[Erika]

A friend recently retuned from a motor bike tour that she and her husband took down the Oregon coast. While she was the passenger on the back of the bike and her husband was driving, something began to go terribly wrong.

He first started swerving, then nearly lost control of the bike while dodging a car as he quickly pulled off to the side of the highway. They had barely come to a stop when he suddenly jumped off the bike and took to struggling with his leather jacket as if it were on fire.

Just then a highway patrol officer pulled up with lights flashing. The officer cautiously approached as my friend’s husband performed something that my friend described as a cross between a frantic Strip-tease and the Macarena dance on fast forward, by the side of the highway.
She said that while trying to extricate himself from the jacket, he swatted at his shoulder, then his chest, then reached inside the jacket, then swatted at his other shoulder, then undid the cuff zipper on a sleeve…like that.

While trying to balance the bike and get it on its stand, she became increasingly fascinated by her husband’s road side performance; because typically his dance moves were more along the lines of a bear suffering from a sore paw.
Apparently the one man show also gained the attention of passing motorists, who applauded with a couple of admiring horn honks.

When the officer asked her “What’s going on?” she caught herself doing an instinctive side-to-side head shake and shoulder shrug, while trying to appear casual and unrelated to the dancer in any way.
I really admire that friend because she knows when and how to distance herself from potential trouble.

The officer then approached her husband and asked again, “What’s up?”
Still doing the dance her husband gasped, “Some wasps flew into my jacket and they’re stinging me.”
Growing concerned, the officer asked “Are you anaphylactic?”

At this point the husband, who is usually a quiet spoken and calm individual, seemingly became incensed at having received some sort of derogatory insult and ceased to dance just long enough to firmly assert,
“No, I’m Canadian!”

Her husband’s reply left my friend and the officer, first stunned and then in stitches.
Me too .

With love, Erika