It was about a week before Christmas and I was working a night shift. My lunch hour fell around 7:00 PM so I thought I’d take the opportunity to get some shopping done. I had to stop into a Bath & Bodyworks to get some lotions and whatnot. When I walked in the door I was blown away by the crowd. I expected the place to be busy but I didn’t expect a scene from Woodstock. I thought to myself that perhaps the reason for the cast of thousands was because they were having a big sale. Wrong! It was just extremely crowded.
I guess they were expecting the weather to be far colder than it actually was because they had the heat cranked up to the Satanic setting. With the heater on steroids and enough people to start our own small country the place was really warm. But as sweltering as it was none of us had any idea that things were about to get significantly warmer. I elbowed some people aside and shanked a couple of televangelists to get to the prepackaged gift assortments that have become the time honored gift selection of the clueless male when it comes to cosmetics and skin care products. We don’t understand them, we just know that they make women about as happy as cordless drills make us. I very carefully chose the first five I could get my hands on.
I saw a break in one of the shorter checkout lines and found myself only eleven patrons away from the hallowed squares of tile just in front of the register. The wait was on. About five minutes into the wait things began to get immensely more interesting. Two registers to my left there was a forty something lady arguing with the clerk about whether the ten percent off tag pertained to the existing price or if the discount had already been factored into the price. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, especially this time of year. But what made this situation more interesting is that as Mom was arguing with the cashier her daughter was putting on a show of her own.
Given the stifiling heat it almost seemed too coincidental that the song on the store’s speaker system was “Mr. Heatmiser” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. As circumstance would have it, it just so happened that this girl who I would guess to be 17 or 18 was standing next to one of those posts that acts as a conduit for the power and phone lines to the register island. In other words, the girl was standing next to a pole. Now in describing this young lady I’m not going to lie to you folks. This girl was about as pretty as they come. She had been gifted. Seeing this one proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we humans were indeed created by a Supreme Being and furthermore, He had definitely been on His A game the day He crafted this one. I think you get the point.
Now if you’ve never heard Mr. Heatmiser, the song has a really rhythmic bass line. I’m not really sure that the young lady was conscious of what she was doing, or that she was in public. I like to think that she was. All of a sudden this girl started dancing. Now by dancing I don’t mean a subtle swaying or shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other. This girl was busting some moves. This girl was busing some early Madonna moves. It didn’t take long for me to see one guy nudge his buddy and point her out. Well it seems that we weren’t the only ones to see her. Pretty much everyone in the store stopped and stared at this girl as she continued to gyrate, dance, grind and writhe around the post whilst her Mom continued her all important quest to save an additional eleven cents off of some bath powder. Well at some point I guess ol’ girl sauntered into Mom’s field of vision because Mom stopped arguing and started wincing.
When the lady first saw her I think her initial reaction was that of disbelief. The disbelief quickly, VERY quickly, turned to that awkward emotion between shock and embarrassment when the nervous system just kind of ginks a little because it doesn’t know what else to do. She paused for a moment, perhaps to see exactly what the girl was doing, and then she reached out and grabbed the girl by the elbow, spinning her around, thus ending the girl’s in-store presentation of Hoochie Mama Dancing's Greatest Hits.
I take great solace in saying that I wasn’t the only one to laugh as the mom drug her out of the store gibbering at her in that semi-intelligible, “I can’t believe you acted that way in front of all those people, blah blah blah,” tone that only a pissed off mom can summon. I mean if everyone laughed then it must have been the right thing to do. Wasn’t it? In the end the girl had her fun, the mom got to experience the obligatory “What the hell is wrong with you?” moment of parenting and I got my various gift baskets to hand out to those whom I care about. All in all, I think it’s one of my favorite holiday moments. And from that day forward I guess I have to say that Mr. Heatmiser has been one of my favorite holiday songs.
Oh yeah… Hey Amber, remember the look of disbelief on my face when I realized that I’d been had because the stuff in the basket didn’t really take up the whole basket but instead was only a couple of inches deep thanks to a big piece of Styrofoam that took up most of the basket? Haha!
Click the video link to hear the song!
Use the comments box to tell me about one of your more irreverent Christmas memories.
No comments:
Post a Comment