I took a long break for the summer as you will notice from the previous post which includes the words “Father’s Day” in the title. It was important as I was getting a little nuts and I am married. The freedom to spiral into whatever hole strikes your fancy is severely impaired by saying the “I do’s,” mainly, because the primary responsibility of any spouse is to ensure their partner that they have not made a life long mistake that will haunt them on their deathbed as the ever slowing ping of the heart monitor reminds them that they wasted their life on an idiot. So, with that, you learn to take little breaks and stay at an acceptable level of sanity. Honestly, my wife will put up with a shit ton of crazy, so if I took a break you know that I was getting pretty close to a feel good movie staring Michael Keaton and Cristopher Lloyd, which is the worst kind of crazy to go because no one ever sees it.
But, equilibrium has been achieved, or patched like a leaky brake fluid valve, and I am back in the saddle with a run of shows.
First of all, I, along with Cyndi and Jeff and D. Billy from the And I Am Not Lying crowd will be doing a new live show at the brilliant Union Hall. Here’s the poster with the info.
Then, I will be hosting The Moth. TWICE. The first will be at The Bitter End on 8/29 – the theme is drive – and the next will be at Southpaw on 9/5 – the theme is Chutzpah.
Also in September, we will be restarting the Standard Issues Podcast, so look forward to that. And speaking of podcasts, on August 31st I will be heading into the Sirius Satellite Radio studios to record some material for the Stripped Stories podcast. I have no idea what their release schedule is like, but if you subscribe now you don’t have to worry about it.
Next, on the seventh I will be joining the most recent MothSLAM winner and fellow BTK Band Member, Rory Scholl, at his new show, The Sammich Show, 9/7 at Green Fig Cafe at 462 36th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Peter Aguero will also be there.
Then rejoin the three of us with the rest of the BTK crew on Monday the 12th for our monthly show at Under Saint Mark’s Theater.
Ok, I am going to stop there for now. But, just so you know. I am planning something big that I will be announcing soon. So take off your pants and get comfortable. And come see these shows. Not mutually exclusive activities.
That was my general feeling upon seeing Kindergarten for the first time. I was standing in the doorway of the containment area – classroom, whatever –and taking in the scene. The dingy white tile, all the primary colored plastic, furniture all my size, everything at my height. A room full of children playing with what appeared to be free toys. All under the watchful gaze of posters showing cartoon characters and playful kittens. I liked kittens and toys and I loved cartoons. That was exactly why the whole thing had the smell of a set-up.
The Kindergarten classroom was the first time I had been in a place custom designed for children and it seemed like a put-on. What was the purpose of all of this? What was I not seeing here? No one goes this much out of their way to accommodate you, unless they have something to hide. Someone wanted me to sit in a tiny chair, a tiny bright red chair at a tiny yellow table – they knew how irresistible I found a basic color scheme. Seriously, that shit’s like coke for a five year old. At that age you’ll cash all your checks for a little play time with anything in fire engine red. Then if I was getting the gist of this, they wanted me to feel entirely comfortable playing with a toy truck that wasn’t mine. Clearly someone had pegged me for an easy mark.
I hadn’t done the pre-school thing. This was the mid seventies in The Ozarks and, while I know that this is going to give many mothers reading this today an anxiety attack, Pre School wasn’t really the thing back then. It was there, but it wasn’t seen as the first mandatory step in the tightrope walk of getting little Finn and Madison to realize their full potential and get into the right college. As a consequence, my first five years had been spent in adult environments. My Mom had spent much of that five years as a single parent surrounded by the kind of redneck relations you don’t leave children with. So, I basically rode around on her hip like a vestigial twin.
And I thought things had gone well. I mean, sure, I wasn’t exactly the most independent social companion. Hanging out with me involved a lot of picking me up, carrying me, and it goes without saying that everything was on you. And if I got a little hungry or sleepy, I could be a bear. I will admit all that freely. But, well, lets be frank, I was more or less a trophy child. Which is to say. I was beautiful. Like really beautiful.
I was aware of this because people kept saying it to my mother. We would be out in public somewhere, a doctor’s office or the DMV, and another adult would strike up a conversation with my Mom. They thought I wasn’t paying attention. I would draw a lot, and generally speaking, I really didn’t care much what went on around me while I was drawing. My art was very important to me at the time and I was working on a whole outside the lines technique which I was certain would set the art world on its ear. But I would always tune in when they started talking about me.
