BEG OUR PARDON: K&K ATONES, PART III
The sins are a flowin'. Apparently, confessing is good for the soul, if you believe in such things, because we're feeling much lighter unburdening ourselves of long-ago but apparently omnipresent guilt about past naughty deeds. It's like losing weight.
So here we go again-but perhaps for the last time. It is starting to get embarrassing.
It was the fall of our 15th year and we were attending a high school dance at one of our friend's schools. (We'd never behave this way out our own school.) As mentioned in a previous confessional, we overindulged in homemade jungle juice and probably tried to smoke too many cigarettes (because they made our head spin). We tragically ended up puking into the vice-principal's waste paper basket while the VP was asking for a phone number of a family member to collect our sorry ass. The older siblings who no longer lived at home were the first to be called. No answer. Then, it was the dreaded call to the parental units. The old man came to collect us, which is ironic, given how many times we've seen his sorry ass drunk. Nary a word was spoken on the way home. Really, what could he have said that wouldn't have sounded a little hypocritical?
When we did make it home, our visibly angry mother said little, except for: "Get to your room."
Our first hangover is indelibly seared into our memory as is our mother's obvious disappointment. "Of all my kids, I didn't expect this of you," she said the next day.
Ouch. Little else was said, but we'll give our mother credit for creative punishment. Knowing how ill we were feeling, she ordered us to dust and vacuum the entire house, including the stairs, the next morning. The noise, pulling the awkward machine up and down stairs- our stomach is churning just recalling the gross memory.
So sorry, Mom, for not being the great last hope you thought we'd be. At least our dear mama is no longer asking why we aren't a Paris-based foreign correspondent anymore. She can find comfort, however, in the fact that we never became a smoker.
ALAIN, LIGHTEN UP AND SHUT UP
The Sedin Sisters. Yes, it's old and yes, it's insulting to women. Chicago Blackhawk forward Dave Bolland might want to work on more creative insults because this decadesold jab at Swedish twins Henrik and Daniel Sedin is more dead than that cow we ate last night. Bolland went for cheap and playful laughs with more such sisterly talk on a Chicago radio station recently, but it certainly didn't warrant what Vancouver Canucks coach Alain Vigneault said in response. Bolland hardly sounded mean-spirited. Actually, he came off as light and playful. But why the Canucks bother dignifying such silliness with a response is mystifying. A coach has to do what a coach has to do, we guess. We suggest Vigneault let the Sedins' NHL records speak for themselves. The Sedin Sisters slag is more insulting to women than it is to the Swedish phenoms anyway, but for Vigneault to say Bolland has an IQ the size of a bird seed and a face only a mother could love was nasty (well, at least the latter, anyway). So come on, boys, work on that creativity.
