Dear The Makers of Axe Body Wash: Hangover Cure,

Composed April 10, 2008
Postdated April 2, 2008
Hamburg / St. Pauli

Dear The Makers of Axe Body Wash: Hangover Cure,

I was not familiar with the product “Axe Body Wash: Hangover Cure” before my recent trip to Hamburg, Germany. I was, in fact, not familiar with ANY axe product aside from the pernicious advertising suggesting that any man wearing any Axe product was certain to magnetically attract beautiful women.

Of course I thought that this so called “Axe Effect” was pure hyperbole. The few times I’d had the misfortune to sniff a sample of an axe product gave me the same reaction as I have when an overheated electrical wire begins to cook it’s own insulating plastic.

Boy was I wrong!
Allow me to backtrack:
My girlfriend Jenn and I were happy to be hosted in Hamburg by mein guter freund Frank. The evening began with climbing from a train with our large packs and finding a theater In St. Pauli (don’t call it Hamburg!) we met other old guter freunds, and had the surreal experience of watching those guter friends perform an improv show completely in German. I’m well aware of the playing style of those guter freunds, so for me it was much like the enjoyment one gets from watching dogs play! After much celebrating, mein guter freund Frank took us back to his place where my girlfriend Jenn went off to bed while mein guter freund Frank and I stayed up for a traditional “absacker”. Now I’ve had drinks with Germans before and my previous experience has taught met that “absacker” is supposed to mean “the last drink of the evening”.
I love the way Germans have single words for complicated ideas, don’t you The Makers of Axe Body Wash: Hangover Cure? I bet you do!

Six or seven “absackers” later, mein guter freund Frank and I were still reminiscing over old times, chuckling about the sound of our various words for hippopotamus, and plotting future domination of the international improv world.

It was that next morning that I discovered, in the shower of mein guter freund Frank (he wasn’t in there, it wasn’t that kind of evening!) Axe Body Wash: Hangover Cure. The quick bit of googling I’ve just done had led me to believe that you market this product in the U.S. as Axe Body Wash: Recovery.
What a shame!
Yes, when I first began applying the Axe Body Wash: Hangover Cure, it smelled and felt as though I were wiping gelatinous Gatorade about my body. Sure enough, I presently felt much better than I previously had!
My girlfriend Jenn and mein guter freund Frank both postulated that the extra hour of sleep, the breakfast, the coffee, and the shower itself probably had more to do with my feeling better than my use of gelatinous, sweet smelling Gatorade, and I might have believed them if not for the events of later that evening:

We had an interesting and fun tourist day, led by mein guter freund Frank in his mini-clown car (appropriate!). That evening, we took a stroll and began our absackers in a St. Pauli bar.
You probably already know this, The Makers of Axe Body Wash: Gelatinous Gatorade Cure, but St. Pauli is a historic port. Sailors have been docking St. Pauli for centuries!

For some reason, the presence of my girlfriend Jenn seemed to block the following effect, (it must have something to do with her offsetting estrogen), but the one time I walked down the block in this neighborhood on my own, I witnessed the Axe effect in person!

Sure enough, as soon as I appeared on a block where several pretty young ladies happened to be chatting, they began drifting directly towards me! They ALL wanted to chat, and one even went so far as to proposition me RIGHT THERE ON THE STREET! I did find it slightly odd that every single one of these very pretty and charming ladies (no joke) wore their pony tail in the exact same way, all had puffy, pastel ski jackets, and acid wash jeans. I suppose that just happens to be the St. Pauli style.

My girlfriend Jenn was clearly jealous of the attention I was getting due to the correctly advertised Axe Effect. She went so far as to suggest that the young ladies propositioning me were prostitutes! CAN YOU IMAGINE! She actually said OUT LOUD that she thought that they were simply offering me sex because they expected me to PAY THEM!
I mean, SERIOUSLY! I live blocks from Times Square in New York City! I know what a prostitute looks like! A prostitute that approaches one on the street is a middle-aged woman (if she’s a woman) who looks beat up, used up, and dragged through a sharp pile of trouble. She’s barely understandable over the delirium tremens and has bad teeth, if she has teeth, if she’s a she. Which isn’t to say s/he doesn’t give a great time for your seventeen dollars!

Thanks again The Makers Of Axe Body Wash: Hangover Cure! I’ll be certain to buy your product regularly, if I can get over the instinct to shut down all the electrical power each time I catch a scent.

Sincerely,
Rob Reese