This Afternoon In Drama

One Night Stand

The night before I left Bennington, as I was lying drunk in my dorm bed and listening to the soft crinkling of the zip-around pee cover, I noticed a firefly on the ceiling. He was very excited about something, blinking his ass like he was saying, "Hihihihihihihihihihihihihihihi." He couldn't get out the blinks fast enough.

Seeing as how I was the only other living thing in the room, I wondered who he could be flirting with. Then I understood. He was pining for my fire alarm. It had a green light on it the color and size of a firefly's ass, and I realized that the firefly must think that he was in the presence of an incredible partner with awe-inspiring glutial stamina, a creature with an olympic ass. In the firefly world, this must have been like stumbling upon Lance Armstrong.

The firefly would slowly make his way toward my fire alarm and then halt, clearly wanting a sign that his advances were desired. When he stopped, he'd make insecure blinks of the ass, asking his beloved, "Honey, do you want some of this? I can't tell." After about ten seconds, I noticed that there was yet another light in the room- an intermittently blinking red one in the middle of the fire alarm. I wondered if the firefly could see the other light in the room, or if he, like my friend Bob, was blind to that end of the spectrum. Maybe he perceived the red blinking light as a daunting competitor, a firefly mutant that possessed exceptional abilities like the "firefly" with the unstoppable ass light. Maybe this is why my firefly appeared to take two steps backward every time he stepped forward, losing his courage mid-approach. He was probably telling himself that he should just go home and find a nice firefly with an average ass, and that while she wouldn't have the same exotic allure as the one on the ceiling, she might still be good and nice and loving.

After about twenty minutes, the firefly finally made it across the ceiling and to the base of the fire alarm. I was cringing, knowing that this could not turn out well. It didn't. Upon discovering his love was a machine- a machine!- the firefly proceeded to have a psychotic meltdown. I heard an angry buzzing and then the firefly fell straight down from the ceiling, and I know this because I saw his blinking ass dropping through the air like a destroyed satellite from space. Then there was quiet in the room. "Are you dead?" I asked. Had his little heart broken from the disappointment?

Suddenly, the firefly buzzed and sprang from the floor, proceeding to throw himself from wall to wall with so much intensity that I could actually hear the makeup of his body every time he hit. I figured that he was trying to match his internal hurt with equivalent external pain. Inconsolable, he flung himself around the room for the next hour.

The firefly's plight almost brought me to tears, and maybe this can be attributed to the drunkenness, as I've recently learned that I become increasingly empathetic and patient when toasted. At a party on Saturday night I sat on a couch with a girl who told me (in detail) about her and her husband's savings account, and this is something that I'd never withstand without the sauce.

But I'd like to think that it was only the poignancy of the firefly's raw hope, longing, and disillusionment that kept me riveted for almost two hours. I reached for my cell phone and used its artificial light to blink at the tiny guy, wanting him to fly over and investigate. Then I would guide him to the hole in my screen, where, before he could discover that "I" was also a machine, he'd find himself exiting the room and among one of the millions of available, blinking fireflies in the grass outside.

But the firefly only wanted to bash his brains against the plaster, mourning his loss. He just wouldn't come down.

Quick Haikuing

the guy outside my
window plays the star wars theme
on his loud banjo.

i do not believe
that it gets much more dorky
than what i'm hearing.

All I Ever Needed To Know I Learned From The WB

Inevitably, whenever I am at the gynecologist or the vet's, there is a "What I Learned From..." poster on the wall.  At the gynecologist, it's a "What I Learned From My Toddler" one, and at the vet it's a "What I Learned..." from saucy looking cats and dogs.  I'm thinking of putting out a "What I Learned From My MFA program," except I don't think it would sell that well because instead of a smoosh-faced kitten in the middle, it would have a pasty, depressed writer, and I can't even imagine who wants to look at that, except maybe Soon-Yi.  I've never been involved in anything sheerly for the money, though, so I won't rule it out at this time.

