truly, madly, A LOT

I wasn't going to say anything here about the latest Ayelet Waldman debate piece, on the lust in her heart for her hubby, Michael Chabon. But everybody else is playing, why not me? Actually, this is only a tangental comment.

There's a little country church that Christopher's family converges on once a year for what's called "Homecoming." (In my experience, this word is used all over the place at rural churches, even when no one is coming from anywhere because everyone's already home.) One year we went to fulfill our familial duty. The place is tiny, one small room with a pulpit and nice pews in the front and an overflow section of pews that would usually be closed off by a folding door in the back. We all sat in the back. Homecoming features singing, so there was that, and then a short sermon by the preacher, who is the focus of this anecdote. The preacher was a young man, or young for my imagined version of a preacher anyway, and he's also what I suppose would be considered a certain kind of Hott. Or he thought he was. Long, lean face, short clipped hair, a tidy kind of handsome that gave away his probable teenage self as the kind of guy who drove a fast car and spent weekends plying girls with cans of Bud Light he'd bought from some bootlegger. A shadow mullet. A mullet aura.

So, he reaches the end of his sermon and it's time for him to give his "testimony," which, for the uninitiated, would be his story of sin and redemption. The music to serve as a backdrop kicks in and his wife instantly hops up and escorts their youngish son from the room. This was obviously an exit she'd made plenty of times. She had it down to a scurrying, red-faced art.

Youngish preacher proceeds to tell his story. Just so you know, he used to get a laid a lot. I mean, A LOT. That was the subtext of the entire monologue, which featured something just short of bragging about his exploits with drugs, drink, and, do not forget, the ladies. Oh yes, the ladies loved the preach. He could STILL be getting it, if he hadn't found the savior.

We barely kept from laughing aloud, which, truthfully, has always been my second biggest problem with actually attending church. (The first being getting my ass out of bed.) (And you know, besides the obvious, of not being religious.)

For some reason, after reading Waldman's sextastic piece in the NYT I kept hearing Michael Chabon saying: "I may be married to the writer of the Mommy Track mysteries, but I get laid A LOT."