Festival Gators and A Belated Ground Hog Day Greeting

Hey y’all, I thought I’d post this because yesterday was Groundhog Day, and I’m nothing if not right on top of things around here, right? (Don’t answer that. God “don’t” like ugly.) This is a little excerpt from one of my humor books, Sue Ellen’s Girl Ain’t Fat, She Just Weighs Heavy. It occurred to me that A) I rarely mention them anymore, and B) We are approaching the next big election and politics is even crazier than it was when this first released. (Don’t waste your sweet little emails telling me to take it serious. You have no idea how serious I take it but I will always believe #lifeisbetterwhenyourelaughing.) I hope you get a stress relieving chuckle from my rambling~

…Of course, being civic minded and all, I recently came up with an idea to help us beat the heat, stimulate the local economy, and have some fun at the same time. (I don’t know. It just comes to me.)

First, we’re gonna need a cute animal like Phil to jump up and give his prediction smack in the middle of June as to whether or not we’ll have six more weeks of hot weather. No, not Husband Phil— he’s precious— but I’m talking about Phil, that groundhog they’ve got up in Pennsylvania, the one with the less than impressive record of predicting the weather, the one who conveniently speaks only to men in tuxes. Are you with me? How hard can this be? If you’re thinking, “Of course we’ll have six more weeks of hot weather!” you are missing the whole marketing opportunity. Some 30,000 people will go see that groundhog this year. Can you say tourist dollars?

Now hold on, folks, we can’t just throw up a big tent and have a huge fish fry. That’d work in these parts but to get the national press corps down here we’re going to need to plan this thing out and choosing the right weather predicting animal is one of the most important decisions we’ll make. Papa said it’d be fun to use blue runner snakes and have the reporters tap on their open cages. That may be true but I have reminded Papa that we want repeat visitors. Paulette suggested we go with the opossum because it could play dead and we could revive it with special healing mineral water that we could then sell to all the foreigners for an incredibly low price of $19.99. (You would think I could get better help with something this serious.) Myself, I’m leaning towards the Black Bear. He might get it wrong but I doubt he’d get called on it.

Unfortunately, at this point my biggest problem is with the festival’s steering committee. I got a group of forward thinking volunteers together at the dock recently to help plan the thing. What with the groundhog party being months away, I thought we should strike while this is, well, hot. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to share half of my good ideas with the board as the meeting broke up before it got started good! Some folks are saying we may be forced to postpone our inaugural event until next August, and that’s only provided we’ve managed to run Bubba out of town by then. (The boy could’ve simply suggested we use a polecat. We still wouldn’t have gone for it, but after that little show and smell exhibit there was no way in Hades I was gonna be able to bring that meeting back to order.)

On the positive side, we did come close to choosing the official “Hot Enough for ‘Ya Weather Predicting Animal”— only it’s a reptile. Yeah, after bringing the subject up on my radio show, I got a ton of letters from all five of the people who were excited about my idea and the alligator won hands down.

Rena Dillman from North Carolina was the first one to vote for the gator. Along with her vote, she also provided her own thought provoking observation about how animals tend to eat more right before the weather changes. And that, y’all, gave me yet another brilliant idea. We’re planning the first Hot Enough For ‘Ya festival for the summer preceding the next presidential election, right? And the election season, if it holds true to form, will be one big pain in the back side, right? Well, if we handle this thing right we may be able to make it something of a public service. Follow me, here.

What if we took three politicians, tied ‘em up and placed ‘em on the lake bank? If the Festival Gator goes for the Republican, he’s predicting six more weeks of hot weather. If he goes for the Democrat, he’s predicting an early Fall, you know, somewhere around November. If he goes for the Independent, he’s saying it’s just too hot to bother. Of course, we couldn’t actually let him eat the politicians. That wouldn’t be fair to the Gator.

We’re gonna need some good publicity, of course, but I may have that figured out, too. We could always let summer settle in and the humidity start building and then someone could slide up to one of the local boys and ask, “Hot enough for ‘ya?”  I’ll have my flip camera ready and shoot his reaction up to YouTube. If we’re lucky he’ll go postal and the clip will go viral.

Hugs,
Shellie