Mary Kay vs. Strega Bruja

Wanna get rich? Wanna make ten thousand dollars a months from the comfort of your own home?  Yeah?  Well, it’s you and everyone else my friend.  It is because of this great desire to have your cake and eat it too…that the triangle plan was made.

What’s the triangle plan?  I’ll explain

This is Mary Kay.  Isn’t she beautiful.

It’s all fake.  She’s wearing a wig, and the face is just painted on.  You can look this beautiful too if you go to one of her parties and spend a hundred bucks on make-up every month.  Oh, what’s the matter, can’t afford it?  That’s okay, you can get it all free if you have a party and talk all your friends and neighbors into buying it.

Well, that’s the catch isn’t it?  Everyone’s who’s heard of Mary Kay, either sells it already, or they just don’t want it.  So you don’t get the makeup or the free pink car Mary Kay gives to all her top sales ladies.  The only people who actually get rich in the triangle plan, are the first few people who got into the program. Everyone else is just a minion.  Sure, they get a little cash, but they’ll never ever in a million years, get rich.  But they can learn everything there is to know about the marketing system, like who the manufacturer is, and how to outsource the labels and shipping services.  Tim Ferris explains all about how to to this in his book, “The 4-hour workweek.”

Triangle plans, AKA, multilevel marketing schemes, are everywhere. There’s Amway, Pampered Chef, Kirby and Rainbow Vacuums, as well as quick and easy meat seasonings and vitamin companies.  You can market anything and everything if you just have zeal and passion.  Heck, you could even use this multilevel marketing scheme with your coconut smuggling business. Well, not you, personally, someone else has done that one.

This is Strega Bruja.

She is the leader of the biggest multilevel marketing business in the world.  You might not have heard of her, because it isn’t exactly legal to smuggle coconuts, now is it?  With ordinary triangle schemes, the little minions can just quit when they realize they’ll just never make it to the top.  They can just run off and start a clan of door to door magazine salesmen if they want to.  But with coconut smuggling it’s different.

If the minions talk, the police will find out about what they’re doing and everyone will go to jail.  They can’t have that, now can they?  They don’t want to get caught, so the only way out of this business, is to die.  So why do they get into coconut smuggling in the first place?  For the money, of course.  Play your cards right, and you’ll make it to the top. Eventually.  But they leave out the “eventually” part when they’re making the sale.  First they lure you in.  Then you find out the hard way, how life, really is.

That’s what happened to my aunt Dorcas.  She and my uncle Don Pedro worked in a vinegar shop in downtown Tijuana.  They sold every kind of vinegar that you could possibly imagine.  There was apple cider, balsamic, cherry bon bon, and truffle.  You name it, they had it.  The vinegar was sold in these really Gothic looking bottles with jewels and decorative silver.  They looked like the kind of bottle that the vampires drank blood from in the movie ” Lost Boys” They were really nice, but the vinegar was just a cover for what was really going on.  It was all just a front to cover up the money laundering.

When you smuggle coconuts, you get paid a lot of money.  If the government finds out that you made a bunch of money and didn’t give them any, they’ll get mad, take your stuff, and send you to prison forever.   Actually, it’s more like five years, but whose counting?  You can’t just claim that you made 4.7 million dollars on your annual tax statement by declaring that you were smuggling coconuts or you’ll go to prison.  Smuggling coconuts is a federal offense all over the world. It’s socially unacceptable, and you just have to keep it a secret.  So you buy a vinegar shop, and pretend you made a lot of money by selling fancy bottles of fermented wine to put on your fish and chips.   And then you hire a couple of schmucks to run the thing for you so you won’t have any affiliation.

My Aunt Dorcas, and my Uncle Don Pedro were the couple of schmucks running the vinegar shop in downtown Tijuana. They got to live in the upstairs apartment, and were each given a brand new, 1957 Chevy to drive.  But they didn’t get much of a paycheck in exchange for their services.  They were too low on the pecking order, and had to prove their worth before the real money came in.  But in order to prove your worth, you had to find a good supplier, and find people to sell your goods.  But they couldn’t just go out and have their own seminar, hand out fliers, or advertise, what they wanted to sell was illegal.  So they just sat around, pinched their pennies, and hoped and prayed that someone up there on the totem pole would die and leave them a good position that paid a lot of money.

