THE NIGHT I MET DENNIS QUAID

I lied.

I didn't meet Dennis Quaid.

But I DID take the family down to our annual CityFest this weekend for fun, frivolity, music and naked women with corn cobs shoved up their booties.

Alright. There I go again...lying about naked women with corn cobs shoved up their booties.

When will this lying ever cease??

I called my old buddy, who longtime readers of this site will remember as "Drunk-Assed Jamie". Drunk-Assed Jamie is my most alcoholic of friends, so bad that he showed up for a recent Easter Egg Hunt at my church with his two kids with liquor on his breath. At 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

That's when you know you have a problem, people. You're drinking before 10 a.m. on a Saturday, then you stop long enough to load the kids in the car and hop on over to church for a drunken Easter Egg Hunt.

Anyway, I called Drunk-Assed Jamie to ask if he had any tickets to the Festival. After I typed in the last entry, saying how I felt weird that we weren't going, Susie and I decided that we WOULD go, but only on Saturday afternoon.

I really wanted to go down Friday night to see Mattie Gee's band, The Spicolis. I hadn't seen the band play in about 16 months or so and he kept telling me how much better they had gotten.

Mattie Gee. The master of the modest hype.

So Drunk-Assed Jamie said he had two weekend passes that he wasn't going to use.

Bingo.

Friday night, we head on downtown for the big event.

We were warned by the shuttle bus driver...they were searching bags this year for security reasons. Apparently, the FBI has received reports that third-rate musical fests in the middle of Alabama have become targets for Al-Queda terrorists or some shit. I dunno.

We walk up to the gate which has a HUGE line of people waiting to buy tickets.

We bypass that line because I'm CONVINCED that since we have tickets, there's no way in hell we should wait in the "Need Tickets" line which is more than a block long. Even though I see people with tickets in hand, grumbling to the back of the line. I have a wife and child with me this year, not a beer and a joint. I REFUSE to wait in line.

Wrong. The jackass volunteers at these events get more and more ignorant each year. We get up to the entry where we are promptly told to turn around and go to the back of the line.

"But we've already got tickets and that's the ticket line," I protest.

"Everyone waits in that line," the dumbass redneck says. He had already turned away several dozen people with that phrase while we walked to the front of the line.

"That's insane," I said. "Why do we need to wait in a ticket line for tickets when we already have tickets?"

This confounded the ignorant redneck who stood there silently, trying to think up a good reason for this lapse in logic.

Just as I was willing to concede and wait two hours in a line I didn't need to be waiting in, another volunteer came up and said "Cletus, if the people have tickets, they don't have to wait in that line. We already went over that."

Cletus, temporarily robbed of any power that he may have foolishly led himself to believe that he possessed, grumpily said "Go 'haid" which roughly translates to "Go ahead" in English.

We strolled past Cletus and I stopped to tell the volunteer that Cletus had been telling dozens of people they had to wait in line and they're going to have a ton of irritated people at the back of the line standing there with tickets in their hand and waiting to get inside. The volunteer looked at me like I was scum and she was the most important bitch in the free world because SHE was a volunteer for the year's hottest event in our city and I wasn't.

Oh. Excuse me, ma'am. I'm sorry I overstepped my boundaries in suggesting that you might lift a finger in order to make sure that people don't go to their websites tomorrow and point out you and your fellow volunteers' incompetence.

Bitch.

We got into the festival and cut our way through the crowd to Mattie Gee's stage where he and the Spicolis were rocking the crowd like nobody's business.

That's the band during their medley of "Wild Thing" and "Push It". That's Mattie Gee at the mic, playing an imaginary set of turntables because he IS the legendary imaginary mixmaster Mattie Gee.

We listened to the band for a while then went to get the boy something to eat. We settled on a foot-long corn dog (only five dollars!) and some potato chips (also five dollars!!). Susie and I both got Chicken on a Stick (A steal at $4 apiece!) and a soft drink (only $3 a bottle).

After I mopped the blood from my ass following this massive screwing, we went back to Mattie Gee's stage where they were closing with Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me Because It Has To Be Cheaper Than Buying A Funnel Cake Here".

They exited the stage to raucous applause.

We then hunkered down for that rock and roll madman ... Dennis Quaid.

You may know him as Hollywood Superstar Dennis Quaid. We know him as Dennis Quaid, weak singer of mediocre songs.

Here's the only decent picture I managed to snap of him and his guitar player.

I know, I know...he could just as easily be Shawn Cassidy or any other has-been recording artist, judging from that picture. But trust me, it was Hollywood Superstar Dennis Quaid, masquerading as a singer.

Andrew then let us know he was tired by passing out face down in the streets of our city. Like father, like son. I can't tell you how many times my drunk ass has done the same thing at this festival in the past.

Saturday, we went back to the festival to allow Andrew to experience all the fun and excitement of KidsFest.

...Which he was kinda too young for.

There was a room..."Just For Tots". From reading about it in the newspaper, the room was designed "Just For Tots". Lil' Tykes toys...children's books...a giant TV showing Blue's Clues continuously ... and coloring tables.

