My husband graduated from a Baptist high school, where the academic year was crowned not with a senior prom — no dancing allowed — but a banquet. It was a tux-and-date event, and while the tux was easy enough to come by, the date apparently was another matter altogether. When the fateful night rolled around, my husband, having for some unfathomable reason not secured an actual living female for the evening, showed up at the banquet in the company of a life-sized cardboard-cutout hula girl. Scantily clad she may have been, but she could not possibly have incited him to dance.
Later he met me. I was three-dimensional and had a pulse, and the rest is history.
Is it just me, or is there really something intrinsically weird about life-size cardboard cutouts? When I was in college in Nashville, Tennessee, people used routinely to steal Loretta Lynn from the sidewalk in front of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and while I insist that my children agree with me solemnly that this is very, very bad — well, of course stealing is very, very bad, we all know that, and there’s nothing the least bit funny in the vision of Loretta Lynn levitating horizontally across the quad of a freshman dorm at three in the morning. Pas du tout. But as far as I can see, that’s what cardboard cutouts are there for.
Which is why I’m at a loss to explain what the heck you do with things like this: 
She’s five feet six inches tall — more life-size than I am, as it happens — and what do you do with her? I have a hard time imagining a non-blasphemous use for a cardboard cut-out of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, except maybe as an educational prop for diplomats preparing to make a courtesy call on Mexico.
From Giftapolis.
Gift wrap not available. [Rating: 1.4/100]
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