I'm a Brooks Brotha

I like Brooks Brothers.

I do.  I really, really do.

I own three Brooks Brothers shirts.  Two, I bought from thrift stores for a grand total of $22, and one was purchased for me, at full price, by my in-laws.  It has an eyelet collar (that's a hole through each collar, through which a solid gold tie-bar (they also bought that for me) goes through and fastens behind your necktie's knot.  I can't even imagine how much that shirt cost.  I don't want to imagine it, but I sometimes find myself imagining about it.

Against my will, of course.

According to Facebook, which is never wrong about anything except that one thing someone I didn't go to middle school with said once about Tina Fey that time, Brooks Brothers is "the official men's clothier for The Great Gatsby".

What the fuck does this mean? I genteelly asked myself, in that Great Gatsbian way of mine.  Google, which is also never wrong about anything except for that one time someone Googled "donkey porn electrified cum twin badgers" and got to My Masonic Apron, informed me that Brooks Brothers teamed up with costume designer Catherine Martin to design over 500 costume pieces for Baz Luhrman's film interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby and Toby Maguire as that other asshole whose name doesn't matter.  I'm guessing that ready-to-wear versions of these costume pieces will be/are available for wealthier-than-average Republican motorcar aficionados and parlour games enthusiasts at nationwide Brooks Brothers retail establishments.

I don't recall much literature I read in high school for required reading.  I don't remember much of the literature I read in high school for the other kind of reading either-- what was it called?  Where the student gets to pick the book?  Voluntary?  Secessionist?  I forget.  It's far easier for me to remember middle school.  There was a story in the obligatory Houghton Mifflin Reader about an Eskimo dog whose heart explodes while he's doing something heroic.  Or something.  I remember distinctly reading about an explorer who, along with his crew, froze to death while searching in vain for the Northwest Passage, and I didn't sleep for two months thereafter.  I remember in 6th grade, I chose to read "Death Be Not Proud", which was sitting there on the shelf (right where it had no business being) and its morbid back cover synopsis, the tale of a young boy in the 1940s being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and dies at 17, of course called out to morbidly-obsessed 12-year-old me seductively.

I remember reading Graham Chapman's "A Liar's Autobiography" the following year, in 7th grade.  Actually, I didn't read it, I listened to it on several tape cassettes, because the book was out-of-print.  How I managed to score the tapes, who knows?  I recall being fascinated by Chapman's vivid and frank discussions of his alcoholism and his homosexuality, and the moment he realized he was gay.  He was in medical school and was having sex with a nurse, or a nursing student, I forget.  He said that he had the epiphany that he was attracted to men "as I came between her breasts for the third time".

I did a long book report on "A Liar's Autobiography" and Miss Stein, a newly-minted year-long substitute, gave me an A, and couldn't look me in the eye when she passed the graded report back to me.  There were no comments and, fortunately, no phone calls home.

In high school, I know I read "The Crucible", and I appeared in it onstage, too.  That was a mistake.  So was the time I appeared in it in college.  I hope to not make that mistake a third time.  I read "Major Molineux" which, apparently, is actually called "My Kinsman, Major Molineux", but who cares?  I also read "The Scarlet Letter" which is by Hawthorne, too, and it was hot-- much hotter than Major Molineux.  I read a short story by James Joyce in eleventh grade, but I couldn't tell you what it was called.  There was "The Grapes of Wrath" and "The Great Gatsby", too.  But I didn't find either very wrathful or great.

Maybe that's because I'm a phony bastard.

I fell in love with "The Catcher in the Rye" the same way every depressed, repressed, neurotic, sardonic scowling and howling boy of sixteen or whatever does, and I'm embarrassed to be such an ardent cliche, but then, I'm also a Jew with a big nose, too, so what can you do?  I could sit here and write all day about it, but then you'd probably start to get worried about me.  But then, maybe you wouldn't even notice.  People never notice anything.