I've learned that the two words I definitely refuse to put in any of my work are: 1. lovemaking, which always sounds to me like someone is baking vaginas in an oven and generally grosses me out and 2.  belly, which I think is okay to use if you're talking about a beer belly or actual fatness, but not okay to use when you're just trying to find an especially "sensual" way of saying "stomach."  When belly and lovemaking come into play in the same work, I just mentally retitle it "Ew" and move on.

From my new friend Greg The Doctor I've learned so many things that I couldn't even put them all down here, but probably the most important is that pubic crabs can't live on head hair, and head crabs can't live on pubic hair.  But, and this is key-- pubic crabs can live on eyelashes, so if you ever see someone with crabs waving over their eyes, and that person's just like, "Oh, don't worry, it's just lice," they're totally lying.  I find the information about the crabs especially poetic because it seems to me that this is a halfway decent metaphoric method of splitting apart the two general types of people that exist in the world: those who require curly coarseness in their lives in order to "hang" in there, and those who can only survive when they feel their lives are smooth and silky.

Greg The Doctor also told me that if you see a family and they all have two different colored eyes and a gray patch in the the middle of their otherwise colored hair, they're probably deaf.  Also, and perhaps this is the most pertinent to me personally, Greg The Doctor told me that my somewhat recently added regimen of taking Centrum A-Z vitamins in the morning is enough to ward off the scurvy that constantly threatens my system.  He says that if my gums start bleeding nonstop, I'm on the path to becoming an honorary pirate and that's when I should start to worry.

I've learned that chipmunks, which I've seen for the first time in my life ever, are so fucking cute that I can't really handle it.  If you've never seen one, they're tinier than you ever thought.  And I've learned that fireflies, which I've also never seen before this week, light up their asses in the most beautiful, electric way to locate willing booty calls.  I can't believe that with all of our evolutionary progress, humans haven't learned how to make our own asses light up, because I think that would really help in alleviating (a little bit) some of our existential concerns, if we had glowing asses.

I've learned from Ish that Native Americans can't really grow beards, but they can grow really creepy moustaches. I've learned from Bree that if you announce loudly that you "love little schoolboys!" in a supermarket, you have to qualify that with "cookies."

I've learned that there is one thing that will keep me away from a television set, which is a busted septic tank.  The TV room smells like liquid death, and while I might be tempted to overcome that smell if we were in the middle of the essential fall season, during summer, when I am only missing "The Real World: Austin Casting Special", I am willing to wait until I can get home to my TiVo recordings.

I've learned that like Angelina Jolie, I have no qualms about married men.  And since my new love, poet/novelist Virgil Suarez specifically asked me to announce our affair on the internet, and, to quote Tom Cruise on Oprah a few weeks back, "Well, I don't want to disappoint her," here's the public announcement.  Why do birds suddenly appear...every time... he is near?  I don't know, but maybe it's because he used to professionally show canaries, and their brothers and sisters can just generally sense his aura.

P.S. And Happy Father's Day to Larr, who taught me about the hidden mysteries behind two deceptively simple life lessons: toilet plunging and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Popping In Like A Zit

Look at me, posting in the middle of the week. I have to because if you're a purist, then today's the only day that you'll be able to read this short interview (sorry, when I'm on my Mac laptop I can't link, so you're going to have to cut and paste it yourself: www.freshyarn.com/FD/FD.june05/today.htm) I did with Lori Gottlieb online. If you're one of those people who has to watch TV letterboxed and with Dolby surround-sound speakers in your living room, then this notification is for you. Otherwise, if you're indifferent to presentation or a lollygagger (a term that I learned from my middle school P.E. teacher, which, along with "fartlicking," means to be falling behind whatever's going on while not particularly caring), then you can read it at your leisure below.

I just woke up from my first Vermont nap of the season. As I was falling asleep, I heard two guys throwing down underneath my window. "What the fuck did you say to me?" asked voice one, getting impressively more pissy by the second. "Say it again, motherfucker!" And this back and forth went on and on, escalating toward what I was sure was going to be some violence. I was so excited that there might be some writer ass kicking on the ground floor that I almost got out of bed to watch. I thought it would be especially great to watch two poets throw punches. But when I listened for a little longer, I realized that it was just two guys rehearsing a scene. There's an "acting" residency here the same time we are. These two guys were just "acting." God, I hate theater; it always disappoints.
---

LORI GOTTLIEB and ANDREA SEIGEL

Lori Gottlieb, FRESH YARN contributor and author of several books including the national bestseller, Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self, talks with Andrea Seigel, author of Like the Red Panda, which Publishers Weekly calls, "Astute, confident and keenly articulated."