I knew enough to let them fawn, but never to engage. You gotta keep the fans wanting more. In the meantime, they could talk to my representative. Or Mom, as some people thought of her. “Look at those blue eyes,” they would say, “And those long eyelashes! You just have the prettiest little girl.”
My mother kept my blond hair very long at that age and little boys with long hair was still a new thing in small town Missouri in the seventies. As a consequence, many of these folks thought I was a girl. In later years, when I tell people that it was often commented what a pretty girl I was, they will get a little wide in the eye and almost immediately want to know if that traumatized me or gave me some kind of complex. My response to that has always been that they are getting hung up on the “girl” part, where as the important word in the sentence is “pretty.”
And I was gorgeous.
But, suddenly, she seemed to be making a concerted effort to get rid of me. And not in the way where I was being handed off to a wealthier family that could afford to give me more of the finer things in life. That would have made sense. No, this was a prefab box done up in institutional colors. It was just a beige, military green, scar tissue pink rectangle that had been divided into even sections. Was I being warehoused? I mean, I thought things had been going so well. I definitely pulled my weight in this relationship. Sure, all the money was out of her pocket, but every third conversation she had was about her stunning child. I was opening doors for that woman. Now the plan seemed to be to shove me into a child sized rat maze and keep me running in mindless circles until it was time to do whatever you do with really pretty children who have outlived their usefulness. Where does paste come from?
Maybe I should eat some to try and figure that out.
When we had left the house that morning, and, if I were being fair, in the days leading up to that morning, there had been some discussion about this so called “School.” This “Kindergarten.” I had said “Kinder Garden?” Sounded like some kind of hippy be-in crap if you asked me, some kind of child labor dream catcher sweatshop. No, I was corrected, “kindergarten, it’s a German word.” That was worse. My only experience with the Germans up to that point was the Brother’s Grimm and I am here to tell you, those two needed to have a long talk with a trained professional. They clearly had issues with women. And children. And knights, frogs, little people, the elderly, and alternative religions. Yes, we should hand me over to the Germans. Issue the uniforms and start up the bonfires, no sleep till Nuremberg.
Then I had been informed that this was an effort to teach me things. I apparently, needed to “learn.” This was another shock, as I had also thought this had been going fine. I was all over the “sound it out” technique. In fact, my mother herself had assured me that my use of the method was, her own words, “very good” and that I was “so smart.” So I’m a genius – a very pretty genius – who has clearly mastered the more complex aspects of this whole reading and writing thing everyone seems so concerned about – I’m not sure what the problem is. What is this so called “school” supposed to do that I can’t on my own? I was certain that, with a little more time, I could work the sounding out of things into a fairly solid theory of everything. I mean, at the rate I was going, I’d be retired on my accomplishments and awards long before my teenage years. This “kindergarten” was just going to slow me down. I should be back home, working in the ways that had already proved so fruitful: lying on my belly with my picture books spread out in front of me while cartoons played. I needed to get back to my lab.
And now that we were at “School” I really wasn’t seeing it.
The place was full of other people my size. Children, I supposed. And to be honest, not a whole lot of learning seemed to be going on. From what I could tell, most of these people were broken. If they weren’t actively trying to steal things from one another – and, again, what won’t you do once you have that bright color monkey on your back – then they were hysterically weeping in public. Ok, there were a few who were coloring quietly, head down, minding their own business. They seemed fine. But others were just staring while snot ran down their face. These were the ones I found it hardest to look at. You had to wonder how long those poor bastards had been there. Did somebody come around with a tray full of paper cups at some point or were they just slipping the drugs into the apple juice? Jesus, get me a big Indian and a sink and I will be on my way, thank you very much.
I turned to express my reservations to my Mother. Clearly, when we had discussed this before, I really didn’t know what we were talking about. But now that I had seen the situation first hand, now that we both had, surely it was time to reevaluate this plan. I decided to cut right to the chase. I clung to my Mother’s leg and said, “No! No! No!”
The woman laughed at me. Honestly, she in no way took my concerns seriously. There are key moments in every person’s life when they find out who they can trust.
I was pried loose and handed off to “Mrs. McGowan.” Being an adult, she was tall. She was also long and thin, with golden brown hair flowing down over her graceful shoulders towards her high placed breasts. As I stared up at her from about the middle of her well formed, one might say dancer-esque, thigh, and watched her regard my Mother with an easy, glowing smile, I had to wonder how stupid these people thought I was. “Mrs McGowan,” I suppose I was expected to believe that was a real name. She said to my Mom, again with the laughing, “He’ll be fine.”
