April 26, 2006

I can't recall exactly which on cable station I frequently see the ads for it, but for some reason the show Pimp My Ride has been lodged in the sides of my brain for a few days now. It's easy to dismiss it as a mere drop in the ongoing deluge of reality programming, just playing off another modern trend of people "tricking out" their cars to make them amazingly flashy modes of transportation. But then I realized that this has been going on for years.

Case in point: in the groundbreaking 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma, the hero, a suave cowboy named "Curly," attempts to woo the beautiful-yet-hesitant Laurie by trying to get her to envision what it would be like to go for a ride in his carriage, or "surrey" in this case. Innocuous enough, but check out how his surrey is equipped, according to the lyrics:

- Yellow Wheels
- Brown Upholstery
- Genuine Leather Dashboard
- Isinglass curtains (serving as windows)
- Two bright sidelights that wink and blink

That, my friends, goes way beyond the standard equipment package for a buggy of the day. And all of this was driven by a team of snow white horses! Oh yeah -- Curly was a pimp. Transposed to modern times, we'd be looking at a banana yellow late model Honda Civic with rims, spinners, spoiler, sunroof, tinted windows, neon ground effects, and an extra large tailpipe. Oh, and we can't omit the red balls wrapped around the inside of the windows -- it was a surrey with a fringe on the top, after all.

Dustin wishes he had a surrey to pimp out.

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