LG: Your first novel, LIKE THE RED PANDA, is about a smart, eccentric, suicidal high school senior in Orange County who's headed for Princeton. You grew up in Orange County and wrote the book as a college student at Brown. In fact, you set the book at your real-life high school, without changing the school's name. What elements of your own life did you use in writing this book?

AS: I guess you could say that the entire book is a love poem to suicide, which is also (and I know it sounds weird) what my life has been. Beyond that, there are tons of episodes in the book taken from experience -- the opening scene that has Stella being forced to throw an "invisible" beach ball up and down in drama class, that came from this one time my parents signed me up for summerstock. They made me play fake tennis there. And I wasn't "keeping my eye on the ball" or whatever, so I got bitched out. Then we learned how to "theater-slap," except I failed at that, too, because I left a red handprint on my teacher's face. But I like to say that PANDA is about 90% true to my life, with the remaining 10% of untruth being that my parents are still alive, that I've never gone topless in front of an AP English classmate, and I don't eat cereal.

What about your autobiographical work, especially your "autobiography of an anorexic youth," STICK FIGURE: A DIARY OF MY FORMER SELF? How much truth do you keep in your stuff, and how much is sacrificed in the name of cohesive storytelling?

LG: Wait, first: you don't eat cereal? Why not? Maybe you should write about a character who won't eat cereal. Anyway, in STICK FIGURE, it's based on my diaries from when I was 11, but because I recorded the play-by-play of every single interaction with friends, teachers, my parents, boys I liked, my shrink -- you name it -- I had to edit the entries into a cohesive narrative. So, for instance, the chapter on my first boy-girl party begins with a paragraph about the classmate I had a crush on (simply to inform the scene). But in the diaries, entries about this boy went on for months and months (and pages and pages). Also, even though the diaries are edited, I wanted to keep the voice authentic. I corrected for spelling and grammar but I tried to stay true to my language and speech patterns at 11 years old.

My mother, though, had an issue about "truth" after she read the book. There's an incident in which, after watching Charlie's Angels, I tell my parents that if the Angels thought I was too thin, I'd believe THEM, because clearly they know what thin is. So the next week Jaclyn Smith comes over to take me out. And I wrote about how I knew my brother had brought his friends over to gawk at Jaclyn Smith because all their bikes were in the driveway when we pulled up after lunch. So my mother says, "I don't think I ever let your brother's friends park their bikes in the driveway." Of all the issues she might have had with the book, THIS was her concern about verisimilitude.

But back to PANDA: I changed everyone's names except for those of my immediate family members. Did people from your high school read PANDA and recognize themselves, even though you didn't use their real names? How close were these characters to real people you went to school with? Or did it happen that you completely made up a character and somebody claimed that character as him/herself?

AS: Cereal daunts me. I'm just really turned off by the idea of eating a whole bunch of small crunchy things for a meal. I can barely deal with Skittles. I don't feel the same way about pasta because even though pasta is similarly a bunch of small things pretending to be one bigger thing, a spoonful of macaroni and cheese will coalesce itself and at least pretend better.

I think your mom and my mom should start hanging out. Last year a reporter from a paper interviewed me and got tons of things wrong, including the actual text from my book. My mom read the article and all she said was, "Our house isn't beige!" She was pissed the woman got our exterior paint color wrong.

As for people from my high school reading the book and recognizing themselves, that's only really happened with my friends, who I made obvious on purpose as sort of a shout-out. There are two people in the book who should recognize themselves because their names are barely scrambled and I'm totally bitchy about them, but they haven't. To be even more bitchy, I suspect this is because they don't read. And then there's my high school boyfriend, Jonny, who told my friend Taryn (Jonny and I aren't in contact any more) that he "knows" the charismatic boyfriend in my book is obviously based on him. Which he's not.