I’m standing right here!
Just as I was trying to come to terms with the mountain of betrayal that had suddenly rained down onto my life, I saw a girl across the room suddenly drop a puzzle maze, spin on her heals with a wild look in her eyes, let out a guttural howling sound and sprint towards another child who was attempting to eat a plastic snake. The werewolf was no more than three steps into her planned assault on the snake eater when she tripped over her own feet and landed face down in a pile of blocks. She was so much in the grips of her inexplicable rage attack that she didn’t even have enough front brain activity to put out her hands and brace her fall. It was just a headlong dive into a drift of unforgiving wooden corners. She rolled over, sat up and burst into tears. The snake eater, who had been entirely unaware that he was about to be murdered, snapped around to see his would be assailant wailing and then immediately exploded into tearful screams, himself.
I wanted to cry also. Who were these psychopaths? Why would I be left in this viper pit of the unstable and brain damaged? This was some sort of dystopian mad house right out of the good old days of leaches and scrambling people’s frontal cortex with knitting needles. This has got to be a mistake.
I turned back to my Mother, hoping against hope that she had seen what a bad idea this was, but… She was already gone.
I was taken and put at a table with a fellow inmate we will heretofore refer to as The Booger Eater, for reasons that I feel are obvious. While the Booger Eater seemed rather single minded in his focus, I figured the best I could do now was gather as much information as possible. I asked his name, but all I got was a display of his dexterity and his commitment to recycling. Obviously, he was a dead end.
It’s Father’s Day. It is a weird holiday for me. The essay below will illuminate the reasons why and, hopefully, be entertaining at the same time.
The centerpiece of my hometown is the town square, which is actually a circle. In the center of the circle is a two-story brick building with a bell tower stretching out of the peaked roof. This is the courthouse. On one side of the walkway leading up to the courthouse entrance is one of those black moveable type boards behind a pane of glass. This informs you that you are in Fredericktown, that so and so is the mayor, some other so and so is the sheriff, and yet a third so and so is the presiding judge. Any critical assessment as to the three so and so’s level of competence is left off the board to make room for public announcements, by which I mean when the carnival will be arriving in town. Which is the same date every year.
On the other side of the walkway is a community bulletin board on which the only important information is that “Lori is a slut” which the town has known since 1987 thanks to whoever wrote it on the board in very permanent Magic Marker.
Behind the bulletin board, just out from the corner of the building, set in front of a backdrop of sumac trees and red cedars, is the statue of my father. Nine feet tall and cast in bronze, Billy Joe Lawrence stands looking straight down Main Street from straight down the sites of a long barreled revolver. He is wearing a cowboy hat, pushed back to reveal a mischievous grin and gleefully squinting eyes. The hand not holding the gun is clutching a beer bottle. My father is portrayed wearing a V-neck T-shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, one of which is resting on a crate labeled TNT. At his side, frozen in a never ending howl of excitement, is a blue tick hound.
The Groundskeeper at the courthouse went to school with my father and he keeps the statue absolutely spotless with special attention paid to the placard set in the granite base. The placard reads: “Billy Joe Lawrence, the Greatest Good Ol’ Boy This Town Has Ever Known. Who tragically passed before his son could ever know how amazing he was. No urinating.”
Every year, in the spring, a virgin goat is ritually sacrificed.
I am totally pulling your leg. There is, of course, no statue and no placard. However, Lori is a slut.
What is true is that my father, Billy Joe Lawrence, not William Joseph – the birth certificate said Billy Joe, died when I was three months old. A long haul trucker, he went out for a run east one early morning and halfway across the state of Illinois hit a guardrail doing seventy-five miles an hour. The eighteen-wheeler flipped completely over and my father was killed instantly. The highway patrol’s official theory was that a car swerved into my father’s lane and he had attempted to dodge the oncoming vehicle. If so, the person who caused the crash hadn’t stuck around. My grandfather on my Mother’s side always put forth the theory that Billy Joe had been trying to “ride the rail,” which is when you try to take a vehicle up on half its wheels using the guard rail as a launch. He would say this with a little half smile of admiration at the thought that his son-in-law could be a man of such daring as to attempt this in a tractor trailer. My grandfather also liked to say that he liked Billy Joe more than his own sons. While his sons were standing there.
