Wee Wee, Monsieur!

You know, I have heard people use the phrase "I laughed so hard, I almost peed my pants!" time and time again. Now I must say, as a person who loves to laugh...well I find this hard to believe in most circumstances. You see...I once actually did laugh so hard that I pissed myself...ONCE....I was approximately eight or nine years old...I was at a stranger's house...an acquaintance of my mother's who may have sold either Tupperware or Avon products...it was so long ago I cannot recall the reason for this visit or really even who the woman was, but I do remember she had a son...and I was sent to play with this kid in his room while the adults did whatever they were doing, negotiating a big Tupperware deal or applying cheap lipstick...who knows?

For some odd reason this kid had a plastic Colonel Sanders Halloween mask...why on Earth he would have a mask depicting the face of the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise I have no idea...I have asked myself since then if I was either embellishing this or hallucinating...did they really make a Colonel Sanders Halloween costume back in the seventies?

I have found no proof of the existence of such a costume on the Internet...but this is what I remember...I remember some weird, little fucker in a plastic Colonel Sanders mask...and I can still see it in my head..and it will probably come back to haunt me during a funeral service or symphony performance...some time when laughter is the most inappropriate thing on your mental menu.

So standing before me is an eight year old child I have just met who is now wearing a Colonel Sanders mask and, suddenly, without warning or for any particular reason, this kid simply flipped his goddamn lid...he went nuts...spinning around and screaming and running into walls. It was like the scene in "Alien" when Ash ( Ian Holm) is discovered to be a robot and completely malfunctions...all this kid needed was a mouthful of milk to spit in all directions and it would have been a near exact recreation of that scene. It was the most insane and unexpected display of behavior I had ever scene...it was literally psychotic...it was also one of the most fucking hilarious things I have EVER seen a person do in my lifetime...and to this day it still makes me laugh. What a weird thing to do. I laughed so hard I couldn't stop..and the more I laughed, the more spastic this miniature fried chicken mogul became...until my bladder simply could not withstand the hilarity. I do believe that moment in my life, oddly enough, had one of the greatest impacts on my character as a human being. It was like a soon-to-be-full blown junkie getting their very first shot of heroin. It had a power that was all-consuming. I had laughed so hard it became literally euphoric.

Certain moments in a person's life forge one's character, be it the tragedy of a loved one's passing, your first kiss, witnessing an axe murder or losing your virginity. For whatever reason these moments leave an indelible mark on one's personality that can never be undone...for me one of those moments happened to involve a psychotic eight year old kid in a Colonel Sanders mask.