Unconventional

About eight years ago, I took a trip to New Orleans with a couple of my nephews. Notwithstanding the fact that I had lived within easy driving distance of The Big Easy for the greater part of my life, it was the first time I had occasion to visit. I don't know why but most of my forrays outside of Texas had been to the west and not the east. I think that part of the reason for this is that nature hates a vacuum and, whenever I traveled eastward, I would get near to Louisiana and start feeling the IQ points getting sucked right out of my head. Once I made it all the way to Vidor and forgot how to read for a week.

If you've never been to New Orleans, you really ought to make the effort and see it before God gets around to destroying it....for the second time in man's existence, Sodom and Gomorrah has been created. I spent most of my time there with the following thought running through my head, "There is really no valid reason for a Latter-Day Saint to ever visit New Orleans"

My nephews and I checked into our hotel and became immediately aware that there was an hugely dispropotionate number of extremely beautiful young women also staying in this hotel. Not only were these women extremely beautiful, they were also dressed rather provocatively and, most of them were rather obviously, (how shall I put this?) "surgically-enhanced". They also wore laminated I.D. badges dangling from chords about their necks.

On the way up to my room, I shared an elevator with a couple of these young women and so I asked, "Is there a convention of some type in this hotel?". I learned that there was, indeed, a convention there that weekend...a pornstar convention.

When I got to my room, I called my wife right away to tell her what was going on. When asked why I was telling her all of this, I explained that over twenty years of marriage had taught me that there was just some information that my wife needed to hear straight from me and, more importantly, before she might learn about it from some evening news report.

That evening, as I waited at the dining room bar for my nephews to come down and join me for dinner, I passed the time drinking my Dr. Pepper adorned with a lime wedge and a cherry and joking back and forth with the bartender.

A couple of young women from the convention came and sat down at the bar and also joined in the conversation. After a few moments, one of them turned to me and asked, "Are you here with the convention?"

You know those moments when time just seems to stop and hang there?...the times when your mind seems to race with all sorts of responses and ponderings about the appropriate way to answer a question that you were ust asked?...that's what happened to me...

Why would they wonder if I'm here with the convention?

Are there really pornstars that look like fat dumpy greying old men?

Do I act offended when telling them no?

Eventually I settled upon what I considered the right response...because, really...how often does one get the opportunity to answer a question like that? So just before time began to move forward again, I put on my most pleasant and earnest face and answered.

"Yes....I'm a stunt double"