How Farrah Fawcett and Bo Derek saved my sanity

By Dano ~

When I was 7 or 8, I remember going through a stage where I wanted to be like captain Tootsie. I may be the only person on the planet that remembers who Captain Tootsie was, but for all of you non, tootsie roll lovers, he was an advertising creation , no different than the ones used to sell stuff today.

If I was fortunate enough to be in the possession of a nickel, usually by commission of some kind of sin, like not giving it to God on a Sunday as I was supposed to, or stealing from my mothers purse, I headed straight to the candy store, (yes there was a little store up on the corner that sold nothing but candy, mostly a penny a piece, from a large showcase full of tootsie rolls, little wax bottles full of sweet stuff, paper ribbons with little dots of candy on them, guess-whats, with a prize in each one, and all day suckers, and innumerable others.)
Tootsie rolls were my favorite, because they were chocolate and the bonus was a short pictorial on the back of the wrapper, of Captain Tootsie doing what he did best, saving the world from evil.

The point of the above, story, is to demonstrate how at one time when we were young, we could believe just about anything, and I believed that I was captain tootsie for a while, with a towel tied around my neck for a cape. I would savor my delicious chocolate tootsie rolls and imagine that I too could do miracles.

There was a big Presbyterian church a couple of blocks away from our house, in K. C. Mo., and we generally were supposed to go to Sunday School, where we learned that Jesus loved us, and where I memorized all of the books of the Bible, only because the old guy who was our teacher said he would give me a dollar if I did, and I he did, and that was just wonderful for a kid whose father had died while I was only 2 , and whose mother worked all the time trying to feed and clothe us. A dollar really was a gift from God. I think I ended up with my first Daisy bb gun, using that dollar and a couple more that I earned selling garden seeds, door to door.
As I look back 60 or 70 years, I remember that I just automatically believed there was a god, ( my mother was very religious) and since I hadn't committed any really big sins, I believed he would look out for me. That belief was just about the sum total result, of all of the indoctrination I received from Mom, and Sunday School, because Mom was either working or berating us kids for laying around and making messes, and I don't think we ever really understood why we went to Sunday school in the first place.

My last and only real brush with Christian insanity was while I was in the Air Force, and I somehow got the idea that the Jesus story, was really true and I went around loving, forgiving, and praying, for awhile until someone reminded me that I was getting a little spooky, and by then I was already liking the sensations I got from looking at posters of more intelligently designed creatures, like Farrah Fawcett and Bo Derek (in their prime) , more anyhow, so I guess you could say, that in a way, sin saved my life, or at least my sanity! From that point on till the present my thinking has evolved into the hardcore, free thinking skepticism, that has kept me from buying into religion, or any other cult or scam. Not to mention many hours of talking to the ceiling.

Isn't evolution a beautiful thing, how it can naturally select for characteristics, ( I.E., Farrah, & Bo ) that keep us grounded, as intelligently as it does?

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