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Valentine’s day advice to the love-struck

Bob Sweigert

Here is a Valentine’s Day special bulletin: I am the true biological father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.

I was Anna Nicole’s ski instructor. She was very impressed with the ski instructor life style ” a life style very much like hers, you know, alcoholism, substance abuse and the vocabulary of a high school drop out.

She and I really connected. May she rest in peace.



Now, before you ski instructors organize a mob to attack me with pitchforks and garlic in the middle of the night for portraying you in such an unflattering light, stop and think. If I made the same joke with a beer in my hand around the barbecue you’d be laughing your heads off. Just because it’s in the paper now doesn’t mean it’s not funny. Act out your psychotic denial on the slopes.

Yes, romantic love is in the air today. So are Cupid’s arrows. You never know when one of them will hit you from behind. He tries to aim for the heart but he has a sense of humor. Sometimes Cupid aims for the rear end but hits you in the head. He can’t always tell the difference with some of us (wink, wink). Otherwise, he’s a pretty good shot.



Do you remember your first kiss? I do (not yours, mine). Just like in the children’s song we were sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. It was a hot summer day in the early sixties. Cindy Horn was her name, and what a kiss it was. I followed her around all day like a lost puppy. I would have rode my bicycle off a cliff into the river if she told me to.

All kids play with fire ” the symbolic, Johnny Cash, Ring Of Fire kind. My little brother Paul and his friend John Lukens literally played with fire. They burned down the haystack behind our house.

There had to be a girl involved. Paul is now a doctor in Napa. He went from pyromaniac to drug dealer.

Romance reveals tragic dimensions where Lover’s Leap, the foreboding granite cliff west of Echo summit, imposes its dramatic story of true love high above Strawberry. Across the canyon, Horsetail Falls weeps a fond lament to the Indian princess and her warrior lover who leapt to their deaths because they were forbidden to love.

Camp Sacramento is right next to Lover’s Leap. There, innocently oblivious to the dangers of passion, my brothers and I explored the creek with some girls. One of them was Vicki Ball. She was a black haired, blue eyed beauty.

That’s why I fell in the creek.

One of the Camp Sacramento staff somehow (she was cute) coaxed my brothers and I into performing in an all male production of a Cinderella spoof she called Slinderella. Danny played Slinderella. David played one of the ugly step sisters. I was none other than the Fairy Godmother. I came swinging in from offstage, didn’t grab hold of the rope high enough and hit the floor spinning on my rear end, knocking Prince Charming off the stage. My wig ended up backwards, covering my face. I stopped, center stage, facing the audience, who, by now, were falling out of their chairs with laughter.

I’m not exactly sure how the story of an all male production of Slinderella fits in with my Valentine theme today. Maybe it was the adult’s way of shielding us from the pitfalls of love, as if that was something they had a chance of preventing. Silly adults.

Back home, my brothers and I rode our bikes a very, very long way to visit Vicki, with Cupid’s arrows sticking out all over us, like pedaling pin cushions. I think Vicki ran.

May love pierce your heart soon, if it hasn’t already. Love is wonderful, and impossible to resist. But it never hurts to have a good shield for those arrows once in awhile. It only takes one to make you fall into a burning ring of fire, jump off a cliff, or reach the end of your rope.


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