Should've Skipped Straight to the Family Barbecue

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," sniveling cowards since ... emm ... since ... emmm ... oh hell, since Eisenhower was president!

My daughters The Heir and The Spare are in a national organization called Children of the American Revolution. C.A.R. for short. Like 99.9 percent of all the youngsters in C.A.R., they absolutely hate it. Yet The Spare persists because she wants to be able to put it on her college applications as community service.

Here in our bucolic New Jersey borough, we have a mom somewhat younger than me who is a stage mother for C.A.R. Her daughter, The Heir's age, is the state president. So, wanting to put on a nice show for the daughter, Stage Mom engineered a modest Fourth of July float, recruited a few kids from the neighborhood to wave flags, sat her daughter in a different vehicle (posh convertible) with an equally posh D.A.R. member, and a very posh banner identifying the two of them as poobahs, and off we went to the local Fourth of July parade!

Recall, folks, that if you're in a parade, you don't get to see it. You sit on your float for 45 minutes until it's your turn to float down Main Street. Which can get a tad boring for a bevvy of 5-year-olds.

I'll give it to The Spare. She spent three days making signs for the kids to carry. C.A.R. Stage Mom didn't like them, but we used them anyway. (Adults carried them.) The signs all had to do with an incident that happened in the bucolic borough in 1777. You know, the usual heroic bloodshed and all that rot.

Except someone had written something on the back of each of The Spare's signs. Just a little light something in thin ballpoint pen.

The back of the signs said:

IMPEACH

WHERE'S OSAMA?

PARDON MY FRIENDS

OUT OF IRAQ NOW

Gee, I wonder who pimped those signs?

Okay, I'm a closet Freeway Blogger without the guts and the savvy to do interstate highways. Told you I'm a craven coward.

So we march in the parade. Spare is pouting as only a 13-year-old can because she hurt her foot and Stage Mom (rightly) would not let her march barefoot. Spare had to sit in the float with the tots. Heir is lugging a sign with a significant lack of enthusiasm, especially given that the only other young woman her age in the group is sitting in a convertible, perfectly coiffed, waving like Miss America.

We get to the end of the parade route, and I'm toddling around collecting The Spare's signs before anyone can spy the subliminal messages. Lo and behold, Stage Mom shouts: "Oh, give me those! We can use them at the state picnic!"

I won't be able to herd The Heir and The Spare to the state picnic with a cattle prod, but I'll betcha those signs don't make it there either. I know Stage Mom's politics.

FROM ANNE

Will this Mercury Retrograde ever end?