As our sons played on the Linden Hills playground, my friend Nick and I sat on an adjacent park bench. We sat in the dappled shade and fired up our usual scandalous park bench banter: gossip about coworkers, revealed secrets about our wives, and your typical bromance confessions.   Forget about Bravo’s mega hit reality TV franchise “The Real Housewives”. Nick and I were “The Real Househusbands of South Minneapolis”.

I started off our latest Househusbands installment by regaling Nick with the sordid details of my single friend Morris’ life. Every married man with kids has at least one friend who is living life like Frank the Tank. 

“My single friend Morris lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he is a photographer and an internationally acclaimed booze hound,” I said. “Morris just flew to San Francisco to participate in a bachelor party.”

“Of… course,” Nick replied sarcastically. Then Nick pried open his son’s lunch box and discreetly shoveled a handful of his son’s Goldfish crackers into his mouth. I pilfered my son’s snack bin as well. This is known in the world of Dads as Grazing. 

“For the bachelor party, Morris had a seamstress sew some giant hairy balls together, paint them blue, and then sewed the blue balls onto belts,” I said. “Morris and his friends put on the hairy balls and then walked in a San Francisco parade with 70,000 other people. They pushed two shopping carts with kegs in them. To top it off…”

“Wait. There’s more to this story?” Nick asked, as he took a secret sip off his son’s Hi-C drink box.

“Oh, yes,” I said, “Morris called to tell me that in the course of the parade he made out with two separate women. In front of 70,000 people! While he was drinking beer out of a shopping cart! With two giant blue hairy balls stuck to his shorts!”

We blew out a collective breath.

“Morris flies off for a weekend of drinking and skanking. And I just bought a minivan with dual sliding doors,” Nick said, as he shook his head.

We checked in with our sons. They were soaking wet with sweat and happy as hell. We walked back to the bench.

“Do you know that my wife is a vegetarian?” Nick asked.

“OK,” I replied.

“But there is one kind of meat that Bree does eat…Ribs,” Nick said shockingly. “My wife is a secret Rib-a-tarian.”

“My wife Sarah goes to bed every night with a velcroed neoprene sleeve strapped across her forehead,” I confessed. “She fills the sleeve with ice packs. It helps reduce her migraines. I call the Velcro sleeve the ‘Bedazzler’.”

Just then I received a text from one of my blue collar coworkers, a wild cat of a man known simply as Rafalski. It read: “Smitty! I just had a date w/ a Slump Buster!”

I shared the text with Nick. Nick has a five year old son, 16 month old twins, two mortgages, and a demanding job. This is to say, his life is about as far away from a date with a woman known as a ‘Slump Buster’ as humanly possible.

 “When I got my vasectomy,” Nick confessed, “For a week straight I wore nothing but a jock strap.”

“Yuck,” I replied.

“The whole Doctor’s office smelled like burning meat,” Nick said.

“Oooo…barbeque sounds good right now,” I quipped.

We rounded up our sons to go eat lunch at the Famous Dave’s in Linden Hills. Before we left the park, both of our sons opened up their snack bins.

“Where’d all of our snack go?” They asked.