by Annie Smith
School-age redneck boys are naturally interested in girls. It’s in their jeans.
And redneck girls are just as curious about boys, although they try harder not to show it.
But it’s up to you parents to teach your boys and girls about the ways of romance, how to behave on dates, and (when they’re older) safe sex.
We realize you don’t want to even think about sex and your kids. But it’s something you’ll have to face sooner or later. None of us got on this earth because our parents just kissed and held hands on the front porch swing.
Problems can crop up with teenagers no matter where they go on a date—to the drive-in show, the Saturday night rodeo, a tractor pull, wrestling at the town auditorium, or parking out by the lake.
When a boy takes a girl to the drive-in and he’s got a cold, nothing’s more embarrassing than having a runny nose all night. Snot also makes popcorn taste terrible, and trying to pass it off as “buttered” popcorn won’t work with a lot of girls.
So tell your boys that in an emergency, their truck’s gas cap rag can be used as a snot rag.
Some parents buy books advising them how to tell their kids about sex. But the easiest way to teach young’uns is to take them to a farm where they can watch the cows, pigs, and other creatures in action.
Chances are that once your daughter see what a cow has to go through while giving birth to a calf, she’ll never let a boy touch her indecently!
Sex, Lies, and Duck Tape
We used to have a little town tramp named Lisa who spent more time in the backseat than that little dog with the bobbin’ head in the rear window.
If your daughters turn out like Lisa, we pity you—because she was a laughingstock from one end of Chicken Neck to the other. All the boys called her Moaner Lisa.
She was a preacher’s daughter, but she sure didn’t act it. Lisa guzzled beer like a man dying of thirst, swore like a sailor, and lied more than all the town’s lawyers put together.
Even worse, as she got older she got into something called “bondage.” Lisa would get a boyfriend to tie her up with duck tape before she’d agree to do it with him. She got some kind of thrill out of that.
Next thing we knew, Lisa had left Chicken Neck and was working at the Chicken Ranch out in Las Vegas. On the side she became the spokeswoman for Tru-Tite duck tape.
That ain’t no fitting end for any girl. Tell your daughters the sad story of Moaner Lisa and maybe they’ll keep their clothes on, at least more often.
Twins: Should You Keep Just One?
The problem with having twins is that they’re twice as costly to raise. And if you’ve seen one twin, you’ve seen the other—so why keep both?
A family of kids should all look different so the parents can tell right away who did something wrong. You can’t tell twins apart unless one is a boy and one is a girl—and you still might get confused if the boy happens to be a tad sissy.
So if you’ve got a married sister who yearns for young’uns but can’t have any, why not give her one of your twins? Then you and your sister will have a matched set!
We realize most parents are going to want to keep both twins for themselves. If that’s what you decide, you should do certain things to make sure you can identify which kid is which.
Shave one twin bald, and let the other grow long hair. Have them switch styles every New Year’s Day.
Get a barber to cut each twin’s name on the back of his head. You still won’t be able to tell them apart when they’re facing you, but when one is running away after some mischief you can holler real loud, “James Edward, you GIT RIGHT BACK HERE!”
Make one twin learn Spanish and speak it all the time. You won’t understand a word she’s saying, but that’s okay—most kids’ chatter ain’t worth listening to anyway.
Feed one twin more than the other. At family reunions you can introduce them as: “This here’s my boys Jimmy and Johnny—Jimmy’s the fat one with the Big Mac wrapper stuck between his teeth.”
Use and Care of Snot Rags
Every boy should carry a handkerchief in his back pocket. It’s got all kinds of useful purposes—you can wipe a runny nose, clean dog poop off your shoes, and tie up loose hard candy in it.
Snot rags should be colored, not white, and have patterns so snot boogers won’t show. It’s downright embarrassing for the teacher or preacher to compliment your young’un on his pretty polka-dot snot rag, then take a closer look and learn the awful truth.