I'm kind of surprised Brooks Brothers didn't release a line of clothing inspired by late 19th century garb after the movie "Lincoln" was released.  Throwbacks.  Vintage.  Silk top-hats with grosgrain ribbons for everyone.  I learned yesterday listening to a radio interview with Julian Fellows, the creator of "Downton Abbey" that, in the 1950s, they briefly brought back the corseted, crinoline clothes of the 1880s, only to abruptly halt making them, because even rich people in the 1950s didn't have valets or maids to help them button seven thousand buttons the side of a baby's pinkie fingernail.  People have to get dressed themselves now, like big boys and girls.  I put on a pair of spats for a gig last month, and I almost broke my ankle, my wrist, and fell off the bed.  I was just pretending.  When I wear my Brooks Brothers shirts, especially the one with the eyelet collar, I'm just pretending.  I'm a marvelous pretender.

I guess what I really want to say about all of this is I'm very jealous of people who get to shop at Brooks Brothers, you know, regularly.  Like, when I say I'm going to "the store to get some clothes", I'm talking about a thrift store, typically, or Kohls.  I know there are people out there who say they're going "the store to get some clothes" and they're talking about Brooks Brothers, and I hate people who say that.  I hate people who say they loved "The Great Gatsby", because they didn't.  They'll sure like wearing the clothes, though.

I know they will.    

Once Upon a Time

Celebrities are never quite as interesting as their deaths.

When Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers died in an airplane fire in 1983, he was little known outside his native Canso, and perhaps Hailfax, where he gave his last full-scale concert. His brother, Garnet, wrote the song "Night Drive" about Stan's death, and their lives together.

"They lost sight of you,
As your legend's grown,
But this road and I,
We remember."

"They" lose sight of everybody famous, after the flame dies out. Don't they?

Don't we.

It's what we do best-- lionize and memorialize and tributize until we're as blue in the face as the waxen figures whom we celebrate.

Stan continued the seemingly obligatory tradition of musicians dying aboard airplanes. Lots of performers, though, dramatic and depressed and desultory as they sometimes tend to be find their end in lots of jarring ways. Some take their own lives, sometimes fueled by drugs or drink-- sometimes not. Some are violently felled by those who supposedly loved them, like the painfully talented Phil Hartman.

A celebrity died on Friday, but it wasn't in one of those newsworthy, exciting ways. Not only that, his death is certainly being overshadowed by the recent death of another celebrity-- Amy Winehouse-- who perished under traditionally dubious circumstances.

It's hard to imagine that the celebrity's death that I'm referring to, has played out in the penumbra of some markedly-talented, tortured young lady, but it is-- much in the way Farah Fawcett's death paled in comparison to the passing of Michael Jackson.

It's hard to imagine that a profound actor like Tom Aldredge, who commanded leading roles on Broadway's stages for over 40 years, could be upstaged by anyone, but that's our funny little world, in a funny little nutshell.

You might not immediately recognize his name, but, if you've ever been fortunate enough to see the PBS "Great Performances" recording of "Into the Woods," you'd know his face. And his gentle, sturdy, fatherly voice.

He stood tall, in his gray, flannel suit as The Narrator, effortlessly welcoming and alternately toying with the audience as he held our hands, sometimes too tightly, on our journey into the woods. He stood, stooped over and grizzled, with a funny voice, as he struggled to connect with his estranged son, The Baker, offering him only barbs and riddles in Act I, and a sweet, tender, and contrite duet in Act II.

It's a fine, kind performance by a veteran of the stage who seemed to understand that the integrity of the show and the humanity of the role was intended to come before him, that his body and his voice were simply conduits intended to communicate a playwright and lyricist's intention, message, and heart.

In 1997, my high school announced that it was producing "Into the Woods" as its spring show. For years, I had enjoyed and respected Aldredge's performance, and I set my sights on the part of the Narrator and the Mysterious Man. I was only seventeen, but, for three years prior, I had returned to my old middle school to assistant-direct the musicals there and, in so doing, I had served as a mentor to the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. As they grew older and became freshman and sophomores with me, my role as mentor changed to friend, and I was privileged enough to call three of those children my friends.

One of them would be Little Red in this show, one of them would be The Baker, and the third, the only one who is still my friend to this day, was cast in the funniest role of all in that production: my dresser. Responsible for the dozen or so quick changes, getting me out of my Narrator suit and into my Mysterious Man clothes, running outside of the theatre (we didn't have a backstage passageway) in the rain on some nights to do quick changes in mid-run, it was a true adventure.

