And I Never Learned Mister Softee's First Name

My second father.

All that blogging I did for Tuesday's post about ice cream, combined with Father of the Anthony Show's birthday yesterday, brought back some summer memories that involved the ice cream gentlemen who roamed my neighborhood.

The main guys who worked the territory were Mister Softee, who usually showed up in the early afternoon, and the Circus Man — I still don't know what circuses have to do with ice cream — who'd swing by after dinner.

When my brother and I were young, too young to have any money of our own, the only truck we were allowed to patronize was Señor Softee. Dad's logic was that Monsieur Softee sold actual ice cream, not the "candy and junk" that the Circus Man offered. Back then, a basic soft-serve cone cost only 50 cents, so Dad could send us out of the house with a buck and we'd be rather satisfied for the next 20 minutes.

My brother and I never went to camp, except for one horrendous two-week experience that I'll probably blog about at another time, so the ice cream man appearances helped us know what time it was during the summer.

So, This Guy Walks Into a Gynecologist's Office...

PODCAST ALERT

I have recorded a podcast version of this post so CLICK HERE IF YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO IT AS I KNOW YOU REALLY DO. As I've mentioned in my previous posts-that-are-also-podcasts, the audio version is not a straight read-through of the written post. I skip some of the written stuff and go off on other tangents when I'm on the microphone. Think of it as a set of twins that aren't identical, and one of them is uglier than the other.

The other day I mentioned that something curious happened to me at a gynecologist's office, but I'll eliminate all suspense and speculation that it was something worthy of a late-1990s Farrelly Brothers comedy with me somehow pinned to an exam table with my legs in stirrups as a nearsightedly wacky doctor (probably played by Ken Jeong) is planning to thrust into me whatever it is they shove into a particular orifice to determine whether a woman is pregnant.

A DIGRESSION THAT I THOUGHT WOULD BE BRIEF BUT IN FACT IS NOT
I consider myself a decent wordspeller, so when the Blogger text box flags a misspelling with that wavy red underline, I'm usually able to correct my error within one or two tries, but for the word "orifice" in the previous paragraph it took several tries before I gave up — which tells you how often I actually type the word "orifice" in my everyday writing — and typed one of my attempts into the Google search box. One of the suggestions was Orifarm, which sounds like a portmanteau of "orifice" and "farm" — "Orifice Farm" would be a great name for a horrible porn site — but is, in fact, "a fast growing supplier of parallel imported and generic pharmaceuticals."

When I went to the Orifarm site, I found myself falling into one of those Internet rabbit-holes that I fall into every now and them, like when I'm looking up who won the 1938 World Series, take a right turn at one of Stalin's purges, and end up learning about the history of biscuits. Anyway, the Orifarm site is in English, but its products are offered only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark: countries which, for most intents and purposes, are the same place.

When you click on the "Denmark" section, you get a page that includes THIS:

Uh...when I drink a lot of beer, maybe.

I don't know what this product does, but I hope if I ever go to Denmark, I'll never be afflicted with any condition that will require a prescription of it. (Why is only the headline in English?)

SO ANYWAY
Oh yeah, the OB/GYN. Let me get to it before I digress again.