Teach your kids to clean their handkerchiefs at least once a year, usually in the spring. The easiest way is to stick the rag on a fishing hook and swish it around in a river or lake.
Last May our boy Lonnie cast his snot rag out in Lost Gizzard Lake and caught a six-pound snot-lovin’ bass!
We gave it to Rufus McKinney. He likes exotic foods.
Vaseline’s Role in Rearin’
We wish Vaseline came in fifty-gallon steel drums, because it’s the handiest product that parents can buy.
You can slap this gooey stuff on a baby’s crotch to ease the pain of diaper rash … smear it inside your kids’ too-tight shoes so they won’t get chafed heels … stick it up their red, burning nose holes when they’ve got colds … and dab it on their lips to soothe winter cold sores.
Parents can use Vaseline to oil their guns cheap, to stop doors and beds from squeaking, and to ease their awful suffering from hemorrhoids.
WD-40 works good on doors and beds, too, but we don’t advise spraying it on your burning butt.
Vaseline’s also important for grooming. Boys can comb the goop through their hair for that slicked-back Elvis look still prized in redneck country.
Sideburns for Young’uns under Ten
Boys of all ages love sideburns, but unfortunately the little ones can’t grow them. So as your dogs shed hair, sweep it up and give it to your small sons. They can use Elmer’s Glue to paste the fur on their cheeks.
Some kids make real-looking sideburns this way. But a few others botch the job and end up looking like Wolf Boy—which can be a plus if Halloween’s just around the corner.
More Grooming Tips
Once a year, take each kid in for his tooth cleaning.
Don’t let your boy use Skoal until he’s got two teeth.
Buy each of your girls a can of 10W-30 motor oil so they can keep their hair shiny like the boys do with Vaseline.
And when your young’uns get close to being grown-ups, clip out the following chapter—and tell them to follow these simple directions for living the redneck life.
The Little Redneck Instruction Book
Always have a cigarette dangling from the corner of your mouth, even in church. Even if you’re a woman. Even if you’re the preacher.
Learn to smoke like a redneck. Hold the filter between your thumb and forefinger, with the other fingers cupped over it.
Never use a truck’s ashtray—open the window and flick the ashes outdoors where they belong.
If you chew Skoal or Beech-Nut while driving, spit the juice out your own window. Some rednecks like to show off by spitting all the way across the seat and out the passenger-side window. That can get mighty messy for riders, especially if the window happens to be rolled up.
Don’t wear your false teeth except on formal occasions or when you’re trying to pick up girls.
Keep a pink or powder blue leisure suit in your closet to wear to weddings, funerals, and the annual PTA dance.
Never buy fancy bottled water with a foreign-sounding name on the label. For the price you pay for a sixteen-ounce bottle of this stuff, you could buy a whole six-pack of Old Milwaukee. If you want to carry water around with you, get a gallon milk jug and fill it up at the store’s water machine for a dime or a quarter.
Your belt buckle has to be solid silver and at least a half-inch bigger than your billfold. Some rednecks pay more for their buckle than they do for their pickup truck.
Get your first name or nickname burned or stitched onto the back of your belt. That way it�
�ll always be returned to you if you happen to lose it. (You might want to deny ownership if your belt is found in the backseat of some redneck’s wife’s car.)
Don’t join a gym. Most rednecks get a real workout on the job and don’t need no costly gym membership. Besides, they’d rather jump off an interstate bridge than wear them short silky gym shorts.
Never go to a tanning bed. People pay to use these contraptions even in Florida—which is the Sunshine State, for God’s sake! If for some crazy reason you want to tan your body, just smear butter or lard all over yourself and lay out in the backyard.
Learn to pick a guitar, a banjo, and your nose.
Never wear color-coordinated clothes. Rednecks’ shirts and caps are always different colors. If you show up on the job site wearing the same color shirt and cap, the foreman will send you home to change.
