“Mane And Tail” Is Not An Intersection
I’LL BE THE FIRST TO ADMIT IT – I am a person who is easily amused. I laugh at “Knock, Knock” jokes. “Animal House” is one of my favorite movies. I can be heard laughing out loud as I walk up and down the aisles in one of those huge Mega-Stores like Wal-Mart and Meijer’s. I find them very entertaining.
Last week my wife, the lovely and much more commercially sophisticated, Dawn, and I were pushing our shopping cart through our nearby Meijer store in search of…all sorts of stuff. Dawn is shopping while I am browsing. She is looking for a good price on Pork Chops while I am wondering how many of those “Happy 100th Birthday!” cards they sell.
Eventually our perambulations took us through the end of the store where the shelves are filled with “Health and Beauty” items. Since I have a limited supply of the first and none of the other, I scoped out the products like a ten year old in a toy store.
High on a shelf in the Shampoo aisle I spotted something that made me pause and call out for my wife.
“Dawn, come and take a look at this. Is this for real?”
She thought that it did look a bit unusual, but not in the “You’ve got to be kidding me” category which is where I would put it.
“Mane And Tail Shampoo?”
There it was on the shelf next to all of the other shampoos. Isn’t that a bit like putting Rat Poison on the same shelf with the Friskies Cat Food?
I picked up a bottle of “Mane and Tail” I had to get more information. Dawn resumed pushing the cart up the aisle.
Nope – it is in the correct aisle. Right there on the back of the bottle are the instructions for use on both humans and your more conventional animals. Well you could have rinsed and repeated me right where I stood. Was this shampoo formulated to be a multi-species product or did it just happen on a Saturday night at a Pajama Party in the stable? I know that I’ve never seen it for sale at my local “Jiffy Cutz” where I go for a trim and a curl.
OK, I have accepted the fact that “Mane And Tail” exists, but all I have to do now is to try to picture 
who would buy this stuff. When I hear the words “Mane” and “Tail” together I conjure up images of Horses and the odd Pony. I also conjure up pictures of Lions, but I cannot imagine anyone trying to shampoo a Lion. Not more than once anyway. Even taking a bottle of “Mane And Tail” after a Horse seems to be a risky bit of business. I know that I’m not going to be the one lathering up the south end of a northbound Horse. I don’t even want to think about what might happen when the blow dryer kicks in.
Yes, I do enjoy going shopping with my wife. She can zero in on the Deal of the Century on Ribs and Chicken while I locate something so we could keep our pet Chimpanzee looking good – if we actually had a pet Chimpanzee. Or a Horse. Or a Lion.
We’re a good team.
Down the Hall on Your Left 
I take it you didn’t see the udder lotion then. Or is that for another post?
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Even I have limits.
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Hilarious, John. Hard to believe that shampoo is real. Like you, I love Animal House. One of the best movies!
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Had to laugh at the statement “… conjure up images of Horses and the odd Pony…”, because that’s exactly what we have out here in Colorado: three horses and one occasionally-odd pony. We may be among the few who don’t find “Mane ‘n Tail” an unusual product – we use it all the time at the barn, exactly as advertised. And excellent point about “the south end”. Horses have a rather swift kick.
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