Speaking of ex-boyfriends- what I really want to know from you is if you've ever been involved with someone who read your book first and then wanted to meet you because of it? Or, alternately, if you've become close with someone who's read your book after you got together, and then had a strong reaction to the "you" depicted in it?

LG: Well, once I was boarding a plane during book tour and I heard some guy yell, "STICK FIGURE! Hey, Stick Figure!" So I turn around and this guy is running toward me saying he recognized me from the book jacket but forgot my name and wanted to sit next to me on the plane. He said he's always wanted to date someone like me. It was weird, because I don't think most guys are intrigued by 11-year-old anorexic girls.

But with boyfriends, the ones who read the book before meeting me often have trouble distinguishing the preteen me from the current me. And then they're confused when I'm not that girl. Maybe even disappointed. My cynicism as an 11-year-old is funnier and easier to take than my cynicism now. But I also feel like reading the book gives boyfriends insight into why I am the way I am today. It's like the Cliff's Notes on all the stuff they missed before they met me and it informs little things like why saying, "End of discussion" makes me go Postal.

I like it best when boyfriends read the book after they've gotten to know me a bit but before they've met my parents. This way, I don't have to give them the run-down on my dysfunctional family. They've already been briefed.

While we're on family dysfunction, I'm curious: Is there anything you revealed in your book about your upbringing (despite PANDA being "fiction") that your parents were pissed about? Did they feel that since so much of the book is based on your life, their privacy might have been invaded? Were they worried, for instance, that because the main character is suicidal, other people in their community would judge them for having a "suicidal" daughter?

AS: Whoa, the plane guy must have really been staring at your author photo because it's pretty hard to recognize authors from those. That's a hardcore groupie.

To answer your question, my parents weren't really pissed about anything specific in the book (maybe this is because they don't appear in it at all) but I know my mom doesn't always love my dark subject matter. So I think she might have, at one point (although she's gotten used to it), been a little queasy about people thinking I'm depressed and suicidal, but she seems to have adjusted. At a Passover seder last week I even did an abbreviated version of my pro-suicide spiel during dinner, and she seems to have become pretty immune to it. I think she's been far more horrified by the "embarrassing" and "unfeminine" details I've included in my nonfiction writing -- I know for a fact she was horrified when I put up an old diary entry about my childhood constipation on my website, and she totally hates it when I do tampon ad analysis. That's the stuff she gets pissed about -- I guess bodily function stuff.

Lori Gottlieb is the author of the national bestseller, Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self, an American Library Association "Best Books 2001." Lori's second book, Inside the Cult of Kibu, is an exposé of her experience as editor-in-chief of an online teen magazine that she describes as "Heathers meets Lord of the Flies."

A commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered," Lori's work has appeared in Time, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, People, Elle, Glamour, Slate, and Salon, among many others. Her personal essays appear in the anthologies This Side of Doctoring, Scoot Over Skinny, and The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt.

You can waste a lot of time by clicking through her Website at www.lorigottlieb.com.

Andrea Seigel's debut novel, LIKE THE RED PANDA (Harcourt), came out in April 2004 and was named one of Amazon.com's best ten debuts of the year. Her second book, TO FEEL STUFF, comes out (also Harcourt) in spring 2006. If Katie Holmes can declare that she had childhood fantasies of being with Tom Cruise and have it come true, then Andrea would like to announce that as a teen, she had fantasies of being with Trent Reznor.

This Is How We Do It

I'm taking off for Bennington in the middle of this week. A little "in Seigel news" wrap-up before I go:

1. Word on the street (the street being "Harcourt") is that my next book, To Feel Stuff, is slated for an August 2006 release.

2. I still can't talk about that Panda deal that I can't talk about.

3. I will have two stories in forthcoming anthologies: The first, "Log Cabin," will be in a parenting anthology (even though I'm not a parent) out from Overlook Press.  The second, titled "Brian Millat" for the time being (my sixth-grade boyfriend), will be in an book on break-ups entitled It's Not Me, It's You (Da Capo).  I think both are slated for 2006 releases.