If you’ve still got your high school jacket with the football letter on it, drag it out and start wearing it again in your forties and fifties. You can get sympathy from gals by telling them you’re just eighteen, but you’ve got that aging disease progeria.
Weighing Kids on Store Scales
Why pay good money for a home scale when every supermarket’s got one in the produce department?
Just put your baby on the scale and see how much she’s gained. Ignore women shoppers who come up to you and ask, “What aisle is the babies on?”
When your kids get bigger, you can weigh them on truck scales out by the highway.
Drive over the scales with the kid in your truck, then dump him beside the road and go through again. Subtract the second figure from the first and you’ve got your young’un’s weight, give or take a diaperful.
Child Rearing for Peanuts
With prices going up every day, it’s getting harder and harder for parents to stretch their dollars. Here’s a few suggestions that might help you save money:
Beds—Seems like every week you pick up your neighbor’s discarded newspaper and read that some hotshot movie actress has spent fifty thousand or more on her new baby’s bed.
Well, folks, stars can do that because they’ve got more money than John spoke about. But redneck parents can’t be so extravagant. Most of us here in Chicken Neck have to watch every penny we spend.
We’re not saying our town is poor, but some people can’t wait to get on jury duty because it means a pay increase.
So instead of buying a costly bed for each of your kids, do like we do: Go out to a flea market or yard sale and spend a couple of bucks on a big old beat-up chest of drawers.
Take out the drawers and slap down a layer of foam rubber bedding in each drawer. Throw in a quilt and pillow and—bingo—you’ve got a whole roomful of beds!
You can chop up the rest of the chest for kindling wood.
Toothpaste—For the price of a tube of toothpaste these days, you could buy two tickets to the county fair and have enough left over to dunk the smart-mouthed clown.
Some of the most expensive brands are the ones with baking soda in them, and that’s just plain funny. We were raised brushing our teeth with baking soda—the box kind, not the fancy tube kind—and now it’s fashionable!
You can get a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda for pocket change. That box will last for months—even if your kids religiously brush their teeth every two weeks.
Shampoo—When kids get around to finally washing their hair, they always slap on too much shampoo. So buy the cheapest brand, something not seen on TV.
If you buy a TV-advertised product, you’re just helping pay the salaries of all those beautiful models with “lustrous, shining, glorious hair.”
After buying a bottle of bargain shampoo, pour half of it into an empty bottle and fill both up with water. You’ll have two bottles for the price of one!
Thriftiness is a way of life in our family. Aunt Alma’s still using a bottle of White Rain shampoo she bought in the fifties. And she’s the only person we know who still Minipoos her hair.
Groceries—One way to save on your food bills is to starve your kids all weekend, then take ’em to a cheap “all you can eat” buffet restaurant on Sunday night. Your young’uns will go into a feeding frenzy, and hopefully you can hustle them out the door before the owner calls the cops.
The Britches of Mayhew County
Let the uppity city kids keep their neatly pressed designer slacks and pointy Italian shoes. When you’re rounding up pants and other duds for your young’uns, be sensible and cheap.
Britches—Buy used Levi’s, Lee’s, Wrangler, and Dickies work pants. They’re the only britches that can be legally sold in Mayhew County, thanks to a 1959 law passed by the county commission.
These brands will wear forever and you never have to iron ’em. We bet that if anybody tried to open a laundry business specializing in pressing Levi’s, the fool would go out of business in an hour.
Footwear—Always buy shoes two sizes too big and let your kids grow into them. If the shoes flop around too much on their feet, stick pieces of cardboard behind their heels.
When your boys and girls get older and start whining for boots, find them a cheap pair at a yard sale. That’ll have to do until they start earning money and can buy fancy boots made from the skins of rattlesnakes, ostriches, alligators, or roadkill.
Hats—When buying hats for your young’uns, you’ve got only two choices: bill caps or cowboy hats.
Pick a cap with a slogan on it. The most prized is a “Cat hat”—one that says Caterpillar on it. Funeral home caps run a close second. Rednecks wouldn’t give you a dime for a cap with a polo club emblem.
