Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

by Dave Barry

  But we talked her into staying, although she never really accepted the fact that Art and Dave were her Tupperware hostesses. She wanted to deal with a woman. All of her communications with Art and Dave had to go through a woman interpreter:

  TUPPERWARE LADY (speaking to a woman): Where do you want me to set up? WOMAN (speaking to Art, who is standing right there): Art, where do you want her to set up? ART: How about right over here on the coffee table? WOMAN (to the Tupperware Lady): Art says how about right over here on the coffee table. TUPPERWARE LADY: Fine.

  Once we got everybody settled down, sort of, the Tupperware Lady wanted us to engage in various fun Tupperware party activities such as “brain teasers” wherein if we could name all the bodily parts that had three letters, we would win a free grapefruit holder or something. We did this for a while, but it was slowing things down, so we told the Tupperware Lady we had this song we wanted to perform.

  The band consisted of me and four other highly trained journalists. You know what “The Tupperware Song” sounds like if you ever heard the song “I’m a Man” by Muddy Waters, where he sings about the general theme that he is a man, and in between each line the band goes Da-DA-da-da-DUM, so you get an effect like this:

  MUDDY WATERS: I’m a man.

  BAND: Da-DA-da-da-DUM

  MUDDY WATERS: A natural man.

  BAND: Da-DA-da-da-DUM

  MUDDY WATERS: A full-grown man.

  And so on. This is the general approach taken in The Tupperware Song, except it is about Tupperware. It starts out this way:

  Some folks use waxed paper

  Some folks use the Reynolds Wrap

  Some folks use the Plastic Baggie

  To try to cover up the gap

  You can use most anything

  To keep your goodies from the air

  But nothing works as well

  As that good old Tupperware

  (CHORUS)

  ’Cause it’s here Whooaaa

  Take a look at what we got

  If you don’t try some and buy some

  Don’t blame me when your turnips rot.

  It has two more verses covering other important Tupperware themes. Verse Two stresses the importance of “burping” the air out of your container to make sure your lid seals securely, and Verse Three points out that you can make money by holding a Tupperware party in your home.

  As you might imagine, the crowd was completely blown away by this song. The Tupperware Lady herself was near tears. But the important thing was, people bought a lot of Tupperware that night. People bought Tupperware they would never in a million years need. Single men who lived in apartments and never cooked anything, ever, that could not be heated in a toaster, were ordering Tupperware cake transporters. It was obvious to me right then and there that “The Tupperware Song” was a powerful marketing tool.

  I explained all this to Dick, of the Tupperware company, and he said I could send him a cassette tape of the song. Which I did, but I haven’t heard a thing. Not that I’m worried. I’m sure there are plenty of other large wealthy corporations out there that would be interested in a blues song about Tupperware. In fact, I’m getting offers in the mail almost every day. Most of them are for supplementary hospitalization insurance, but that’s obviously just a negotiating ploy.

  Bang The Tupperware Slowly

  When I die, I want my obituary to read as follows:

  “Dave Barry is dead. Mr. Barry and his band, the Urban Professionals, once performed ‘The Tupperware Song’ before 1,000 Tupperware distributors.”

  This is the truth. We really did perform before 1,000 Tupperware distributors, and they gave us a standing ovation, although in the interest of accuracy, I should tell you that just before we performed, they also gave a standing ovation to a set of ovenware. But I don’t care. This was without question the highlight of my entire life.

  The way it came about was, the Tupperware people finally saw the musical light and decided to invite me to perform my original composition, “The Tupperware Song,” before a large sales conference at Tupperware headquarters, located in Orlando, Florida, right next to Gatorland, an attraction where (this is true) alligators jump into the air and eat dead chickens hung from wires. Naturally I accepted the invitation. A break like this comes along once in your career.

  I formed a new band, the Urban Professionals, especially for this performance. I chose the members very carefully, based on their ability to correctly answer the following question: “Do you want to go to Orlando at your own expense and perform before Tupperware distributors?” (The correct answer, was: “Yes.”) Using this strict screening procedure, I obtained three band members, all trained members of the Miami Herald staff. I’m the lead guitar player and singer and also (I’m not bragging here; these are simply facts) the only person in the band who knows when the song has started or ended. The other members of the band just sort of stand around looking nervous until I’ve been going for a while, and then, after it penetrates their primitive musical consciousnesses that the song has begun, they become startled and lurch into action. Likewise it takes them up to 30 seconds to come to a complete stop after the song is technically over.

  The only other normal instrument in the band is a harmonica, played by Gene. Gene has been attempting to play the harmonica for a number of years, and has developed a repertoire of several songs, all of which sound exactly like “Oh, Susannah!” “Here’s another one!” he’ll say, and then he plays “Oh, Susannah!” He plays it very rapidly, totally without pauses, as if he’s anxious to get back to journalism, so if you tried to sing along, you’d have to go: “Icomefromalabamawithmybanjoonmyknee,” etc., and pretty soon you’d run out of oxygen and keel over onto your face, which Gene wouldn’t notice because he’d be too busy trying to finish the song on schedule.

