2 Dollar Productions

Back when I was 19 or so, several friends and I ventured out to a rather shady costume store to get our necessary Halloween disguises. The place had all of the usual stuff: vampire gear, super hero get-ups, sexy/slutty/trampy {fill in the blanks}. However, they also had something that for an unknown reason, I found to be truly magical. It was this full-body, ridiculous rabbit costume replete with a giant polka dot vest and matching bowtie.

Through a combination of being 19 and having had several spiked pumpkin juices prior to the outing, I decided that I had to rent it. I had to put down a rather large deposit, but the salesman assured me that I could return the suit up to a week after Halloween. So, I happily handed over the money and walked out of the store. Huge bunny suit in hand.




Exactly, ONE day after Halloween I returned to the store to find the windows boarded-up, the door locked and a 'CLOSED' sign over one window which looked like it could have been hanging in front of the building for about 30 years. Now, not so happily, I was the owner of a ridiculously expensive full-body rabbit costume replete with polka dot vest and matching bowtie. Poop.

Wearing a rabbit costume on Halloween is kind of funny and is in no way a problem. Having a rabbit costume stuck in your closet any other time of the year is something that a date finds accidentally and then suddenly gets an 'emergency' phone call from her roomate and has to go home. Immediately.

Needless to say, I wore that damn costume for about the next 5 Halloweens in order to get my money out of it and in the Halloween off-seasons, I generally stored it in one of my roomate's closets so as to avoid any uncomfortable questions from the few females I duped into my boudoir.

One Halloween while being The Rabbit, my friends and I threw a keg party at our house...and the typical things happened. People drank too much punch and beer. I laughed a lot about a lot of shit that I probably would not find so funny today. I hit on too many girls dressed as slutty/trampy/sexy (fill in the blanks}. And people crashed the party.

Friends of friends of 3rd cousins that someone met once at Thanksgiving in Pawtucket started showing up in droves and doing all the things that party crashers tend to do. They drank our booze. They talked amongst themselves. They hit on the girls we knew who were dressed as sexy/trampy/slutty {fill in the blanks}. And they brought absolutely nothing of value to the party.

So, we had to start removing people. Mostly because our beer supply would not last the night if our new "friends" didn't find someone else to mooch off. So, I in my bunny suit along with a few of my more sizeable acquaintances, started getting rid of the interlopers. Most left quietly and without incident. However, this one guy just had to make a scene. He tried to fight people, started breaking stuff, and suggested several times that my friends and I had inappropriate relationships with our mothers.

We finally did get him out into the street and even there, he stood pitching a fit, insulting the other guests and hosts. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He seemed to enjoy himself even more when someone from the crowd that had gathered near the front door would hurl their own insult back at him.

Then something dawned on me. He actually did enjoy what he was doing. He liked being the center of attention even if that meant he ruined other people's time and was generally hated by everyone in the vicinity. It was obvious that he was not going to stop what he was doing and it was equally obvious that there was no cure for personality ailment. So there was only one thing to do.

I rounded everyone up, went back inside and ignored him. And the party continued happily for the rest of the evening.

Now, real life is not like an afterschool special. So there was a consequence to my strategy of benign neglect. The ex-communicated party-goer did take it upon himself to boot someone's car door. But he also wound up taking a ride with some very nice policemen who had been called by an elderly neighbor who was even less thrilled with his shennanigans than we were.

The little lesson I learned that night has stuck with me ever since. That lesson: Some people are douchebags. Utterly and completely. There is no helping it. And worse, they thrive on spreading their douchebaggie-ness to everyone that they can infect. The only way to escape is to just stay away from them all together.

With this spirit in mind, I would like to officially start THE LIST 2 (Apologies to The Colbert Report but I can not, as of yet, think of a better name). It is for those special individuals in the public eye who show that special determination that it takes to reach the Acme of Douchebaggery. They now have a place at 2 Dollar Productions. And the reward, for me at least, is that I vow to never mention them again, in anything that I write. Be it on a blog or in a movie or in a review or in the random things I scribble down when my boss thinks I am paying close attention to his lecture about wage rate analysis. No, these special few will never thrive off this little corner of the universe putting their name in print and helping to spread their douchery.

And given what has happened recently, the first man to be put on THE LIST 2 is non other than Rush Limbaugh. Sure, all the worthless crap he pulled before got him close, but he recently pushed himself up those last few inches to get to the top. I mean come on. Attacking Alex P. Keaton over his debilitating disease is like shanking your own grandmother...after she just baked you a whole bunch of homemade cookies.



So, from this point on his name will never appear here again and no link will be put up to any article that mentions his name.

Because in the Halloween Keg Party of Life, there will always be crashers who drink without paying, trash things that aren't their own, contribute nothing funny or insightful or interesting to conversation and eventually urinate in your dirty clothes hamper while puking in your bed. But no more will they ruin the fun for me. From now on, I'm kicking them out and returning my focus to where it should be: Trying to get the vixen dressed as a sexy Little Red Riding Hooker drunk enough so that she'll let me give her the most forgetable five minutes of her life...metaphorically speaking of course.

Who would be on your LIST?

--JWS