3. It's that time of year for summer reading lists, so here's mine.  Technically, it's a list of books I chose to read this past term for school. If the book has an "A" next to it, that means I wrote an annotation-- I know I have a lot of high school readers, and if you need a quick book report on any of the listed works, drop me ten bucks and I'll send you the Word file.  Remember to take my name off the top of the paper, kids.

1. A Girl Named Zippy- Haven Kimmel, A (thumbs up.)
2. Cracks- Sheila Kohler, A (thumbs up.)
3. The Ha-Ha- Dave King, A (thumbs mostly up.)
4. Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte (thumbs less up than they were in high school.)
5. Shroud of the Gnome- James Tate, A (thumbs way up for the only poet I've ever been into.)
6. Modern Ranch Living- Mark Jude Poirier, A (thumbs generally up, but maybe just because I like water parks.)
7. The Memoir of the Hawk- James Tate (thumbs so up I read more of him.)
8. Delta Of Venus- Anais Nin (thumbs up but not turned on.)
9. What’s Not To Love?- Jonathan Ames (thumbs up, especially for the pubic crabs story.)
10. I Looked Alive- Gary Lutz, A (a very surprising thumbs down.)
11. Vox- Nicholson Baker, A (thumbs ehhhhh. Sorry Monica and Bill.)
12. The House Of Sleep- Jonathan Coe, A (thumbs up but disbelieving.)
13. The Dog Of The Marriage- Amy Hempel (thumbs way up and seriously not just because she's my teacher this term.)
14. Haunted- Chuck Palahniuk, A (thumbs started up, then went down.)
15. The Magic Mountain- Thomas Mann, A (thumbs controversially down.  Sorry Rick.)
16. The Magic Mountain Pt. 2, A (yeah, still not up.)
17. Meet The Master- Elissa Wald (thumbs up despite the bad cover.)
18. Assassination Vacation- Sarah Vowell, A (thumbs up and badly wanting to hang out with Sarah Vowell at historical sites.)
19. Prep- Curtis Sittenfeld, A (thumbs up but still pissed that she outsold me.)
20. In Cold Blood- Truman Capote, A (thumbs so up I was googling the murderers.)
21. All Families Are Psychotic- Douglas Coupland, A (thumbs sneaking upwards in points, but mostly down.)
22. The Road To Wellville- T.C. Boyle (thumbs up and concerned that the movie is only playing on STARZ, which is pretty much the only cable channel that they don't subscribe to.)

3. When I moved to Venice I was like "Why does everyone leave their shit in their yards?"  And then all of a sudden, after the winter rains, I've got a disintegrating Ikea table in my own yard that's rapidly losing particle board pieces, random moldy pots, and barbecue coals despite not having a barbecue.  My car is looking at me like, "Bitch, let's move before I end up on cinder blocks!"  So I'm going to be relocating in the near future for the Acura's sake. I'm keeping the place's new theme under wraps right now.  It's just too exciting to tuck into a list.

4. Last time I was away at school, Brad and Jen announced their separation.  I predict that this time while I'm away at school, Tom and Katie will announce their engagement. And I'll be just as sad. (Run, Katie, run.)

5. I will try to blog while at Bennington and will inevitably write something that pisses off the graduation speaker, who will then inevitably come home and write an uber-long comment dissing me for not asking questions at the lectures.  So let me just take care of this now: If I ever feel the desire to raise my hand under the pretense of asking the lecturer a question about his/her topic, when really I'm speaking in long, solipsistic paragraphs because I like to hear the sound of my own voice and my own feelings on 1. my latest story/poem 2. September 11th or 3. someone famous I once met that made flattering comments about me, then I'll jump on board.  In the meantime, since I haven't had those feelings yet, I will probably not be asking questions, as I may be self-absorbed in my personal writing, but not so much in my schooling.

What's up Vermont? I hope you've been keeping yourself trim and sexy.

