Let me just tell you that choosing this time of year to attempt to quit smoking, especially for someone who started smoking at age of three, does not make a helluva lot of sense. Any time of the year is tough, but the holidays for some reason turn perfectly sane people into something other worldly, and it s not pretty. Just the other day, I watched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy for the first time. The premise of the show is cute and I m sure that during the non-holiday season it s a very snappy little show. This episode, however, was pretty scary. The guy-gay team of straight-guy makeover experts descended upon a family they had already made over the holiday season prior. The man, wife, and four children lived in a perfectly tasteful home with very minimal holiday decorations. The merry band of do-gooders was having none of it. They made the poor couple feel guilty, calling their dÇcor drug store Christmas, and then forced them to decorate. They started by loading up the whole family and going to a Christmas tree farm, where they picked out a beautiful tree, and then had Dad hack it down with a saw, thereby killing it for their own pleasure. Then they splattered everywhere around the house, inside and out. It looked like a hurricane hit the Christmas tree farm and blew it all their way. They could barely get in the door there was so much on the front porch. Inside their house, garland was draped on every conceivable surface and it looked not unlike that crud that forms on ceiling fan blades when they aren t cleaned for several years. Or so I m told. Then they got an extremely creepy-looking Santa doll with one of those squishy faces and put it on the hearth. It looked just like Viktor Yushchenko after he was poisoned with dioxin. Then, while Mom and Dad were simply trying to cope with all of this, the guys got the kids so wound up you would have thought the eggnog had crystal meth in it. At one point they had all four kids jumping up and down and screaming, I want a pony for Christmas! I want a pony for Christmas! It was so loud it looked like the house was shaking and Mom looked like she was ready to gnaw off her own limbs. (Do you realize that people like this can actually serve on juries? People who put fake reindeer antlers on their dog s head can actually find you guilty or innocent in a trial and in some cases, like Scott Peterson, decide if you should get the death penalty. People who wear red and green flashing Christmas earrings and spray fake snow in their windows can send you to prison for life. Is this justice?) All the while, the guys were perpetuating the lie about there being a real Santa Claus, thereby laying the groundwork for the psychological damage that comes when children realize this good man and his elves don t really exist, and feel like fools for buying this load of crap all the way through their childhoods. They wake up one day, there s no Santa, and George Bush is their president. How much can these youngsters bear? These kids seemed pretty smart, though. When one of the guys told one of the little girls that animal prints made his hips look huge, she just gave him the once-over and replied, Duh? Oh, and when Dad announced he was going to make his traditional Christmas morning breakfast of pancakes, the food dude of the crew acted like Dad was committing a horrible crime, and instead forced him to cook brunch. The one break in all this torture was when one of the little girls asked one of the guys what he wanted for Christmas, to which he replied, a boyfriend and world peace! Is that asking too much?! Anyway, this went on for what seemed like a lifetime, until the crew was finished and packed up and left. And left a colossal mess for the family to clean up once the big day was over. What is one to do? I guess just get around the real point of all this and take a brief look at some of what s going on around town this week. Tonight, there are holiday open houses at Fountain Art Gallery and D Edge Art & Unique Treasures. Voices of the South s production Pre-sent/Pres-ent opens at TheatreWorks. Tonight s Third Thursdays: Art After Dark at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens includes a screening of The Importance of Being Earnest. Better Than Ezra and The Graham Colton Band are at the New Daisy. And Native Son is at the Blue Monkey Midtown. —Tim Sampson
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