Perfect for Andrew.

...As well as several soon-to-be friendly local gang members.

Yes, the trashy punk-assed bitches showed up in droves to ruin as much fun as they could for toddlers.

The first group of kids came in and discretely started spraying Fart Spray.

I've never smelled this stuff. Ever. And now I never want to smell it again.

It basically smells like someone shit their pants. One of these punk-assed brats had quietly crawled under the table we were sitting at and began spraying under there.

At first, I thought it was the lady next to me.

Naturally, she thought it was me.

The kid climbed out from underneath the table and just began walking around the large room, casually spraying the spray. He was about 12 years old, had no adult supervision and had no respect for anybody but himself and his homies.

Which describes just about every 12 year-old in this hellhole of a city.

The teenagers in charge of the room approached the two boys and told them to stop it immediately.

The little fuckers just kept spraying. They ain't go' have no white muhfuh bitch tell THEM what to do. Fuck you, white bitch. I boughts the shit, I go' spray the shit in yo' room and fuck you if'n you don't like it.

I scoped the place out to see if their parents weren't in there.

They weren't.

I walked over to one of the boys, grabbed the spray out of his hand with one hand, and grabbed him by the back of his ratty-assed t-shirt collar with the other one and politely escorted the fuck out of the room while one of the teenage girls who were "in charge" (i.e. they changed the Blues Clues tape every 30 minutes), nabbed the other one.

We found an adult who was in charge out in the hallway and explained that these two lame fucks had walked in the room spraying the nastiest fart spray you could ever imagine.

The adult smiled and let us know that these boys had been doing it all throughout the Civic Center and they had been looking for them. She grabbed each of their nappy asses by the wrists and took over from there.

The teenager in charge found some Lysol and sprayed the entire can in the room. It still barely masked the sulferous smell.

If in fact...sulferous is spelled correctly.

Then some kids...probably about 8 years old or so...harmless kids, but still too old to be in the room, decided to come in with their mothers while their mothers sat and talked on cell phones the whole time while the little monsters took control of the room.

At one point, RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS MOTHER, one of the boys had a big oversized ball that he was throwing into the face of a toddler.

The toddler took it like a man.

He took it twice.

That's when I yelled "Hey!"

The dumbass 8 year-old stared at me, so RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS MOTHER, I said "If you do that again, I'M going to spank you."

He didn't do it again.

And his mother, the perfect picture of an uncaring, unfit mother who thought it'd be really fun to fuck an entire football team and have their children when she was in high school, just sat there, oblivious to the fact that a total stranger was threatening physical violence on her hyperactive, neglected son for invoking physical violence on a baby seven years his junior.

The kid stopped throwing the ball at the baby and then decided he was going to take over the Lil' Tykes playground area so that the toddlers had to step off because he was a little tornado inside there.

Susie went and found the adult who had escorted the fart spray duo to security and told them that there were two older children in the toddler room throwing balls in the faces of the toddlers and generally playing with all the toddler toys while their mothers completely ignored them.

The adult's response?

"We know. Tomorrow we're changing the sign out front to let them know this is for children 3 years and younger."

A fat lot of good that does us today. Do you really think we're coming back tomorrow after you've let these punk asses run all over hell, doing whatever they want and ruining the fun for the little kids when there's tons of stuff for them to be doing OUTSIDE the toddler room?

Sorry.

But as a parent, it just pissed me off.

We then went to the Contemporary Christian stage so that Susie could see a band called Point of Grace.

Alright...hot babes by no stretch of the imagination. Every man and lesbian reading this page can tell you the same thing. Oingo boingo went the zipper in my pants when I realized the babes looked like this.

But they're a Contemporary Christian act. Which means...no boobies flashed.

Grrrrrrr. I felt like a kid locked overnight in a candy store and every piece of candy was also locked away.

It's no big deal really, since we set up camp roughly two miles from the stage anyway. And since Andrew was getting antsy, he and I left to go walk around the festival while Susie rocked out to tunes praising God and changing diapers or whatever wholesome stuff they could sing about.

Changing diapers. Three of them were astronomically pregnant. Even from two miles away, it looked like four elephants in wigs were up on stage.

Anyway..after much exploring, Andrew found a curb that he could step on and off of with ease. No having to stop and gently take the curb. He was WHIZZ! BANG! on and off that curb in milliseconds.

So I watched him do that for about 30 minutes. He was content to just step on and off that curb and pick up trash off the streets. At one point, he had a smashed beer cup and a cap off a water bottle and was content to put the cap in the cup and then pour it out only to do it all over again.

Which made me glad I hadn't actually PAID to get in the place.

Finally, his cap rolled into some stagnant puddle in the street which was full of sour water and sludge.

Andrew splashed his hand in this sludge for about three seconds before I whisked him out of the puddle and off to find Mama.

We grabbed her, washed his hand and left for the day.

A fun-filled weekend for all.

And if you're STILL here after all that...by all means....GO WRITE A FREAKIN' SUCK ASS POEM FOR ME!!! GET IT OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM!!!

That is all.