Out Of Commission, folks. Wedding-style. Family comes in today and chaos shall officially ensue. Sweater story will have to wait.
I will talk to you next week. I'll miss you...
♥,
Folks. This is wicked cool. I can't get enough of it.
It's fun to see when the name "Adolf" dropped out of vogue, or how many babies were named after popular presidents during election years.
It works for movie stars and pop-stars, too... look at when "River" and "Whitney" and "Angelina" shot up.
Not too many ethnic names, though... one wonders which version of America they are tapping...
Pink sweater story to come... I will try to post it Sunday night...
And you know what else I'm gonna post too, I've decided? Since I don't have the headspace to generate new material for a while? MY PRE-TEEN ATTEMPT AT WRITING SOFT-CORE PORN.
Okay, it wasn't really porn. The dirty parts have a tepid Judy Blume kind of quality. I was still pretty scared of sex when I wrote it, so the juicy bits have no juice. But I'll post it in sections, as like a serial story, just to keep all y'all on da Callahol. I literally haven't read it in twenty years. My best (and only) friend at the time DG and I decided we would write competing stories. I don't remember how hers turned out.
A note about DG, since she is featured heavily in the Pink Sweater story... we were inseparable since the second grade. We were the friends that everyone else in the school called LEZZIES. We were on every committee together, did all the school plays together, did photo shoots of ourselves dressed as Madonna. We bawled and held hands for hours on the steps of her house the day she went off to college, two days before I did.
Our parents hated each other, which made it difficult to hang out... we were both very obediant children and hated to upset them. My parents were heavy smokers and had three dogs that crapped everywhere, so our house stank like the bathroom of a dive bar in Red Hook. Also my mother used scented laundry detergent. When DG went home from an afternoon of scurrying at my place, her mother would have to detoxify her before she entered their home. Her mother was allergic to everything, chemicals and perfumes and food. She fed her children sprouts and rice cakes and egg sandwiches. You can imagine how well that went over at lunch time.
So, DG was the skinny weird girl with the too-long hair and the perpetually runny nose, who ate bizarre food and wore clothes her mother sewed for her. I, on the other hand, was the hyperactive loud ugly girl who scared people with her excess energy and tried WAAAY too hard to fit in, always to no avail. When everyone was wearing Reebok hightops, I bought a pair of Zips and was mercilessly torn apart for it. I made varsity cheerleading my freshman year, only to sit by myself at the front of the bus to away-games while the other girls partied in the back with the team. My home life often included long senseless evenings involving too much gin or Canadian Club (though it was never me drinking), and as a result I would come to school with my eyes red and puffy from crying all night. The kids pretty much stayed away from me.
So DG and I were supreme misfits, which worked out great for us. Also, we were in all the smart classes together... another uncool strike against us, another reason we were kin.
I have many stories from my childhood which include DG, but they are bittersweet these days because I think we are no longer friends. I had a pretty snobby period when I got out of grad school, and she was busy cultivating a life not far from where we grew up which I could not relate to at the time. I've since gotten over that and have tried to connect with her. Our last series of email exchanges involved me asking her if she wanted to come to the Florida wedding or the Brooklyn wedding, and her replying "Sorry so busy... good luck with everything!!" So I suppose that's that.
Anyway.. it's all a preface for THE PINK SWEATER STORY. I hope it's as good as I'm making it sound. It's been met with gasps before... we shall see.
Depressing and gag-worthy post about the hazzards of spec-writing in Hollywood.
Reminds me of the two years I spent biking around LA showing up to meetings with Fox and Warner Bros and HBO and etc. laminated in sweat and thinking it didn't matter what I did as long as my work was strong... *sigh*
So remember when I said this blog was a year-long experiment and would self-destruct on September 13?
Well, that was today. And nothing happened. So I suppose it's ON.
However... it's considerably LESS on, due to things like teaching college and practicing my band and getting hitched and starving myself and working part-time and doing freelance design and trying to have a normal social life (notice I didn't say "writing"). So forgive the less frequent posts recently. It's going to be a rough fall.
But I'll be in a bunch of cities in the coming months, teaching and doing shows, including Rochester and Frisco and Louisville and others I've previously mentioned... so if you happen to see me in your town standing on a street corner mumbling and drooling, please be so kind as to direct me to the nearest chain restaurant and buy me a fizzy drink. That usually helps.
In the meantime... go visit Mike!!!
And come see my BAND!!!
