[Ref in PA]

Originally posted by Jurassic Referee

When I was a teen-ager (back in the parentozoic era) lots of kids at my school wore lapel buttons (remember those, Jurassic!?!)
[/B]

Naw, we were poor. We couldn't afford lapels. We useta sew those lapel buttons right on our necks. [/B][/QUOTE]

You are not a Monty Python fan are you JR?


“We Were Poor”

Setting: Four well dressed men sitting together at a vacation resort.

Michael Palin: Ahh… Very passable, this, very passable.
Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, eh?
Terry Gilliam: You’re right there.
Eric Idle: Who’d thought thirty years ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking wine?
MP: Aye, In them days, we’d a’ been glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.
GC: A cup o’ *COLD* tea.
EI: Without milk or sugar.
TG: Or tea!
MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.
EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
TG: But, you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Da’ used to say to me “Money doesn’t buy you happiness.”
EI: ‘E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN’. We used to live in this teeny tiny old house, with great big holes in the roof.
GC: House? You were lucky to have a house! We used to live in one room, all 126 of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
TG: You were lucky to have a room! WE used to have to live in a corridor!
MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin’ in a corridor! Woulda’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House?! Hmph!
EI: Well, when I say “house” it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to us!
GC: We were evicted from OUR hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake.
TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were 160 of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
MP: Cardboard box?
TG: Aye.
MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down at the mill for 14 hours a day, week in and week out. When we got home, Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt.
GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of gravel, go to work at the mill every day for a tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
TG: Well, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o’clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice in two with a butter knife.
EI: Right. I had to get up at 10 o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work 29 hours a day down at the mill, pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing.
MP: But you try and tell the young people of today all that … and they won’t believe ya’.
All: Nope, nope.