The director had originally wanted to cast me as The Witch (yes, the Bernadette Peters part) and it wouldn't have been the first time I'd have put on a dress to honor Thespis, (or the last) but he was convinced that The Narrator and the Mysterious Man would be a better fit.

To this day, I can't listen to a recording of the song "No More," that special duet between father and son, without my throat getting thick and tears welling up in my eyes.

"Trouble is, son, the farther you run,
The more you'll feel undefined.
For what you have left undone, and more,
What you've left behind."

Thank you, Tom, for sharing your gift with the world, once upon a time.

Dance With Me

My wife has observed that I have this tendency to utilize the literary device (gestalt? I forget what it’s called) where you start out talking about one thing and then meander off in another direction only to circuitously wend your weary way back to your original idea. It probably won’t surprise you to know that this isn’t intentional, or purposeful, or my intelligently and deftly applying skills honed in any number of creative writing classes and workshops I could have, and should have taken. It’s just the haphazard, comfort-seeking way in which my brain works.

Or, rather, doesn’t.

That said, I will confess I had an idea for what I was going to blog about before I sat down at the computer, but I made the mistake of sitting down at the computer with an ice-cold can of Diet Coke and a bowlful of peanut butter M&Ms and I thought to myself, “Holy shit, if I don’t immediately write on my blog about how fucking fantastic peanut butter M&Ms and chilled Diet Coke are, well, then goddamn me to Hell.” And so, I’ve just got to devote a few lines to my snack, even though it has nothing it all to do with what I wanted to blog about for today, and I doubt very much that I’ll be able to gestalt this shit back around at the end. But who cares?

You can’t find peanut butter M&Ms everywhere, and that’s just as well because, if you could, well, they wouldn’t be as special as they are—would they? When we spot that orange bag, we go for it. Now, our house, being basically an eighty-two-year-old furnace with a quaint hole in the kitchen ceiling, keeps pantry food at a comfortable, slightly-toasted temperature. This propensity is especially preferred when it comes to two bad-for-you snacks:

Cadbury mini-eggs, and, you guessed it, Harvard Gal: peanut butter M&Ms.

Your dubiously-aligned teeth pierce the candy shell and just absolutely sink into the pre-warmed mookie goodness and instantly pleasure splinters go shooting through the windmills of your mind. There is a Hebrew phrase that my father taught me that sums up this sensation perfectly. You are supposed to say it after an especially good, satisfying, heavenly meal, and, in English transliteration it looks something like this: “Chhhat-tsee-tsee-un.”

Translation: Half-a-fuck.

Yes, children, consuming warm, mookitty peanut M&Ms is, for most intents and purposes, equivalent to half-a-fuck.

There’s nothing more I can say, though, about the merits of Diet Coke. In caffeinated or CFDC variety it is, without qualm or question, the perfect libation. Definitely ‘nuff said on that score.

‘Kay? Thanks. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

-------------

So, anyway, on Sunday morning, my wife and I woke up, as we fortunately always seem to do, and she turned to me and asked me if I went to any dances in middle school. I laughed, because that’s a nice thing to do when your wife asks you a question.

“Yes, I went to one, when I was in seventh grade.”

“Did you like it?” she asked me.

Sad to admit it, but I laughed again. When I was done, I replied,

“No.”

As she asked me more similar questions, I realized that I had attended exactly one dance in middle school, one in high school, and one in college. And people say I never give things a fair chance. Fucking people— always talking smack.

I don’t remember much about the middle school dance. Clearly, I didn’t actually dance with anybody. I mean, that’s kind of a given. I do remember that I, along with three other awkward gimps, got in trouble for sitting on a rolled up gym mat. There was no sign on it that said, “NO AWKWARD GIMPS MAY SIT HERE,” at least, not that I recall, but I suppose it was just one of those unwritten, unspoken rules that you and your three other awkward gimp compatriots were just supposed to know. Well, we didn’t, and we got sent to the assistant-principal, Dr. A. Dr. A was a severe--looking, skinny, dour woman whose face was contorted in such a way that it always looked like she had just swallowed a cup of Halite. She walked with a cane and I can recall being very afraid that, if I said the wrong thing in her presence, she would break it against my neck.