And hey look... I'M A DESKTOP!!! (Not my own, in case you're wondering.)
And OH... as a nod to the fabulous yarn that la Ketch is spinning, I plan to post a tale about a devious and despicable thing I did in my Junior year of high school... one that, when disclosed to a friend years later, was met with this: "Wow. I would THINK about doing something like that to someone, but I'd never DO it. That's... well... I don't know how to feel about it."
To come... The Tale of The Pink Sweater.
Wanna herald the onset of cooler weather with a near-fatal dose of Ass-Kicky Theatre?
Then check out Prelude 2005 in NYC! I'll be there with some excerpts of my play DEAD CITY, and the entire event should be seriously great. There is a gaggle of SICK artists involved. You can go here for an official schedule of events.
AND. "Sagapo," my NEW BAND, will be performing at the closing party! Along with Frances and The Dresden Dolls. The band's temporary website is www.sagapo-theband.com, but I'll probably change it because Soph hates it.
And afterwards, all you Callaholics can hop a cheap-ass Jet Blue flight to Long Beach in three weeks to check out my Los Angeles shows... CRAWL, FADE TO WHITE at the Theatre of Note, and CRUMBLE (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) at Moving Arts.
STILL not enough? Well there's always Seattle!!
Get it while you can, because afterwards I plan to sink into a deep depression, during which I shall flush my cellphone down the toilet and cancel my Roadrunner DSL and retreat into my closet and eat only pistachio nuts and my own feces.
:)
(Here's a quicklink of all three shows...)
Jet Blue gives me VH-1 fever. FIVE HOURS OF STRAIGHT WATCHING. Alternating between VH-1 for reality trash and VH-1 Classic for the videos of my youth. WHAT, I ask you, is more delightful than watching Bonnie Tyler in all her hairspray glory come tearing out of a burning building in a praire dress and drop to her knees, ripping up clumps of dead grass because she can't find a man? Or Pete Burns from Dead or Alive in a kimono dancing in front of reams of blowing polyester strips WEARING AN EYEPATCH HE DOESN'T NEED!!! He invented the Japanese Fabric Pirate before our very eyes! And Motley Crue, proving that boys with peacock hair and blue eyeliner can still bring home strippers.
Incidentally, I blame all my twisted body-image issues on the Girls Girls Girls video... imagine being thirteen and having serious aspirations of someday rubbing myself on a pole for a hair-band at the Dollhouse in Ft. Lauderdale. I actually practiced crawling on my carpet toward my mirror wearing my mother's lipstick, with my cotton Hanes pulled up the crack of my ass.
Though this behavior may have its roots elsewhere... For most of my youth my Dad had a subscription to Playboy, which he bought "for the articles" (he actually said that). In an effort to avoid feeling guilty about it, he would leave the magazine lying out and explain that it was perfectly natural to admire the female form. I used to study that thing like the Torah. Of particular interest to me was the sex advice column... I knew how to deliver a compelling blowjob before I'd ever even SEEN a penis. And the centerfolds were also an object of obsession for me... I would dream at night of round breasts and little pert nipples and trimmed pubic hair and cartoons having orgasms in hot tubs. I assumed women who did not grow up to have 38-24-36 curves were just not trying hard enough. I told my dad I was going to be in Playboy someday, and he bragged to his pals about this.
However, as all inappropriate youthful fixations must come to an end, so did mine. My father stopped subscribing to Playboy when my little brother was caught selling old issues to the neighborhood boys for candy money. (Though he saved the centerfolds for himself.)
Okay, I lied. I am still very much obsessed.
Off topic: I'm supposed to be writing a short play for an Ibsen festival at this theatre in Norway. It's on the theme of freedom. I'm writing about freedom from fear, freedom from hardship, freedom from sitting on a fucking roof watching your neighbors float by while the military helicopters are all off in Iraq.
Also off-topic: My two shows are going great. I have courageous actors and brilliant directors and imaginative designers. Not one goddamn thing to complain about. I can't wait to see them.
I'm still in LA but I missed you and so late tonight/early tomorrow here I am.
FYI. Some guy you don't know. I talked about him tonight, said these words: "I dated that guy." Met with stunned silences. He's not famous, but he's enigmatic and lovely, and I dated him and I dated him and I dated him. In another life. He was lovely. I dated him and the dating is significant suddenly, when it wasn't before. And it has strange meaning.
I like that.
But how does it relate to American cities under water, you ask? Not at all. Don't drop the potato.
August has devestatingly bad breath.
