So I just got back from a short trip with my mom. We had a bitchin' time in sunny Montauk (actually, it rained half the time we were there, but who cares) and during the car trip realized that we had similar problems with sign-reading. It seems our brains read a sign, but miss whole letters or words and re-interpret them to mean something COMPLETELY - and often, AWESOMELY - different. Nature or nurture? You decide.
Case 1: This actually occurred right before our trip. We were in the car together by the train station where a gridlock of buses sometimes occurs. We saw an ad on the side of one bus for
this new craptacular-looking show. I'm still new to blogging, so I'm not going to post the ad on this site, but if you follow the imdb link, you'll see pretty much what we saw, in bus-ad form. The actual text is as follows:
"A lost twin. A dark secret. A deadly game."
And this is what my mother and I BOTH saw:
"A lost twit. A dork secret. A deadly gnome."
Now which show would you rather watch? Yeah, thought so. Just let your mind wander and wonder at the myriad plot-possibilities of the deadly gnome-twit running around and terrorizing the main character, who in a surprise role-reversal, is publicly a hot, hot girl but secretly a dork. The gnome steals all of her hot-girl paraphernalia from her locker and replaces it with all the dork stuff she keeps at home so her dork secret will be revealed to all her mean-girl friends. Gasp as she opens her locker and it spews forth a collection of 20-sided dice, grammar handbooks, and an autographed photo of Neil deGrasse Tyson!
My cursory exploration of internet literature on the actual show suggests it's an intense drama about family secrets that probably hypersexualizes 'tween girls whilst being overly-preachy and judgmental, since it's on ABC family. Feel free to disagree with me; it'll be good prep for this coming school year when all my students praise it and fall all over themselves catching up on it in homeroom. Whatever, ABC family - this plot is ripped right out of
any V.C. Andrews novel, and they automatically win this contest because of their neat double covers that revealed pretty much everything you needed to know about the plot before buying the book. Brilliant marketing, that was. I miss the days of standing in Waldenbooks (or Rite Aid, now that I think about it) flipping open the first cover to gaze at the glossy inside artwork and think, ok, who's the secret brother that will father the secret baby?
Considering the title of this show is an allusion to The Crying Game (whether it knows it or not) I'm gonna guess that the dark secret about the lost twin is that it is REALLY A DUDE. A dude gnome.
Case 2: Driving out on Rt. 27 East leads one through quaint Bridgehampton, where there still seem to be mom and pop-style businesses. (Read: It hasn't become East Hampton's main street, which is, in the immortal words of my mom, "57th street East.") One such business is an old-timey looking ice cream parlour (you can tell it's old-timey by the way they spell "parlour." Well, it's either old-timey or Canadian.) The sign said this:
"Ice Cream Parlour and Eatery"
My brain read this:
"Ice Cream Parlour and FATery"
I thought, Damn, that's judgmental. And probably more accurate. But then I remembered we were entering the Hamptons and nobody there is fat. It's a town ordinance. Well, nobody except the Barefoot Contessa, which is why I trust her and her delicious recipes.
Case 3: Out near Montauk harbor is a collection of motels, hotels, and rental cottages that cater to a mixture of vacationers and local fisherman. Actually, now that I think about this case, it was driving out the previous week with co-blogger KO and our friend Sandy (yeah, I went to Montauk twice in August. I'm a Montauk groupie.) and we passed a motel with this name:
"Tiny Underwood's Motel"
which I read as this:
"The Underworld Motel"
and I whipped my head around like, "What?! Who the hell would stay there?"
A deadly gnome, that's who.
