More of the story...

Friday night, after I arrived at my hosts' home on the outskirts of Topeka, we chilled and had a delicious homemade spaghetti dinner in between bonding moments with the host's 11 and 7 year old sons, my so-called nephews. Jake, the 11 yr old, wanted me to spend hours watching him play various on-line computer games involving wizards, magic wands and endless quests to find magic amulets, while Josh, the 7 yr old, was under the impression I was some sort of new, stretchy, bouncy fun toy for him to pummel and bruise. Except for a traumatic vomiting incident by the overly excited and overly over-snacked 11 year old and the irritation of having to listen to a room full of overly excited and overly inebriated adult male heterosexuals while they watched a college football game, it was an enjoyable evening.

Saturday was spent driving around and going down various Memory Lanes, much to the chagrin of the 7 year old, ("Are we done going down Memory Lane? Memory Lane is BORING!") I also got to enjoy lunch at my favorite bbq restaurant and had to endure a tour of the busy commercial strip of Topeka and all it's newest chain restaurants; apparently, Topeka now has a branch of everything except The Cheesecake Factory...

Saturday nite, we went to Chili's for dinner, then dumped the kids off at grandma's while the grownups went to a cheap tavern for booze and pool. I had a good time slumming in a dive and vastly enjoyed my "Slippery Nipples" as well as my attempts to annoy the locals by playing Shirley Bassey and Scissor Sisters incessantly on the jukebox. (In my defense, it was a reaction to the non-stop barrage of Bon Jovi and Metallica). It was also enormously entertaining to watch a gaggle of local hootchies put the moves on one of my host's single male friends. He is recently separated from his wife and nervously on the market, but he was encouraged to refrain from sampling the wares of a cadre of barely legal porkettes whose slutty outfits and garishly applied make-up seemed to scream out, "Chlamydia: Come and Get It!"

It was a fun evening.

Sunday was spent lounging around the house and I was introduced to an entire world of Bravo produced entertainment...I'm not sure how I've gone this long in life without the joys of Project Runaway, Top Design, and Tabatha's Salon Takeover. I had at least heard of the first two shows, but the delightful Tabatha was an unknown quantity and let me tell you, it's fucking great! It's a simple premise; a virtual copy of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares...A bitchy, British hairdresser to the stars, (who I've never heard of, prior to this show), goes around to tacky beauty salons and gives them a makeover which basically consists of giving everyone involved a good, swift, well-deserved kick in the arse. The best episode I saw, was one where she went to this gawdawful, strip-mall salon on Long Island populated by a bunch of rejects from a Sopranoes extras casting call, or perhaps, a traveling carnival. There was a delicious amount of blue eyeshadow AND blue language, not to mention the fact that all the hairdressers themselves had horrible hairdos, which Tabatha also noticed and in order to teach them how to be classy, she took them all to a posh, high-end salon in Manhattan and gave them all make-overs. For the most part, they all still looked pretty trashy, but at least in was a fresh, up-to-date kind of trashy instead of the tired 80's looks they'd been sporting before. And, what I really appreciated about this show, was that it did NOT have a happy ending...when Tabatha came back for her 6 week check-up, the deadbeat owners were no where to be found and hadn't stuck to any of the improvements and the poor hairdressers were upset that things had gone back to the way they were before Tabatha showed up...but at least they had cute new hair-dos and personally, off camera, I bet Tabatha advised them to jump ship and find themselves a better salon to work in...

More to come.