Dukin' It Out

I know, I know, I haven’t blogged in so very long…and you know what? The longer I’ve been away from it, the harder it is to start up again. It’s like I feel like I have to write something really profound or something. But no. I am about to write about some absolutely meaningless crap. I hope you enjoy it!

Lately, just for silliness’s sake, Iwanski and I have been watching episodes of the Dukes of Hazzard. I’m telling you, if you grew up in the early 80’s, there is nothing like watching the Dukes of Hazzard to make you feel like a kid again. Every time we turn it on, I am immediately transported to a Friday night back in 1982, watching Rosco P. Coltrane and Boss Hogg battling it out with the Duke boys. Too freakin’ funny. It was a fun show to grow up with.

I may have written about this before, but when I was a kid, my two good neighborhood friends and I would play the Dukes of Hazzard as we raced around on our bikes. Since there were only three of us – one boy and two girls – we had a very limited cast of characters. The boy, Jeff Flanders, was blonde-haired, so of course he had to be Bo Duke. And then there were us two girls, my best friend Cari and I…and both of us wanted to be Daisy Duke. What to do, what to do? Well, a very simple solution came from our very simple eight-year-old minds – we would be…Daisy One and Daisy Two! I still laugh when I think about that.

Anyway, I’ve realized that even as an adult, the Dukes of Hazzard is still entertaining…especially since Iwanski and I spend half the episodes pausing our Tivo and making fun of the show. We laugh at the fact that in every single freakin’ episode, the Duke boys are always somehow held at gunpoint, and always by just some random evil strangers who just happen to be traveling through good ole’ Hazzard County. And at least once in every episode, Bo and Luke have to dodge barrels or rocks or some kind of huge boulders rolling down a hill right at their car. Oh, and the police just generally look the other way at the fact that the Duke boys act as vigilante crime-solvers and always end up catching the bad guys. In fact, Boss Hogg and his police brigade (Rosco P. Coltrane and Enos—later replaced by Cletus) generally welcome the Duke Boys’ assistance in solving crimes. It’s just assumed that the Duke Boys will catch the bad guys in whatever way they can; no questions asked.

And by the way, the guy who played Boss Hogg (Sorrell Booke) was freakin’ brilliantly funny. I don’t know why I never realized that when I was a kid—I was just too busy hating that character. Now, I think he’s an absolutely amazing actor—completely committed to the part.

I guess the thing that I like best about the show is that even though the good guys always end up in sticky or dangerous situations, through all of it, there’s always this sense of community with the main characters. You know that no matter what, when it really comes down to it, any one of them would do anything to keep the others safe. Yup, the Dukes of Hazzard really shows the love.

And now I’ve written an entire blog post about the Dukes of Hazzard.

Aren’t you just so glad that I’m back to blogging again?