Yankee Candles recently launched a limited edition line of men’s candles available in four fragrances:
Man Town, which smells like a blend of spices, woods, and musk.
First Down, which smells like orange, patchouli, and leather.
Riding Mower, which smells like hot sun, a cool breeze, and the scent of freshly cut grass.
2x4, which smells like the warm unmistakable scent of freshly planed wood and sawdust.
According to Yankee Candle CEO Harlan Kent, “Candles create warmth, relaxation, and good memories and guys want that too.”
I have some ideas of my own for future scents: Charcoal Grill, Lap Dance, Boating, Three Stooges, Stale Pizza, and Beer.
I’m still having a hard time believing that straight men would actually buy and use candles. I’ve been married twice and I never heard either of my husband’s say, “Gee I wish someone would invent a collection of candles just for us guys!”
What do you think? Men, would you buy and use candles? Ladies, would you buy one of these candles for your man?
Two Colorado women who were chaperoning a high school prom in Manitou Springs allegedly sprayed Lysol on students who were dirty dancing and called the teen girls “sluts” and “whores.” They allegedly called the boys the future Tiger Woods.
I heard about this after a friend of mine, who chaperoned her son’s prom, complained about the dirty dancing. She said they were practically having sex with their clothes on.
All I can say is, “Eeewww.”
I’ve been to around 15 proms myself (no I’m not a cougar that goes to prom with teenage boys and I’m not addicted to punch). I had to go because it was my job as a newspaper reporter to take pictures of the King and Queen. I was working at a small town weekly paper and we needed all the news we could get. I hated going to prom because it meant giving up my Saturday night to drive to a high school and stand around in the dark listening to loud blaring music waiting for the coronation to take place. It also meant dealing with the pushy parents who make paparazzi look like Boy Scouts.
At big city high schools, students pay $60 or more to go to their prom which is usually held in the ballroom of a big fancy hotel. In a small town the prom is usually held in the high school gym and the bleachers are filled with parents and grandparents waiting to see the Grand March when every prom couple walks across the gym floor and poses in front of either a gazebo or a balloon arch. This is a photo opportunity for the parents.
Following the Grand March all the members of the Prom Court assemble on stage for the Coronation. This is when all the parents stampede up to the stage and elbow each other for a good position. I’m always caught in the middle of this nightmare trying to get a decent picture while parents keep jumping in front of me.
Getting back to the dirty dancing, students aren’t going to engage in dirty dancing in front of a gym full of parents and grandparents not to mention the local press. Usually all they do is stand around talking. They must feel like monkeys in a zoo with all the people staring at them. Luckily, unlike monkeys, they don’t fling poop at the crowd. For all I know, there could have been dirty dancing going on later after the Coronation when everyone goes home. But I’ve never seen it. As far as I know, the only inappropriate thing that happened was when I sexually harassed one of the chaperones because in the dark he looked kind of like Tom Selleck.
What I have seen is girls built like Dolly Parton dressed in skimpy prom gowns. Compared to the dresses girls wear now, my prom dress was practically Amish. The overexposed cleavage always posed a problem for me. I worked for a family newspaper so I didn’t want to publish pictures of teenage girls in low cut dresses on the front page. If the girl was wearing a solid color prom dress I could usually use Photoshop to cover up the excessive boobage. Unfortunately this didn’t work one year when the Prom Queen had on a print dress that made Jennifer Lopez look like a conservative dresser. I tried and tried to match her dress but it looked really fakey. Finally I just ran the picture as it was. This resulted in a bunch of old ladies calling me up at work and yelling at me for putting pornography on the front page of their paper. Finally I snapped and yelled back, “Why don’t you call up the Queen’s mother and complain to her. She’s the one that let her 16 year old daughter go to prom with her boobs practically falling out of her dress!”
Thankfully, since I no longer work at a newspaper I never have to go to another prom again until my granddaughter turns 16. Then I’ll be sitting in the high school bleachers staring at her through my binoculars. She’ll be the one wearing an Amish prom dress.
What was your prom like?
This is the hardest blog I’ve ever written. I started writing it on Monday and I couldn’t finish it until now because this is the first Mother’s Day I’ve spent without my mother who died last year. I miss her everyday. I was lucky because I had a loving, supportive, compassionate, caring mother and a wonderful father as well. My mother taught me a lot of great lessons, “Never judge a book by its cover.” “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” “You don’t have to be best friends with everyone but you should always treat people kindly.”
My mother was an optimist who believed that there was good inside of everyone. I on the other hand was jaded and cynical and believed that some people were just plain evil. Like Adolph Hitler was there any good inside of him? Maybe he was nice to cats. I doubt it. My mother saw the glass as half full and I saw the glass as half empty and probably containing polluted water.
