Stupid is as stupid does

Every Saturday morning I meet my favorite work-out buddy at the YMCA at 7:00 a.m. and we walk on the treadmill and then go to our "Abs Attack!" class. It is a real sacrifice on my part because I really, really, really like sleeping. Plus, I barely have enough time for a cup of coffee before I leave, and it is such a drag to have to wake Tony up so early on a Saturday morning to make a whole pot of coffee so I can have some before I go. Yes, I know I could make it myself, but Tony really enjoys getting me my first cup of coffee in the morning, even if it is at 6:30 on a Saturday morning. (I'm being totally sarcastic here...but the funny thing is, even if he doesn't enjoy making my coffee every morning, he ALWAYS does it and hand delivers it to me in bed. Is that love, or what??) Anyway, after my morning workout I come home and sit on the couch and drink more coffee (Yes, Tony makes a fresh pot right before I come home. The man is my own personal Starbucks.) and read the paper.

Last Saturday I was reading the paper and I came across an article that I just can't stop thinking about. It just makes me so mad, I can't believe it. The article had a picture of a black man standing outdoors looking at something in the distance and underneath his picture were the mugshots of 4 white guys. The black man was obviously mentally impaired and was really small and skinny. The four white guys had big fat necks as wide as their heads and defiant scowls on their faces. The story was about how these 4 white guys beat the crap out of this black guy and left him to die next to a dumpster in 2003. The black man was mentally retarded to begin with, but as a result of the beating he is now permanently brain damaged and barely able to walk or speak. Yet, the guys that did this to him were only convicted of misdemeanors and spent less than 60 days in jail. Billy Ray (the black man) is now confined to a nursing home.

What these red-necked bigoted morons did was pick up this man off the street and take him to a "party" in a cow pasture where they made him dance, screamed racial insults at him, then beat him unconscious and took him to a remote dump to die. After this they went and washed their pick-up to get Billy Ray's blood and vomit off. Did I mention that Billy Ray was 46 years old at the time and couldn't function above a 12 year old's level? And the pieces of crap white boys that did this to him were all in their early 20's.

Okay, so the Tribune did a story about this case and as a result the Southern Poverty Law Center brought a civil case against the 4 idiots that beat him up and now they have to pay him $9 million in damages. There is some justice in that, except these idiots probably work at Burger King. In any case, did I happen to mention that this all took place in TEXAS? If you don't know how I feel about Texas, refer to my earlier posts. The article insinuated that the people in the idiot's hometown thought of them as "good ol' boys" who didn't really do anything wrong. Anyway, so now they are supposed to come up with nine million dollars...and they probably only make $30,000 a year half of which is spent on beer and the rest on gun racks for their pick-up trucks. (I am being generous when I assume they make $30,000 a year.) Just to illustrate how stupid these guys are...one of them acted as his own attorney. His name is James Cory Hicks and he is 28 years old. According to the paper he showed no remorse throughout the latest trial. What a shock considering the kind of household he grew up in.

Now, I can presume to know what kind of household he grew up in from this quote attributed to Hicks' mother, "These boys' names are ruined for life. And Johnson (the black man) is better off today than he's ever been in his life. He roamed the streets, the family never knew where he was. Now in the nursing home he's got someone to take care of him." I mean, this woman was pissed! Her precious thug of a son was having his name besmirched! Wahhh! She should get the mother of the year award for sticking up for her son who apparently thought it was great fun to beat the shit out of mentally retarded people. I bet she met this kid's father at a lynching. As mad as I was at the 4 pea-brained morons that did this, I was even madder at this woman! Imagine, insinuating that her son had done this man a favor! It just made me want to find her and tell her off. But, you can't argue with stupid. She honestly believes what she said.

Doesn't that make you mad?

You make me feel like dancin'....