Three years after my father dies, my Mom will marry my Step-Father.
And the Addams Family and the Clampetts will finally be united in a sort of Brady Bunch, as broadcast straight from the icy vortex of Chthullu.
It came up recently. Someone asked me if I believe in God or an afterlife. People often ask you this if they find out you came from a heavily religious background. They are basically testing for any residual crazy that may have been left behind after your days as a child faith healer in Alabama. They arch an eyebrow, wondering if there is a hidden stash of snakes and bibles under your bed. You know the only acceptable answer for the person asking is that you stand proud and tall in your atheism and shout from the rooftops that once you are dead it is over, you are food for beetles and worms and the “soul” was a fantasy that went to the grave with Marvin Gaye, much less you. This is the only thing that will satisfy them that you are not about to begin speaking in tongues and packing your Rapture carry-on.
What I usually say, instead, is “Eh, none of my concern, either way.”
Which is not me being glib. I will not presume to know answers I cannot. That is the thing that gets humans in trouble more often than any of our other bad habits. I do know, that if there were a Higher Being, I have found no satisfying way to communicate with such a person and, as for the afterlife, there is only one way to find out for sure and my curiosity is not that strong. Neither concept has a role in my life that I could quantify or demonstrate. I think it is almost impossible for a human being to truly grasp the meaning of sudden and irretrievable non-existence or, previous to that, true and total isolation. Is that because these things are hard wired into our brain and they serve some essential purpose when it comes to our continued survival? Or is it because we never actually cease to exist and there is in fact some kind of God?
Dunno. And can’t know. Hence, none of my concern, either way.
But, I know what I would want the afterlife to be. God, not quite. If God exists, we would need to have a very long talk about some things. But the afterlife, I do have a wish; a perfect condition that would be all I need in the way of an eternal epilogue. The afterlife should be a state where you understand everything that happened to you in life from everyone else’s point of view. It should be a state in which you know what dominoes fell in order to put someone else in a spot where they could cause you pain, you should see clearly the things that led you to cause pain to others, and you should be able to see the full extent and consequence of the pain you caused. You should also be able to see all the ways in which the pain you caused and were caused really didn’t matter. You should suddenly understand everyone’s story, its beauty and tragedy, and your role in each one. I want the afterlife to be a state of complete awareness and all encompassing empathy. If you were a person who made mistakes, meaning everyone, this would have its difficulties and its surprises. If you were Hitler, universal empathy for all those you caused pain is the definition of Hell. If you were a Holocaust victim, having the riddle of what would make someone do something so monstrous finally solved would be peace. But for most of us, it would just mean finally being able to see all the people who touched your life for the perfect, flawed, beautiful, and bumbling creatures they are and to know that they see the same in you. In that place, love and compassion become truly complete. It would make us the best of ourselves.
I don’t know if that happens. You might just disappear.
Back in November I was asked to curate and moderate a panel discussion on Storytelling at Union Docs. I did not own recording equipment at that time and it’s a pity. The guests were Peter Aguero (Moth Host, BTK Band), David Crabb and Cammi Climaco (both of Ask Me), Seth Lind (Told, This American Life), Cyndi Freeman (Standrard Issues, Wonder Woman), and Jen Hixson (producer of The Moth SLAMS). Anyway, I just came across this flickr set from that night. At some point it was easier to use the microphone as a cane.
This is a piece I put together for an event but it was never used. It was written after it was told, which is to say that I transcribed it from a recording I did for development purposes – the iPod Nano from a generation back has a voice memo function which is fantastic, but also makes me look like a Showcase Hobo on the subway – and in transcribing the piece I have left all the rules broken. It is a thing I like to do when with live bits, try and capture how it is actually said on stage.
I also think it was a long cold winter and now that things are beautiful and my serotonin levels have evened out, I kind of wanted to put something up to see those dark months off, once and for all.
Anyway, there will be more school stuff coming soon. For now, I hope you enjoy this little foray into romantic failure.
Elizabeth and I are having an argument. On the subway platform. This is what we do now. This and sex and the sex is why we put up with the arguing and it didn’t used to be this way, but now we just go in this circle all the time and it is exhausting. Things used to be good, and I guess that is why we both hold onto the idea that we can climb out of this spiral. But these days I am just amazed at how long it can take to hit bottom. And I am hoping against hope that one of these arguments, that are happening in public places more often, that somewhere in one of these we will find that magic thing and we will see eye to eye once again because I do love her and I do believe she loves me. In spite of the fact that all she does at this point is make an infinite list of her doubts.
