Quick comedic interlude

Yesterday I hosted a meeting of a women's group in my town; the artisans that make the handmade products. Now, being the only "gringo" in town I am kind of a local celebrity, and I hate to sound conceited, but I am quite sure that several of the young ladies here have crushes on yours truly. A handful of which were at this meeting.

Okay, so I had just given a long speech about all the opportunities we have in front of us, and detailed exactly what we need to do to proceed down the path to success. Then one of my counterparts, Don Bacilio, got up and decided to reinforce what I had just said. Bacilio is a great guy, but hes got more words than alphabet soup. I compare him to one of those dolls that you can pull the string on their back and they talk; however, Bacilio's string is broken, so you have to be careful when you pull it, because he is going to talk until you are blue in the face.

Well, I didn't think I had pulled the string, but he must have learned to pull it himself, because he went off on a rant. A staple of the Bacilio rant is the metaphor. In this paticular rant he opted to use a rather complicated metaphor about making juice. The basic idea of the metaphor was that these ladies need to take advantage of the opportunities I can provide them. Somehow he illustrated this by saying that their products are like fruit and I am like a professional juicing machine.

So picture this: there I am sitting up front in this room, with about 20 women, several of whom giggle every time I speak to them, and Bacilio is ranting. Then he hits the punch line of his metaphor. It went something like this: "If you girls want to put in the effort and take advantage of what he has to offer, Tony can give you some great juice!"

This immediately stuck me as nothing short of hilarious, but in the spirit of professionalism I tried to keep from laughing. Until I looked up and made eye contact with one of the gigglers in the front row. She let out a "tee-hee" and I just lost it. Then the rest joined in. It was an all out laughing fit for about 10 minutes. I don't even think Bacilio realized what he said or what we were laughing at. "Juice."

This is the scene of the crime. It is a different meeting, but that is Bacilio up there ranthing. This is also where I teach my english classes.