Giving Thanks for Blood Banks and Balloon Malfunctions

I went on a little Twitter rant Thursday morning. It was a positive rant, which is unusual because rants are not usually positive - nor are tweets. It felt weird seeing my string of gratitude filter between people griping or giving half-hearted thanks for tiny things in their lives. Often I'm like that, because you get caught up in your own norms and anxieties. 

But if you have the privilege of internet access, something that would have passed for magic in any time before that of our grandparents, you can be thankful for more than toast. Sometimes it's useful to remember that. So here comes an obnoxious barrage of things I'm glad are real.

For instance, I'm thankful for the crossovers cosplay affords.

Five Phases of Tragedy - #fridayflash

Phase 1

Helen finally tries out for the school play. Danny and Asia hate theatre, but go to her audition anyway, and cheer like it's a conference football game when she's cast as ___. ___ is the role that shall never be spoke of again starting Friday. No one else wants to play ___ because of the costume, with the straps that nobody can figure out are supposed to stay up.

Phase 2

Helen is electric as ___ for two minutes and ten seconds, before the straps come apart like overcooked pasta. Hundreds of people, including, Helen's mother, her brother and the Honors Bio teacher she has a crush on, see her topless. Her life is over.

Asia has an idea to resurrect her. She's watching with Danny on the catwalk.

Phase 3

Running through the hallway, Helen sees a cell phone streaming video of her impromptu topless scene. Her shame is already a Vine.

Danny snags Helen's elbow, hauls her into the empty English classroom, and gives her his jacket. Helen sobs and begs Danny and Asia to never speak of the stupid role again. Danny promises to, and is halfway through promising to replace the name with a blank line if he ever sees it again, when Asia strips off her jeans, and then down to a neon orange bra and thong that her friends never expected she was capable of wearing. With equal fervor, she begs Helen to go streaking with her.

"We have to own this before it owns you," she explains, casing the hallway for adults who might impede seizing the day.

Phase 4

Helen is mocked ceaselessly, on Facebook, the street, and in every glance she gets in school. Asia's plan failed and now the two of them are a school meme - Thesbians.

She keeps taking bathroom breaks from class to cry, and Danny refuses to let her go alone, and so is eventually sent to Detention for going into the Girls' bathroom. He becomes part of the meme before his sentence is served, and Asia and Helen wait up for him afterward to break the news. Asia mocks him for being the biggest Thesbian of all until Helen smiles and agrees to pizza.

Phase 5

Asia is asleep, half on top of the pizza boxes and half beneath the futon, even though she's the one who asked to watch Pacific Rim for a second time in one night. Helen is on her way to sleep, dozing off against Danny's bony right arm as giant robots defend the world. She means to ask what he thought of Asia's dumb streaking plan, and then sees down the back of his khakis and realizes he isn't wearing underwear.

Drowsy, she makes a joke about it.

Then it's part of them.

Waiting for Godot Review

I had the great pleasure of attending my first Broadway play last week. It was Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot, which commanded the sort of cast I’m told you don’t usually get even in New York City. Thanks so much to Ross Dillon and Max Cantor for having me along with them, I, some Philistine who wasn’t sure Broadway was even a real place. It turns out is a place, like a lot of New York City, that exchanged the sky for glowing billboards, making it a fine place to watch two great actors ask each other if life is really happening.

Vladimir and Estragon.

It was a wonderful production. Shuler Hensley played Pozzo as a hooting Texan, which I’d never imagined and immediately adored. Billy Crudup rounded out the cast and completely nailed the role of Lucky, from his weary swaying to that impossible monologue on everything and nothing. There came a point when, as an exhausted Pozzo prepares to leave, Lucky took on a knowing expression and caressed his chin in a way I can scarcely believe they got to work on stage, with Crudup blocking so much of our view and facing away, and yet sharing his expression with a crowd behind him. That’s the level of craft the foursome brought to the play.

