Sara(h) Smiles, Part 4: Hard Partyin'!

On my second day of knocking on doors for Sarah 2012, I encountered some resistance, from someone who felt toward Our Gal as I myself had mere weeks before, when I hadn’t yet seen the light. How, this woman asked me, could she possibly vote for anyone so defiantly ignorant, so manifestly stupid? I assured her that I myself had voted for Obama in 2008, and had even danced in the street the night of his election, only to discover two years later that my fellow Americans had come in large numbers to regard his presidency as hardly less disastrous than George W. Bush’s. I said that at some point it hardly made sense to keep fighting the good fight when so many of my neighbors seemed determined to fight the bad one.

I mused rhetorically that it was looking a gift horse in the mouth to have been born American but not to feel entitled. I have long made it a practice when given too much change or not charged for an item or two to keep my mouth shut; I see such serendipity as life’s way of whispering, “You know, Johnny, you’re all right.” To refuse such largesse would be churlish; it’s a small step from that to whipping yourself while looking at photographs of the widow Schroeder, a la Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire. Drill, baby, drill!

Back at the office, I learned that I was to spend the balance of the day planning a party for our interns for that evening. The Mama Grizzly in Charge explained that the campaign was committed to playing just slightly less hard than it worked. She gave me a credit card and told me to buy enough ginger ale, granola bars, Slim Jims, Doritos, and Sara Lee cheesecake to keep a couple of dozen hard-partyin’ interns rockin’ for a few hours. I was to use her iTunes account to download Christian rock and disco for them to dance to, and hire no fewer than four chaperones, to be disguised as security guards, with walkie-talkies and what not, to keep the interns from behaving in a way that Sarah might find distasteful. It occurred to me that we might be able to lure Hollow Notes, the Hall & Oates tribute band in which the little one with the mustache now plays, up to perform for the kids if we offered more than what the Cherry Hill Holiday Inn was paying them, but MGIC said there wouldn’t be time on such short notice to ensure that their entire repertoire was appropriately godly. I was to ensure that there would be enough The Joys of Abstention and Heterosexuality — A Choice I’m Proud to Make (and Re-Affirm) Every Day brochures for all.

The first thing that impressed me about the actual party was that everyone showed up exactly at 7:30, the time at which the festivities were scheduled to begin. In their unnerving bright-eyedness, they reminded me of the Mormon kids who come down from Utah every summer to work as servers at the spectacularly mediocre restaurants in the Grand Canyon. But I suppose I should be grateful that only one of them — a boy, Josh, who was pretty clearly thinking impure thoughts about one of the other interns, Cake (who I understood to have changed her name from Kimberlee in honor of Sarah’s own child-naming style) had to be escorted from the recreation room to the parking lot, where the chaperones beat him so mercilessly that he was pronounced unlikely to be able to vote in any presidential election before 2016, by which time, with any luck, we’ll have renamed ourselves The Committee to RE-Elect Sarah.