In late August in 1974, my parents were tending camp on the mountain, so my brothers and I decided Friday night was a great time to begin celebrating the sunset of haying season.  Like a prairie fire in a drought, our festivities quickly got out of hand with me being the weekend’s first casualty; the victim of a poorly planned backfire ignited from a tequila bottle.  Live and learn…if you are lucky.   

Saturday night was the Dusk-to-Dawn quadruple feature at the Skyline Drive-in Theater; an event demanding our attendance.  We fired up the family, nine-passenger, station wagon and headed to town and because I recently swore off alcohol, I was the driver.  Dana, my older brother, had arranged a date with a girl who lived 30 miles north of Sheridan.  This meant leaving the ranch around five o-clock, picking her up and stopping at the Decker Post Office and Convenience Store for the evening’s refreshments all to beat the crowds to the preferred parking spaces at the drive-in.  The four movies made for a very, very, very long night with passengers who weren’t nearly as cute as they thought they were.  We dropped off Dana’s date and rolled back into the ranch as dawn was breaking, thus closing out a weekend I hoped was gone forever.  Such was not the case. 

Tuesday afternoon I was stacking bales when Dad drove across the field and climbed up on the stack.  He began bitching about break-downs and finding “beer bottles under the third seat of the station wagon.”  At that moment, the earth fell off its axis, so I waited for it to start spinning again before I said anything.  “I hear you all went to the movies Saturday night,” he said.  “Who drove?” 

“I did,” I confessed, questioning the exact whereabouts of my older brother who had previously assured me he had scrubbed all party residue from the car.  

“Mom said she found your vomit covered sheets in the laundry.  You drank so much you got sick and you drove home?” he asked. 

“Not exactly,” I mumbled.

“What do you mean ‘not exactly’?” Dad shot back. 

I kicked at the hay bales and played dumb.  “You are already in trouble, so you just as well come clean.”  

Congress is half-full of socialists, but only Bernie Sanders (I-VT) openly admits it.  His presidential campaign is attracting so much support from American millennial, mini-Marxists, Hillary Clinton is racing to beat him to the left wing of the political spectrum.  With those two battling as to who is the bigger leftist, DNC Party Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was recently asked by MSNBC’s Chris Mathews to explain the difference between Democrats and Socialists.  She stumbled, stammered, and struggled for an intelligent response just like a 17-year-old boy standing on a haystack on a hot day in August.  She should come clean—there is no difference.