The following is a true story.

I recently held a benefit dinner for my favorite benefit event: benefit dinners. The cost of the event was to be 12 mosquitoes and a subway token. Because subway tokens are no longer in use, I assumed that I was safe in assuming that it wouldn't hurt to assume nobody would be able to come and I prepared no food and I made not provisions for the preparation of food. The benefit of this benefit to benefits was, if it's not completely obvious to you now, that I would get people excited about benefit dinners and perhaps encourage the use of the benefit dinner when one wants to benefit something. I could not come up with a better something that I wanted to benefit as I am in a bit of a funk as of late.

To my chagrin and embarrassment, which is only slightly different than chagrin, but significantly different for me to include both here, over 70 people showed up to the benefit dinner. Fortunately only 12 stayed after I informed them that there would be no food. Of those 12, 6 were children and I hit them on the head until they just kind of wandered off. The other 6 were adults and, as I'd hoped from the beginning, we formed an awesome band based around the characters of Jan Karon's Mitford series of books. I got to be Father Tim (yes!), and I play bass guitar. Our band is called Happy Endings, which is the name of the bookstore in Mitford, where the Mitford series is set.

The band got off to a good start, playing shows in both Cary and at the Streets at Southpoint. We didn't just want to copy the books, so all the songs were about characters from the book doing dirty things to each other that you don't read about in the books. The soccer moms still loved us, though I don't think they could hear the lyrics through Chesty's stage attire, which consists of 20 blankets draped over his head. After we played 2 shows, Chesty got a big head and decided to go solo. He now sits out next to the fountain downtown and gives homeless men and women blowjobs. I have to admit, all in all, that his performances is much improved over his Happy Endings days, but I wish he would have taken the rest of the band with him on his artistic journey.

Me? I'm planning my next benefit dinner. This time I think the price of admission will be 200 tiny radios all tuned to Radio Disney and I'll serve old fashioned candies that I'll have to buy at a general store or Costco or something. The results will be sublime. Won't you join me?