The Sometimes Orange-Headed, Sometimes Purple-Headed, Sometimes Red-Headed Link between Redneck Jokes and King Cake

Tanita "Bonds" Jha

One of the biggest pleasures in my life is the pleasure of learning or experiencing something new.

I am an information and an experience junkie, both.

So emigrating to America provided me with excitement and stress in equal portions.

In the early days, everything was a discovery and a novelty.

The grocery stores.

The malls.

The impressive range of car models and makes on the road.

The wide variety of food choices available at restaurants and stores.

(Cusines from every country and an absolutely unbelievable assortment of packaged foods).

Why, even Microsft Word, Excel and Powerpoint were brand new to me.

Arriving in America with only Wordstar under my belt, I was surprised to find it was obsolete and I would need to have a basic knowledge of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, if I was to make a living.

When I failed to break into advertising, Plan B (concocted between my sister R and me), was for me to apply to an administrative assistant position (administrative assistant being what a secretary is called in America).

Word, Excel and Powerpoint were absolutely necessary for that.

This is how I found myself at Goodwill’s Institute for Career Development.

Discovering Goodwill’s ICD through the Penny Saver magazine, I enrolled in their free classes in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

A Foot In The Door

Those early classes from Goodwill’s ICD were a blessing.

Because they got me a foot in the door.

First at NEC Electronics.

Then at Palm.

And then my rudimentary Excel training seeded a brand new career for me.

After joining Palm as an Administrative Assistant, a few months later, I was able to apply to become their Commissions Analyst.

If you want to know what a Commissions Analyst does, I have tried to describe it with as much excitement as possible in a previous post My Day Job. Xactly. More or Less.

But enough of that.

The reason I am writing this post is because, as I said, I am an information and experience junkie.

And at Palm, I ran into this person who was able to jet-propel both these addictions.

First there was the Jeff Foxworthy transference

I can’t remember what might have sparked the conversation between me and this Palm buddy that led to me finding out about Jeff Foxworthy.

But a conversation did take place where said Palm buddy told me about Jeff Foxworthy.

And before you knew it, I was terribly into this comedian and his unique brand of redneck jokes.

I am not sure if Jeff is the only source for redneck jokes, but he is certainly the king-pin of redneck jokes.

When I first discovered redneck jokes, frankly I just couldn’t get enough of them.

A typical one reads like this:

YOU MIGHT BE A REDNECK IF ...

1.   More than one living relative is named after a southern civil war general.

2.   Your wife’s hairdo was once ruined by a ceiling fan.

3.   Your home has more miles on it than your car.

4.   None of your shirts cover your stomach.

5.   You believe you got a set of matched luggage if you have two shopping bags from the same store.

6.   You consider a six-pack and a bug-zapper high-quality entertainment.

7.   On your first date you had to ask your dad to borrow the keys to the tractor.

8.   You refer to Fifth Grade as “Your Senior Year”

9.   You prominently display gifts bought at Graceland

10.   Nothing under your Christmas tree is paid for

I was so inspired by these redneck jokes, I tried to write similar jokes about the Mangalorean Catholic community to which I belong...

YOU MIGHT BE A MANGALOREAN CATHOLIC IF…

1.    The party is not complete for you until Bara Solow has been sung.

2.   You have a Pavlovian response to Sannas & Sorpotel (especially if it’s made by Kishore)  - it will make you drop everything you are doing -rearrange your calendar, cancel your quadruple bypass surgery,  ditch a hot date – just to line up with your plate.

3.   At some point, you have thought about changing your last name to Shenoy, Prabhu, or whatever you have learned is your Sarsaswat Brahmin family name.

4.   You know your 4^th, 5^th and 6^th cousins, and at least one of your cousins is a nun or a priest.

I know these jokes are not funny, but hey, I’m not Jeff Foxworthy.

Then There Was The Baseball Game

If I can claim to have attended a baseball game (my one and only), it's thanks to the same Palm buddy.

