You've Goat to be Kidding Me

Recently, goats have become a topic of discussion. The only time I've been around a goat was the summer I volunteered at the Louisville Zoo and had to help medicate a goat who'd tried to get too friendly with a female goat. She hit him where it hurt -- in his boys. So I got to know that goat a little too intimately as we treated his wound. Anyway....

My friend Dana treated me to a song that was written for her about eating goat for Jesus. Here's the song and the story behind it as told by Dana:

"Eating Goat for Jesus"

Eating goat for Jesus, Eating goat for Jesus
Don't you know that he sees us
Eating goat for Jesus.
Baked, boiled or fried he is always by our side
Eating goat for Jesus.
Workin' in the autoclave all day hopin' a soul to save
Eating goat for Jesus.

The song was written by my dear friend and co worker Karen Belle Bob that is not her given name but a nick name some of us use around the office. She grew up in Kentucky and reminds me of a southern belle. Anyway, the first year I went to the Dominican Republic I was nervous for a number of reasons. First, it was very much out of my comfort zone. Second, I really do not like to get dirty and third, I just did not know what I was getting my self into especially working in the autoclave. We use the autoclave to sterilize the instruments for surgery. I am a travel agent and as I remind the medical team every year I am a NON MEDICAL person. I feel like that disclaimer needs to be made so that the Doctors do not have too high of expectations of me. The other thing that made me a bit nervous was that I heard that the Dominicans eat goat (on purpose.) I am a true Midwesterner, I like fowl and beef. On occasion, I will get real exotic and eat a crab cake but by and large I do not venture from the fowl and beef rule I have established for myself. I am also not the type of traveler that wants to emerge herself in the culture once she arrives in her foreign county and eat and drink what the locals do. When I returned from my trip the first year Karen asked how my "Eating Goat for Jesus" went. The phrase stuck and that is what we now call my mission trips. Karen is quirky like me and one night when she could not get to sleep she was thinking about me and my trip and decided I needed a song so she came up with these lyrics.

The second matter of goat came up when I was watching "Notting Hill" on DVD. In one scene, Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant discuss the Marc Chagall print hanging in Hugh's character's living room. The painting is La Mariee and has a couple drifting skyward with a goat playing the violin. Julia says: "Happiness isn't happiness unless there's a violin-playing goat." How true. I've never experienced such happiness. My friend Leah called me from the National Gallery of Art a week or so after I watched the movie cuz I'd used the quote in a letter to her. At the time, I couldn't remember the name of the painting so I called Dana and the hunt began. I'd emailed the quote to her along with a link to the print so she was trying to find it in her email. Dana, admittedly, isn't the quickest when it comes to the world of email but she did find it. By the time I called Leah back, she'd since left the gallery but goat was still the topic of the day.