I'll Take You To The Candy Shop

I really love stories like this. Seems someone got through a locked door or whatever and managed to change the wording of a street sign here in the Boston area. Nothing cracks me up more than a good, innocent prank or ridiculous out-of-the-ordinary events. It's part of the reason why I believe Arrested Development is, far and away, the best show on TV. They do shit on that show that is just hysterical. Anyway, back when I was in college, my roommate and I would often (and still do, occasionally) make reference to a story which occured in a Cleveland mall just before Easter sometime in the early 1990's. The mall had their standard set-up: kids and their parents, lined up several hundred feet to have their picture taken with the Easter Bunny. As it was nearing lunch, the "Easter Bunny" got up and approached the guy running the whole get-up and let him know that it was breaktime and he would be back in whatever number of minutes he was alotted for break.

The bossman disagreed it was breaktime, however, noting the abnormally long line of children desperate to meet their floppy-eared Easter friend. The "Easter Bunny" didn't take so well to the fact that he was being denied what surely was 15 minutes of furious chain smoking and a slice of all-meat pizza at Sbarro's, so he did what any sane, professional Easter Bunny would do - he tackled the guy and beat the living the crap out of him, in front of a long line of now horrified, crying and scarred children.

Now, yes, I acknowledge that this is terrible. I am sure that if one of my kids were waiting in that line and witnessed such debauchery, I might have has some splainin' to do to my poor, severely distraught child. All said, a parent doesn't want their kid seeing that stuff. But I don't have kids and that shit is funny. I mean, it's funny! You know? When you step back and picture a dude in a bunny suit beating the crap out of some plainclothes guy who runs the Easter Bunny booth at the mall? Priceless.

I've been thinking a lot lately about dream jobs. Not made-up dream jobs, either, like baseball superstar or "protector of the beach" or something. I'm talking about attainable dream jobs. I think one of my dream jobs would be to perform the role of music supervisor for films. This entails, basically, finding the right song for a certain mood or to enhance a certain atmosphere in a movie. There's another part of it, too, which involves acquiring rights and negotiating fees, etc, but still - not a bad gig. Without patting myself on the back too much, I believe I would do a kick ass job at this. I'd be interested in hearing some of your "real" dream jobs. Do comment if you want.

One of my other dream jobs is writing. It seems for the longest time I've wanted to write. In fact, my only attempt to write a book was way back in the sixth grade when I tried to write a complete rip-off of "The A-Team." The larceny was so bad I even had the guys in a van with a stripe. Embarassing now, yes. Still, I would give just about anything to have a copy of that bile in my hands right now.

While I don't get paid for writing here, it's still such a liberating few minutes of total freedom each day (or so) to do whatever I want, on my terms. To that end, you'll see some very interesting Item Five interviews in this space soon, which branch out a little bit from the normal. Stay tuned....