"When I was a little kid and the parentals (even involving their parentals) were having a gathering there was an amount of "vulgarity" or nuance involved."
I was stunned to learn at an early age after sneaking down the bannister when my parents were having a card party that my very religious parents and their very religious friends enjoyed off-color jokes when they thought we kids weren't listening.
I guess my parents were human after all.
@goatprairie In one of my parents' more amusing (as opposed, alas, to abusing) hours, they went out one night to the old Playboy Club in New York. (We lived in the Bronx, then; I was about seven.) They came home, paid the babysitter, then came into the bedroom I shared with my kid brother, and awoke us by dumping a small tonnage of Playboy rabbit-head paraphernalia upon us---swizzle sticks, napkins, a couple of decks of playing cards, drink umbrellas, you name it. Sleepily, I still couldn't resist crooning a bit from a Bugs Bunny cartoon: "The rabbits are coming, hooray hooray." (Well, at two in the morning what else would you expect?)
Only later did I discover they'd gotten a different deck of cards---one that had the once-famous Marilyn Monroe centerfold (the photo about which she said she'd posed with nothing on but the radio) from
Playboy's first issue in 1953 on the backs of the cards. I knew then that even grownups would still be boys and girls, sometimes.
