Rumsprinkler

So minions, today I'm going to take a different approach to storytelling. Let's talk about something painful. Something I've buried so deep in my psyche, that one day, if I do actually punch a care bear, even B.D. Wong will take a look at my past, and be like "ohhhhhh, ok. That care bear totally had it coming."

And no, I know what you're thinking, and this is not the story about the time I was in 5th grade, and all I wanted to do was take a picture with a cut out of Jon Bon Jovi, and make it look as life like as humanly possible so I could brag to my friends, but the photographer with a heavy Indian accent insisted in broken English that I put my hand on the cut-out's bare hairy chest, and I was like 'dude, I'm only a kid,' but he didn't care, and I'm making this face in the photo that is like 'oh my God, get me out of here.' This story is WAY more awkward than that.

Since I don't have any pictures of this incident, or, at least none that I care to share, I figure now is a good a time as any to tell the harrowing tale of Rinny's family vacation vs. The Amish.

Truth be told, this is probably the ONLY stupid story in my repertoire, that still gets me angry. I don't think it's funny. Not one bit. However, every time I meet a new boyfriend, or introduce anyone in my family to anyone else, the subject of this story inevitably comes up. So I'm putting the kibosh on that tradition right here and now. The whole world is about to hear the story, and then we're never to talk about it again, mmkay?

I must have been in fourth grade. No, actually I take that back. Now that I think about it, I know for a fact that this was the summer between the third and fourth grade. The reason I know this, is that after this family vacation we moved (totally a coincidence, I didn't have my family excommunicated or anything), and I started telling everyone in my new school that I was Amish, and I had never seen electricity, or pencil sharpeners, as a coping mechanism for the fact that I was the new girl, and people were making fun of me.

(Note to fourth grade self--wow, really? Genius.)

(Note to fellow fourth graders--you bullied me because I was new, but let the Amish thing slide? Who's laughing now?!?)

I have a friend who, to this day, if I do something stupid will say "it's OK, you don't know any better. You were brought up Amish." She gets a pass. No one else is allowed to say anything about it. We made a deal, remember?

Anyway, one morning of our vacation, my parents decided to take a break from Pennsylvania Dutch-ing, to take my sister and I to play mini-golf. It was mostly a fun in the sun type of day. I wore my new mesh hair bow that I bought from the Amish gift haus, along with my my favorite red t-shirt and matching red spandex shorts. (What do you want, this was the 80's). Things were going great, until about the second to last hole. The penultimate hole, if you will.

It looked easy enough, and had a par 3. My sister and I both made par, and took a break to sit on some rocks while my parents battled it out for dead last.

After about an hour of watching both of them miss time and again I began to get delirious, and it actually started to become funny. Twenty more minutes passed, and finally my father was close enough to the hole to just tap the ball lightly, and sink it.

To my fathers credit, he did what he was supposed to, but the mini golf Gods were angry that day, and his ball did that 'nope, just kidding, gonna make it look like I'm sunk, but really I'm going to circumvent this hole right here, and roll even further away, and into a sand trap' thing they are all trained to do.

Being young girls, my sister and I naturally took our mother's side on everything, and we began to laugh hysterically at my father.

I was laughing so hard, that I threw my head back, which knocked me off balance, and everyone (except the Russian judge, of course) gave me a perfect 10 on my backwards swan dive into hole 4's water trap.

Did I mention that in Amish country they dye their mini-golf water bright blue?

It stained my skin, I ruined my new bow, and I had to strip naked in front of all of God's country, and wear my father's heavy denim jacket as a dress for the rest of the day. Oh sure, let's take a bright blue kid, with a bright blue bow in her hair, and stick her in a bright blue and white denim jacket dress for the duration of the day. No seriously, my dad's jacket just so happened to match my skin. You can't make this stuff up.

And YES, I was more upset about the denim jacket dress than I was about having to strip naked.

It totally didn't match my Keds.