Shame on me for my highlight coming out of the non-superstars, but McKellen and Stewart were as sterling as you’d expect. McKellen is the more versatile performer, and here played Estragon with so many senile and demented notes, all with the weight of immense age, that reminded me keenly of my grandfather’s final years. Even gestural suggestions of senility were perfect for Waiting for Godot, and particularly for Estragon, who has to forget so much of what’s allegedly happened in front of us. It detracts from my reading of the play as raw nonsense, deliberately eschewing its own continuity to make points about post-modernism, and yet it fits to humanize the material. I love when good actors read material differently than I do. Art isn’t worth it if we all agree. Then it becomes Heinz ketchup.

Also, I love Heinz ketchup.

Vladimir and Estragon.

McKellen got me thinking about other interpretations of the work, and inspired a vision that can never be: Waiting for Adventure Time. The cartoon is often absurd, but that’s a credential for this kind of mash-up, and is so often about exactly the kind of baffling logic that, here, Vladimir is infuriated with for not working. On the subway ride out, I pitched it to Ross and Max, with Finn as Vladimir and Jake as Estragon, and likely animated by the same crew. They won’t even have to switch backgrounds. Any number of Adventure Time voice actors would fit Pozzo, while if we’re going to get anyone to do Lucky’s monologue, it’s got to be Lady Rainicorn running it in Korean.

The play has that elemental nonsense about it, that honestly does remind me of Adventure Time. Adventure Time follows a contrived internal logic, something unreasonable and that children don’t know isn’t acceptable yet. Waiting for Godot is about a grown man’s inability to deal with that lack illogic. An easy highlight of the show was arguing with my friends over its potential meanings as we were stuck in the stairwell trying to exit the theatre.

Vladimir and Estragon.

And no comparison I make can render me guilty. No, sir and madame, every inane thing I think about Waiting for Godot was made to lofty after the lights in the theatre came up and a woman sitting two rows behind us asked, “Why were they waiting for him?”

That’s another highlight right there. You can get angry, or despair, or relish in gifts like those.

Bathroom Monologue: Revenge

Step 1: make two small cups of tea since your OCD friend stole your big mug.

Step 2: sip randomly from both cups.

Step 3: watch your OCD friend pay.

Very Superstitious

I’m the first to say he’s not boyfriend material. He came on too strong, and then he backed off too fast. Plus, all these hurricanes he’s causing suggests if it does work you guys will need a lot of couples therapy.

But Helen, you don't friend-zone a weather god.

The highway’s flooded, and it’s snowing inside our apartment. The McDonald's where you two had your ironic non-date? I don’t want to know what happened in the ball pit. I just want it to stop being struck by lightning.

Look, remember the time Mark grabbed my ass at the office New Years party? He'd been hitting on me all night even though I straight-up told him I'm straight, and come midnight he's giving me a rectal exam? Remember how I reacted?

Yeah. I decked him.

But if he threw hurricanes along with his temper tantrums, baby we'd have moved to Virginia and be raising a little family of Pomeranians right now. Because you don't screw with that. At least not until our lease is up and we can get out of here.

Look. Your mom's a Reformed Episcopalian, right? Well this god is a fixer-upper too. And this is all still his fault, but just for right now, and this is the only time I’m ever going to say it… lead Thor on.

Unless you’ve got somebody else we could stick him with.

Bathroom Monologue: How Jay Processes Grief

Spend one minute on the phone with her widower, learning the news and asking the questions everyone does, in Jay's case, because he thinks that's what you're supposed to do.

Spend twelve minutes on the phone with her widower, the widower trying to console Jay when all the widower wants is to hang up and grieve with his family. Jay will spend eleven of these minutes feeling worse about being consoled by the widower than about the death, which doesn't seem real, and socially stumbling and failing to let the widower go do what he obviously wants to.

Spend thirty-two minutes staring at the clouds through his window, drapes halfway pulled. They are snagged in a way he's never understood.

Spend two minutes fixing the cord on the drapes.

Spend all night watching clips of her favorite shows on Youtube, and searching for related things, and forgetting her entirely and laugh at Youtube videos until his alarm clock goes off and he realizes he forgot to go to bed and he remembers why.