Tick-Tock, Summer Don't Stop

Ah, summer, the season of "what the fuck, let's put it on" reality television.  I seriously doubt that any summer series could ever replicate the heady scent and power of Paradise Hotel, but I appreciate that the networks and cable channels keep trying.  Because summer is seen as a write-off, a televisual wasteland, the shows tend to revolve around a strange experimentalism that leaves the door open for immense possibility.  And that is how you get ABC's Dancing With The Stars!

On Celebrity Jeopardy, Alex Trebek throws fuzzy softballs at the famous contestants.  On American Idol, the producers step away from Paula Abdul's bat shit craziness, giving her the kid glove treatment.  But on Dancing With The Stars, I think that the producers actually convinced the "celebrity" contestants that they would be lauded for their efforts. I get a strong feeling that the show was pitched to them as a "just do your best and America will love you" type of situation.  The contestants put in a surprisingly heavy number of hours training with their ruthlessly sexy professional partners, and on Wednesday night I could see it all over their faces before they hit the floor-- that they thought they were going to get gentle pats on the ass and congratulations for a job well done.  They knew they'd be competing, but they thought this was going to be Celebrity Jeopardy competing.  Hollywood Squares competing. They thought that they would get Paula Abdul soft-core criticism.

How else to explain General Hospital actress Kelly Monaco's face when the judges tore her a new asshole after she performed the waltz?  They told her she was stiff and "not enjoyable" to watch, which I think is a major deathblow for an actress.  Not only did they criticize her grace and movement, but they also told her that she had failed to emote properly with her face, and for a woman who spends five days a week fake crying and laughing and loving, I think she probably wanted to smack them in the heads with her reel.  What was truly memorable about the performance, though, was the expression that Kelly held while listening to the judges and being post-interviewed backstage.  I could see it in her eyes, that she was about sixty seconds from placing a meltdown phone call to her agent, who probably told her that this show would be nothing more than a chance to exercise her girlhood princess fantasies.

There's something very personal about watching someone being criticized for the way he or she moves.  The judges don't just comment on footwork or carriage, but almost let a contestant's style of dancing stand in for personality. When they are disgusted or turned off with a celebrity's dancing, they act as if they're plugging their noses at the performer, not the performance. When the judges were bagging on Kelly for being, basically, a cold dancing fish, it was if they were saying, "You are stiff, unfeeling woman who must suck in bed!" It probably didn't help either that her professional partner, a guy who introduced himself as being the best-looking, sexiest guy in the business, seemed as if he wanted to chew his arm off after he saw their scores. Not because Kelly's ugly-- she's beautiful-- but because she was dragging down his ballroom dance street cred.

Being handicapped by one's partner is also a central theme of Ashton Kutcher's new show (don't worry, he's only the producer), but what's actually interesting about The Beauty And The Geek is that, unlike Average Joe and its spin-offs, the dorks have an equal opportunity to be disappointed by their pairings.  Instead of having socially and physically inept guys chasing after a model without having the chance to openly question why they'd even want a relationship with the model, these socially and physically inept guys are paired with dumb, dumb girls. Hot, but dumb.  I can personality attest to the authenticity of the dumbness of at least one of the girls because I've met her before.  She lived in the same house as my ex-boyfriend, and every time I ran into her I would think, "Whoaaaa.  Dumb as a rock."

While the dumb girls have to teach the dorky guys to be "cooler," the dorky guys have to teach the dumb girls to be "smarter."  And this is where the new, never-before-seen-on-television moments start to come into play.  This past week, as the host administered a spelling bee and viewers watched the girls forget consonants and vowels right and left, what we also got to see was condescension all over the guy's faces.  By now, the hot girl giving sad, "you're a really nice guy" puppy dog eyes to the guy she'd never realistically go for is a common image. Less common is the dorky guy giving sad, "you're really stupid, but I'm going to give you an encouraging smile because I feel totally sorry for you" disbelieving eyes to a girl misspelling "tattoo" (when you just know she has one on her ankle.)  This is groundbreaking programming.  Sure, we know that the girls are going to come out of the series thinking that the dorks are really good guys.  But it's going to be far more interesting to watch as the heavily intellectual guys emerge from the summer immunized to (at least some) gigantic breasts.   I'll continue to watch as long as Ashton doesn't show up.