Aunt Dorcas had this secret plan to get really super rich and buy this really nice mansion on Plummet Avenue.  So, she secretly left the house on Friday nights and went to play black jack at the pub down the street.  She was a terrible black jack player, and always came home broke.  Uncle Don Pedro, also had a plan to get really stinking rich.  He snuck out of the house on Friday nights and went to the pub on the outside of town.  He put bets on the cat fights in the basement.  Sometimes he lost, and sometimes he won, but he always managed to spend all of his money on candy and cigarettes.  He didn’t share them either. They could have stayed at home and held dinner parties for the head honchos of their secret organization, but they didn’t.  It’s too bad, because rubbing noses with important people is always the way to work your way up the corporate ladder.

According to a song by the Beatles, all you need is love. Broom Hilda didn’t get any of this.  Her parents were far too busy plotting and scheming ways to get rich quick to give her a hug or read her a bedtime story.  So she became a whiny, needy child.  She complained all the time and it drove her parents just crazy.  They were always trying to sneak away from her just to get away.  If they couldn’t sneak away, they’d just send her to her room.  She just asked for way too many things and they weren’t going  to buy any of it for her.  They just didn’t have the money.

Well, Broom Hilda started sneaking out of her window.  Nobody knew she was gone, they never paid any attention to her.  It was like that wherever she went, it was almost like being invisible.  She didn’t look rich and she didn’t look poor, she just blended in like a chameleon. And since nobody was watching, she started to steal things.  She walked into a pastry shop and while a old lady was fumbling through her purse, Broom Hilda swiped a chocolate éclair right off the table, and marched right out with it.  Nobody noticed her at all.  It was so easy, and so nice to get whatever she wanted.  So she started doing it all day long, every day.  Years went by, and she had never been happier.  She even learned how to be a pick pocket.

But then one day she bumped into a man, and lifted a necklace out of his pocket.  It was a gold necklace with a little green snake pendant with black jeweled eyes.  When she put it up to her face to have a closer look, the man grabbed her hand, and took back the necklace.  He looked deep into her eyes and put his right hand on the top of her head and smiled.  Then he said,”Go home, and steal no more.  From now on, you can have everything you want, and it will come to you.”  And she did just that.

When she got home, nobody was there.  It was Friday night.  It was the night her parents both snuck out of the house.  She wasn’t quite ready to stop stealing, though.  So she decided to sneak into her mother’s room and see if there was anything good. There was something really good.  At the bottom of an old trunk filled with books and love letters, Broom Hilda found an old book with a picture of a snake on the front.  It was the Kundalini.

Her Aunt had tried to summon the Kundalini, and it didn’t really work so well for her, so she just gave up.  But Broom Hilda studied it, and spent the next 80 days in quiet meditation.  And then all of a sudden things changed around that upstairs apartment.  It was almost as if they had all entered an alternate universe.

Aunt Dorcas started taking black jack lessons from a Cartel member she met at the pub.  After that, she started bringing home hundreds of extra dollars every Friday night.  Don Pedro invited “The Boss” over for a coconut shrimp party, and they had plenty of money to have a delicious fabulous catered and served on the veranda.  Loads of people came that night and showered Broom Hilda with gifts wrapped in sparkly paper with glittering bows.  She got new dresses, and hundreds of bottles of bubble bath that was scented of lilacs and sweet violets.  There were big boxes filled with ginger orange shampoo.  She was told that this shampoo was new and hadn’t been put on the market.  They wanted her to fill out a questionnaire and mail it to their customer service department.

Life just got better and better after that.  For some reason, everyone in the entire Cartel fell in love with Broom Hilda, and kept sending her free samples of products that they were testing for retail.  She was sent chocolate chip flavored toothpaste, marshmallow mouth wash, boysenberry flavored ketchup and sweet potato french fries.  One day, a giant dollhouse came in the mail.  It even had a working toilet, just in case the doll came to life one night and had eaten oatmeal with flax seeds for dinner.  Then dolls were sent for the dollhouse and the furniture to go with it.  And the dolls have to eat, so they sent packages of food, too.

Oh sure, I suppose this just sounds fabulous.  But you have to remember, they lived in a very small apartment.  There was so much stuff in that little room of Broom Hilda’s, that she had to sleep on a pile of cardboard boxes and wrapping paper.  She loved having all that stuff, but it was way too much.  The whole hose was so crowded that there was no room to walk. Wrappers and packaging and plastic bottles were everywhere and the whole house was an absolute mess. Her wildest dream was becoming her worst nightmare. She didn’t have anywhere to put it all and they didn’t have a garbage truck to pick up the cardboard boxes and tissue paper that all the stuff came in.  It was getting worse and worse, too.  Packages came every single day, so she had to do something.  So, she found an address in her mother’s room and started packing everything up and sending it there.

And guess whose house it was?  That’s right.  She sent it all to me.

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