Then she says, “Well, what about Valentine’s Day?”
And I am confused she would bring this up, because Valentine’s Day was one of the best days we ever had as a couple. We had gone out to a great dinner and gotten a little tipsy on a bottle of wine and then we had taken a cab back up to her place in Harlem. And that had been our first Valentine’s day as a couple, so once we got in that cab, lets just say that I am sure we are one of the stories that cabby still tells.
Anyway, the cab driver let us off on the other side of Morningside Park and we decide we are going to walk through the park to Elizabeth’s apartment. And the park is blanketed in about two feet of snow and it is clinging to the trees and in the street lights it couldn’t be more beautiful or romantic. And we get down to the bottom of the park and at this point Elizabeth decides she wants to play in the snow and she goes jumping into these drifts. She is wearing high heeled boots and if you have ever been to Morningside Park, you know that it is really steep and twisty in spots and really rocky and you can’t see what is under the snow, so I am kind of worried that this is going to end in a snapped ankle and a trip to the emergency room. But eventually, after she has thrown enough snow at me and shown me enough thigh I chase her into the snow. Then we went back to her place and the rest of the night was literally Ice Cream and sex almost until dawn.
And that night had become a reference point for our relationship. It signified something special. It was one of those experiences we would bring up and get all warm. If one wanted to rev up the other, we just brought up, “Do you remember Valentine’s day,” and it was on.
So, now, having a fight on the subway platform, this is a weird time for her to bring it up, and I say, “Yeah, what about Valentine’s Day?”
And she says, “Well, that night you hesitated. You really held back, and I had to get you to play in the snow with me, and I thought then that, maybe, we weren’t right for each other.”
We are the stories we tell and a relationship is pretty much the stories we agree on. And this was not my first go round. When you are willing to take those stories and turn them against the other person, change what they mean in your relationship and how they support it, that is a scorched earth policy. Because you have taken that away from that person and they can never feel that way about that moment and that memory, they can never have that thing again, because you have turned that good feeling into a weapon to use against them. From then on, they can never ever trust their memory of how that moment felt. In fact, you have made them feel ashamed and foolish for ever believing in that feeling in the first place.
And I look at Elizabeth and I think, well this is over. From here, the only story left to tell is the story of how this ended and I doubt we will agree on a version of that either.
Tomorrow night I will be performing the entirety of this piece at Under Saint Marks Theater with The BTK Band at seven o’clock. As a preview, here is a little sample of what The Fifth Grade was like for me.
There were vials and vials of strangers’ bodily fluids on the dining room table. They were scattered in piles. There was probably some kind of order. If I had to guess, I would say it was by date, the various urine and blood specimens gathered together according to when they were ejected or extracted, warm and viscous and with that brown coppery scent that your insides have. On the dining room table. By the hutch where my Mom’s wedding china looked on and gathered dust. True, this was an area some families might reserve for special occasions. This is where my family kept its quarts of foreign blood and piss.
The urine came in opaque plastic screw top containers. All you could really make out was varying shades of yellow to brown, but even across the room, just looking at where the pee containers were lined up like passengers at an airline counter, you could sense that cloying warmth that piss gives off.
The blood came in glass vials. The black on red liquid was very clearly seen through the glass, nothing obscured. You could really study the way blood clings to a surface, kind of spreading in fractal branches cohered to the smoothly curved interior. It stretched out from the inky depths of the coagulated lagoon below, towards the rubber stopper that kept it all trapped in there. These vials were rounded on the bottom. If the pee waited in line, the blood lay prone like hostages on the third day of a siege at some third world airport during a doomed coup d’etat.
It was certain that each of these containers teamed with viruses and diseases that, if freed, would wipe out not only my family, but possibly the entire sub-division. There would be sweats and fevers as a short lived pre-cursor to the black boils and flesh rot that would quickly set in. Death would come only after you had suffered in agony, as much from the Doctor’s desperate probing and ad hock solutions, as from the ravages of the mysterious plague’s advance on all of your body’s vital functions. Finally, you would just be a corpse lying in an undammed pool of your own corrupted effluvia. Then the entire medical staff that had tried in vain to save you would be exposed and summarily wiped out as well.
I was absolutely certain that this was how the end would come.
I can’t tell you what a relief that was.
