Cheesy Tomatoes: The Attack of the Psychic Killer Coreys, pt. 2

After we left the Grindhouse, we went to pick up our two-year-old daughter Georgia from day care and then went home. Whilst Penny and Georgia played "Let's take all the books off the shelves and color in the most expensive ones while throwing saliva-sticky half-eaten cheeze slices on the hard-wood floors," and Nicholas ate Cheetos, I searched through the inner workings of my sanctum sanctorum for some fine film options for our Cheesy Movie Night. I unearthed the following:

• Anaconda
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
• Blackenstein
• Cat Women of the Moon
• Flash Gordon
• Foxy Brown
• Gasss ("that's a movie about you, Dad!" said my son)
• Kung Fu Hustle
• Lake Placid
• The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
• Sextette
• Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
• The Warriors
• Xanadu

I brought them all upstairs, and having decided to let our guests pick the movie, I placed them atop the entertainment center and waited for Mark and Sherry to show.

And waited.

And waited.

'Round midnight, Penny woke, and she asked me what I was doing, just leaning on the entertainment center. I told her I was waiting for Mark and Sherry to come. "Like that?" she said. I told her that I thought my pose reflected a cool, casual, and gracious attitude, yet with just the right amount flair and je ne sais quoi expected of master party host (back during my early college years, we called this pose the Buffalo Stance). Penny's brow furrowed, and she grumbled, "They're not supposed to come until tomorrow, you idiot. Go to bed."

Well, the next day, early evening, I happened to look out the window, and I saw a very strange couple walking up the street. The man wore a black sweatshirt with its hoodie around his face, sporting Wayfarers to further obscure his identity. The woman, too, wore Wayfarers, and over her shorts she wore a skirt that looked as if it were made of mosquito netting. Under the skirt, her legs were splotched with large patches of speckled hair. Nicholas came to the window and asked me if those were Skrulls. I took a closer look; "No, son," I told him, "those aren't Skrulls; that's just Mark and Sherry."

Mark told us that they disguised themselves because they were on the lam, and they were walking because they had to ditch the parents' ride in some nondescript alley behind the old Piggly Wiggly. Nicholas asked Sherry if she forgot to shave her legs that morning, and she told him no, that the hair was part of the disguise, and that her friend back in PA gave her that idea when her friend, trying to wax her legs, let the glue stay on too long, and when she tried to remove it, not all of the glue would come off, resulting in the most of the epoxy remaining on her skin, which meant that when her cat rubbed against her, the cat's hair stuck to her legs--for two weeks.

After a fine meal of turkhetti (spaghetti with turkey instead of beef), I adopted the Buffalo Stance near the entertainment center, and offered our guests their choice of cheese, succinctly detailing a synopsis of each movie. When I finished my summaries half an hour later, Mark and Sherry decided upon The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, a movie all of us had heard of, yet none of us had seen. By the time the movie was over, we all wished that was still the case.

A little later, Mark and Sherry left under the cover of night, telling us not to try to contact them, that they didn't want us involved any further than we already were. After tearful goodbyes, my family went to bed, but I had grown too distraught to sleep. I sunk down to my sanctum sanctorum, corrected every invalid opinion on the internet forums I normally visit, but...I was too troubled to turn in. I went back to the house, turned on the television, and scrolled till I could find something passionate, something angsty, something through which I could vicariously vent my anger at a world in which my friends had to go on the run because of the price of coffee in Campo Grande...and I found it; however, I only caught the tail-end of it, the preview of what was happening on the next episode. I scrolled through the listings, and I discovered that the next episode would be the next night. I sighed. Tomorrow night. I was defeated. I was tired. I was ready for bed. As I am now. No more posting tonight.

Tomorrow: Part Three.