The Dude Drop

One of the problems with trying to write a weekly humor blog is sometimes you run out of material.

Sure, I guess I could write about Donald Trump again, but that gets boring.  The primary season is coming up and I need to save all of my Trump jokes.

But leave it to my hometown, Marietta (or as my friend Tater calls it: "Mayberry-etta"), Georgia to come to my rescue.

First, the details. Marietta has a nifty town square.  It is a gem. The Marietta Powers That Be have really improved the Square over the past thirty years. There's a lot of little shops where you can find cool little do-dads. It has several restaurants, including The Local, which serves really BIG biscuits.

A group of city leaders decided to make The Square a destination this holiday season. The first thing they came up with was an ice skating rink.

Of course, this is the South, where it can still be rather warm during the Christmas season, but I happened upon the ice skating rink and it was really neat. So the ice skating rink can be considered a success.

Then they came up with an idea to have people come to The Square during New Year's Eve: Have a ball drop at midnight just like they do in New York City. This is when it started to get weird.

It was promoted as a ball drop. From the Marietta Daily Journal on December 28, 2015: " To ring in the new year, celebration events are planned across Cobb County, including on Marietta Square, which is set to host its first New Year’s Eve celebration with live music, ice sculpting and a ball drop at midnight." So far, so good, right? The article continues: "The “ball” will actually be an 8-foot cube with the letter M on it playing off of the geometric shape of the Square." Okay, well, I guess, it wouldn't be my first choice, but whatever.  Sterling Wharton, President of The Branding Project which is a group that promotes Marietta said this: "I think it will be a unique surprise to everyone. I think it will be something where folks will be surprised".

As Scooby-Doo used to say, "Rut roh, Shaggy".

Here is what happened, again from the Marietta Daily Journal:

"As the last seconds of 2015 counted down, the crowd on Marietta Square turned its eyes to a box suspended by a crane 50 feet in the air.

Emerging from the box was a shirtless man in sparkly gold pants who performed acrobatic gyrations on a trapeze.

The plan was for the acrobat to perform while a countdown sounded and “Auld Lang Syne” rang out over the speakers, organizers said.

But a glitch in the sound system meant most people couldn’t hear anything as they watched the dancer emerge to greet the New Year like a freshly hatched chick."

So instead of a "ball drop" you have a "shirtless man in sparkly gold pants" performing "acrobatic gyrations on a trapeze". The Marietta Daily Journal then quoted former Congressman Bob Barr: "I would just describe him as a trapeze artist, and he was very good at that, but what a trapeze artist has to do with a New Year’s Eve celebration sort of escaped me."  It did me too, Bob, and I went to Cobb County Public Schools.

There was other negative reactions. On the city's Facebook page someone posted, "Super uncomfortable when the way too young 1/2 naked guy starts falling from the square nothing says happy new year like that, right? … Glad I left my children with their grandparents.”  This sums up the negative response in that people were not prepared for a shirtless man in sparkly gold pants to ring in the New Year.

One of the planners responded,  "Cheer up folks, there is always the corn boiling you can look forward to". (Note to non-Cobb Countians: "The corn boiling" is an event in July that the Sheriff puts on and all of the political people go to it.)

I want to emphasize to the planners that I am not just another one of those local yokel yahoos who's the reason we can't have nice things around here. Just this last summer, my wife and I went to The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. We saw Van Gogh, Monet, and a couple of paintings that were obviously influenced by what art historians call "heavy hallucinogenic drugs".

When we went there was a special exhibit on the "works" of Yoko Ono Lennon. Rock historians generally describe Yoko Ono as "one weird chick".

One of the "works" was a film about a fly walking around on a nude woman's body.  I'm not quite sure what makes this "art" except the woman was naked because if you want to make something "art" just throw a naked woman in it. I just wondered how they got the fly to walk around the body. In my experience, flies do what they want. The only explanation is Yoko told the fly the she was going to sing if it didn't walk all over the body.

So, just a bit of advice, not being reactionary or anything might remotely seem like I'm an uptight Baptist offended by shirtless men. If you are going to promote a New Year's Eve Ball Drop, drop a New Year's Eve ball. If you want to have somebody jump out of a box with an M on it, promote that.

Personally, I think a Big Chicken should have been dropped.  You could even put sparkly pants on it.

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution