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...for you married Targa and Cab drivers!

Topless driving drives men to the dogs
By Doug McIntyre, Columnist

Nothing says summer in Southern California like a top-down cruise along the beach with the wind whipping though your hair, unless it's the wind whipping through HER hair.

You see it in commercials and movie montages all the time: a young couple in love, laughing as the sun glints off their Ray-Bans and blindingly-white, orthodontically-perfect teeth.

Of course these days the guys driving convertibles in TV ads tend to be silver- haired gents with bladder issues, but the dream is still the dream.

The dream of the open road, freedom! With nothing between you and the heavens!

But let me blow the cover off this mass-marketed myth: Girls don't like riding in convertibles.

At least not after you marry them.

I drive a convertible, an 8-year-old Ford with 80,000 miles. I bought it to indulge my own Southern California fantasies, and no surprise here -- it hasn't worked out.

For starters, I'm too pale to drive top down in this latitude. The first traffic jam or long red light and my dead-fish, belly-white pasty flesh begins to sizzle like sausage patties on a griddle.

This is actually my second stab at a California convertible. My first, also a Ford, was 22 years old when I pushed it west from New York in December 1985.

Most of it made it here.

I lost a couple of tires along the way, as well as a water pump, thermostat and the radiator, but the real fun began in Grants, N.M., when the gas tank
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ruptured, resulting in a six-hour layover while I tracked down a replacement tank from a local junkyard.

If you've ever wondered how long six hours can be, try cooling your heels for that long in Grants, N.M.

But eventually, that old Ford made the climb over the San Bernardino Mountains, and I was ready to soak up that California sun.

Until I actually experienced the California sun.

With a beet-red farmer's tan on my arms and neck, and sweat pooling in big, dark half-oval pit stains on my shirt, I began to question why my convertible didn't seem as much fun as those convertibles in the movies.

But a convertible is a chick magnet, right?

Well, they are until the "I do's" are said.

"Could you put the top up?" asks The Wife. But only when she isn't asking, "You're not going to put the top down, are you?"

And as every husband knows, she's not really asking.

Even when I point out how lovely Fritz says it's going to be, she still slams the door on the fingers of my PCH beach- cruising dream with the unrebuttable, "It'll mess my hair."

Women will indulge their boyfriends by riding with the top down about as long as men are willing to dance with their girlfriends -- just long enough to seal the deal. Once you're husband and wife that convertible is about as welcome as that photo album you keep in the garage with Polaroids of ex-girlfriends.

So let me offer the following advice for the married man who still dreams of racing top-down along PCH with his loved one's wind-swept hair blowing in the breeze:

Buy a dog.