I mean, really-- why do they even have dances for middle school students? Is it just for the teachers and the adult chaperones to have something to laugh at so they can feel better about themselves? We're all so fucking terrible looking-- gawky, mawky, mawpish, mopish, and just awful. We barely know the opposing gender exists, so why does this painful ritual exist? Isn't it just an attempt at prematurely sexualizing us? I'm surprised FOX News hasn't jumped on this idea yet.

"JUST LET OUR KIDS BE KIDS!!!!!"

Hahaha. Shut the fuck up, FOX News.

In high school, I was convinced by some friends (yes, I had a few back then) to attend a Halloween dance.

“You’ll get to wear a costume,” one of them said. This was enough to make the sale. I came in an Army officer’s dress uniform that I had picked up for twenty bucks at a thrift shop. The pants were large enough to clothe five of me at the same time, and my mother did a hack-job on the waistband so that they would stay up through the evening’s festivities. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” army policy was just beginning to take hold that year, and I wore a name tag that said, “Hi, My Name Is Ham-Pies” and I spent the evening dancing the tango and other absurd dances with my gay friend, who was wearing a yellow polyester leisure suit. I wonder why I wasn’t asked out by a girl that year.

The college dance I attended, though, was quite special. It was the formal ball hosted by the theatre association. I mean, “formal”? “Ball”? How bad could this be, I reasoned with myself. I was dating a girl at the time who had been begging me to go to the dance, and I was very much against it. But the words “formal” and “ball” kept swirling around in my brain. I had conjured up images of my classmates in enormous hoop-skirts, massive mounds of cleavage pouring out of Victorian-era dresses, hair in ringlets, and the budding men in gleaming black patent leather shoes, white gloves, long coats.

If you’ve ever doubted the brain’s capacity for fantasy, doubt no more.

I ended up renting a tux for an absurd amount of money at “After Six Menswear.” Not only did you have to pay to attend the ball, too, but I plunked down $189 on a hotel room. I can remember, very, very vividly getting dressed in that ridiculous tuxedo in front of the full-length mirror in our hotel room and, as I affixed the bullshit fake bowtie, my girlfriend came up behind me, sat down on the bed and looked at me with a smile, but with her brow furrowed and said,

“You’re going to be so handsome when you can buy clothes that actually fit you.”

She was so sweet—- but not quite as sweet as a peanut butter M&M.

BOO-YA!!!!!!!

Smile

I have fucked up teeth.

My canines are perhaps more befitting their name than most. Actually, they should probably be dubbed "fangnines."

It's very appropriate, I think, that I have such disordered and discombobulated dentition, because, as an ardent Anglophile, my teeth are really the only thing about me that looks remotely English. I know, I know: and a thousand-and-three other stereotypes. So sue me, 'enry, 'iggins.

If I had my pre-teen, tween, and teen years to do over again, there are a few things I would do differently, knowing what I know now about how all that turned out. The biggest thing I would change, besides my name, would be that I would have gotten braces.

Kids are funny little bastards. Some are more delusional than others-- and I was more delusional than most. By the time I turned fourteen or fifteen, I was definitely operating under the misapprehension that, if I got braces, that would somehow be the tipping point (in the bad way) as concerns my personal, aesthetic appearance.

Post Bar Mitzvah, I was forty pounds underweight for my height, with angry, pugnacious acne, frizzy hair, oversized glasses and poor posture-- I was not winning any Campbell's Soup endorsements, let's just put it that way. Maybe I could have scored a March-of-Dimes poster, if my parents had hired me that agent they sometimes talked about back in 1994 when they humored notions that I might turn out to be the star of stage and screen that would save the family from an eternity of middle class doom and less-than-desirable retirement homes.

But, alas and alack-a-day, it was not meant to be.

Whenever my mother or a dental professional would approach me about braces to correct my wayward chompers, I would steadfastly refuse. There was one reason for this: I was awkward enough, and if I was ever going to be the recipient of a handjob performed by someone other than Leftie, I was going to have to at least maintain the status quo, as regrettable as my yearbook pictures evince that it was.