Leading up to my terror of the plague, I had given almost no thought to disease or viruses and I thought “Pandemic” was a shop at the mall. I had other things to worry about. For instance, one of my most pressing concerns was the over abundance of Satanic cults in my suburban neighborhood.
From what I had come to understand, it was a foregone conclusion that a fair number of the people that pushed shopping carts past my Mother and I in the Schnucks Supermarket, probably the entire management staff at the Chi Chi’s, and a good third of teachers and policemen were secret Devil worshipers who had altars to their Dark Lord in the basement of their ranch houses. Apparently, while my mother was warming up left over spaghetti, at least a few of my fellow classmates were dining on the freshly carved and stewed meat of their infant siblings. One assumes you don’t get too attached when your little brother is conceived as a blood offering during a coven orgy. Really, don’t play with your food.
No one, not even Donahue, seemed to know exactly how to identify who was in league with demonic forces. But I will say this: if Mommy is staying at home and having sacrificial babies like the Devil’s own convection oven and serving them up hot and fresh, not warmed over, then we are clearly talking single income family and Daddy has done well. If you want a guide to which families are in a cult, it’s the kid whose Mom drives him to school and he arrives wearing brand new parachute pants not more than a month after Thriller comes out. So, two reasons to hate that kid.
Of course, it was no joke at the time. I walked to school everyday. Suburban sprawl had not yet turned the eastern half of Missouri into the elaborate Olive Garden parking lot it was destined to become. At this point the subdivisions were separated by bands of darkly wooded areas. It was those lonely stretches of road where the black van was going to pull up and a bank officer who owed eternal allegiance to Lucifer was going to grab me and haul me off to a cage in the corner of his rumpus room next to a never used exercise bike.
After much activity, many shows, a new proposal out in the mix, lots of producing, I am on a little half vacation. Meaning that I have more shows to do, but I am trying to get in a little rest at the same time. Ok, I am napping on the subway. All right, I am sleeping in the subway. Don’t touch my garbage bags! Won’t last long. In the meantime, read kindergarten.
First of all, we have been asked for a new And I Am Not Lying show. It was requested by the venue, and so THIS!
That is our amazing trailer put together by the lovely Tracy Rowland!
Also, I have a full discussion about the upcoming show on the current podcast of The Standard Issues. Download it for a preview and to find out what it is like when the soft porn you film gets rebroadcast in France.
After that a jam-packed week starting with me hosting The Moth at the Bitter End on the 25th.
The next night, the 26th, Cyndi Freeman will be hosting the next Standard Issues Live Show where we will be featuring six brilliant storytellers myself included. That will be at 8 o’clock at Pacific Standard. Becky Flaum will be there and she fucking rocks, so there you go. The theme is Television.
Then I will be telling at the premiere of episode 2 of Connections which I have virtually no information on except that I will be telling a story about drugs. I have some of those. It was a long time ago, way past the statute of limitations for such things. Keep your eye on their facebook page for more info and I will update this when I have it. If I Had my guess I would say this is going to be at The Pit. Here’s last month’s poster, which is kind of meaningless.
The next one will be on Weds. the 27th.
Hope to see you all at some of these shows and go get my podcast! Do It Now!
One note about these pieces on school, each one of these posts contains about a third of a chapter. But I will be performing the complete Kindergarten at the next Monsters at Under Saint Marks Theater on the first Tuesday in April.
I was standing on the sewer grate where the bus picked me up for second grade. I was wearing a navy blue snow suit that was about a size too big. It was around this time that I had entered what I refer to as my “Save-A-Lot Toy Aisle” period.
Cars would drive by and I imagine that I looked a little discount, a misspelled Mexican knock off version, a “Qid” instead of a kid. Seeing me, one would have thought that my parent’s really should have sprung for the name brand that came with accessories that fit. By that age even I knew that if you got Go-Bots instead of Transformers, Stryke Force instead of G.I. Joe, Space Wars instead of Star Wars, you were better off leaving that shit in the packaging. The only way to make those toys more disappointing was to play with them. You put the helmet on the Luke Skywalker rip-off and instead of looking like he’s ready to pilot an X-wing, he looks like the doctor doesn’t feel he can be trusted not to injure himself. That was me. The “Idaho Jones Action Play Set” of children.
My parent’s neighbors must have thought “you get what you pay for.”
