the new TLC show, "here comes honey boo boo" has taken a lot of knocks by a lot of people and hey, i'm hardly here to defend it as erudite t.v. but i am here to point out a few things about this show that i think some of the rest of you have missed - a few very wonderful things.
first of all, here's a man - mike - who wants to marry (and not just live with) his girlfriend of 8 years - june. june doesn't want to get married, but mike keeps trying. where's the support for him for that? hollywood might be home to some of the most beautiful people who don't offend your sense of taste and class, but really? you put them on a higher level than mike? good ol' tobacco-spittin' mike who is at least staying at home and trying to raise his kids? and isn't getting divorced after 72 hours of marriage? face it - the kardashians and all the rest of 'em out there, while maybe not farting in public, have a whole lot less real class than honey boo boo and her family. they might have a whole lot more fake class - if that's what floats your boat.
this family, despite not being a married one, stays together. not that i am saying that staying together for 8 years is any kind of reason to pop the champagne cork - i mean, chug the moonshine - but still. in this do-whatever-the-hell-you-want world we live in? 8 years is about as old as the universe. and it's not just the number of years - it's the family. everything they do is together. they're not out running up the corporate ladder and letting everybody who gets home first fend for themselves. they're not eating hamburgers out of a greasy bag and calling it "dinner." they're frying up chicken - together - in the kitchen and.......don't faint now......they're sitting down - together - and eating it. i know - right?
june is often quoted as saying things like this: "we're family. you might not like us, but we're family. we enjoy each other. we have fun. everywhere (ok, so she says, "everwhere") we go, we're together." and they are. they do. you won't catch one of them staying away from the rest of 'em for 3 months while they're in paris filming their most recent movie. i mean......look at 'em......where are they? in front of a camera, maybe, but every last one of 'em is right. there. - to.geth.er.
yeah - that's pretty classless.
mike bought june a stupid lookin' sculpture of a deer for their 8-year anniversary. he meant well. she didn't like it. when they got home from their anniversary dinner out on the town (a cafeteria in the local strip mall), the kids were eagerly awaiting them - they wanted to hear all about their parents' first real "date" in 8 years. mike told them about the deer. and how their mama didn't like it. and those girls gave their mama grief. they told her to stop being unappreciative. to stop being ungrateful. to go in there and apologize right now to daddy and put that deer on the mantle.
june did. she put the deer on the mantle, apologized to mike, and said, "i was wrong."
yeah. classless.
these people have wicked good senses of humor. if you can sit through one of their shows without laughing - not at their farting and not at their frequent references to their bathroom habits - but at their incredibly dry, frank, whatchu- gonna-do-about-it style, then there's something wrong with you.
and the high horse you rode in on.
"never end a sentence with a preposition," june told honey boo boo one day.
"why not?" said honey boo boo.
"it's bad manners," said june.
i rest my case.
