Amarillo Sam's Drive-In Round Up - June 28th

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Amarillo Sam's Drive-In Round Up
Sunday, June 28th, 1981

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting a lot of folks knocking on the door of my double-wide lately, and not for the usual reasons: no bill collectors or legal representatives for one of my five ex-wives coming to sue me for some waffle iron I refused to give em in the divorce. No, everytime I open my door these days it’s one of these clean cut door-to-door people with a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a bowl of dirt in the other, who I think  wants to throw the said dirt all over my floor and show me how fast he can clean it up with said sucker. The problem is, before I can tell him to go ahead, be my guest, and by the way, if you wouldn’t mind getting the rest of the trailer while you’re at it I may consider the purchase, they’re hitting me up with what they call this “amazing business opportunity”. They say they want to recruit me under their tutelage, and that for giving them just 300 beans, I can be a licensed door-to-door man myself, and after a very short 9 week training program, I can be the one throwing dirt on people’s floors and being strung along by them before they kick me out of their spotless mudroom that I made spotless. Then they say it doesn’t end there, and that for just 600 more beans, I can suddenly start recruiting folks my own danged self, and then I can be the one sitting back, making all the money off a sales force who doesn’t seem to be selling anything except more salesmen.

Now I’m not very good at numbers, so I called up my cousin Jimbo Barclay who graduated from Stillberg Community College in Applied Mathematics -- just about the smartest guy I know, and therefore, the black sheep of the family. After 10 minutes of asking me for money, Jimbo figured that if this model of recruiting actually works, then half the country by now should be knocking on doors selling vacuums -- and that in the next five years, the stump speech of your average politician won’t be about fixing the economy and putting clothes on poor nekkid African children -- but about how “Even you can be your own boss...if you just send in $49.95 for the basic starter sales kit and all applicable accessories”. That’s right: the future of politics won’t be votes, but commissions.

And speaking of government shams, “Stripes” opened this week at The Safari and it’s another one of those snobs vs. slobs epics that’s so popular right now -- basically the “Meatballs” of geopolitical conflict. Let’s see what we got:

--Billy Murray from “Meatballs” as a deranged New York City cab driver who hates his life -- and this is supposed to be absurdist comedy?; possibly the best all-nude mud wrestling match ever filmed, which really gets the philosophy of the sport; P.J. Soles from “Halloween”, who screams louder for Bill Murray than she did for Michael Meyers, and demonstrates how to properly use a suitcase for things other than clothes; and an ending that could very well end the Cold War if the Ruskkies had any sense of humor. I guess we’ll just have to settle for World War 3.

Sam says check it out, and remember: don’t sign up to throw dirt on anyone’s rug unless it will almost certainly lead to the kind of Ardvarking that’ll make a stag flick blush