Summer vacay essay assignment: Shakespeare's "Clinton"

Ok, summer hols are here and once you've been to the pool five straight days in a row and hit the Dairy Queen twice in one day, it's time to think figuratively about cracking open the school books and contemplating next semester.

To help the summer slip by, I've devised an ingenious summer project: Shakespeare's "Clinton."

If you've been reading carefully, you'll have noted that I'm reading Terry McAuliffe's What a Party! and it's been quite an inspiration, let me tell you. For starters, it dawned on me that I should have had a driveway repaving business at age 14, but quite aside from Mac's entrepreneurship, I realized that there really just hasn't been enough love for Bill lately.

Bill truly was a great - yet deeply flawed - president, and we should give him his due. Bill is tragic, but heroic. A leading man and his own villain. Larger than life, but the embodiment of the common man. A man of Shakespearean caliber. Bill is a title hero worthy of puffy shirts and Elizabethan collars.

Sadly, the bard is long dead, but staring down the long barrel of summer break, I'm sure we can come up with something.

So here it is: the Trixie Sanchez William Jefferson Shakespeare Playwriting Competition.

Outline for play:
-Bill is the main protagonist
- Story arc must incorporate all of the following: humble beginnings, rises to great heights, falls from grace due to human flaws, conspiracy of enemies, rescued by the Deus Ex Machina of untouchable opinion polls, plays golf, loves junk food
- Other characters as desired (but Janet Reno would be good since it might involve a Will Ferrell revival performance)
- Exit, pursued by bear

Deadline: August 19 - Bill's birthday

Prize: a catfish lunch at Doe's in Little Rock, AK. The restaurant quite righly proclaims that it was "recognized by the Catfish Institute in 1998 for a superior job preparing farm-raised catfish."

Hey, who can argue with well-prepared catfish? Get out your notebooks and start writing.

Soul of the Party

OK, I know this will come as a surprise to some, but recently I've been called upon to attend a few children's parties. And it hasn't escaped my notice that while they claim to be "parties," there's no booze, no dancing and no making out.

Instead, there's usually a scene of over-enthusiastic parents behaving in a way no sane adult should. At the last one I attended, the parents were dressed in swim suits (remember, parents in their forties aren't pretty when skimpily clad - no hard bodies and string bikinis here) and had a tug-o'-war with a bunch of preschoolers. The parents "lost" and fell in the pool. Hilarious, right? Let me tell you, it would have been more hilarious with a glass of Jack Daniels in my hand.

At another, the mother dressed up as Dorothy, performed songs from the Wizard of Oz that she'd been rehearsing for several weeks, and hired day laborers to create a yellow brick path leading up to the party venue.

Children really only attend parties for two things: the cake and the goodie bag. But rather than stand by the front door for ten minutes and hand out a goodie bag and slice of takeout birthday cake, the hosting parents go through two hours of breathless entertainment - or worst still pay hundreds of dollars to children's party performers* - to make sure their offspring has a good time.

And yet, is it really worth it? I think the current trend in excessive kiddie parties really took off in the 80s. Has it paid off? Are today's college students better equipped to party? Do they know how to tailgate like there's no tomorrow? Are they socially superior, entertainmentally evolved, organizationally unchallenged?

The jury's out, but until I get a Jack Daniels, there's no way I'm going to another party where I'm the tallest person in the room.


*Please don't get me started on what a scandalous waste of money it is to pay for children's party entertainers. Untalented-yet-bouncy people sing repetitious songs, make sock puppets dance or strum the guitar for grossly unreasonable sums.

Janet Reno, where are you?

Today, I spent a quiet moment thinking about Janet Reno, which is not suprising since I'm reading Terry McAuliffe's book "What a Party" (boy, what a Kool Aid salesman, but I say that in the nicest possible way, really), and what a loss she is to late night television.

I loved Will Ferrell's brilliant impersonation of her every Saturday on SNL - robotic, slightly butch and dressed in a vivid shade of polyester blue. Nothing comes close these days, with the possible exception of Bobby Lee's rendition of Kim Jong Il.

Janet, Janet, Janet - what made you so tall, so seemingly near-sighted, and so shapeless? There's not been an Attorney General like her since.

So Janet, if you're out there, please consider a reprise in the role of Attorney General - surely Alberto Gonzales isn't long for the job, and we know Will Ferrell's just itching to get back into those old blue dresses.