MAY 22nd DRAMA AT SEA

Family Planning Conference Leads Preacher To Jump Ship On May 22nd

by Winsip Custer CPW News Service

No one told Rev. Willard Prudhomme, a conservative non-denominational preacher, that the luxury cruise ship he and his wife were taking on the only cruise of their lives would also be home to the Nevada Association of Family Planning Workers. Prudhomme who is president of the Abstain Now Chapter XII of Buffalo, New York, was infuriated when he accidentally walked into a seminar titled Rhythm & Blues: What The Roman Catholic Church Does Want You To Know. 

"I thought it was about music," said Prudhomme.  Later on May 22 as the ship was steaming toward Hawaii and several hundred miles off the coast of Seattle, Washington, Rev. Prudhomme decided to try another seminar titled Cosmo Connection. "I thought that was about outer space or something. It was the story of how Cosmopolitan Magazine was responsible for promoting the birth control pill and how its publisher, Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex And The Single Girl helped advance the sale of J.D. Searle Company's new pill. Then they said that my hero, Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, was hired by J.D. Searle to promote the development of Aspartame, better know as Equal....that sweetener is the creation of the devil and I have told my parishioners never to use it. It's poison," said Prudhomme who following the Searle seminar convinced his wife that the world would, indeed, come to an end on the May 22nd and rather than risk being in the company of a ship full of profligates, they'd stand a better chance of a clear "lift off" from one of the ship's lifeboats.

"When we discovered that the lifeboat was missing, we did a head count and the Prudhomme's were gone," said Captain Ira Rushmore of SeaAdventure Inc., a Washington based cruise line. "When we picked the couple up after a twenty-six hour search, Mrs. Prudhomme was mumbling something about Jaws, the movie. When we got them back on deck one of the family planning workers told Mrs. Prudhomme that the movie was all make believe and that Helen Gurley Brown's husband had produced the movie Jaws. "Helen Gurley and David Brown addressed people's two biggest fears," the woman told Rev. Prudhomme and his wife... "being eaten alive and having an unwanted pregnancy," said Captain Rushmore who said that the couple retired to their cabin for the remainder of the voyage.

Rev. Prudhomme said of the escape from the cruise ship and disappointment of the May 22nd prediction "it gave me time to think out there on the open ocean with nothing but the stars and my wife's familiar snoring.  I remembered an old movie from my childhood, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and how the whole ship, the Titanic, went down, but Molly Brown survived to carry on with even more energy and enthusiasm than before.  I believe God is giving me another chance," he said.

Mildred Prudhomme had a different story.  "I thought about that seminar Willard made me attend and how my father wouldn't let me read Sex and the Single Girl nor see the movie when it came out.  In that seminar I read the book and also met Bernie Marx a family planning  administrator from Syracuse, not far from where we live in Buffalo and I'm leaving Willard for Bernie," she said.