Two Kinds of Rich: Adventures with Milton S. Hershey and Bobby Flay

Hershey Park (an amusement park in Pennsylvania) and Bobby Flay's restaurant, the Mesa Grill, in New York City, may seem unrelated to you, but to me, they both made statements about the relationship between money and perception to me over the last week.

We did the small family vacation thing this year. We spent two days in Hershey, Pa. There's an amusement park and it is the home of the chocolate company, founded by Milton S. Hershey, way back. It's a cool place to go, just to see a good example of a business that built a town and to take the tour, replete with animatronic, talking cows, that explains how the chocolate is made. But, we are also a roller-coaster-loving family, and some of our faves are in the park.

1st Class Cabin, Titanic

Since we were going small, this year, we shelled out a pretty obscene amount of money to rent a cabana at the park. Doing this made every fiber of my musician/teacher's body tremble with Scroogiosity, but we had saved the money just for vacation, so...what the hay?

The cabana got us a shady place to sit when we needed a break. It also gave us instant access to "The Lazy River" -- no line waits. We got a refrigerator stocked with water. We got "free" towels (I figure they were more like, maybe, thirty dollars a piece). We got a tote bag for "free" towels and a little restaurant stand that was just for cabana people: no waits, and they would bring your food right to the cabana. We also got a "free" soda machine we could use with out "free" souvenir cups.

Calling All Ladies and Gentlemen . . .



John Jacob Astor IV, who is
said to have put on his tuxedo during
the sinking of the Titanic, so he could
die "like a gentleman."


Read carefully -- there will be a quiz.

Today, I was in the drugstore with my little boys. At the check-out, there was a line of magazines, right at their eye level. Each magazine was graced with a picture of a beautiful woman. Most were wearing low-cut dresses, but one of the women was seductively opening her shirt, exposing most of her bra; her head was thrown back, eyes mostly closed, mouth barely open.

Recently, on the radio, I heard a song. The singer used the "f-word" but they "edited it out," so that he only said: "fffk," in the song.

On Nickelodeon, the children's channel, there is a show called "Victorious," about a bunch of kids in a performing arts high school. Victoria, the main character, sings a song called "Freak the Freak Out." Some lyrics: "What I'm gonna do now is freak the freak out."