When I turned sixteen, my mother made the mistake of trusting me to drive myself to the dentist for the watershed appointment concerning braces. Out of her eagle-like shadow and presence, I pretended to listen closely as the dentist recited the litany of rational reasons why I should get braces. He handed me the business card of the periodontist who would perform the work and I shook his hand, promising to call that afternoon. As I walked out of the office, I slipped the business card under the windshield wiper of a white Chevrolet Cavalier with a spray-painted front license plate that said, "NIKKI." That was the name of the dental technician from the office.

If I can just maintain, I thought to myself as I got into my car and drove away from that dentist's office, surely the handjobs will follow.

They did not follow. High School was a period of unrelenting romantic failures. Actually, I can't even really honestly call them failures, because, for something to be a failure, it at least has to be attempted. You can't fail at climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro if you are sitting at home in your apartment in Des Moines, drinking Swiss Miss and watching "So You Think You Can Quieff." My high school experience was like a desert, with me occasionally rubbing up against a cactus for comfort.

And I thought it would have been bad if I'd had braces!

Of course, by the time I was handjob material, had I gotten braces when I should have gotten them, the braces would have already been off and my teeth would have been straighter than Bob Dole.

But that's another story.

Today, as a happily married man, I don't so much mind my teeth. At least, not until somebody says something about them. Once, when portraying Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B. in "H.M.S. Pinafore" a nice, elderly lady came up to me afterwards and said,

"Oh, my, you were so funny! Now, tell me-- were those joke teeth?"

A year earlier, a different leathery old crone came up to me after a production of "Patience" and asked if my eyebrows were real. Now that I'm doing "The Sorcerer" I suppose someone will ask me if my head is really a fucking decomposing pumpkin or if my nose is a partially regurgitated apricot.

There's a theory I'm quite fond of about humor, and the theory is that humor, when it's at its most effective, is painful. If that is true, and I believe fondly that it is (haven't you ever experienced acute pancreatic pains during an episode of "Maude"?) then I suppose most of our lives are pretty goddamned funny-- because it's all basically pain, isn't it? A pain in the eyebrows? A pain in the teeth? A pain in the ass. The head. The heart. But we laugh it off as we bite into the core of life, leaving our funny little teethmarks behind.

Noted Author & Recluse

When J. D. Salinger died, I realized that I didn't want to be a famous writer anymore.

When I read the article written about him in the local papers, an unfortunate mirror of other articles written about him in other not-so-local papers, all I could do was shake my head. Even at the headline.

"Salinger: Noted Author & Recluse Dies at 91"

Noted author. And recluse.

Why?

I suppose it isn't enough that he wrote one of the best-selling, most-beloved books of all times-- thumbed through by hundreds of thousands of middle and high schoolers for decades. Because he shunned the spotlight, he had to be "noted author & recluse." Because we didn't see him on "Entertainment Tonight" and on television endorsing Acme Brand Puppy Chow-- because he didn't choose to bust his ass and sell his soul giving corny-ass lectures at universities and book readings in front of the salivating masses across the country, we slap that label right on his dead, wrinkly ass.

"Recluse."

Oh, and then there was the part in the article where is daughter talks about him drinking his own urine. Well, really-- what literary genius isn't a little bit eccentric? I mean, Augusten Burroughs has a dog named "The Cow."

It was a thoroughly disappointing obiturary as obituaries go. It was split into two decidedly unequal parts-- the one about him being a tremendous writer of irrevocable influence on youth and the 20th century, and the one about him shutting himself away from the world in his little hamlet in New Hampshire.

Sipping blithely on his own pee-pee, apparently.

My guess is that, if J. D. Salinger had died thirty or forty years ago, his obituary would have read very differently. The press wasn't as salacious, we the public didn't have such a voracious, insatiable appetite for slander and filth and pornography, literal or figurative. The man would have been lauded as a literary great, a master of the pen, and maybe the sentence, "He was content to live his life apart from everyday society in his small home in New Hampshire."

And that probably would have been that.

