twosmallmonsters

When I was in the second grade, my two closest friends were sisters. Sarah loved to wear shiny blue Umbros & she also loved her commercial celebrity stuffed animal, Snuggles the fabric softener bear. Sarah was my age. Michelle, her sister, was the goofball love of my life trailing behind as one year younger than us. All three of us thought "Smuckers" was the funniest word imaginable. We giggled and eventually breathlessly howled with laughter every time someone would say the word. Even as a six year old Michelle could flawlessly impersonate Peter Jennings. She was always the star of our very own created and produced Weak News. Before sleep, we would huddle together in our sleeping bags and partake in our slumber party tradition: The Hanes Story. There really was little plot to the Hanes story, just a lot of adjectives and descriptions all related to underwear. Usually it was I who told the unremarkable story of the man who only wore white Hanes underwear, lived in a house shaped like Hanes underwear, & whose name was Joe Hanes . . . I think you get the picture.

I am at the gym now and am on an elliptical machine. I prefer running outdoors but am not motivated enough to wake up before work and before the summer heat settles in. I get bored on exercise machines but have found the cure to the monotanous gym environment: David Sedaris on cd. Today, however, there is an actual music video on VH1 & it is a Gwen Stefani video of her single "Cool". The televisions at the gym are silent but you can either read the captions or tune your radio into the correct frequency. The video is colorful and catches my attention. I briefly read the captions and realize how entirely dumb the words are. "I now realize we are cool/ yeah cool/ we are cool/ yeah cool" You simply cannot read a music video or even watch it on mute. The experience is ridiculous & rather intellectually frustrating.

A few moments of this reminds me of another passtime that Michelle, Sarah, and I shared as kids. If we were hanging around a television tuned in to VH1 and the ever so popular Rod Stewart rock video came on, we would jump to our feet, immediately mute the video, and play other music in the background. I suggest trying this- as I remember, it is quite entertaining because Rod sings with such passion and with so many dramatic head movements that his video can be convincingly dubbed over by Wilson Phillips or any other fabulous band. It will look like he is singing whatever you have playing. Genius. Unfortunatly I have not seen this magical phenomenon performed since fifth grade. I can hardly count on VH1 to air "Downtown Train" anymore. But I do know that the humor we shared many years ago still persists. I still laugh when I hear the word Smuckers.