For a Smile They Can Share the Night

Because you have no reason to read this, I don’t have to have a reason to write it. Today’s topic: stereotyping. Why you ask? Well, in a world of coincidences…

I spent the early evening in deep discussion about the stereotypical Brentwood girl. After all, it’s No-Pants-and-Uggs season. If you haven’t purchased your Cleveland Cavaliers 2011 calendar… you know, the one with LeBron James on the cover because they print those things way too far in advance… if you haven’t picked up your 2011 calendar, No-Pants-and-Uggs season runs from September 2nd through June 28th.

For those of you sweet innocent girls out there, I’m not upset that you choose to wear tights under your dress or your strangely long, ridiculously overpriced t-shirt… No-Pants-and-Uggs season is geared more toward those girls who are genuinely offended when a male is suckered into glancing at the Urkel-high thong popping out of your low-rise paint pants.

Anyway, so I spent a decent amount of time making casual references to the anything but casual attire one might find at the local frozen yogurt store in the upper-class part of town. [Note: I mean, really, a store that sells only frozen yogurt? ] Don’t get the wrong idea, Brentwood girls are great people… even the ones with vicegrip pants, but they are fairly easy to pigeonhole (thank you, Microsoft Word synonym finder).

So I stopped at my slumdog shell station on the way home from that conversation. While I’m waiting for my tank to fill, a set of rims pull up to the pump on the opposite side of the parking lot. [Note: The car the rims are connected to doesn’t really matter in Inglewood.] So the rims pull up, with their tinted windows and sound system blaring. Now that you have all joined me in my first stereotype, the song blaring from the rims? Don’t Stop Believing. So, I transitioned from stereotype 1 to stereotype 2. I went from thinking a young male with his obese father’s pants around his ankles was going to step out of the rims to thinking a high school kid who has been given a little too much of his parents’ money to do with as he so poorly chooses. Then the guy stepped out of the rims.

As I try not to commit manslaughter with suspense, let me tell you a little about the man who stepped out of the rims. While I’m pumping gas like Alshon Jeffery, singing along to Journey, a middle-aged man with his white shirt and red tie, with his driving cap atop his smiling head, danced out of the rims and into the gas station. That’s about as close to unstereotypable as a situation can get… unless he had let his mother drive.

So what did we learn today? You can’t judge an audio-book by its case. Everyone is living just to find emotion. Journey went on and on and on and on, long before Lamb Chop. And when we’re all singing to the same song, we’re never really strangers.