Mother’s Day is this Sunday, leaving most of the world going “Shiiiiiiiiii, I totally forgot that’s still a holiday.” I’m right there with you. What do moms even want for Mother’s Day, anyway? As a child, this question was easily answered with reminders and recommendations from your school teacher: pottery made of air-dried Play-Doh, necklaces of uncooked pasta, and dead flowers glued to a strip of paper serving as a bookmark so she wouldn’t lose her place in how completely depressing this last idea is.
As an adult, however, handmade gifts such as these have inexplicably traveled from the realm of adorable and exciting to the realm of terrible and worrisome. Why is it so strange that your grown child now wants to surprise you on Mother’s Day with miniature replicas of yourself and Fabio Lanzoni in the form of sock puppets made from their very own unwashed socks, and then put on a short play with said puppets, reenacting the most sensual scenes from one of your favorite romance novels? How is that grounds for an “emergency family meeting”? Personally, I find a gift like that to be rather sweet and thoughtful, and not mentally disturbed in the least.
Obviously, there is a lot I don’t understand about Mother’s Day gifting, so this year I decided to go a bit of a different route in hopes of finally getting it right. I’m an adult, my mom’s an adult, my cats are senior citizens, and it’s time we all started giving mature and meaningful gifts to each other. In lieu of material items and handmade hogwash, gifting a special experience to share with your mom this Mother’s Day is sure to thrill her. Especially if the experience includes a carefully crafted beer pairing!
When figuring out the best option for giving your mom an “experience present,” it’s good to think back to the time y’all spent together when you were a child. What did you enjoy doing together then? Growing up, one of my favorite things to do with my mom was watch movies. Not the movies I picked out – there are only so many times in a row that you can watch All Dogs Go to Heaven before someone can no longer suppress the urge to slam the VCR against the wall – but rather, crawling into my parents’ bed on a lazy weekend and watching the movies my mom wanted to watch. And my mom wanted to watch all the movies! Foreign films, classics, sci-fi, drama, comedy, fantasy, horror; you name it, we watched it. All the movies starring Ewan McGregor? Yeah, we watched them.
No matter what types of movies we watch, though, my mother has never been a passive viewer. She becomes completely immersed in each and every film. I remember sitting next to her during our special screenings and looking over at her to find her weeping quietly or grinning hugely or, as was often the case, biting her nails, all the while completely transfixed by the film. She’s one of few people I know who would read the movie credits and actually pay attention to them, storing away detailed information and facts like some sort of movie trivia rain man wizard. I’m still a firm believer that IMDB is just a download of my mom’s brain that the internet takes from her while she’s sleeping.
All this is to say that in deciding what kind of Mother’s Day experience to gift my mom, the choice was pretty obvious. We needed to watch movies together. So I told my mom, “You pick the movies, I’ll pick the beers.” And that’s all the instructions she needed before determining her assortments of celluloid entertainment for the day.
Since this Sunday is going to be too busy to while the hours away watching movies, we decided to hold a pre-Mother’s Day movie screening and beer pairing with the ladies of the family a week early. I’ll spare you the less-exciting details and focus solely on the featured film my mother surprisingly chose which was, for better or for worse, Magic Mike, starring Chafing Taintman and Matthew McConaughey-hey-hey-y’all.
I had never seen Magic Mike before as I try to stay away from most forms of disappointing soft core pornography, but I guessed that the movie would be comprised of basically two types of scenes: scenes with wieners and scenes without wieners. That being the case, I knew exactly the two beers to compliment these scenes.
It just so happens that Last Stand Brewing Company in Dripping Springs, TX (where my parents live) has recently started distributing bottles of their year-round beers onsite and around town. What’s more, at the brewery they usually have eight different beers to choose from, all of which are now available in growlers to-go. What’s more than more, growler fills are $1 off on Sundays. Knowing all this, I painstakingly limited myself to two beer styles from Last Stand to pair with Magic Mike. I purchased a bottle of Coffee Porter and a growler of their rotating Wheat ale and I headed over to my mom’s house to watch a bunch of silly wangs dance around on a screen. Typical Sunday.
So, why Wheat and Coffee Porter? One of the most notable characteristic of Last Stand’s Wheat is it’s lovely and prominent banana-y taste imparted by the yeast. I figured it would go quite nicely with the abundance of banana hammocks I expected to see in Magic Mike. I informed my family that we would drink Wheat during every wiener scene, and they were totally on board. On board the banana boat.
For the non-wiener scenes, I instinctively knew I wouldn’t be very interested, sticking by my long time motto, “No wiener? No want it.” But I was going to have to get through the portions of wienerless drivel somehow. I knew that the cold brew coffee in Last Stand’s Coffee Porter would keep me awake and alert if Magic Mike decided to include any sort of plot or whatever in between the essential wiener events.
You know, as far as movie predictions go, mine wasn’t far off. As we watched Magic Mike, my mom, my sisters, and I all laughed and gawked during their strip teases and lap dances. Then we shouted incredulously at the characters during their deeper “thoughtful” moments, trying our best to understand why this movie was even a thing outside of the wiener scenes.
We never did figure out why, but we had a great time theorizing and an even better time imbibing our delicious beers. One thing we do know for sure, man hips probably shouldn’t be able to move that way. Partly because it seems unnatural, partly because we’re a little jealous.
To sum it up, the important thing about Magic Mike and all the wieners in it is that they brought my mother and me together again. They allowed us to remember and relive precious, albeit not-as-wienery memories from years ago, and to build new wienerful memories today.
To sum it up again, the important thing about Last Stand’s beer is that you don’t have to watch Magic Mike: The Wienering to enjoy it. Just head over to Last Stand this Sunday, get you a discounted growler, and parrot with a wonderful and special Mother’s Day experience between you and your mom. Whatever that experience may be, I hope it allows you to repeatedly use the word “wiener”.
Cheers to your mother!
Wieners and butts.
