Tall Drink of Water

My latest catchphrase

After my clumsy, bloodtastic afternoon yesterday, I decided the best solution was beer and television. Prison Break wasn't on until 8, so I watched ABC's Wife Swap.

For those of you who don't know the premise of this show, two families swap mothers for two weeks. Each woman leaves behind a "manual" for her replacement. The first week, the visiting mom has to live by her new family's rules. The second week, the family has to live by the visiting mom's rules. Hilarity and conflict often ensue as the producers go out of their way to cast families with the most opposite lifestyle/beliefs they can find. The episodes usually end with each family changing a little bit after a stranger points out what wasn't so evident to the other mom.

The first family is from Kentucky. They live in a deer-head-decorated half trailer/half house in a woodsy area. They hunt together, and the parents have no qualms about swatting their two boys, 10 and 12, when the kids misbehave. Their diet consists mainly of what they shoot themselves: squirrels, rabbits, and deer. As a person who has eaten all three of the mentioned animals and grew up in hunting family, this wasn't too strange to me. We didn't have any Confederate flags in our house, though. Or participate in family taxidermy.

(Full disclosure: I can't remember what squirrel tastes like; I was [1] too young and/or [2] my mother slathered it in some sort of edible sauce. I remember eating hasenfeffer stew, though, and just try to get between me and the deer jerky from my dad's yearly buck. You'll be sorry!)

The second family is from Arizona. The entire "nontraditional" family is strictly vegan and only eats raw foods; they didn't even have a stove. The oddest thing, however, was the matriarch's belief in something she calls "sun gazing." I can't describe it any better than she does in her instruction manual:

From 7:30am-7:38am I stare at the sun. Sun gazing has changed my life - it suppresses my appetite, gives me mental clarity and prevents disease. I learned about it through an Indian guru who believes we don't need food to survive. He lives on sun, air and water alone. Hopefully one day I will be like him and no longer desire food. I believe sun gazing can help with world hunger. If people knew they could look at the sun for energy we would have less starving people in the world.

As Ellen (she had called me after reading about my day) scoffed, "Does she know she's talking about photosynthesis? And that she's not a plant?" I was explaining the sun gazing thing, and reading the subtitles aloud to Ellen when the elder Kentucky boy looked directly into the camera during an interview and said:

"My new mom eats the sun. [pause] Creepy."

Awesome.

I am going to incorporate "My new mom eats the sun" into as many conversations as I possibly can. I could not stop laughing, although it could have been the beer. I don't know.

Of course, lessons were learned. The hippie chick allowed her family to start cooking vegetables, and the Kentucky husband helped his wife with household chores. But...

"My new mom eats the sun."

Posted by Dee at November 15, 2005 03:53 PM