A Sordid Tale

Sometimes life has a strange serendipity; unlikely choices and the tides of fate collide, with extraordinary and wonderful results. On the other hand, sometimes life gives you the opposite of that, and what should have been nothing turns into something awful. One particular example of the latter phenomenon occured on the eve of my friend Dean's wedding. As the title of this post notes, it's a sordid tale indeed - in fact, the story I'm about to recount is so scandalous that it's ruined any hopes my best friend Mahan had of venturing into politics.

Okay, so maybe she never had any intentions of going into politics. But if she had, they would now be dashed.

A few days before Dean & Crystal's wedding, which would take place in Dallas, Mahan drove up to Austin from Houston so that she, Matt and I could take one car to Dallas for the wedding. At some point we stopped at Erin's - I think because she was cat-sitting Neville - but maybe we were just hanging out. Mahan and I couldn't help but notice that Erin had a Playboy on her coffee table. (See? I told you this was a sordid tale.) Erin, who at the time was working at Starbuck's, explained that she and a friend had bought Playboy because the theme of the issue was "the Girls of Starbuck's" and supposedly featured real Starbuck's employees, and they wanted to see whether the pictures were actually Starbuck's employees. Erin then told us that the girls didn't look like baristas at all. Here's where the bad choices begin: somehow it was decided that Mahan and I should take the Playboy with us so that we could look at the pictures.

Mahan was the driver on the trip to Dallas, and Matt spent most of the trip sleeping. Have I mentioned that the drive to Dallas is the Worst Drive Ever? Well, it is. Other than the possibility of picking up a Dr.Pepper made with real sugar, the trip has almost no redeeming qualities. About halfway through the trip Mahan and I started to get bored. We started daring each other to do things, which was boring until we remembered the Playboy. Then we spent about half an hour playing a game where Mahan would match the speed of an unsuspecting car next to us, and I would hold up a picture of a naked lady to the passengers in that car.

(I wanted to point out that this happened BEFORE I started law school, because if someone suggested this now, I would promptly explain about negligence law and how creating a distraction on the road is a bad idea. But back when this story took place I was young, innocent, and ignorant about tort law.)

When we got tired of holding up dirty pictures for other cars and trying to shock them, we came up with a better plan - let's take crazy pictures!! In yet another twist of fate, neither Mahan nor the Giani-Sherrill's had brought along a digital camera, but for some reason we had a disposable camera. (I really have no idea why.) We had to stop for gas anyway, and while Matt went inside to get snacks I took some Very Interesting pictures of Mahan, some of which involved the Playboy. Then we decided to stop wasting film, and the rest of the car trip proceeded normally.

Dean & Crystal's wedding was wonderful, and, since we'd left plenty of film on the disposable camera, Matt took a lot of wedding-related shots. After we'd all seen Dean and Crystal off with the ceremonial flinging of rose petals, a group of people decided to go the Cheesecake Factory. Matt had more items than usual so I checked to make sure he had everything. Keys? Check. Wallet? Check. Rachel's lip gloss? Check. Then I asked about the camera. Matt got a little flustered, and then realized he'd left it in the room where the wedding took place.

This might not have been a huge problem, were it not for the fact that each table at the wedding had a disposable camera on it. You know, the kind that you put on the table so that guests can take pictures of each other? Mahan and I ran back into the main room when we realized Matt had forgotten the camera, and were horrified to see that ALL of the disposable cameras- including, presumably, the Camera in Question (CiQ) - were grouped together in the corner while the roomed was cleaned up. And they were all the same brand. And the same color.

Okay, so maybe I was a little entertained, in addition to being horrified. But Mahan was seriously horrified.

We pored over the cameras until we noticed a slight difference in the packaging of just one camera, as if it had been purchased at a different time. We snatched it up, praying that it was the CiQ.

I got the pictures back about a week after the wedding, and called Mahan to let her know that everything was in the clear and we had the CiQ. I thought that was the end up the issue until a few months later, when some North Austin locations of a certain drugstore chain got in trouble with the law because their teenage employees were making personal copies for themselves when customers brought in photos. The reports implied that these were male employees copying dirty an semi-dirty pics. Guess where I'd had the film from the CiQ developed . . .

On another side note, who takes serious dirty pictures and then has them developed at a store? Get a digital camera, or take Polaroids or something. Invest in a color printer like a normal person.

I never heard what happened with the litigation about the photos and the news sort of stopped caring, but I'm fully convinced that in some evidence file in the Travis County DA's office, there's a picture of Mahan pretending to lick a picture of a humungous boob. That should be the moral of this story: if you pretend to lick a picture of a humungous boob, don't allow the incident to be documented.