Wife Swap
I’m not afraid of very many things.
Well, of course spiders and snakes. And drinking milk that has expired.
But there is one thing that terrifies me.
My wife signing us up to be on Wife Swap.
For you folks who have never watched Wife Swap, it’s this train wreck of a show on Paramount where two women from vastly different households trade places for two weeks and attempt not to kill their new family.
Oh, and at the end, the two couples sit around a table and tell the others why they suck at being parents and spouses.
Trust me, I already know my shortcomings in those two areas. I don’t need some toothless woman who makes goat cheese in her bathtub enumerating them on national TV.
I don’t know why my beautiful and sophisticated wife likes to watch this show. Maybe she suffers from Pittakionophobia.
That has nothing to do with this situation but when researching to see if there was a mental disorder for people who like watching trashy TV shows like Honey Boo-Boo and My Strange Addition, I ran across this word and thought it was funny.
By the way, Pittakionophobia is the fear of bumper stickers that are half-peeled off.
There are some freaky people out there.
And apparently, a few of them are on Wife Swap and that is why it is so hard not to watch it.
Here is the basic premise of a typical show.
Carol is the wife of a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher who lives in a singlewide trailer somewhere in the backwoods of West Virginia.
She also has a black belt in the Japanese martial art, Hojojutsu, raises Pygmy goats and feeds her family a strict diet of nothing but raw foods and cold-pressed organic vegetable juices.
Apollonia is a practicing pagan whose husband is a high priest in the Church of Satan. They live in a nudest colony in upstate New York with 500 other pagans and nudists.
Apollonia has not worn clothes in 34 years and has no intentions of starting now. Her diet consists of raw meat and Diet Pepsi and since her husband was castrated in a pagan ritual before they met, she is childless (thank God)!
Now the way this show works Carol, the Pentecostal martial arts expert moves into the nudist commune with her new Satanist husband for two weeks.
And Apollonia, the naked pagan raw meat eating, Diet Pepsi addict arrives in the home of the snake-handling preacher. No luggage, of course.
From there, things begin to fall apart.
The kids in the West Virginia singlewide learn to eat their roadkill raw and washed down endless cans of diet soda and the preacher’s wife gets to let her double-D’a get some sun.
It would fascinate me to be in the production meetings when the folks at Paramount are deciding how to arrange the swaps.
“I got a woman who thinks she’s a cat. Her husband empties her litter box.”
“And I’ve got a one-legged kindergarten teacher who works part time as a stripper on the weekends.”
“Oh, I forgot to mention. The crazy cat lady has two children with leprosy.”
“Perfect! Book ‘em!”
I do believe the ultimate goal of the show is to film one of the husbands murdering his ‘new’ wife on camera. Imagine the ratings if the man who lives on a strict diet of nothing but bacon is forced to eat only bok choy for a week flies into a murderous rage.
Pretty sure a guy like that has got plenty of guns stashed around the house and wouldn’t be shy about using one after a few days without any pork products.
I don’t have a lot of patience, so I don’t know what I would do if my wife signed us up to be on Wife Swap.
I’m sure the producers would send me somebody who wants to paint my toenails pink and make me drink my own urine.
But I’m not too worried about that. I’ve got some Xanax stashed away for just these kind of occasions.
It’s my wife I worry about.
They would probably send her to a house with a bunch of disrespectful punk-ass kids and some guy named Doyle who wears a dirty wife-beater t-shirt and insists on calling her ‘little lady.’
Let’s just say there would be blood in the streets.
I’ve asked my wife if she was contemplating signing us up for Wife Swap. There is an incentive.
The show pays each couple $20,000 and that would buy that fancy new manure spreader she’s had her eye on.
She doesn’t say yes.
She doesn’t say no either. She just looks at me with a sly smile.
I’ve stopped calling her little lady.
