Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when mere mention of the word “boner” could send Young Sarah into a paroxysm of hysterical giggling.In fact, nearly any mention of the male penis and its activities, no matter how vague or tangential, served as the catalyst for uncontrollable guffawing (most often in a completely inappropriate environment like church or Social Studies class).The introduction of any man named “Dick” could provide hours of juvenile amusement.

Imagine, then, the hilarity proceeding from the events of one evening at Lawrenceville Tennis Camp.I went to Lawrenceville during the summer after eighth grade, at the age of twelve, when the mirth provided to me by the male package was exceeded only by my utter inexperience with said package under laboratory conditions.One night, a young man whom I will call Tent Boy, who seemed quite devoted to his tight white tennis shorts even after our clinics had ended for the day, became the unfortunate victim of a public erection.The most delightful aspect of Tent Boy’s humiliation — aside, of course, from the fact that we now had an excuse to use the word “boner” in conversation almost constantly for the remainder of camp, not to mention the novelty of an actual Woodrow sported before our very eyes — lay in his resolute pretense of flaccidity.In other words, he pretended, with almost tragic nonchalance, that a major groin-related social catastrophe had NOT befallen him.He acted as if he had NOT gazed just a bit too long at Dawn Simmons’s butt and had NOT wakened the sleeping beast, in front of a ruthless public, as a result.

A number of famous folk share this ability with Tent Boy, the ability to pitch a metaphorical tent in one’s metaphorical pants and steadfastly ignore it.Farrah Fawcett comes to mind.Despite the National Enquirer‘s announcement that a battle with baldness has caused Farrah’s behavior to take a turn for the markedly bizarre, even the casual observer will conclude that Farrah has a little bit of a drug problem.I myself did not see her notorious Letterman appearance, in which she fidgeted around in her chair, answered Dave’s questions with non sequiturs, and generally acted like something expensive and white had disappeared up her nose.But I don’t care how much she protests that she “meant it as a joke” and that nobody “got it” — all empirical evidence suggests that she has taken a few too many drugs lately.After all, she posed for Playboy by smearing paint on herself and rolling around naked on canvases.This does not indicate clean living to me.I would like Farrah to tell the world that she turned to drugs in despair over the crumbling of her relationship with Ryan O’Neal, or that she took a few too many diet pills before the Letterman show and washed them down with Jagermeister, because “a joke” does not explain away dilated pupils.

Michael Jackson has also walked the earth with a boner for the last few years.Let’s discuss the real boner first.Jacko would have us believe that he invited little boys to his house for sleep-over parties because, well, he loves kids and wants to make them happy.Ohhhhh, okay — NOT.Why didn’t he invite little girls too?More importantly, why didn’t he invite boys or girls HIS OWN AGE?What kind of FREAK hangs out with pre-pubescent boys at the age of THIRTY?And who looks at the population of heterosexual women in the world and decides to marry THE DAUGHTER OF ELVIS, and then decides to DIVORCE HER?And now for the metaphorical boner.How many times does he have to repeat that vitiligo bullshit before he realizes that we don’t believe it — that we all caught on long ago to the fact that he wants to look white, so badly that he surgically whittled his nose down to the point of collapse?He hates himself, virulently, and he thinks that we will believe him if he blames it on a skin disease.Why can’t he just admit that a number of factors have made him unable to deal with the world on its own terms?

Speaking of people unable to deal with the world — professional boxing.Everyone with two brain cells conversing knows that boxing smells fishy, they fix the fights, Don King needs to switch to a different conditioner, so on and so forth.Still, fighters and their trainers and the refs and everyone else with their hands in the till insisted otherwise for years, because it didn’t pay to say otherwise.No, no, they said, nobody takes dives anymore.Don King hasn’t done anything wrong, they said.Well, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an ear, and if Don King turned Mike “Crazed Animal” Tyson loose in that ring to gnaw off Evander Holyfield’s extremities, then he did something wrong.I saw that ear, and I almost threw up, and I saw Tyson complaining that Holyfield headbutted him so he had to “take action” in spite of the fact that he should be able to handle a headbutt since HE HITS PEOPLE FOR A DAMN LIVING, and I almost threw up again.The basic premise of boxing, throwing punches for money, strikes me as kind of perverse, but this got way out of hand, and only now have a few writers and officials stepped forward to say that this fight epitomized everything bad about the sport.Well, duh.Now throw some cold water on that boner, before Iron Mike bites it off.

Sometimes, people can’t control boners.I have accepted this fact of life (and, in the literal sphere, it does have the occasional pleasant side effect).But can’t people just point down and shrug, instead of pretending that nothing happened?I guess they can’t.I guess that the American press has such a viselike grip on the way people form opinions that no public figure can reasonably consider acknowledging mistakes or errors in judgment.Or perhaps these public figures cannot even acknowledge their mistakes and errors in judgment to themselves.I would have a lot more respect for them if they could.If Jacko could just suck it up and say, “Well, folks, I am a freak,” I for one would welcome him to the club.

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