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Thursday, November 17, 2011

Prairie Oysters



In Season One of the TV show Dallas, THE MOST GLORIOUS SOAP OPERA THERE EVER WAS, JR Ewing fixes himself a Prairie Oyster the morning after a bender. This is because he is woefully hung-over and needs to get himself into shape so that he can go to the office downtown to conduct dastardly business deals of dubious legality and perhaps get it on with one of his secretaries.

The Prairie Oyster is so-named because the raw egg it contains resembles both visually and texturally, a raw oyster. Oysters have long been considered aphrodisiacs, in part due to their slipperiness in the mouth, something the raw egg would appear to approximate. The Prairie Oyster, however, is one of the many names given to bull’s testicles which are breaded, fried and eaten. Eggs are also obviously an essential component of reproduction. The ingestion of another animal’s sexual equipment has also long been an apocryphal method of increasing one’s own sexual prowess. Drinking a Prairie Oyster, then, would constitute a triple-whammy.

Actually downing a glass of brandy and Worcestershire Sauce in which floats a raw egg when hung-over is a challenge only the most steel-stomached drunkard can achieve, meaning that one has to have a rather large set of huevos in the first place.

In the TV show Dallas, THE MOST GLORIOUS SOAP OPERA THERE EVER WAS, the list of principal characters arranged by the size of their cojones (from most to least) is:

Jock Ewing
JR Ewing
Cliff Barnes
Ray Krebbes
Miss Ellie
Lucy Ewing Cooper
Sue Ellen Ewing
Pamela Barnes Ewing
Bobby Ewing

Ray Krebbes, the soft-spoken super-sexy illegitimate son of Jock Ewing, is a cattle rancher, and therefore the only character who is likely to have had experience of actually procuring bull’s testicles, which elevates him far higher on the list than his little brother Bobby, whose name alone implies a child-like innocence and purity in keeping with his role as perpetual underdog.

In case you're wondering why Lucy figures so high on this list, check out this scene, which was part of the storyline where she sleeps with Ray, who turns out later to be her uncle. Also for Pam's gratuitous bum-wiggling shot. 

The House of Calvert Party Encyclopedia, Calvert Distillers Company, 1960


Also from this book: Better Than Anything
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