My parents were raised on farms about thirty miles apart in deep East Texas. They didn’t meet until they were adults and living in Beaumont. Thirty miles was a chasm back then.

We lived in Venezuela when I was growing up, but we flew back to the States a couple of times a year for extended vacations, usually during summer break and over the Christmas holidays. We’d often spend much of that time on Harper Land, where my grand-parents farmed, about ten miles outside of Hemphill. My mom’s family would usually come up to her parents’ place, too.

I had a lot of relatives: four grand-parents, twenty-two aunts and uncles. Six (eventually, eight) cousins on the Harper side, more than twenty on the MacDaniel side. I even had my own personal sister. I knew them all quite well during childhood, and our families often visited back and forth after we returned to Texas in 1959.

We ran wild on Harper Land, with the kids getting turned loose after breakfast and brought back in well after dark. We played together, hunted together, went on trips together. Harpers seem to have dominant genes. All the kids looked like Harpers, and were generally bright and had strong, bouncy personalities.

They were my blood, my family. We still got together often on Harper Land as I got older, though my sister Cheryl and I were the only ones who became hippie freaks, so we were distanced from that redneck culture. Gradually, I drifted away, though we’d still go up on Christmas holidays. They still felt like family.

Mom and Dad built a house on their piece of Harper Land after he retired, and Cheryl and I drove up a couple of times a year to hang out with them and the rest of the family. Still rednecks, drinkin’ and sittin’ around the fire in the pasture, talking late at night. Pyromania runs deep and hot throughout our family.

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Teresa over at Making Light blogs:

It’s a disco-era cover of “Apache”, and from the very start it’s terrible beyond human reckoning. After that, it steadily gets worse.

So, I went into it with high (low) expectations and it started out so bad that I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse.

I was wrong.

The Tommy Seebach Band. I am deliberately not posting an image. From the comments on YouTube: “Make it stop, make it stop, oh God, make it stop.” Pretty sure we’re not talking lesbian subtext here.

Click here. If. You. Dare.

Note, I have deliberately not set the following categories: Music, Art, Dance.

While I again contemplate which of many fascinating things to chat with you about today, I’d like to post what may be the best dance sequence I’ve ever seen. You should full-screen it if you have the bandwidth.

It’s not just the rockin’ song. Or the gorgeous costuming and cinematography. Or the sinuous, seething mass choreography.

It’s the subtext.

The scene is supposedly about these two women telling each other how wonderful the other one will be as a wife for Mustache Guy. They’re all generous and warm about each other’s prospects with him.

But Mustache Guy doesn’t have a clue, because, if you see the scene clearly, as I do, it’s obvious that they’re both actually hot lesbian babes hooking up.

That’s a hot lesbian babe mating dance if I’ve ever seen one.

Come to think of it, all the other dancers are also hot lesbian babes. Just watch the way they move in lubricious synchrony.

The mind boggles about what’s gonna go down later on that evening, after the movie filiming is over.