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Thursday, while not technically the weekend, was the start of the fun. Clara "Lazy Pants" Jane and I headed across the river to Belleville to finally pay a visit to my recently-relocated pals Mary, Bob and their darling 13-month-old munchkin. You remember Mary and Bob - they were my neighbors ten years ago and just moved back to the area. Mary and I spent the afternoon playing catch-up while our girls ran amok. Much fun was had by all.

Friday, Angie and her girls came over for lunch. Again with the fun and running amok, which was followed by Lazy Pants' 18-month doctor visit.

Ask me how old my child weighs. Go on. Ask.

The answer? I don't fucking know, because she threw a stiff-legged, limb-flailing, abduction-screaming hissyfit and refused to stay on the scale!

Obviously, she's healthy. An unhealthy kid wouldn't be able to launch herself over my head in effort to escape the clutches of the scale. Granted, there might be some issues with the kid's emotional health, but physically, she's fine.

Saturday, my entire family finally got out of our pajamas sometime around 4 PM and went in search of all you can eat Vietnamese food. Which we found rather quickly. Good thing, because if it had required an intense hunt, we would have gone hungry, such was the extreme depth of our slothiness.

The food? Excellent, as always. But the musical selections ... questionable. They were really dragging the bottom of the barrel, with double-plays by Cher ("Halfbreed", followed by "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves"), Tony Orlando & Dawn ("Knock Three Times" paired with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon"), and The Carpenters ("Top of the World", along with a rarely-heard cover of "Jambalaya". And let me tell you, it's rarely-heard for a reason). It was a bit surreal, and I think I watched too many Vietnam War movies during my formative years. You know how every movie of that genre has a scene where happy Americans are enjoying R&R in Hanoi while happy music from home always plays in the background, and it's always a sign that one of the soldiers is gonna die? With all the sunny, chirpy early-'70s lite A.M. everything's-fine-nothing's-wrong tunage, I kept halfway expecting Charlie to come busting through the plate glass windows. It wrecks havoc on one's digestion, that's for sure.

But that's not the worst. How bad is it that one song - one trite, awful, cloyingly bad song - when played in a Vietnamese restaurant, can conjure up every terrible, vile stereotype about Asian food? When that song is "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, it makes me look at my spring rolls a little differently, which is then followed by an overwhelming wave of white guilt and shame.

Songs about dogs played in an Asian restaurant in this uber-white area of the Midwest? Bad. But not the worst. No, there's one song that should never, ever cross the speakers in an Asian restaurant...

Towards the end of our meal, when the opening strains of "Kung-Fu Fighting" began, I excused myself from the table, walked into the kitchen, apologized for my country, and wrote each restaurant employee a check for $25 before gathering my child and husband - both who were doing karate-chops at the table - and went home in disgrace.

(OK, so I didn't go to the kitchen and write checks, but I did shake my head in disbelief a lot while hissing at B. and Clara "Hanoi" Jane to cut it the fuck out with the faux-fu, already.)

Speaking of being a disgrace ...

Sunday night Holley and I headed to the scenic employees parking lot at Harrah's to see Loretta Lynn. Going into the show, I was curious as to how much of the crowd would be young hipsters brought to Loretta via her collaboration with White Stripe/next babydaddy Jack White and how many would be old hillbillies. Holley and I obviously fall somewhere in the middle of that continuum.

Holley arrived a few minutes before me and informed me that, per her observations, the old hillbillies where far and away the bulk of the crowd.

I hate to admit it, but The Pill, which was so revolutionary and controversial when Loretta recorded it, loses a bit of its political punch when there are only six women in the audience who haven't entered menopause.

One of the night's big surprises - Interpretive Dance Girl™ was there! For those of you who might be a bit new to these parts, Interpretive Dance Girl™, or IDG™ as she's often called, is a friend of mine who always - always shows up at every single concert I attend. She stands in front of me, arms and legs akimbo, so moved by the power of the music that she must DANCE! Usually after a great deal of ALCOHOL! She waves! She sways! She shimmies! She commits moves that, once she sobers up, she will swear she didn't commit. Oh, but she did. And she always did right in front of me.

Last night's IDG™ probably hasn't been called a "girl" in at least five decades, and I think her outer casing was made entirely of Naugahyde™. And not the kind of Naugahyde™ used on an indoor couch, either. This was Naugahyde™ that's on the couch you keep in your front yard.

If you've never had a couch - Naugahyde™ or other - in your front yard, I'm betting you've never been to a Loretta Lynn concert in a casino parking lot, either.

Anyway, IDG™ did not disappoint, although her age was showing. She only danced for a few songs before being escorted out by her gray-haired, wife-beater-bedecked partner, whom she leaned on heavily. Probably because all that alcohol leeched the calcium from her leathery bones a long, long time ago. They might have required a stop at the hipbreak station on their way out.

As for Loretta, she was exceptional. Her voice - amazing. One of the greatest voices I've ever heard live. Her dress - sparkly. And big. Even way back in General Admissionville, we could see how sparkly and big it was. People on the space station could see how sparkly and big it was.

I'd always heard that she can be a bit ... erratic. Had I not known that, I might have thought that she's starting to go senile. For starters, she took requests from the audience. Sometimes she knew the songs. Sometimes she didn't. She yammered and yapped and bitched about how hot it was, wearing that sparkly (and big) dress, which probably weighed more than her tour bus, in the 90-degree heat. It was refreshing to see a celebrity, nee icon, who obviously doesn't employ a handler who tells her what to say and how to act.

The only low-point of the show came during the next-to-last song, Tex Ritter's God Bless America Again, a song that's fine in and of itself. But when the bass-throated guitarist added a spoken-word verse about needing prayer in school and the Bible in the classroom, everyone around us - even those with walkers, who Holley accused of being big fakers - went wild.

"They're on to us. We're going to be hung in liberal effigy from the light scaffolding!" I told her.

"I hate America now," she replied. "I loved America when Bill Clinton was president."

"Shut up! They're out for blood! They can sniff out liberals like us!"

Fortunately for us, there was a guy a few rows ahead of us how happened to be brown. Racial profiling trumps political profiling everytime, so we were able to escape under cover of night before our lovely concert experience, where we got to see one of our musical heros, ended with us being strung up like the traitors we are.

Later, in the parking lot, I approach that poor Middle Eastern fellow, apologized for my country and wrote him a check for $25. It was the least I could do.