Orange Man, the Understudy

In July of 1971, I was working at the Waffle House on Westshore Boulevard in Tampa as the cook on the 3-11 shift. On my day off one week, I got a phone call from the district manager. He wanted to know if I could work the 11-7 shift that night at the store on Dale Mabry. Always willing to make a little more money, I told him that I would do that. 

A few minutes after I arrived at work that night, I heard some laughter, and I looked around the room. At the low counter, the two waitresses were talking to a black man who was drinking coffee. I got back to what I was doing and a minute later, one of the waitresses came to me and said, "Wayne Allen is that man over there. He wants to talk to you." 

In 1971, the uniform for cooks at the Waffle House was white shirt, white pants, white paper overseas cap with the WH logo, white shoes and a red bowtie. If you are ever in a Waffle House, look up at the old pictures they have on the walls and see it for yourself. Anyway, I walked over to Wayne Allen. He was still laughing a little while talking to another customer. 

Wayne introduced himself. He was not a Kamala Harris or Barack Obama shade of black. He was black black. Anyway, Wayne looked at me and said, "Daddy, I don't want to offend you, but you are the whitest white boy that I have seen." The people all around us just started laughing. This may stun some of you, but I didn't have a comeback for that comment. I just laughed and went back to work.

Wayne passed away several years ago, so he didn't get to see "the whitest white boy" that I have ever seen. That would have been on Friday morning when I turned on the news to see the debate highlights. If Wayne Allen were alive today, he would have called me to say, "Did you see that white ass boy Joe Biden on television? " Yeah, Joe Biden looked pretty pale on Thursday night for the debate. Biden wasn't Waffle House cook white; he was cadaver white. Casper the Friendly Ghost wasn't as pale as Biden. Biden looked closer to death than anyone I have ever seen. He must have spent all of his prep time at Camp David in an old photography darkroom.

Anyway, fast forward from Thursday night to Monday evening. Biden made a national television appearance to attack the Supreme Court. I looked at his face and thought that it was some kind of political joke. Biden's face was some other color than the pale white that it had been on Thursday night. Observers who can tell shades of color reported that it looked kind of orange. All joking aside, my vision is color deficient, so I am not sure. I just knew that it didn't look right.

I was stunned, but obviously I gave them too much credit. I thought that they were taking a shot at Trump and would make a joke about it. They didn't. After the four-minute speech, several of the news people commented on Biden's sudden "tan". That "tan" got more attention than his speech.

I just want to make sure that I understand how Biden's people think. At the debate he couldn't complete a sentence, he could not speak coherently and on the way to the podium, he waved at a crowd that wasn't there in the empty room. He also just stood there for the first half hour looking slack jawed and slope headed.  So, the staff looked at that performance and immediately thought, "He needs to look more tanned." Really? Wait! I forgot that liberals don't measure a man by the color of his skin. Unless of course, that it is their guy. 

Can we call in some kind of consultant to study the thought process that Biden campaign staffers are using? It would be hard to argue with those claiming that Biden's campaign needs to change some staffers. Biden probably told him that he wanted to look more Presidential, like Trump. Is there an undercover Republican on the Biden staff?

People, even those who vote for him, have spent years ridiculing Trump for that spray tan look. Biden and Democrats hate everything that Trump does. Then one day they roll out "Orange Joe". Who is making these decisions for Democrats? How bad was this decision? This was like "New Coke" bad. This is like deciding that you want an electric pickup truck bad. What wife lets her husband go out looking like that?  Is Jill channeling Rush Limbaugh's spirit? Was there a circus at Camp David? Did Hunter get a bad bag of weed or cocaine to share? What possessed those people to send him out looking like that? 

I guess that Oscar Wilde was right. Oscar is credited with saying, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness”.