The average redneck keeps a selection of caps at home, at work, behind his truck seat, and in the outhouse. We know people who’ve got more caps than IQ points.
Don’t buy your young’uns a beret. Rednecks would rather get caught naked in a gay bar than be seen wearing a beret in public. Even Big John Wayne looked kind of sissy wearing one in The Green Berets.
Socks—White-sock makers would be out of business if it wasn’t for rednecks and tennis players. That’s the only color we ever buy—because they show the world we’ve got clean feet.
If you send your kid to school wearing colored socks with fancy patterns, you’re just asking for him to get ridiculed. You might as well put big yellow clown shoes on him.
The only time rednecks wear black socks is when they’ve got on white shoes. We’re big on “contrast.”
Neckties—No self-respecting redneck young’un would ever own a necktie. If they need one for a wedding or some such nonsense, send ’em down the street to borrow one. Or slap a curtain sash around their neck and cut it to the proper length.
Night of the Living T-shirt
When it’s warm, redneck kids like to sleep buck-naked until they’re maybe ten years old. And when they need something to wear at night in winter, there’s no need to blow a wad on fancy name brand pajamas or nightgowns.
Your old T-shirts will do just fine. If your potbelly or bosom stretched them out a bit, so much the better.
Rufus McKinney’s potbelly is so big he can stand in two zip codes at once, and young teenagers go wild over his T-shirts. Sheriff Gardner says they’ve got a street value of one hundred fifty dollars each.
’Course, they’ve got to be washed six or seven times because they’re so dirty. And the Lord only knows what little invisible critters might be living on ’em. We’ve heard that when Rufus takes off a T-shirt at night, it crawls all by itself into the closet.
Look around malls and streets these days and you’ll see that kids love the “baggy” look. They don’t even realize that rednecks have been wearing baggy ripped clothes since the beginning of time.
We were “grungy” when “grungy” wasn’t cool.
Give your older boys pocket T-shirts so they’ll have a place to keep their Marlboros. If the T-shirts don’t have pockets, show them how to roll up the cigarette pack in the left sleeve.
If you ain’t got any extra T-shirts, toddle down t
o a Goodwill or Salvation Army thrift shop and buy a bunch for a quarter apiece.
Don’t be embarrassed to buy secondhand clothes. We’ve heard of people paying fifty dollars for a pair of prewashed jeans, which is pretty dumb. It makes more sense to let the first owner prewash the jeans, then later you can buy them at a thrift shop for two bucks.
Mind-boggling treasures can be found tucked away in flea markets and secondhand stores. We make the rounds about once a month, and it never ceases to amaze us what precious things people throw away.
Last week we bought a genuine Little Jimmy Dickens—1995 World Tour T-shirt for a dime, and you could barely see the ketchup and mustard stains on it.
Our girl Betty Jean grew up sleeping in a See Rock City—Atop Lookout Mountain T-shirt that she still owns to this day. She’s got it framed and hanging on her bedroom wall, just above the yellow lava lamp she’s had since the sixties.
As for our son Lonnie, his favorite bedtime T-shirt is one he found lying in the middle of Old Muskrat Road four miles outside of town.
It says Lonnie’s Hubcap Heaven and has a drawing of St. Peter with a smiley hubcap face, welcoming two flattened hubcaps at the pearly gates.
Buying Brand-New Duds
We’ve got so many stringbean boys in our town that the local 7-Eleven opened a Tall and Skinny clothing section. We hope this idea catches on nationwide so all parents can save on new garb.
Wherever you shop, never take the price tag off a shirt or pair of jeans until you’re absolutely sure your young’un will keep it. If the shirt gets too tight after a few washings, or the jeans chafe a kid’s crotch, you’ll need the tag to return it.
Of course, this means you’ll have to wash these clothes by hand while holding the tag above the water. But that’s better than losing money.
