Hits and Misses

  Every year, the high council of the elderly out in Lakeway put aside their budding senility and general malaise about the consistency of their pea soup to try and form a coherent display of talent in a show known as "Hits and Misses."  Of course, it may also be due to the fact that the good ol' boys and handsome "Pats" (the gender-neutral name I have come to adopt for those women that exude an ambiguous sexuality on and off the golf course) can no longer pander their meager talent for shanking balls out on the course because of the mildly-cold temperatures; everyone knows that old people turn into crankier versions of the Tin Man sans-oil when it gets below 60 degrees in South Texas.

  The point is, that when old-White affluence is driven indoors and forced to deal with  more versions of itself in social situations, the natural way to establish a pecking order is a talent show. It's impossible to know how rich the guy next to you is, but can he fart the ABCs? In reality, the talents on display are...dated.

  Some were not even talents at all, unless you call reenacting the Newlywed Game a talent (I guess still having a memory of that show in their age is impressive). A German couple, the Gruettners, displayed their acting chops in a twenty-fucking-minute skit where the husband played a butler having to pretend to be all the guests at his madam's dinner party because they are all already dead, and thus couldn't show up; the guy is 82, so I had no idea if it was some sort of post-traumatic cry for help that the Allies killed all of his Nazi friends.

  The bulk of the show was made up of old folks warbling 50's songs into a microphone for 2 hours, the result of which sounds something similar to the soundtrack of Fallout 3 via Galaxy New Radio. This years mass-fail of "Hits and Misses" was also largely a result of the fact that they had no DJ like years prior; more specifically they didn't have THE DJ that had come to be synonymous with the event until he went into a rage: Bobby Ray.

  The thing about Bobby Ray is, if you haven't already noticed, he has a bit of a complex. No not a Willy Nelson hick-off complex, but OMG T-REXARMSGROSS!....

  Jesus those withered appendages still haunt my dreams. At the 2008 Hits or Misses, Bobby Ray's strong-handed assistant spilled some water on his amplifier and shorted it out. So what does mini-T-rex do? He goes King Kong on our asses, claiming that we were the ones that intentionally spilled water - that we were picking on him because of his deformity! Firstly, I would never touch an amp that had been handled by those doll-hands; secondly, it was a blatant attempt to try and extort money form the club to get a new amp. So before the event even starts, he threatens everyone with lawsuits and peremptorily packs up his truck, all the while yelling that we "crazy assholes" better not have fucked with his car.

  No amount of feigned (or probably real) narcissism could ever take away from the fact that this "carny" was the heart and soul of what "Hits and Misses" was supposed to be for the members of the club: a way for the elderly to parade their awful talents and still feel good about themselves because hey, they can just look over at their withered-handed DJ and be thankful that yeah, maybe they couldn't sing, but a least they could still masterbate. Without Bobby Ray, the annual talent show was nothing but a bunch of nursing-homers wandering around on stage and forgetting lyrics. Thank god for bourbon.