After almost thirty years of marriage, I'm not often surprised by my husband's activities. I've gotten to know his patterns pretty well - needs coffee within fifteen minutes of rising, falls asleep on the way to the pillow, hurls insults in Swiss to moronic drivers, etc. - but the other night, he engaged in a behavior I never saw coming.
I was standing in the kitchen, trying to assemble a dinner out of the assortment of leftovers hanging out in the fridge, when I heard a couple of decidedly down-home Southern female voices emanating out of the family room TV. I expected to hear them hastily replaced by Bill O'Reilly's caustic comments or, at the very least, those guys from Mythbusters blowing up something, but I did not. I continued to re-purpose and reheat until my curiosity got the better of me.
What the heck was he watching?
Turns out my husband - the elegant, European-raised, reality-show abhorring man I married - was engrossed in a soon-to-be Emmy-nominated, culturally relevant, mind-expanding gem called Mud Loving Rednecks. I honestly could not believe what I was seeing. Yes, he has (reluctantly) watched a couple of Wife Swap episodes with me. Yes, he has deigned to sit through an occasional Wipeout to marvel at the lengths his fellow human beings will go to to make a few bucks. He's even caught a few minutes of Duck Dynasty and a millisecond of Say Yes to the Dress when he couldn't get out of the room fast enough. But this, a show about a family that owns a mud bog (a previously unknown to me venue of entertainment) in Alabama, was a shocker.
I plopped myself next to him on the couch and watched as the owners of the mud bog, a married couple and a few of their Harvard-educated pals, proceeded to host a wedding for a couple named Nikki and Cowboy, constructing, among other things, a camouflage-covered limo on a monster truck bed and a side-by-side tube slide by which the bride and groom would enter the mud once they had said "I do".
Amazingly, it turned out to be a fairly entertaining hour of TV. We laughed at the "unusual" bridal requests (bridesmaids were to be adorned in camouflage dresses courtesy of Aunt Pam) and the attire of the wedding guests (shirts were evidently optional but boots were not). When it was over, we came away impressed with the ingenuity of these hard-working people determined to make their business a success and have a good time while doing it. I also enjoyed seeing my husband let his hair down a little and not take life so seriously. He needs to do that more often, if you ask me. Maybe we all do.
Tomorrow's our thirtieth anniversary. Since we already took that amazing trip to Europe earlier this year in celebration, we're going to keep things pretty low-key. We've talked about going to see Gravity (if I can figure out a way to watch it with my eyes closed) and use a Groupon to treat ourselves to dinner.
If we're really lucky, there'll be an episode of Hillbilly Handfishing on when when we get home.
No comments:
Post a Comment