To tell you the truth, I’m clueless when it comes to sports.

So though I went to this baseball game at AT&T Park, if you ask me questions like who was playing who that day and the score and whatnot, I would have to go and look at the photo album and see what the captions (written by said Palm buddy) say.

I am sounding terribly sportsneckish, ain’t I?

But anyway, why don’t I do that…

I’ll be back.

Okay, I’m back.

The captions in the photo album say the Giants played the Braves on that fine day in August at AT&T Park.

Now I know you’re thinking, with that kind of passion for sports, whatever was I doing at a baseball game?

Well, you see I was incidental to the affair. The whole shebang, day out, watchamacallit was entirely arranged on my daughter’s behalf.

And you can see from the pic she was quite in to it.

One of our album pics depicts her getting a shoulder-height view of the entrance to the park.

Other pictures show us eating hot dogs and snow cones.

And dancing to KC and the Sunshine Band, who opened before the game.

It was an unforgettable day. And since we were gifted a photo album memorializing the visit - complete with funny captions and decorative embellishments, we look back at it from time to time and smile.

And Finally, There’s The King Cake

How that got started I don’t know. 

Possibly, I might have said I had been reading about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and I wanted to go to New Orleans during Mardi Gras some day and I was also intrigued about King Cake.

Mardi Gras, if you are interested, officially begins with Epiphany and runs till Ash Wednesday, and New Orleans is the happening place for it (tuck this info away for when Las Vegas begins to feel a little jaded to you).

But back to King Cake and its part in the celebrations of that week.

King Cake - What Gives?

King Cake is a type of coffee cake.

What gives it its name and makes it unique to Mardi Gras is that a tiny gold plastic baby (representing Baby Jesus) is baked into the cake.

And there’s this charming party game associated with it.

The way it's played is that if you are at a Mardi Gras party and the plastic baby shows up in your slice of cake, you are obliged to host a Mardi Gras party at your house the following night.

Because of the Baby in the Cake,  there's partying every night during Mardi Gras.

(They sure know how to have fun in New Orleans!)

So anyway, me and this Palm buddy are having this conversation on the phone about all of this, one of us in the SFO Bay Area, the other in Florida (or was it Georgia?).

The next thing I know...

…. a King Cake is on its way by Fedex to us just in time for the future Barry Bonds' birthday.

(If Minoo and Tanita can’t go to Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras will come to Minoo and Tanita.)

The Fate Of The Cake In The Hands Of 8-Year Olds

Now because the cake got served to a bunch of 8 year olds at the birthday party, it had a bit of an unfortunate fate.

If you let 8 year olds in on the fact there’s a gold plastic baby inside the cake, what can you expect?

No sooner had we finished singing Happy Birthday to the birthday girl, when 10 pairs of hands were all over their slices of cake, pulverizing and crushing the pastry to find the little gold baby.

And of course, one lucky child did get to find and keep the gold baby.

At the end of the day, even if the cake didn’t actually make it into anyone’s mouth,

…the experience definitely made for an original and very cute memory.

So there you have it….

Redneck jokes.  The One and Only Baseball Game.  And The King Cake.

3 very special experiences.

All as American as apple pie.

And there’s this one person to thank for all of them.

Sometimes Red-Headed. Sometimes Purple-Headed. Sometimes Orange-Headed.

It’s timed I named her.

April, will you please take a bow!

P.S.  April and her soul mate and hubby Damon brought a ton of joy into our lives, when they were in the Bay Area, and even after they moved away. Faithfully, every Christmas and every birthday, a gift would show up for Tanita, each one more unique than the other. This went on right until Tanita was 10. This post is my way of saying Mucho Gracias to them. Or as they say in redneck…MUCHABLIGE!

P.S. 2 In referring to sorpotel,  I very deliberately left out Kishore’s last name. This is to protect him from being mobbed by hungry and weak-willed gastronomes with last names such as Lobo, Fernandes, and such. Kishore, I know you are saying "Phew!"