My Buddy

I have this friend...let’s call him McSorley for two completely non-PC reasons: (1) he’s Irish on Pop’s side, and (2) there’s an Irish bar near my apartment named “McSorely’s Pub.” I met him when we both worked at Unnamed Government Agency (hereafter “UGA”). This alone will provide many an anecdote in future blogs, I promise.

Anyway, McSorely and I fancy ourselves quite amusing, and we have had ongoing inside jokes for over a decade now (he’s available for parties, weddings and bar mitzvahs for reasonable rates. Contact me for details.) One of these jokes involves Guy #2 who also worked with us at UGA. Guy #2 takes too long to type, so we’ll just call him “Brad.” Brad was in our Division at UGA, but in another group. Somehow or another he and I struck up a friendship, and he began spending time with McSorely, Dancer (another McSorely/SuperMilkChan group associate) and me. He started joining us for lunch, and this continued for several weeks until he decided I was his soul mate and started mooning over me. This might not have been so bad, except I was engaged to be married at the time.

This initially being an uncomfortable and, soon after, annoying, situation, I stopped hanging around with him. He made it a point to try and continue his friendship with McSorely and Dancer, neither of whom was particularly interested, as he had only been a fringe on my moccasins, and not an entire shoe on his own.

His favorite excuse for trying to keep up a relationship was lunch. He thusly earned the moniker “Lunch Buddy.” For those of you who think this sounds vaguely familiar, you probably remember the boy doll “My Buddy” (complementary male version to the girl doll “Kid Sister”). The point of “My Buddy” was to create a non-threatening, non-gender-specific-owner doll that could be comfortably played with by little boys...

(yeah, THAT lasted!)


But the best part was the ad jingle…”My Buddy, My Buddy, wherever I go, you’re gonna go, My Buddy, My Buddy, My Buddy and me!” (this is probably paraphrased – don’t hold it against me). McSorely and I immediately co-opted the song and changed it to “Lunch Buddy, Lunch Buddy, wherever you go, he’s gonna go, Lunch Buddy, Lunch Buddy, get away from me!”

So I go shopping for a new umbrella a couple of weeks ago (hold on, hold on, this does connect up), and the one I pick out is called “Rain Buddy!” Oh the memories it brought back! (I still haven’t come up with a good set of lyrics, so please feel free to throw some out there.) Rain Buddy. What a classic.

Okay, so that’s probably only funny to McSorely and me, so press the button below to go back in time 5 minutes and pretend you never read this.