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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Let’s hope streetwalking
virgins bring irony
to WaikikiI love irony. I was planning to do a whole column on the irony regarding Hawaii bounty hunter Duane "Dog" Chapman getting locked up in a Mexican prison at the same time that Hawaii was finally doing away with its medieval pet quarantine laws. Get it? Just when we are freeing dogs in Hawaii, Mexico is locking up one of ours. But then Mexico let our Dog go free so the whole deal kind of lost its ironic punch.
Then I see this wire story about a large group of virgins who flew into Las Vegas to promote abstinence and I thought, man, there's irony on a stick.
About 750 people attended the seventh annual National Abstinence Clearinghouse Conference in "Sin City." Among the seminars was the "History of Abstinence," which, considering the behavior of Adam and Eve, I gather was a rather short presentation. There was another seminar on "The Consequences of Premarital Sex." My guess is that the seminar leader never uttered the line "Premarital sex can make you wildly, deliriously happy!"
The consequences of premarital sex are pretty much like the consequences of the Spanish Inquisition. In the beginning you have a jolly time with all the whips and chains but after a while it becomes a trial. ("Dost thou renounce bachelorhood and all its forms? Will ye pledge thy body and soul to only me and forsake all frat parties and poker nights? Didest thou seeest the movie "Fatal Attraction?" Because if thou ever layest with another after thou has lain with me, I shall maketh Glenn Close look like a Girl Scout.")
DURING THE abstinence conference 200 teens, parents and youth counselors took to the streets of Vegas to hand out "Good Girl Cards" to passersby. This was to counter the fliers that are handed out on the Strip advertising "Not So Good Girls" with whom you can have a date for a reasonable price. I understand that some passersby were excited to actually meet a "Good Girl" in the flesh and willing to pay big bucks for a date with one of them. The virgins were a bigger hit in Vegas than they ever imagined they'd be although not in the way they imagined.
When I started to do the math, I realized that there actually weren't too many virgins there. If only 200 people took to the streets and those included parents and counselors, then there probably couldn't have been more than 20 or so true virgins on hand. It's a sad state of affairs (no pun intended) when, out of a country of nearly 300 million people we can scare up only a couple of dozen virgins.
Two things struck me about this whole virgin conference thing. One, that a pack of virgins was able to get into and out of Las Vegas without a single one being sacrificed into the volcano in front of Mirage Hotel. Two, how come the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau can never get virgin conventions to come to Hawaii? I believe that state auditor Marion Higa specifically highlighted this problem during her recent audit of the HVCB, noting in the margins of her report "Where's the virgins?"
This is not intended to be an insult to the unsullied womanhood of Hawaii. I'm sure we have virgins here numbering in the several. It's just that we have an irony deficit in Waikiki. Packs of "Good Girls" walking the streets would certainly confound the tourists.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com