Hollabackgirl!

The house down the street from us in El Cerrito is up for sale again.

Tony and Jeffrey and I scoped the place out a couple months ago during the open house. What a dump! Yard full o' weeds. Illegal addition that completely enclosed the chimney. You know the part of your chimney that's supposed to be outside? That part was inside. And the chimney was sort of crumbling, so there's a little pile of rubble inside the illegal addition.

And there's a space heater in the illegal addition with a duct on it that looks like something you'd see in a L'il Abner cartoon.

Do we even have a fire marshal in El Cerrito?! Hell-o!

Plus the toilet didn't work. Seriously. There was a plastic garbage bag taped over it. I don't even want to think about the implications.

But anyway, the good news is some savvy investors snapped up this property, rototilled the yard, swept up the chimney rubble, built a deck, installed a state-of-the art commode and put the whole enchilada back on the market for an unheard-of-on-our-block $629K!

So Tony and I have decided that if this superficially made-over dump goes for that much, we're gonna sell our little bungalow and buy a bakery with the profits.

Not just any bakery! A bakery in Merced! Where the houses are cheap and the college students are hungry!

So anyway, the kurttrue.com team went on a fact finding mission this past Sunday to the Union Hotel in Occidental (which has a bakery). We ordered pastries and did some brainstorming.

We decided to call the bakery Kurt, Tony and Jeffrey's Hollabackgirl! Cafe. That's because Jeffrey and I started using the term "Hollabackgirl!" at work to mean… well, it can mean a lot of things. Like for instance, if Jeffrey says to me "Did the payroll batch go through?" I'll say "Hollabackgirl!"

And then Jeffrey says "Holla!"

It all started with a coworker who was trying to explain to us the significance of the Gwen Stephani song "Hollabackgirl."

Well the song seemed even more insipid after the explanation than before. I said to Jeffrey "OK, do you feel like you know what a hollabackgirl is?"

He said "Big Daddy, I don't have a clue. But it's such a great word. Let's just try to work it into conversation and see what kind of meaning it develops." So that's what we did. I'm not sure where the "Holla!" part came from.

But it just feels so right!

So, see, at Kurt, Tony and Jeffrey's Hollabackgirl! Cafe, all our signage and promotional material will say "Everything here is hollabackgirl good!"

Doesn't that sound like a positive message? We can't lose!

We were so pleased with the outcome of the brainstorming session in Occidental that we drove down the Korbel winery outside Rio Nido and toasted our coming good fortune. Then, since we were in the neighborhood, I called up my coworker Diane, who lives off Occidental Road and asked her if she could spare any horse manure.

She said, "Honey, I can give you some hollabackgirl horse manure!"

Holla!

Kurt "big daddy" True
30 september 2005