Meow House Theatre

I pretty much stopped watching TV about 6 months ago, except for the Fake News™ and the real news on CNN, but the other night I flipped around and came across A&E, where they’re showing cleaned-up reruns of The Sopranos. So what the hey, I didn’t really remember this episode (I’ve seen them all on HBO) so I watched it.

Well, being on A&E, they’ve had to dub all the swear words. Most of the time you can understand what they originally said, just by the context–”freakin’” for “fucking,” and so on. So I’m watching and I hear Ralphie say (about his just having been dumped by Janice, Tony’s sister), “That crazy bitch, she wanted to put a pillow on my ass and pretend she was pimping me out!” (N.B. Actually it was Ralphie’s idea to do the pretend thing but of course he wouldn’t admit that to his hulking friends.) Anyhoo, the second that line went by I was all WTF? What the hell does that mean–for one, put a pillow ON someone’s ass? I’m not picturing how they could be having sex with a pillow ON the guy’s ass. And what does that have to do with pimping someone out? Come on, come on, think! What kind of freaky role-play uses a pillow in some kind of prostitution scenario? It bugged me all night. I have seen and heard a lot of crazy shit but for the life of me could not figure out how a pillow and being pimped out had any relation to each other.

Then the next day I was driving to work–still puzzled about what the hell it meant–and like a bolt of lightening I realized, they had dubbed what he actually said to make it “family-friendly”–and there’s not much ways to change “That crazy bitch, she wanted to put a dildo up my ass and pretend she was pimping me out!” and have it vaguely match the movement of his lips while he was talking. I guess “pillow” was all they could come up with.

The guy in the car next to me must have wondered what the hell made me burst out laughing all of a sudden.