Sometimes if you are being really good, you are given a gift. Like if it’s a Sunday morning and you have taken your kids to Sunday school and then Mass and then lead girl scout meetings all day, God rewards you. The gift might be small, might be something only important to you, but it’s a gift nonetheless. I received such a gift today.
I dropped the girls off at Sunday school. I have an hour to kill, so I went to the Dollar Store to buy some things for my afternoon of girl scout meetings. I love the Dollar Store because everything is, well, a dollar. Hard to go wrong in a store where a buck can buy you a Diet Coke or the Sunday paper, two things that would cost more than $1.50 at any gas station. Hey, the economy sucks right now, so I save when I can! I was looking for day planners to give to my older girl scouts because I am hoping to teach them some time management. I have never actually learned it myself, so I’m not sure why I think I can teach them, but when I read those inspirational girl scout books, I start thinking anything is possible!! I looked in the office supply section, but all they had was full size calendars. So I walked over to the greeting card section, thinking they might be with the invitations. And that’s when I received my gift.
Now that Christmas is over and out, it’s time for the retailers to put on a hard sell for the next major holiday. Not Martin Luther King’s birthday; no one ever buys cards for that. No, Valentine’s Day is lurking just around the corner. And the Dollar Store had a full selection of Valentines for the kiddies to hand out at school. Being the Dollar Store, most of them were pretty cheesey. They had Bratz valentines and Strawberry Shortcake, of course and princess valentines and pony valentines. They had Simpsons valentines, which were actually pretty tame, although I’m not sure I want to be known as the mother of the child who handed out cards plastered with Homer Simpson’s mug. And then I saw them. The air shimmered just a little and I thought I heard a Hallelujah chorus, although it was probably just the Dollar Store elevator music soundtrack (available to purchase for only a dollar!!!). Sitting on the shelf, next to the ponies and Bratz and princesses, were the HOMIES!!
The box is red and HOMIES is spelled out in industrial style gray letters. The Homies themselves are standing proudly in front of a gritty urban landscape and there are hearts around them. I moved toward the box in a dream, enchanted by the very wrongness of HOMIE valentines. ‘Just who in the hell hands these out?’ I wondered as I reached for a box to put in my cart. On the back, it showed the different cards contained within the box. The first one has a large, portly dude in an oversize football jersey with a tenement building in silhouette behind him. His friendly pit bull is at his side, tongue lolling happily out of his mouth. The card itself reads WUS UP HOMIE? I closed my eyes in ecstasy and imagined the furor generated when the blonde goddess handed out her HOMIES valentines at her semi-urban school. Would LaTavarius’s mother be amused? Would I be her HOME GIRL because of my ability to speak Ghetto?
Eagerly, I perused the rest of the offerings on the box. ”KEEP IT REAL” offer two HOMIES dressed in baggy pants and backwards ball caps. One HOMIE on the card is all in blue; his gang colors maybe? A HOMIE with very large eyes and really weird dreads that make him look like a bat offers the following: ITS ALL GOOD IN THE HOOD!! But my absolute favorite is the one that shows a HOMIE holding a screwdriver in one hand and a car stereo in the other. The card reads: I PICK’D THIS JUST FOR YOU! As in, I jacked this car stereo for you baby, will you be my ho???
Now I knew there had to be something behind these, some obscure cartoon from Cartoon Network or something, so I came home and researched HOMIES. Here’s what I found: The Homies are a group of tightly knit Chicano buddies who have grown up in the Mexican American barrio ( neighborhood ) of “Quien Sabe”, ( who knows ) located in East Los Angeles. The four main characters are Hollywood, Smiley, Pelon, and Bobby Loco. Ok, fine, so they are based on good old fashioned Mexican American barrio humor. But did YOU know that? Probably not and if you had found a box of Homies valentines at your Dollar Store you would have been as shocked as I was! There’s something a little unsettling about getting a valentine with a girl named Chula, dressed in a giant hoodie, telling you “YOU ARE SO COOL”. Whatever happened to Charlie Brown or Scooby Doo? I guess our Dollar Store is marketing to the growing Hispanic population in our city but I’m not sure it’s grown enough for HOMIES. I’m not sure the WASPS in the area have evolved enough for HOMIE humor!!