I take this "Group Groove" class at the YMCA. It is a dance fitness class--which means that it is this generation's answer to Jazzercise, which I can't believe people could even say with a straight face. I don't really know what Jazzercise is, but I can only imagine a bunch of women in leg warmers and headbands being led by a Richard Simmons wannabe. Now, if it were true to the name the entire class would take place in a dark room, everyone would be wearing black and nodding to a quartet and the only exercise would be lifting your right arm to light your cigarette. Now there's an exercise class I can get behind.

Anyway, my Groove class is nothing like that. We actually sweat. There are 9 or 10 tracks of music and there are routines we do to them. It sounds like aerobics but it isn't because we really dance. We do hip-hop and Latin and disco...it's a lot of fun. My neighbor teaches this class on occasion and I told her one day that I feel like a total idiot dancing, especially to the hip-hop numbers and she said, "Don't worry, no one's looking at you." I was like, "Who are you kidding?" She said, "No, really. Everyone is too busy trying to learn the dance to look at what everyone else is doing." I said, "Are you crazy? I look at EVERYONE. I don't care how stupid I look as long as I'm assured that there are people in there that look even stupider than I do." She said, "Oh, you're so bad," and I replied, "No, I'm just honest. I look around, see who is making a total fool of themselves and watch them the whole time. That's half the fun of the class."

Two other women I know take this class with me. This morning we were all totally distracted by this woman in the front row. She has been in our class before and when she walked in we all looked at each other and groaned. This out-of-shape fool thinks she's a Solid Gold Dancer. Honestly, she wears $70 jazz dance shoes and warms up like a ballet dancer would. However, she is 5 feet tall, weighs a good 160 (all of which she carries in her upper body judging from the number of rolls of back fat she has) and has a really pushed in face. I'm telling you, she looks like a Pekinese. If she turns to the side her face is completely flat. I have never seen anything like it. Now you would figure that someone that looks like that would not want to draw anymore attention to herself. But not this woman! She is in the FRONT row flipping her hair around and shaking her groove thing like a Fly-Girl. And she's doing it all with her serious dancer face on. I don't know why this annoys me so much, but it just does. Even our instructors don't over exaggerate their movements like this woman. She's throwing her arms around and shimmying and looking so smug at the same time. It makes me so mad, I just want to kick her.

So, today we are barely into the warm-up song when the nursery worker comes in the room and retrieves the Disco Queen to get her kid from the nursery. My two friends look at me and smile and we immediately mentally high-five each other. I turn to them and say, "It's because I was praying for her to leave, " and one of them says, "Oh! The church lady was praying and it worked!!" I said, "See! Behold the power of prayer."

Not two minutes later the Disco Queen walked back in and took her righteous spot in the front row, right in from of us. I said to my friends, "God was teasing me because I've been bad. If I were a better person she wouldn't have returned." So, we had to watch her cha-cha like she was Rita Moreno and disco like Denny Tario.

I left early.

I also like to watch the 70 year old Chinese woman who comes every Saturday. Bless her heart...she is the worst dancer I have ever, ever seen. Picture an ancient 4'11" Asian woman trying to dance to "Bootylicious". Yet, she is there every single Saturday. I love that. Plus, if I stand by her in class I look like a dancing genius. It's brilliant.

My neighbor, the teacher, is fun to watch too. She is a really great dancer. She is blond and pretty and thin. She has 4 kids. Secretly I hate her and imagine all these terrible things about her, like...she has a third nipple that mars her otherwise perfect body. Did I mention that she is really nice and friendly too. Plus, she lives in the biggest model house in our neighborhood and she has a big flat screen TV in her basement. Now you hate her too, right? (unless you are a man and now you WANT her. Sickos.)

Another fun person I watch is the pretty-cheerleader mom who is there in the evening class. She has a fantastic boob job. Her hair colorist is a genius. All her work-out outfits match. And she is a complete spazz. She looks like she is getting electrocuted. I keep waiting for Allen Funt to come out and tell me I am on Candid Camera. Seriously, she just looks ridiculous. I like to stand next to her too.

It all ends well...