I just don't understand what the point is in becoming a great, vaunted genius if, after you die, they're going to make you into some kind of perverted degenerate, as if he ate a constant diet of blue food coloring so he could throw up on himself every morning and shout, "THE FLOOD OF BLUEBERRIES IS UPON US!" into a megaphone to wake up the entire neighborhood. I mean, Jesus-- all the guy wanted was a little privacy from a socially retarded world-- the world that invented "Throw Mama From the Train," college football, "American Idol," the made-for-TV miniseries, sweaters for dogs, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Can you blame the bastard?

If you took some time to think very seriously about the world in which we live and function, trust me, son-- you'd go running for New Hampshire to some basement where you could sit, shivering, with a wool blanket over your head.

Maybe Salinger was trying to escape the ridiculous convention of the media. Well, it was abundantly clear that, after his death, it found him just the same.

They say that denying people something just makes them want whatever it is even more. This is probably true-- take a look at children. Tell them over and over and over that they can't touch the stove and watch how many of them wind up with coil ring-shaped imprints branded to their palms and the words "General Electric" on their faces. Salinger denied the world his presence, and his comments on day to day happenings, something that a megalomaniac like Mark Twain could never have permitted. Even when he was too sick and tired to walk, he summoned newspaper reporters to his bedside so they could record his daily dose of witticism. But Salinger didn't want that. And people sought it out anyway.

People like my high school writing teacher.

I think he was of Polish descent-- his last name was thoroughly unpronouncable, ending in wicz or some combination of those letters-- so we called him "Mr. O." Mr. O was a peculiar fellow, wearing his eyeglasses down on the very tip of his nose, with the lenses tilted down and almost pointed directly at the floor, so that the frames were almost always falling off his face. Somehow they never did, leaving me to suspect that Velcro was somehow involved. Mr. O had legendary pit stains and an bodily odor that bordered on the post-mortem. His hair resembled a graying birds nest, haphazard and sticking up in places and his moustache bore specks of food and tiny shavings of wood, presumably because he enjoyed gnawing on pencils.

I don't remember much of what Mr. O taught us, but I do remember a few anecdotes. He told us that, for one year, he stopped speaking-- to anybody. I remember a fellow classmate of mine asking if it was for any sort of religious reason. Mr. O replied no, that he just wanted to see if he could do it, and that he realized he didn't have very much to say to anybody.

I also distinctly remember him telling us (I don't remember, though, how it came up) of his unquenchable love for popcorn.

"If there was a bag of popcorn sitting right on the edge of a cliff, and my wife was also hanging off the edge of that same cliff," he told us one day, "I'd go for the bag of popcorn."

The only other thing I remember about Mr. O was him telling us about the time that he stalked his favorite writer, J. D. Salinger. Somehow he'd found out Salinger's address (these things were a lot harder to do in the 1970s) and he drove up to the town where Salinger lived. He stocked up on tinned tuna and chicken and other necessities, purchased camouflage facepaint, covered himself in it, and hid in Salinger's bushes.

For a week.

Finally, Mr. O told us, he couldn't take it anymore, and he summoned up the nerve to walk up the path and ring the bell of J. D. Salinger's house.

"I couldn't believe that I was about to meet my hero, J. D. Salinger," Mr. O told us. "I crept up the walk, slowly, slowly, and I stood in front of his door for at least ten minutes. And then, finally, my finger reached shakily for that little circle button on the side of his door and, I don't know how I got the nerve to do it, but I pushed it."

"What happened then?" someone in the back of the room asked. Mr. O looked at the kid as if he'd asked a very stupid question. He gave his answer in a manner that would suggest that we all should have been able to predict the outcome of this tale.

"I ran away."

The Dickhead

So, I was sitting in the waiting room of my allergist's office, and this dickhead looks at me and goes, "I like your mustache, man."

The dickhead had a mop of wild, dark curls and couldn't have been more than a junior in high school.

I stared at him with a look that I hoped would turn him into a pillar of salt, or at least a stick of margarine.

To fill the awkward silence he added, "It's cool."

I continued staring at him until he gave up whatever it was he was trying to accomplish with me and walked to the opposite end of the waiting room and sat down next to some taught woman who, I presume, was his mom. I resumed pretending to watch "Bee Movie" which was playing at impossible decibels on the 40-inch, wall-mounted flat-screen in front of me.

