At a CNN Town Hall last night, ex-Colorado governor and presidential candidate John Hickenlooper made his centrist case for why he should be the Democrat to take on President Trump. He outlined his opposition to the death penalty, pledged that he would name a woman as his running mate (and perhaps unwisely questioned why women candidates aren’t pressed about adding a man to the ticket), and generally attempted to introduce himself to an American public that doesn’t know him very well.
Substance aside, Hickenlooper’s most memorable moment of the night may have been when he told the tale of the time he took his mother to see America’s best-known pornographic movie — a story he also recounted in a 2016 memoir.
In Hickenlooper’s self-deprecating telling, which was punctuated by laughter and groans from the amused audience, he was home from college in 1972, had planned to see the movie with a friend, and invited his mother at the last minute, assuming — incorrectly — that she would decline. As for the movie’s infamous reputation, Hickenlooper claims he “didn’t know what an X movie was” at the time, and thought Deep Throat was only “a little naughty.”
When it became clear that the movie was more than a little naughty, Hickenlooper suggested to his mother that they leave the theater, but she insisted on sticking it out — then tactfully praised Deep Throat’s lighting on the way home.
The overarching lesson here: John Hickenlooper’s mom seems pretty cool.
