All right, so they found me in the fountain of the town square at four o’clock in the morning, naked save for a plastic Halloween mask and a hockey goaltender’s mitt, belligerently brandishing a bottle of Mezcal and scat singing in a previously undiscovered chromatic scale. I wasn’t the first orthodontist who had raised eyebrows in Parched Thistle Prairie by going a bit overboard in celebrating Orthodontist of the Year honors from the National Orthodontists’ Association, and I wouldn’t be the last.
In fact, just four years before my now fabled spree, another NOA honoree, Dr. Richard Nesbeth, had been arrested while sitting astride the life-size steer replica atop Chuckwagon Charlie’s Steakhouse wearing only a lobster bib emblazoned with the likeness of J. Edgar Hoover and drunkenly shouting, “Free yourselves, you poor, doomed bastards” at passing vehicles and pedestrians. Dr. Nesbeth had quietly resumed his practice after a brief hiatus, and his little indiscretion had been forgotten. Why then had I been stripped of the award I had sought my entire life and ostracized by the citizens of Parched Thistle Prairie for my single night of Dionysian revelry?
Initially, I thought that my brief but well publicized association with the Radical Anarchist Atheist’s Union for the Immediate Destruction of Patriarchal Oppression and the Nuclear Family may have created the impression that I was out of step with Parched Thistle Prairie’s ancient, stolid conservatism. But I soon realized that it was the full-frontal, full color photograph of me cavorting in the fountain splashed across the the front page of the Parched Thistle Prairie Courier that had stripped my credibility away in the eyes of the community.
True, the plastic Yertle the Turtle mask I was wearing obscured what was undoubtedly an outlandish expression, judging by the wild, red, glowing orbs behind the eye-holes, and would have afforded me a shred of plausible deniability had it not been for the tattoo of Popeye and the Virgin Mary clog-dancing on an asteroid I had gotten seventeen years earlier during a drinking binge with members of my Bible study group.
Nevertheless, the picture cast doubt on my character. Bathed in an eerie, yellow-green light from a nearby rent-a-car sign, I appear to be in the midst of an improvised pirouette while apparently performing some sort of imaginary religious rite with the Mezcal bottle, which I am holding like a staff.
Incredible as it may sound, I am as bewildered as to what my intentions were that night as the shocked citizens of Parched Thistle Prairie. I vaguely recall coming under the impression that the rent-a-car sign was God and hearing the voice of Barney Rubble command me to “purify my soul.” I have no idea what happened to my clothes or where the Yertle the Turtle mask and hockey mitt came from, although I have been having a recurring nightmare about being chased through a toy store parking lot by a man with a tremendous overbite.
I tried to resume my career far from the placid confines of Parched Thistle Prairie, but the scandal followed me everywhere. The tentacles of the National Orthodontists’ Association reach far and wide. Strangely enough though, there is a secretive religious organization that utilizes Mezcal bottles in their religious rituals in a similar fashion to my intoxicated improvisation, and after my fountain photo went viral, they contacted me to see if I might be interested in joining their exclusive brotherhood. They liked my chromatic scat singing but insisted I must wear one of their elaborate robes for the ceremonies, which they said they would provide for free if I agreed to straighten the teeth of their guru. As they say, when one door closes, the glass is half full.