My mother grew up on a farm in Iowa close to a small town of 2,000 people. She went to a one-room country school until she was in high school. She met my dad in college and they got married and had four children (I’m the oldest).
My parents didn’t smoke, drink, swear, or talk about anything crude or vulgar. That’s probably why I saw them as two really nice naïve innocent people who viewed the world through rose colored glasses. Especially my mother and I felt that it was my job to protect and shield her from the bad things in life.
I found out about the bad things in life at age eight. I grew up in Arizona but we were back in Iowa visiting my mother’s parents. Since there was nothing to do at my grandparent’s house I went to the City Park and was playing on the swings when and older boy I didn’t know came up and told me, “I have a boner.”
“What are you talking about?”
He proceeded to explain it in great detail. I was horrified and ran back to my grandparents house as fast as I could. My mother could tell I was upset.
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
In an ideal world I could tell my mother that there was a pervert in the park talking about his private parts. But what would my mother do when she found out that sick, disgusting children were living right here in her hometown? She might faint at the mention of the word “boner.” I decided to lie in order to protect her, “There was a mean kid at the park.”
This started a whole pattern of me trying to sugar coat things in order to protect my mother. Like the incident with the T-shirt.
When I was in junior high, baseball T-shirts with raglan sleeves were in style. I really wanted one so I saved up my babysitting money. I couldn’t believe it when I was at the store with my parents and I saw a whole bin of the shirts on sale! I bought one and couldn’t wait to wear it to school the next day. As soon as I got to school in my new shirt, I immediately noticed kids pointing at me and laughing and snickering. This went on all morning until finally someone clued me into what was going on.
“They’re laughing at your shirt.”
“Why would they be laughing at my shirt? What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s the number, 69!”
“I don’t get it?” She proceeded to explain what the number 69 represents. I was horrified and humiliated. I ran into the bathroom and turned my shirt inside out and wore it like that for the rest of the day. As soon as I got home I ran to my room crying changed out of my shirt and threw it into the garbage.
My mother was shocked. She grew up during the Depression and you didn’t throw brand new perfectly good clothes into the garbage.
“What are you doing? Why did you throw your new shirt in the garbage,” she demanded.
“I can never wear it again! It has a dirty number on it!”
“I don’t understand. What’s dirty about this number?”
There was no way I was going to explain oral sex to my mother. She probably had no idea that such a disgusting vile thing like that even existed, “I can’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing!” I yelled before running into my room crying.
As an adult I found out that when my parents were first married, my mother worked in a meat packing plant to help earn money so they could buy a car. I’ve worked in factories before and I heard some pretty raunchy stuff so I’m sure my mother was exposed to some raunchy stuff, too. I also found out that my father was in both the army and the navy so he was undoubtedly exposed to raunchy stuff.
When I was 30 I was at a family dinner when out of the blue my mother brought up the shirt with the dirty number on it, “I still don’t understand what was wrong with that number?”
Should I finally tell her? No, I still couldn’t talk about it; “It’s too embarrassing I can’t talk about it.”
My sister wanted me to whisper it in her ear. Since she was a college student I figured she’d know what I was talking about.
“It had the number 69 on it.”
“I don’t get it what does that mean?”
I guess some things are better left unsaid.
Happy Mother’s Day!
On the rare occasion when I shell out $6.50 to see a movie in the theater I like to laugh, be uplifted, thrilled, and entertained. I don’t want to come out of the theater with swollen puffy eyes and a red nose. If I wanted to spend two hours crying I could re-read my high school diaries (another Saturday night at home with my parents watching the Carol Burnett Show. Will I ever have a boyfriend?)
I cried my eyes out the first time I saw Titanic (spoiler alert the ship sinks and almost everyone dies). I started crying during the opening credits.
“What are you people doing? The ship is going to sink! Get off while you have the chance. Victor Newman why are you on the Titanic? Go back to Genoa City where you belong!”
I’ll never forget when I was in the hospital feeling sad and lonely and I wanted to watch something on TV to cheer myself up. While I was channel surfing I came upon a movie starring Richard Gere and thought, “Great I can ogle him for two hours. That should cheer me up.” Wrong, the movie was “Nights In Rodanthe” based on the book by Nicholas Sparks. I ended up crying my eyes out. If only someone had warned me before hand.
We have a movie rating system to warn people about sex and violence, why can’t we have a rating system to warn people about tearjerkers? I have an idea for a new rating system. All sad movies would receive a Kleenex box rating. The saddest movies would get the most Kleenex boxes. For instance, the following would all receive at least one or more Kleenex boxes:
The Notebook
Terms of Endearment
Sophie’s Choice
Toy Story 2 and 3
My Girl
Life Is Beautiful
Beaches
Love Story
Dumbo
Steel Magnolias
Little Women
Old Yeller
This is only a partial list since there are too many sad movies to include them all.
What’s the saddest movie you’ve seen?
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