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January 12th, 2009 at 12:29 am
OMG! I think this is hilarious!! I would have purchased them just for blog fodder!! And what a terrific post they made! Truly amazing what one can find at a Dollar Store. My husband and I used to both work downtown in the city. We used to peruse the Dollar Store on our lunch hour….and some of the stuff we found was just incredible! I think he wore a pair of sunglasses we got there for like three summers! ha! I actually scored a Shania Twain DVD for my daughter in there a couple of weeks ago! Like I said…never know what you’ll find! It’s cheap retail therapy!
January 12th, 2009 at 12:46 am
I have never been in a dollar store, but this sure makes me want to go into one!!
January 12th, 2009 at 8:45 am
OMG! That is hysterical! What would have been even better than handing them out at her little school in the hood would have been her handing them out at the very homogeneous Catholic school they used to go to!
January 12th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Holy hell. I don’t know how I’d react to those. And, I couldn’t imagine giving those at Knute’s full immersion preschool!
January 12th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
The first thing that ran through my head: our lovely daughter would buy those and give them out to her friends and think it hilarious.
I must now avoid the Dollar Store until March.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Oh, how I wish I had been with you when you discovered the Homies! Oh.My.Goodness!
I think we need to come up with our own line: Whitetrash Luvin. There’s Rita May with missing teeth and 2 babies on her hip (”I luv you like you was mine own”). There’s Roy with a confederate flag tatto and mullett (”Come on over here, Baby, let me test those melons”). Your turn…
January 12th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Oh Renee you are definitely on to something. Bubba in his wife beater shirt that only covers half his hairy beer belly leering and saying “Won’t you be my bitch?”
January 12th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I don’t know the cartoon, but I would have known what they were based on, given that my wife comes from East LA.
January 12th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
I wasn’t familiar with HOMIES until I bought a used vehicle and someone had left two of those tiny “action figures” in the console. Fell in love with them, they were too cute! Then I found a third in a parking lot… can’t remember where I acquired the fourth… those things rode around with me in that truck for years, and transferred to my Mustang when I traded in said truck. Last year, when the Mustang and I had to regretfully part ways, I left my HOMIES in the console for the teenager who bought my car to find.
*tear*
January 12th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I’m speechless! This might be the first thing about Valentine’s Day that didn’t totally annoy and piss me off! It freaks me out a little, but in a funny way. I remember analyzing every message on those little candy hearts to make sure I didn’t give anyone I didn’t like a good message!!! I don’t know what I’d have done with these!!!
January 14th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Completely unrelated to the blog entry, but has anyone else had trouble accessing the site? It normally takes a really long time and then an error message…
January 14th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Completely unrelated to the blog entry, but has anyone else had trouble accessing the site? It normally takes a really long time and then an error message appears…
January 14th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
It has been extremely slow. It appears to be a problem with the hosting company’s SQL database servers. I’ve opened a trouble ticket with them.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Ok, I’m glad to know other’s were having trouble, becuase all day I could not load this site…but I’m disappointed that there were no juicy new comments!!!
January 14th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
my brother told me that the dollar store was going to raise their prices — and things wouldn’t be guaranteed one dollar anymore. Will they change the store name?
i can’t believe what has happened to kids valentines. We always had bunnies, kittens, and Be mine. (:
January 15th, 2009 at 8:14 am
I still remember the valentine I got in 3rd grade from the boy I had a crush on. I thought he picked it out just for me, but he didn’t know I was alive.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Oh my… That wouldn’t over well here, LOL.
They didn’t have HOMIES at my Dollar store! It’s my favorite place in our ‘hood.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
My valentine cards, 100 in each box, are all hand-crafted and the boxes sell by the GROSS (pun intended) FOR FREE!, as all the cheap TV ads say.
Each and every card has a gross picture of a dirty, elderly, horny, perverted old man (that would be me) and the inscription on the card says:
“If you will be my concubine I will be your Valentine”
Unfortunately I have yet to figure out how to make them “pop-up” cards, but I’m working on it.
January 19th, 2009 at 10:07 am
You DO realize I am unprofessional enough to find them in a local Dollar Store and give them out to my fellow teachers, right? If I am lucky enough to snatch up a box before they’re sold out, I will take pics of myself putting them into the teacher mailboxes in my main office and post the pics on my bloggy.
That’s how we ROLL in the inner-city school districts!
January 19th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
those are great, too funny. Unfortunately, it is too close to home here and I am sure they would be politically incorrect….but I think they are hilarious.