Like a cheaply made action figure, one might wonder if I came complete with arms. Fortunately, I was wearing a backpack, which illustrated for all passersby that I did have articulated parts. The backpack was red. This was a minor miracle, because it was, like the snow suit, a hand me down from my older siblings and there had been a sister-discarded pink one floating around, threatening to land on my shoulders. That would have been a kick me sign that Russian satellites could pick up. The Soviets would have felt compelled to send someone from the KGB Youth Brigade to come and beat me up. “The Capitalists have put a pink back pack on a second grader! This provocation cannot go unanswered!” Et tu, Brezhnev?
I had not been so lucky with the lunch box situation.
We lived in a land of plenty. And especially plenty of plastic. Beautiful, shiny plastic lined up in rows. It’s molded and press shaped curves reflecting the pure white light of K-Mart’s fluorescents. They lined them up at the beginning of each back to school shopping season for a fashion show. The fall collection of lunch boxes. Each one emblazoned with the closest thing a second grader understands as a work of art. Murals of Spiderman battling Doctor Octopus or Thundar the Barbarian with his very Chewbaca like friend that really should have had Lucas suing, but they had given him a cat face and gotten away with it.
The lunchbox was your first chance as a kid to display taste of any kind and to throw around some sort of brand loyalty. Any sort of comic book or Saturday morning TV show was fine so long as they were properly macho enough for the boys and cute and flowery for the girls. Comic characters were a little more classic so you knew they’d last. Saturday morning fare, well that stuff lived and died with ratings, so the show you had chosen as the symbol of your fledgling identity might last a total of one season. You could wind up out dated pretty quickly. But it was also The New Thing and it had that New Thing Smell. Plus, seasons when you are that age are an eternity. Twenty two weeks of anything are quite an investment when you have only existed for a grand total of eight years. Movies were good, if they made a lunchbox of it then it was a good movie, that’s obvious. The boldest move was to go for prime time live action shows. On one hand it said that you were allowed to stay up and watch The A-Team or CHiPs. You’re a sophisticate. Other kids are picturing you having a drink and a Camel at the wet bar while talking with Mother and Father about their days, and letting them know yours was pretty much a bear as well. On the flip side, anything that adults also watched was open to accusations of lameness or being boring and if the other kid making this pronouncement had the right kind of confidence in his disgusted dismissal, you were better off brown bagging it. Brown bagging it was not cool.
I did have a lunch box. That should have been a good thing. But it was a hand me down.
Nothing that gets handed down to you from an older sibling is ever good. No one hands down anything that is going to make you cooler. The words “This 1969 Mustang in mint condition, including the pheromone air freshener, was a hand me down” have never been spoken. Instead, the items you receive from your older family members make you wonder what is wrong with these people and if the condition is genetic. Why is every sweater they ever owned the same color as the key symptom of a severe gastro-intestinal disorder? When was dysentery green in season? How is it that every shoe they ever wore is shaped like a goat’s hoof, unless your brother really is the spawn of the Devil? And the toys. How exactly are you supposed to incorporate this two-foot tall Lone Ranger doll into the universe of your four inch Snake Eyes and Han Solo Action Figures?
But none of these things could compare to the lunchbox. The lunchbox was rusted metal with a full wrap around tableau depicting the life and times of Raggedy Ann and Andy cast in a distinctly pink world of flowers and quaint wooden bridges and very pretty ponies. And just to prove it could be loud in every possible way, the lunchbox also squeaked. At every single hinge. Including the ones that joined the handle to the box itself. This meant that you couldn’t even just carry it inconspicuously. And as I said, rusted metal, which meant the first thing you did at lunch time – the first thing after cringing at the sound of wrenching metal that drew every other kid’s attention to the abomination that contained your food – was to brush off the little flakes of brown oxidized metal off of your wonder bread. It came with a matching thermos.
I doubt that it is really necessary for me to explain the social albatross this thing represented. That lunch box was an anchor around my neck dragging me to the bottom of the popularity ocean. The kids down where I was had evolved chemically lit proboscises and ultra sensitive eyes, which had migrated to one side of their head so they could lie, flat and camouflaged, on the gymnasium floor and still look out for predators.
That was me. Standing there in the cold in my partly flaccid snow suit clutching a lunch box whose main purpose was to issue invitations for people to punch me in the face. I had a thousand yard stare and I still couldn’t see cool from there. I was just waiting for the bus. Like a cow waits for a sudden, sharp thump right between the eyes.