Spend eight minutes in the shower wondering if rain on your face could ever really be mistaken for tears.

Spend three minutes toweling off and wondering if he's ever cried in his adult life, and if it's bad that he's not crying.

Spend lunch break spreading the news around the office and finding all the social crannies are already filled with the grief-news. Pause awkwardly whenever someone seems shaken up by her death; despite desiring to share the news, he is utterly unprepared to talk to someone affected by it.

Spend two hours of work time wondering why.

Go to the wake.

Go to the funeral.

Go to the after-work drinks thing on Friday that is not about her death but is absolutely and totally about her death.

Get drunk enough to spend thirteen minutes in a red-faced argument over what her religion was. Get thrown out. Relentlessly kick a dumpster for no good reason.

Spend drive home thinking she'd be on his side for that argument and they're all full of shit and never liked her as much as he did and remember some more Youtube videos to hunt down.

Spend fifty-two years occasionally remembering her because of a funny video, or when bumper repair is mentioned, or whenever someone actually looks happy in a Christmas sweater, sometimes eliciting a pang, sometimes a tranquil smile, and very occasionally eliciting the feeling that "over it" and "not over it" are nonsense terms.

Go senile. Forget her.

Bathroom Monologue: Playing Pool

"I have a headache. Go without me."

"No, come down to the pool with us. Francis invented a new game. It's amazing."

"I don't know. What game?"

"We take ten Nerf balls. They're foam and full of air, so they float. And you make a triangle out of them, floating in the middle of the pool."

"Ugh, and Francis gets drunk and jumps on them?"

"No, it's way more measured. Everyone takes turns aiming the pool skimmer and knocking an eleventh ball at the triangle of ten. They scatter and bob all over the pool, usually towards the filters."

"So, it's like billiards? I like billiards."

"Exactly like billiards. You get a point for every time one goes into the filter. It's really fun to see if you can aim with the way the water sloshes around. Kind of zen. I bet you'd be good at it."

"I might try it. What's it called?"

"Oh, Pool Ball."

"Get away from me."

Bathroom Monologue: Eulogical

Ali was a great man, and everyone here will miss him. He was one of my closest friends. I met him in college, where he was screaming at the Dean of Studies. I was waiting next in line, to get her to sign something. I think he was fighting either about Affirmative Action or letting the Kung Fu Movie Club back into the campus theatre. As soon as Ali stormed out, I ran in and got her to sign the form, and then hustled after him. I bought him dinner at the crappy campus café, just to talk to him and learn how you could have balls of that size. By the end of our nachos, he was screaming at the bar tender for his taste in music. It’s not a big surprise that a heart attack killed him.

So next week, I imagine, Ali will cure heart attacks. It will likely be the first medical innovation based on offensive medicine. Attacking hearts, probably. That’ll be why no one thought of it before.

By the end of the year, he’ll have used his fame to found the world’s largest television network devoted to martial arts movies. It will spur a renaissance in the genre, and he will probably star in one where he fights social injustice with compassion and Capoeira.

Having both won the Nobel Prize for curing heart attacks and won the hearts of the world with his digitally enhanced fists, Ali will ride superstardom to political office. There, he will do what he told us all he’d do for the last twenty years: get those Washington assholes to listen to reason. I’ve had hundreds of political discussions with Ali and I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but I know that as soon as he gets into a room with those Senators that he hated, he will fix the entire system overnight.

His newfound axis of social policy will change the world we live in. He will revitalize our space program. He will, I think, make both Israel and Iran extremely unhappy, and pride himself on it. Surely in Year One of Ali’s reign, he will force Axl Rose to stop ruining Guns ‘N Roses. Given how many impossible problems Ali believed could be solved by people ceasing to be stupid, I imagine he’ll have fixed the world before the midterm elections. We’ll all be so grateful that he’s still with us.

That’s what I’m going to imagine Ali’s future is like tonight. I invite you to join me in a well-earned delusion for a dear friend. It’s not fair that he’s gone, and I think the least we can do is lie about what could have been for a while. Let Ali have his way tonight.