Get on your knees, Oklahoma City. It's time to worship our generous oligarchs!
Yesterday afternoon, city leaders and an eager-to-please local media gathered at the future home of Scissortail Park to announce everyone's favorite truck stop moguls – the Love's family – are "gifting" approximately .0002% of their net worth to fund maintenance and support stage productions at Scissor Tail Park.
Instead of linking to one of the numerous local media articles about the gift, let's go straight to the source:
The Stage and Great Lawn at Scissortail Park, scheduled to open this fall in Oklahoma City, will be named the Love’s Travel Stops Stage and Great Lawn in recognition of a major gift from the Love Family. The $2 million gift will fund ongoing maintenance of the park and support stage productions in the future.
The six-acre Love’s Travel Stops Stage and Great Lawn is a first-class outdoor performance venue and features a prominent stage with green room and capacity for small (up to 1,500 guests), medium (up to 10,000 guests) and large (up to 15,000 guests) events, including concerts, outdoor movies, corporate events and symphonic performances.
Wait a second. If it's a "gift" from the Love family, why do we have to name the park's main stage after their chain of truck stops? It almost feels like they're buying naming rights to the facilities as part of an advertising deal but framing it as a gift so they can also get the positive PR and media attention that comes with…
Hahaha. Just kidding. I'm a stereotypical Oklahoman, which means I'm very grateful that this generous family that earns more in one hour than you'll likely earn in a lifetime generously donated a day’s worth of profits from their chain of over 470 "travel centers" to have their name plastered all over the taxpayer-funded park, giving the uninformed the impression they funded the entire thing.
Here's a photo from the big unveil:
Geeze, for $2-million bucks you'd think the city could have ordered a bigger sign! I think we spent more on the gigantic check we gave to guys who won the $250 OKC Cock Ring Selfie Contest!
How much do you think the city would charge us – or Patricia's – to fund maintenance and operations at the Cock Ring? We may have to start a Go Fund Me for that!
In all seriousness, I'd like to thank the Love family for their generous gift. They didn't have to donate the money, and could have simply left it in the bank earning compound interest for their great-great-great-grandkid's cousin's niece to enjoy. I just hope they will still be able to afford their block of Jack Nicholson seats next to the opponent's bench at Thunder home games!
In fact, why stop at naming the grand stage after them? Perhaps we should have our city's parks and recs employees wear obnoxiously large Love's patches on their uniforms, or maybe would could erect a statue of Judy Love yelling at LeBron James and place it in a fountain? We could also put Love's in charge of maintaining the bathrooms. Okay, that last one may take things too far.
