“Kiss” Begins with What?

“Every kiss begins with __________.”  If you filled in the blank with “slobber” or “tongue”, well, I’m not sure whether to congratulate you for having been unsullied by Madison Avenue or wonder just what you were thinking.  After all, who kisses with the tongue first?  It’s lips, right?  At least, that’s how it is where I come from!

[If you filled in the blank with “Gene Simmons” we’ll have to deduct points but still give you partial credit for trying.]

But anyway, if you’ve had a TV on at all in the last ten years, you know that the advertisers want you to fill in that blank with “K”, or, possibly, “Kay”, as in Kay’s Jewelers.  It’s a catchy little slogan, not the least because it’s really kind of obvious.  I mean, unless were talking the Cyrillic alphabet, in which case “kiss” begins with, well, some other letter.  Maybe that one that looks like a shovel or even the one that has a tail.

All that being said, their last commercial makes me think that the next time I want to start a jewelry-encrusted kiss, it’s going to start with Zales, or one of the local jewelers (check your local listings for times and availabilities).

Have you seen it?  It starts with a guy in a restaurant.  He’s looking around and everyone in the restaurant is either on a phone or a tablet, including the woman he’s with.  He’s trying to get her attention by making eye contact, but she’s too into her phone to notice.

Finally, he sends her a text message that says, “Honey, look up.”  When she does, she sees his back as he exits the restaurant, leaving her forever.

Just kidding.  That’s what a sane man would do.  This idiot is in a jewelry commercial.  What he does, once he has her brief attention, is give her a diamond necklace.

What a putz!  This woman doesn’t care about him!  All she cares about is her phone.  Considering he didn’t even take his phone out until he had exhausted all rational forms of communication, it’s a safe bet she wasn’t calling or texting him.  She was, in theory, “on a date” with him (it requires both quotation marks and a caveat), yet she didn’t care enough about him to pay him attention.

He should have left her right there like a hot rock.*  The momentary notice she gave him after the presentation of the necklace was just that: momentary.  As soon as the commercial’s over, she’s going to be taking a picture of the necklace with her phone and emailing it to all her friends, or maybe taking a selfie of him putting the necklace on her, but she WON’T do is give him any more attention than he was receiving before.  Why?  Because he has established that, no matter how much she ignores him, he’ll still give her valuable gifts.

What he should have done, after exiting the restaurant, is go right back to Kay Jewelers and get his money back.  He should then put the money in a savings account and then maybe buy a gift for a woman who is worthy of his attention.  Or hunting equipment.  Just about anything would be a better use of his money than giving that narcissistic wench a necklace or another moment of his time.

*We talk about dropping something “like a hot rock” but, really, why would someone pick up a hot rock, anyway?