I love teaching Sunday School. Well, let me amend that...I don't actually teach Sunday School, I am a Shepard. You see, our church does this thing called "The Rotation Model" and this is how it works. All the kids gather together for the first ten minutes of the Sunday School hour. Then they split into groups according to their grade in school. They then proceed to a classroom where someone is ready to teach them a lesson pertaining to whatever the theme of the rotation is...for example, we did a rotation about Jesus being a "fisher of men" and we had 6 classrooms set up to teach this lesson in different ways. There was a storytelling room where the story of Jesus gathering his Disciples was being told, and an art room where the kids took actual dead fish (no kidding) and dipped them in paint and made fish prints on muslin. (I don't really know what they were supposed to learn from that. I can tell you what I learned...boys are wimps. All the girls in my class picked up a gross dead fish and made the stupid fish print but none of the boys would touch the fish. Now, the woman who was in charge of getting the dead fish for this exercise waited until the last minute to get the fish and by the time she bought them, all she could find in the "not dismembered dead fish" category was partially dried smoked smelt. Do you know how much those fish stank? Plus, the room we did this in was really, really hot. I haven't smelled anything like it since my college roommate and I emptied out the 10 gallon fish tank and left the poor plecostemous in about an inch of water and then left for two weeks in the middle of summer. Yikes! In our defense, we forgot the stupid fish was there.) Anyway, back to the rotation thing. Each group of kids has a Shepard, and that is where I come in. I just take them to whatever room they need to be in. The idea is that one teacher will teach the same lesson 6 times (one week they will be teaching to the First grade class, and the next week to the Fifth grade class, etc. until all the kids have visited their classroom) and the Shepard's just make sure they get there and pay attention, etc. Well, I have been sheparding Brenna's class every week for the last 3 years and I like doing the sheparding instead of the teaching. That way I don't actually have to "prepare" a lesson and I get to see the same kids every Sunday so I know them really well and they are completely comfortable around me.

Last Sunday, though, was Easter so we did a special program about Holy Week. We kept all the kids together and took them through the Easter Story. In the first room they visited there were two adult men dressed up as Disciples and they reenacted the Last Supper (sort-of. I mean, there were 13 people at the last supper...) In any case, the kids took communion in that room and heard about Judas and the betrayal to come, etc. In the next room was the Garden of Gethsemane. There was a Roman Centurion in that room that told about the actual betrayal and how Jesus was led off to be crucified. The kids then left that room and passed by a huge wooden cross that was in the hallway and quietly entered the tomb. This is where I come in. I was to tell the last part of the story and the poor misguided church people let me pick my own costume. So, did I decide to be Mary the mother of Jesus and tell how I came to the tomb to anoint the body only to be greeted by an angel who told me Jesus had risen? NO. Was I the angel? GIVE ME A BREAK. Was I Peter who had to come and see the empty tomb for himself rather than take the word of Mary? PLEASE!!

I was the grim reaper. I dressed up in Brenna's Dementor costume. If you don't know what that looks like, see the picture above. Okay, so I'm in this totally scary black costume (with a hood that partially covered my face) in an almost completely dark room standing with my back to the kids as they enter. As if they haven't already been freaked out enough by the tale of Jesus getting lashed and crucified! (And let us not forget that Jesus went through all this for YOU, kids!! It's a wonder they aren't all in therapy.) Well, at least they were quiet...except for a few whispered, "Who is that?" I put a stop to that by lifting my arms and showing off the flowing black sleeves of my costume. I'm all about drama. However, I am not all about following the script because the grim reaper isn't actually in the Bible. Whatever.

Before I turned around I asked the kids in a deep voice, "Why are you here?" When they didn't answer, I asked again. Then I turned around. Slowly. When I took my hood off, the first thing I saw was our brand new Children's Ministries director sitting on the floor with about 5 Kindergartners in her lap. Did I mention that it was this woman's first day on the job? Hee! Hee! She must think we're a bunch of freaks to come up with this for Easter!! Well, I then went on to tell how the 3 women came to the tomb and the stone was rolled away and the angel came to ask them, Why do you look for the living among the dead?" and yadda, yadda, yadda. I looked scary, but I got to tell the best part of the story.