David Hardin didn't know what hit him.
Bedecked, bandanna'd and bejeweled, Melissa Kraut, Bucks County sex-toy saleswoman, blew into David's quiet Tennessee home.
"I look like that every day," the irrepressible star of Monday's edition of Wife Swap said this week in an interview. "Every day's an event for me."
David eventually caught his breath and stood firm against Melissa's declaration that his eight home-schooled children should get out and get their freak on.
"Eight kids!" Melissa proclaimed. "Who has eight kids these days?"
For two weeks, Melissa did, as David's wife, Kathy, left her brood and traveled to Holland, Bucks County, in an attempt to teach Steve and Melissa Kraut's three boys the joys of card games and a blank TV screen. You can see it all at 8 p.m. on Channel 6.
From its position on a high shelf of reality entertainment - it's fun, but let's hope you weren't expecting Masterpiece Theatre - the show can be surprisingly enlightening, as it shines an intimate light on America's culture wars.
Family values? They're anything you make them.
Brandon Kraut, who says the TV has put him to sleep for nine of his 10 years, hears about the eight Hardin children. They have no household electronics, do copious chores, and are forced to tithe to the church and pay taxes to their dad out of their piddling allowances.
"Mom is going to take care of them," Brandon marvels, "which is going to be a scary thought."
Melissa, who on the show says she spends only five minutes in the morning with her kids, is as unremittingly intense as any of the ladies featured on Wife Swap in its year and half on the air.
"I'm very, very extreme," she acknowledged on the phone, "but I like who I am."
She didn't miss a beat when asked about David Hardin's comment on the show that he's appalled that "her value as a person is wrapped up in a dress."
"That would be a good thing," she responded, "because I love my clothes. Actually, I think I'm a great person. I love people and I also love myself. I find the good in everyone."
Her motto, she writes in an advisory packet to Kathy Hardin, is "more, more, more."
And one area where she lives up to it is in selling "romantic enhancements" three to five nights a week at all-gal parties in suburban homes.
She said she clears "well over six figures" annually as the No. 2 purveyor (out of 8,000 nationwide) of Slumber Parties Inc. merchandise.
"I will always have to work to keep up with my excessive habits," she says on the show.
