Southwest Road trip Redux:

Turkey Dressing as Janet Jackson 

Leg 1. Red Meat Wedding 

Leg 2: Southwest Roadtrip Music: reviews of new Nick Cave and Tom Waits

Leg 3: Native American Graffiti

> Leg 4: Turkey Dancing 

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Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Sedona & Jerome, November 25-27, 2004

The turkey dance is an in-law tradition going way back. Maybe everyone has in-laws that perform the turkey dance before they watch football, I don’t know, but it makes perfect sense to me and I wouldn't be surprised if it goes on in other households across America (though I’d never heard of it until I got married). Anything to divert from the true meaning of Thanksgiving.

This is how it works: Before you stick the bird in the oven, you dress it up as a pop culture icon of your choosing and make it dance around in some sort of pagan rites of passage. 

One of the conditions of us coming out to Albuquerque for Thanksgiving was that Jess and I needed to perform the turkey dance ourselves. The obvious choice that presented itself, summarizing the events of 2004 was “Wardrobe Malfunction”. 

I was originally supposed to be Justin Timberlake, but Jess decided that I couldn’t dance or sing for shit. Point taken. It was a good thing as manipulating a 15 pound flesh puppet is no easy matter. And speaking of 15 pound turkeys, note that we created the wardrobe for the turkey without no hindsight of size, and the damn bird was smaller than I imagined. The pilgrim bustier was not quite as snug as I would have liked. And well, turkey's don't have nipples, which is a problem when you are trying to figure out where to pin the star-studded nipple ring. 

Jess danced and lip-synched while I manipulated the turkey, and of course when we got to the part that goes:

Are you feeling me? 
Let’s do something
Let’s make a bet
Cause i, gotta have you naked by the end of this song

... off came the bikini patch over the right breast, an intentional wardrobe malfunction, just like the real one. And now that the turkey was exorcised of any evil spirts, we let ma stuff it with edible dressing and put it in the oven. It made for one hell of a juicy turkey.

The day after Thanksgiving we took the northern route back to Phoenix. We spent Friday night in Flagstaff. 

Saturday morning we woke up and headed out through Sedona and Jerome. We almost ran out of gas before we got to Sky Harbor, but made our plane back home.

5¢ense rating: * * * *

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Baptismal Font

Abandoned House in Jerome, AZ

Branches in Jerome

Broken Window 

Cholla Nest and Barrel Cactus