November 26, 1971 – KHJ – Johnny Williams – Mike Devich Collection –
In your defense you were nervous – none of your girlfriends has ever invited you to their parents house for Thanksgiving dinner – not one. She said her family wanted to meet you – they heard a lot about you – they heard you got accepted to UCLA – they heard you were class President (she lied). She asked you to wear a suit. She told you to get there early. She told you to say something nice to her mother about the decorations.
You’re not sure if it was one joint you smoked on the way over or if it was two. Things got a little fuzzy. But you do remember arriving to a festively decked-out house, getting ready to slide right into Christmas and flinging your arms around her mother, who stiffened like an ironing board, and loudly exclaimed “Wow – your house looks like it’s been attacked by Better Homes and Gardens!” – it went downhill from there.
You vaguely remember sitting across the endlessly long banquet table from your girlfriend and sitting next to your girlfriend’s sister, whose abundance you couldn’t take your eyes off of. Your bad news was her boyfriend sitting to the left of her and staring at you, holding a carving knife. One of the cousins arrives carrying an enormous bottle of red wine and proceeds to fill glasses up and down the table. You have discovered the rosy glow coming from downing that glass of wine fills your head quite nicely with all sorts of ideas and you want more.
Everybody had smiles that slowly wore off as dinner progressed – and then it went blank.
Lucky for you your girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend) relayed the story from first course to Pumpkin pie in grim and gruesome detail. How you decided playing with your food was more fun than eating it, flinging a Turkey leg at the sister’s boyfriend and stuffing a fistful of mashed potatoes down sister’s blouse. How you wound up face-down in a slice of Pumpkin Pie before getting dragged off, tossed into a bathtub and doused with cold water by your now-ex girlfriends father and some relatives you’ve never seen before.
As she tells you every sordid detail of this festival of wild embarrassment, the best you can do is stare at the floor and shake your head. If it was possible to crawl under the floorboards and hide, you would. But no. The best you can do is face the music and listen.
When she comes to the end she gets up and hands you back the pendant and necklace you gave her and wishes you a nice life as she walks off, disappearing into the post-Thanksgiving afternoon.
It’s at that point where you swear off Thanksgiving Dinner forever.
And to go along with that Post-Thanksgiving/melatonin let-down/recovery, here is a little over a half hour of Johnny Williams on Boss Radio KHJ from November 26, 1971.
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