why? I’m not sure. I was a pretty shy kid, and not very much fun, so that probably had something to do with it.  Maybe I was scared of sliding off the side of that float.  Maybe I was scared that the parade would take me away forever, and that I’d never see my family again.  But if I had known  that would be my only chance to be in a parade -- I mean, let’s face it.  I’m a stranger to the pageant circuit, I’m not in the armed forces, and I don’t know how to wrangle a giant balloon --  I probably wouldn’t have been such a baby about the whole thing.

Then again, I – unlike the kids on the float – ended up having a lot of candy thrown my way.  Maybe I did make the right decision. 

P.S. Hi Kj!