(I still, at 29, go to my pediatric allergist's office, but some of you already know that.)

As "Bee Movie" played, the teen proceeded to make comments about the film in an extremely loud manner, since I was the only other person in the waiting room other than his mom, I can only assume, for my "benefit," usually to the effect of, "WHAT EXACTLY IS THE POINT OF THIS MOVIE?" "YEAH, LIKE WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THAT BEES HAVE THAT KIND OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY?" and "WHY WAS THIS MOVIE MADE?"

While I admired his intellectual curiousity, I was bothered by his running rhetorical commentary. I'm curious, too. I could very well have asked, loudly, "WHY WERE YOU BORN?" (and, since his mummy was there, I might have actually gotten an answer, too) but I didn't. Because I have dignity, restraint, and a modicum of motherfucking class.

This dickhead reminded me of what I was like in high school-- acerbic, brash, accustomed to sharing my point of view with people who most likely didn't give a shit (uh-oh, is that what I'm doing right now?) and I shuddered at the similarities that existed between him and the high school version of me.

The only thing that made high school me different from this dickhead were his boldness in approaching someone in a public place to make a comment about their facial hair and his propensity to speak very loudly in a public place.

I didn't, and don't, speak loudly pretty much anywhere, and I have never and would never approach a random person and make a flip comment to them about any aspect of their appearance for fear that they would produce a Glock and promptly shoot me in the face.

I was, however, in high school, pretty fucking annoying. The adjectives "sarcastic," "disingenuous," "sophomoric," "scatalogical," "apathetic," and "unattractive" could all be easily applied to a photograph of me, circa 1997. I didn't have a lot of pleasant things to say, and I kept most of those myself. A bit of it managed to slip out in my senior year yearbook quote. Quoting comedian George Gobel, I wrote:

"Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes? That's kind of how I feel about high school."

For most of my life up to that point, and unfortunately beyond, I have vacillated about my self-opinion, and my thoughts on the matter have spanned the extremes, ranging from an intense, burning self-loathing to feeling that I was the only person my age with a brain at all-- that I was somehow special, and this quote selection is a good example of both sentiments. A high school student in 1998 knowing who George Gobel was: definitely unique. A high school student in any era feeling out-of-place: definitely not.

As I sat in the doctor's office waiting room, no doubt Swine Flu seeping through my trousers and up my ass, I stared at this curly-haired dickhead and wondered if he knew who George Gobel was, and if he ever felt like he was the ill-matched Florsheims to the universe's immaculate tux. Then I realized that I didn't care.

I wanted to say, "It's for a play" in reference to my mustache after he'd made the comment about it, but I didn't because I realized that he didn't care. I wouldn't have benefited in any way from explaining the facial hair's origins or purpose-- like having a gay mustache is made somehow less gay by the knowledge that it is being grown for a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. I also wanted to say, "Go fuck yourself, you smarmy, smug shitsack," but I don't think his mother or the receptionist would have appreciated such language in front of an animated black and yellow Jerry Seinfeld with wings.

Ironically, I didn't have a negative reaction when my nurse called me in and made a comment about my mustache, nor did I have fleeting, vulgar thoughts when my allergist walked through the door and did a comic double-take upon seeing me. I did tell him it was for a play, and then I tried to sell him tickets. He politely declined.

"My wife, frankly, enjoys the theatre more than I do."

I wanted to tell him that I didn't enjoy "Bee Movie" or the kid in the waiting room either, but that I obediently sat through both, but I didn't. I did perk up when he asked me a funny question while he was examining my ears.

"Do people make comments?" he asked, I guess meaning people other than him.

"Yes," I said, "in fact, some schmuck kid just did in the waiting room."

My Friend the Farmer

Being a blogger, I tend to spend a lot of time talking about myself.

And I guess that's okay, however, sometimes it's nice to spread the wealth around a little bit. With that in mind, I thought I would spend some time today talking about my friend, Sara.

Well, I guess I'll talk a little bit about me, too.