The first show we have for you is going to be brilliant! I have Adam Wade, Peter Aguero, and Nisse Greenberg at Domino Effect along with our score keeper, Rory Scholl of the BTK Band. All three master storytellers will be on stage at the same time, trying to steal the microphone, with Rory Giving out a prize at the end for “Most Self Serving Segue.”
Here is the Fifth Estate site for directions and any other info you might want.
Then I will be at Strip For A Cure at The Wild Project. I will not be stripping, I will be talking, which is almost as good. That is on March 17th, all proceeds go to finding a cure for HIV/AIDS, and you have to go to that link and look at the amazing line-up. It’s ridiculous.
A Picture Of Me Talking.
Speaking of me talking. I will be doing that some more on the upcoming TOLD by Seth Lind at Under Saint Marks, the theme is politics and I will be setting the record straight on the horrors of Congress as a one time eye witness. That is at 7 o’clock, on Monday the 21st, at 94 St. Mark’s Place, btw 1st and A.
Seth Lind is a handsome man.
Next will be The Standard Issues live show with Story Collider’s Ben Lillie, BTK’s Jeff Scherer, sex blogger Jefferson, and Cyndi Freeman fresh off her very succesful staging of her latest one woman show, as well as Allison Downey and Jennifer Glick, plus our Mystery Guest. That could be you. Come to the show and make sure you subscribe to the podcast, which is like the show, only directly in your ears. Pacific Standard, 8pm, on March 22nd – 82 Fourth Avenue between St. Marks and Bergen Streets in Brooklyn.
Miss Mary Cyn
This is the home base of the producer of Original Cyn, as well as several one woman shows, a book, a calendar,and a lot of all around hotness.
I hadn’t done the pre-school thing. This was the mid seventies in The Ozarks and, while I know that this is going to give many mothers reading this today an anxiety attack, Pre School wasn’t really the thing back then. It was there, but it wasn’t seen as the first mandatory step in the tightrope walk of getting little Finn and Madison to realize their full potential and get into the right college. As a consequence, my first five years had been spent in adult environments. My Mom had spent much of that five years as a single parent surrounded by the kind of redneck relations you don’t leave children with. So, I basically rode around on her hip like a vestigial twin.
When we had left the house that morning, and, if I were being fair, in the days leading up to that morning, there had been some discussion about this so called “School.” This “Kindergarten.” I had said “Kinder Garden?” Sounded like some kind of hippy be-in crap if you asked me, some kind of child labor dream catcher sweatshop. No, I was corrected, “kindergarten, it’s a German word.” That was worse. My only experience with the Germans up to that point was the Brother’s Grimm and I am here to tell you, those two needed to have a long talk with a trained professional. They clearly had issues with women. And children. And knights, frogs, little people, the elderly, and alternative religions. Yes, we should hand me over to the Germans. Issue the uniforms and start up the bonfires, no sleep till Nuremberg.
Just as I was trying to come to terms with the mountain of betrayal that had suddenly rained down onto my life, I saw a girl across the room suddenly drop a puzzle maze, spin on her heals with a wild look in her eyes, let out a guttural howling sound and sprint towards another child who was attempting to eat a plastic snake. The werewolf was no more than three steps into her planned assault on the snake eater when she tripped over her own feet and landed face down in a pile of blocks. She was so much in the grips of her inexplicable rage attack that she didn’t even have enough front brain activity to put out her hands and brace her fall. It was just a headlong dive into a drift of unforgiving wooden corners. She rolled over, sat up and burst into tears. The snake eater, who had been entirely unaware that he was about to be murdered, snapped around to see his would be assailant wailing and then immediately exploded into tearful screams, himself.
I am totally pulling your leg. There is, of course, no statue and no placard. However, Lori is a slut.
No one, not even Donahue, seemed to know exactly how to identify who was in league with demonic forces. But I will say this: if Mommy is staying at home and having sacrificial babies like the Devil’s own convection oven and serving them up hot and fresh, not warmed over, then we are clearly talking single income family and Daddy has done well. If you want a guide to which families are in a cult, it’s the kid whose Mom drives him to school and he arrives wearing brand new parachute pants not more than a month after Thriller comes out. So, two reasons to hate that kid.
I had not been so lucky with the lunch box situation.
That was me. Standing there in the cold in my partly flaccid snow suit clutching a lunch box whose main purpose was to issue invitations for people to punch me in the face. I had a thousand yard stare and I still couldn’t see cool from there. I was just waiting for the bus. Like a cow waits for a sudden, sharp thump right between the eyes.
Here is the 
