Free You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning by Celia Rivenbark Page B

the formerly Most Precocious Multiples, the McCaughey septuplets of Iowa, once and for all.
    As the CDs of
A Gosselin Christmas
sell in the millions, I can picture a gleeful Kate looking at a photo of the McCaughey family and saying, “Face bitch!”
    The McCaugheys have chosen to keep a much lower profile, choosing only annual chats with the perpetually sad-eyed Ann Curry on
Dateline
and the occasional
Ladies Home Journal
update.
    Will Jon have to assume the role of Jackson Five patriarch Joe, herding them into the recording studio and demanding that they rehearse until their tiny vocal cords snap like dry twigs?
    “Holy God, it’s ‘TEN LADIES DANCING.’ How many times do I gotta tell you? Oh my God, I am so stressed out. Kate, can you handle this? I’m just gonna go grab a tan.”
    At times like this, OK, at times like when I’m simply breathing in and out, I am grateful not to have eight children.
    My grandmother had eight children, spaced out every couple of years or so to assure a steady supply of strong arms and legs to work on the family farm.
    Some of us just weren’t intended to have more than one child. We can’t all be Kate Gosselin—or my grandmother, for that matter.
    Members of the one-and-done club can be ferociously protective of that one little cub, though.
    That’s why I could never understand why the mama of that little Chinese girl who had to sing behind a curtain at the Olympics didn’t make a stink.
    In the words of Mr. T., I pity the fool that would tell me that my daughter would sing on the sly while the cuter kid would lip-synch and soak up the credit.
    Here’s the way that conversation would’ve gone if little Yang Peiyi’s mama had, say, just returned from a few months visiting her long-lost adopted sister raised in the Deep South.
    Chinese Politburo member (CPM): “Mrs. Peiyi, we need to use your daughter’s voice but her teeth are a little, how you say, snaggledy, so we’re going to pretend the prettier kid’s doing the singing, okeydokey?”
    Mama Peiyi (MP): “Do whaaaaat???”
    CPM: “Don’t worry. It is still a great honor to you and your ancestors to have even a small part in this most magnificent ceremony ever staged in the history of the Olympics.Now. Please tell your obviously genetically inferior daughter that it has been decided.”
    MP: “You want my daughter to sing but you want everybody else to think it’s another kid that you think is cuter?”
    CPM (relieved): “Ah, yes! That’s it exactly. Of course, we will compensate you for this inconvenience (fumbling through tote bag). Yes! Here it is! An officially sanctioned souvenir bird’s nest Olympic Stadium ashtray and cigarette lighter combo.”
    MP: “Are you trippin’? My kid doesn’t smoke.”
    CPM: “Well, of course not. She’s only seven. You should probably set it aside in a safe place until she’s nine.”
    MP: “My daughter’s earned the right to sing. She’s rehearsed for weeks!”
    CPM: “Oh, cry me a Yangtze. Your daughter’s not the only one we’ve insulted. At first, we picked a ten-year-old but, ultimately, she just looked too old. You know how it is. You say ten-year-old and right away everybody’s asking, ‘Who’s the hag?’ Look, it’s in the national interest that the child who sings ‘Hymn to the Motherland’ be flawless in appearance, and I believe it’s obvious that your daughter could easily eat an egg roll through a picket fence. I mean no disrespect.”
    MP: “You looked in a mirror lately, asshole? You’re uglier than a bucket of armpits.”
    CPM: “Madame! May I remind you that this is a very serious matter. Everything must be perfect. Perfect voice,perfect looks! Oh, why can’t you embrace perfection like that nice American woman Kate Gosselin?”
    MP: “You ain’t perfect. In fact, you’re a mo-ron. Anybody can look at you and tell the wheel’s still a-turnin’ but the hamster’s dead.”
    CPM (happily distracted): “Mmmmm, hamster . . .”
    Which