WBFDD: Risk our lives unnecessarily

I know the picture makes no sense but read on and all will be revealed. In this installment of What Bougie Folks Don't Do, allow me to present three cases where Bougie Folks are nowhere (and won't be anywhere) to be found.

  1. Hang out with angry large wild animals: Okay, small OneChele confession: I love shows where people are in terrible peril but cheat death. Poor BougieSis has listened to me rant on and on about episodes of I Survived on the Biography Channel. Each week they profile two of three stories of people who managed to beat the odds and come out of super scary situations with their lives. So one day in the middle of an I Survived Marathon, they played a promo for a new show called I'm Alive on the Animal Planet channel. For some reason, I did not make the connection that a show produced on Animal Planet would involve all sort of deadly species of critter. Anyway, I watched the first three episodes and laughed until I literally fell off the bed. I'm sure it wasn't meant to be funny. But when you start a story, "Young man decides to visit wild elephants in China." Or, "Family receives shark warning but enters ocean anyway." Or my newest favorite, "Rugby player takes girlfriend out to lion reserve." Okay see? Right then, I knew were not dealing with bougie folks. This dude decided to get a closer look at the lions and thought it was cute that the lion was pacing alongside the gate with them. The lion paused in a certain spot so the rugby dude paused too, sat down, and extended his legs toward the lion… like his foot is six inches away from the King of the Jungle nothing but a wire and post division them. The lion sat down too. The human and the lion stare into each other's eyes for a second. The lion never blinked. Half a minute later, the lion had reached through the fence (lion knew it was broken, human did not), grabbed old boy by the legs and dragged him into the enclosure. Now Mufasa and two of his pals commenced to snacking on rugby dude's legs like well, a drumstick. The other lion was preparing to sit on his head. Long story short, two of the lions reared up to fight each other over who would get the kill and the third lion lifted up when the game warden fired off a round. Rugby dude gets up, hobbled to the gate and managed to get out. Three inches of muscle have to be cut away from his leg, six skin grafts and numerous other dramatic medical ordeals ensued. All's well that ends well – dude is playing rugby for his national team three years later. BougiePoint: Nature looks lovely from a distance. This is what zoos and the Discovery Channel are for.

  2. Sit in tiny "sweat lodges" with 50 strangers: Some little dude in Arizona runs a "Spiritual Warrior" week-long class for which he charges $9,000 a week (or more). <- - - Grand Hu$tle Award. Anyway, by shelling out your bucks and listening to what Reverend Ray (I can't MAKE this sh!t up) has to say, you are on your way to a new level of financial success and spiritual enlightenment. The highlight of the week involves cramming into a makeshift steam room type of contraption with all the other suckers worshippers to purge oneself of the past and experience a religious awakening. Too bad his last awakening resulted in three people dying (D-E-A-D, ya'll) and eighteen people being hospitalized. Umm? Hydration? Temperature? Fire marshall codes? Anyone, anyone? Reports vary but say that the sweat lodge is about 415 sq ft and the participants spend over three hours in there. A bunch of flesh pressed together for hours with heat? Isn't that just a big old human crock pot? Seriously now add a few veggies, rosemary and some chicken broth, we're halfway to stew. Anyway, this man has been all up on Oprah (hard side-eye) and on bestsellers lists hawking his stuff. NOW that folks are dead and whatnot, he's under investigation and people are coming out of the woodwork calling him a charlatan. BougiePoint: I don't even get in a hot tub with more than a few folks I don't know. Why the heckity-heck would I pay $10k to smush into a big old steam room with strangers? No. Thank. You.

  3. Build homemade flying apparatus: I thought the entire Balloon Boy story was shady from jump. But my first question when the story broke was not how did the kid get in there (even though he wasn't)? My first question was – who the hell builds a homemade flying machine? This is what we in the BougieFam call a for-who-for-whatter?! As I watched the thing that most closely resembled a giant floating Jiffy Pop container than anything else whizzing through the sky, I could not help but think – who does this? You will not catch bougie folks tinkering away at gravity defying machines unless we are scientists/engineers in a lab, getting paid to do so. And no, building model or paper or remote control airplanes doesn't count. Toys = good, crap people could climb in and crash to earth = no bueno. My next thought was – who's going to pay for this? The whole story was such a BougieFail my siddity mother said, "They all need their asses whipped!" BougieMom curses about once every two years. The Balloon People brought it out. She also went on a rant about how if this had been a black family, everybody would be in jail. She finally had to go "put her feet up" because the whole situation was just "too silly for words." BougiePoint: What BougieMom said… so there.

And this is just from the last week, ya'll! So tell me, agree or disagree? Ya'll hanging out in the Serengeti with no tracker, no bullets, no sense? Ha! Whatcha think about Reverend Ray? And can we all agree to lift up our pimp hands and slap the hell out of the BalloonFam for putting that mess on TV when we could have been watching live coverage of Obama in NOLA? Any others to add to the list for this time?