Mrs. Apron and I just got back from a weekend in rural Vermont where we visited Sara in the rustic, half-finished home she is building with her longtime boyfriend. By "half-finished" I mean, "they just put on a bathroom door for us a couple hours prior to our arrival." That arrival was 11:58pm on Friday night, after getting in the car at 5:19pm.

Last year, we spent 5 days at Sara's over Christmas, which none of us celebrate. Sara's boyfriend does, though, and it was fun eating a Christmas goose for the first, and probably the last time ever. This visit was prompted by the fact that Sara was starring in a community theatre production. Though we drove the longest, we were by no means the only nutjobs who schlepped 330 miles to see a play produced in a converted barn. Two of her friends from college came over, the one from upstate drove 2.5 hours and the one from New York drove 5 hours. Sara's parents came up, too, but they don't really count because her mom flew, and because they're her parents.

Sara's being in a play, as you can speculate from the vast distances people covered in order that they might see it, is an event itself. This was her first onstage appearance since 1997. She and I acted in shows together in high school, and we were quite close. Sara, under the moniker of Margaret Hyland in a totally inappropriate play for high schoolers called The Rope Dancers, was, in fact, my first kiss-- and I was hers. She was also my first slap-- I clocked her across the face pretty goddamn hard during that show. This was before we were fully introduced to stage combat.

This, by the way, is what happens when high school students are allowed to direct themselves.

A side-note about The Rope Dancers: I've said that this play was inappropriate for high-schoolers. We, as high-schoolers, didn't know it, though. The play concerned the plight of an Irish Catholic immigrant couple, James & Margaret Hyland, who moved to New York City at the turn-of-the-century. Their daughter, Lizzie, was conceived whilst James was drunk and had already fucked a prostitute earlier that evening, came home (to quote Margaret "still wet with the whore"), and had forced himself on his wife. Lizzie was born with a sixth finger on one of her hands, which Margaret believed was a punishment from God. During the course of the play, Margaret tries to hang herself, James smashes her across the face, Margaret lies down on the floor and spreads her legs, Margaret shoves Lizzie's sixth finger into her own mouth, a Jewish doctor cuts the offending digit off, and Lizzie dies.

Now you know why high schools do Our Town.

I always thought Sara was a shockingly talented actress, and not just for the insane shit she did with/to me in The Rope Dancers. Her talent was a ferocious kind, it was passionate and intense, never waning or compromising. But Sara had other interests. Primarily: shit and the animals who made it.

Back in high school, Sara always smelled like shit. Her car smelled like shit. So did her hair and her clothes and her aura. When she wasn't at home or on stage, she was shoveling copious amounts of horse shit at the farm where she rode, volunteered and later worked. She went to Cornell and became an Ag major, which is a polite name for people who enjoy shoveling and smelling like shit. She voiced her unremitting desire to, upon graduation, become a farmer-- much to the chagrin of her affluent and highly conservative Jewish parents.

They didn't take it well.

In spite of their objections, that's exactly what she did. Today, this Jewish girl from suburban Philadelphia sells fresh eggs, yogurt, yogurt cheese, raw milk, and grass-fed beef to drive-by customers. Sometimes, she even sells pork. And, yes, she still gets to shovel shit-- thanks to her twenty-odd cows.

A small, white painted sign that's as unassuming as she is reading, "Fresh Eggs and Milk for Sale" is just about the only advertising she can bring herself to do. Not much of a businesswoman, we witnessed her tell prospective customers that they could "get raw milk closer to where you live from another vendor." And so falls another stereotype about Jews.

As I stood next to Sara's father, watching her drive a tractor that was stabbing a load of hay with an enormous spear, I watched him smile, and it made me smile, too. I think he's still probably more or less a little shell-shocked at what has happened to his daughter, but this is a natural thing-- a thing that was bound to happen. Her on a tractor driving through a field of mud and shit is certainly no less natural than her pretending to be an Irish Catholic woman with a disordered brain. The Sara on the tractor isn't pretending, not for you, or me, or anybody. And I think her father is finally coming around to the idea that this is not a phase or an act. This is his daughter, who always, and who will always smell like shit. And like it.

By the way, the play we drove all that way to see was wonderful-- and she was heads above her castmates. Even though she probably should be a little rusty.