  The other two instruments in the band are actually Tupperware products, played rhythmically by Tom and Lou, who also dance. How good are they? Let me put it this way: If you can watch them perform and not wet your pants then you are legally blind. For one thing, they are both afflicted with severe rhythm impairment, the worst cases I have ever seen, worse even than Republican convention delegates. You ask Lou and Tom to clap along to a song and not only will they never once hit the beat, but they will also never, no matter how eternally long the song goes on, both clap at the same time. On top of which you have the fact that they do not have your classic dancer’s build, especially Lou, who is, and I say this with all due respect the same overall shape as a Krispy Kreme jelly doughnut.

  When we got to the Tupperware convention center we became a tad nervous, because (a),it turns out that Tupperware is a large business venture that many people take very seriously and (b) we had never even practiced as a total band. The bulk of our musical preparation to that point had consisted of deciding that our band outfits should include sun glasses.

  Fortunately, the Tupperware distributors turned out to be extremely peppy people, prone to applauding wildly at the slightest provocation. They especially loved Lou and Tom lunging around waving their Tupperware products in what they presumably thought was unison, looking like the Temptations might look if they were suddenly struck onstage with severe disorders of the central nervous system.

  After we got off the stage, Lou announced that it was the most exciting thing he had ever done. Gene kept saying: “A professional musician. I’m a professional musician.” A Tupperware person came up and asked if we’d be willing to perform again, and of course we said yes, although I am becoming concerned. Tom has announced, several times, that he thinks next time the dancers should get a singing part. I can see already that unless we hold our egos in check, keeping this thing in perspective, we could start having the kind of internal conflicts that broke up the Beatles, another very good band.

  Bite The Wax Tadpole!

  Now we’re going to look at some important new developments in the U.S. advertising industry, which continues to be a hotbed of innovation as well as a source of pride t
o all Americans regardless of intelligence. This country may no longer be capable of manufacturing anything more technologically sophisticated than breakfast cereal, but by God when it comes to advertising, we are still—and I mean this sincerely—Number One.

  Our first bit of advertising news will come as a happy surprise to those of you who lie awake nights asking yourselves: “Whatever happened to Mikey, the lovable chubby-cheeked child who hated everything until he tasted Life brand breakfast cereal in the heartwarming television commercial that we all saw 63,000 times back in the seventies?”

  The good news is: Mikey is coming back, as part of a major advertising campaign! The Quaker Oats Co. sent me two large press kits on this, both quoting a Quaker Oats executive as saying: “We’ve received thousands of letters over the years asking what’s become of him. ... We thought it would be fun to satisfy America’s curiosity by conducting a nationwide search to reveal his present-day identity.”

  Ha ha! Fun is hardly the word! I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be waiting on tenterhooks until the big moment comes when the Quaker Oats Co., in a national press conference, finally reveals what “tenterhooks” are. No, seriously, they’re going to reveal who Mikey is, so that the thousands of people who wrote to them about this important matter can go back to learning how to eat with real utensils.

  Speaking of adorable and talented young actors whose moving commercial performances have tugged at the heartstrings of our minds, I wonder whatever happened to that little boy who used to do the Oscar Mayer commercials. Remember? The one who claimed his baloney had a first name, and it was O-S-C-A-R? I wonder if that child didn’t run into problems later in life. (“OK, pal. You and Oscar there are under arrest.”).

  Another commercial personality I was wondering about is the man who used to promote Ti-D-bol brand automatic commode freshener by rowing his boat around inside the tank of a giant toilet. I mean, it must have been difficult for him, going back to normal life after having reached a show business pinnacle like that. So I called the Knomark company, which makes Ti-D-bol, and I found out an amazing fact: The role of the original Ti-D-bol man was played by none other than “Miami Vice” ‘s Don Johnson! Isn’t that an incredible celebrity gossip tidbit? I hope to see it reprinted in leading supermarket tabloids everywhere, although in the interest of fairness and objectivity I should point out that I just now made it up.

  The actual truth, according to Bill Salmon, Knomark’s marketing director, is that there were a number of Ti-D-bol men. “The Ti-D-bol man,” he said, “was anybody who put on the blazer and the white hat and got in the boat.” The current Ti-D-bol man, he said, is a cartoon character who remains on dry land. “Right now he is not in a toilet tank in a rowboat, but that does not mean we would not use the Ti-D-bol man in the tank again at a future time,” Salmon stressed.

  By the way, I was disappointed to learn from Salmon that the rowboat commercials were done with trick photography, meaning there never was a 50-foot-high toilet. I think they should build one, as a promotional concept. Wouldn’t that be great? They could split the cost with the jolly Green Giant. I bet he sure could use it. I bet he’s making a mess out of his valley. Ho ho ho!

  I found our next news item in the Weekly World News, a leading supermarket tabloid, and it is just so wonderful that I will reprint it verbatim:

  “The Coca-Cola Company has changed the name of its soft drink in China after discovering the words mean ‘bite the wax tadpole’ in Chinese.”

