October 15, 2008

Hello to all my darling prairie dogs!

I just got back to Richfield last week after 4 months in Ptown! And the nice ladies at A Mighty Fortress Is Our God Lutheran Church, my home congregation, have already raised enough money to buy me a one-way bus ticket to Mexico! Well actually I’m going to Los Angeles, but let’s not split hairs I’m now on the Greyhound moving south, where I will be joining the Atlantis Events Mexican Riviera Cruise! And coincidentally the ship will be visiting Mexico this year! I don’t know our ports of call, but it really doesn’t matter, as the Third World all looks the same to me!

I hope this year’s trip will be as exciting as our time in Cancun last April. That’s when I included one of the locals in my act – this darling little monkey named Ted, who played the piano, tapped danced and rode on the back of a dog.

Ted just approached me on the beach and offered to work for peanuts, literally! So we started rehearsing, and that monkey insisted that we do “Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer,” one of the delightful tunes from the musical “Cats.”

I’d done that number once with a trained seal at the Como Zoo in St. Paul, but never with a monkey and a dog! That just sounded ridiculous.

So I started looking into the monkey’s past. Ted told me that he’d done the Berlin cabaret circuit, a couple years Off-Broadway, and opened for Wayne Newton in Vegas. All that turned out to be false, much like his name, which was not Ted; it was Whiplash the Subway monkey of TV advertising fame!

Apparently he’d made some sort of sex film and was let go by Subway. Now poor Whiplash was down on his luck in Mexico trying to break into the tourist entertainment trade. I had to explain to Whiplash that my church sponsors my trips and that I had to keep my show family-based.

The last I remember was Whiplash riding into the sunset on the back of that dog, who apparently was not in the sex film, but sadly implicated only by association.

XO and one to Jesus!
Miss R