  I called Coca-Cola, and a woman named Darlene confirmed this item. She also said the company decided to go with a different name over in China, which I think is crazy. “Bite the Wax Tadpole” is the best name I ever heard for a soft drink. Think of the commercials:

  (The scene opens uP with a boy in a Little League uniform, looking very sad. His father walks up.)

  FATHER: What’s the matter, Son? SON: (bursting into tears): Oh Dad, I struck out and lost the big game.

  (Sobs.) FATHER (putting his arm around the boy’s shoulders): Hey! Forget it! Let’s have a nice cold can of Bite the Wax Tadpole! SON: And then I murdered a policeman.

  The Rules

  Recently I read this news item stating that the U.S. Senate Finance Committee had printed up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. The Senate Finance Committee did this on purpose. It wasn’t the kind of situation where they got the document back from the printer and said: “Hey, Every single word in this document is crossed out! We’re going to fire the zitbrain responsible for this!” No. A 452-page document with all the words crossed out was exactly what the Senate Finance Committee wanted.

  This news item intrigued me. I said to myself: There has to be a logical explanation for this. So I called Washington, D.C., and over the course of an afternoon I spoke to, I don’t know, maybe 15 or 20 people, and sure enough it turned out there was an extremely logical explanation: The Senate Finance Committee was following the Rules. As well it should. You have to have rules. This is true in government just as much as in sports. Think what professional baseball would be like if the pitcher could just throw the ball right at the batter whenever he felt like it, or the batter could turn around after a called third strike and try to whomp a major cavity in the umpire’s skull. It would be great. I’d buy season tickets. But you can’t have that kind of behavior in your government. This is why, back when we bombed Libya, the Reagan administration made such a large point of the fact that we were not trying to kill Moammar Khadafy. I think most of us average citizens had assumed, since the administration had been going around announcing that it had absolute proof that Khadafy was an international baby-murdering scumball, that the whole point of the raid was to kill him, and although we didn’t want to see innocent persons hurt, we certainly wouldn’t have minded if say a half dozen fatal bombs had detonated inside Moammar’s personal tent.

  So I, for one, was quite surprised when right after the raid, President Reagan himself said, and this is a direct quote: “We weren’t out to kill anybody.” My immediate reaction, when I read this statement, was to assume that this was another of those unfortunate instances where the president’s advisers, caught up in the excitement of planning a major military operation, had forgotten to advise the president about it. But then other top administration officials started saying the same thing, that we weren’t trying to kill anybody, and specifically we weren’t trying to kill Khadafy. you following this? We announced we have proof the guy is a murderer; we announce that we are by God going to Do Something about it; we have large military airplanes fly over there and drop bombs all over his immediate vicinity; but we weren’t trying to kill him. You want to know why? I’ll tell you why: The Rules.

  That’s right. It turns out that we have this law, signed in 1976 by Gerald Ford, who coincidentally also pardoned Richard M. Nixon, under which it is illegal for our government to assassinate foreign leaders. So we can’t just hire a couple of experienced persons named Vito for 100 grand to sneak over there one night in dark clothing and fill up Moammar’s various breathing apertures with plumber’s putty. No, that would be breaking a Rule. So what we do is spend several hundred million dollars to crank up the entire Sixth Fleet and have planes fly over from as far away as England, not to mention that we lose a couple of airmen, to achieve the purpose of not killing Moammar Khadafy. We did kill various other random Libyans, but that is OK, under the Rules. Gerald Ford signed nothing to protect them.

  OK? Everybody understand the point here? The point is: You have to follow the Rules. Without Rules, you would have anarchy.

  And that is exactly why the Senate Finance Committee had to print up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. What this document was, originally, was the tax-reform bill passed by the House of Representatives. It seemed the Senate Finance Committee didn’t like it, so they wrote a whole new bill, with all different words. Their new bill is 1,489 pages long. Also they wrote another 1,124 pages to explain how it works.
(Sounds like our new reformed tax system is going to be mighty simple, all right! I can’t wait!)

  OK So the Finance Committee had 2,613 pages worth of tax reform to print up, but that was not all. They also printed the entire House bill, the one they rejected, with all the words crossed out to show where they disagreed with it. According to the 15 or 20 people I talked to on the phone, the committee had to do this. I asked them if maybe it wouldn’t have been more economical, and just as informative, if the Finance Committee had stuck a note on the front of their bill saying something like: “We thought the whole House Bill was pig doots and we chucked it,” but the 15 or 20 people assured me that, no, this was not possible, under the Rules. I was skeptical at first, but I heard this same explanation over and over, all afternoon, from people who all sounded like very bright college graduates, so that by the end of the day I was beginning to think that, yes, of course, it made perfect sense to print 4,500 copies of a document with every word crossed out. I felt like a fool for even bothering to think about it.

  By the way: This document is for sale. This is the truth. You can actually buy a document that your government has used your tax money to print up with all the words crossed out. It’s called HR 3838 As Reported in the Senate, Part 1.

  The Government Printing Office is selling it for—I swear—$17. So far they have sold 1,800 copies. And I don’t even want to know who is buying them. I am sure that whoever they are, they’re going to claim every single cent they spent on these documents as a tax deduction. But I don’t care. I’m through asking questions.