This Afternoon In Drama

So, The Wedding

In lieu of the wedding march, disembodied children's voices come out of a nearby speaker, the kinds of voices sound-edited into horror films before super bad shit goes down in the cornfield.  "She's going to march to creepy kid voices?" I ask my mom.  "Really?"

"No," my mom says.  "I know they picked a song that means a lot to them.  By a band called...Phish?"

And thus two institutions I have always been inherently suspicious of, holy matrimony and The Jam Band, collide in one fell swoop.  I sit back in my chair and wait to see who is going to be the first to utter the phrase, "May you make beautiful music together" while marrying or toasting the couple.

During the ceremony the rabbi, who clearly wants his own radio show, details the couple's love of live music ("live music" will be the two words I hear most often over the course of the evening, topping even "mazel tov") by listing various concerts they've attended, complete with dates, and I puzzle over this shared love of live music, the pleasure of the experience having always eluded me.  (With one notable exception: for my sixteenth birthday I went to see Nine Inch Nails at the L.A. Forum, and I was in heaven for the entire length of the set, but this had more to do with the fact that Trent Reznor's microphone shimmying is basically porn for a dour teen, and I was lost inside each song, trying to figure out how I could sleep with him before I died.)

We move into the ballroom where the tables are concert venue themed.  I am at the "Warfield" among the group the bride says she put me with because they are the "fun singles."  Boy, am I fun.  As I take my seat, I overhear the two guys to my right discussing favorite live music shows from past years.  I quickly realize that "live music" is going to be "the van down by the river" of the night, so I begin to supply it any time I ask a table-mate, "So how do you know the groom?" because this is inevitably the answer.

The wedding band is a local jam band whose name is fucking crazy but now escapes me because it's so fucking crazy, and they play a jammy song as the couple enters the room for their first dance.  All of a sudden I know what those famed Grateful Dead love-ins looked like because friends are joining the couple on the floor, and there is lots of "Casey Jones" head nodding and air drumming and hallucinatory swaying. 

The lead singer/guitarist of the band has twisted his dreadlocks into a low pony, which I recently saw advocated in Teen Vogue as a hip style for prom, except minus the dreads, and the bassist (you'll only get this reference if a fan of Howard Stern) has Richard Christy's hair from before his Beth O. makeover.  He is also wearing the flannel that went missing from my closet in eighth grade and which I've wanted back ever since.

Next the band launches into a lengthy rendition of Hava Nagila that would make The String Cheese Incident jealous, and a young man who needs his space steps off of the main dance area, proceeding to rock out as if listening to Hendrix solo from the beyond the grave.  He becomes significantly happier when he discovers he can utilize a dinner napkin as an interpretive scarf.

One of the guys at my table works with Yanni, and I try to scrounge up some gossip about Yanni's alleged girlfriend-beating, but the friend of the groom can provide no additional details.

And whaddayouknow?  There's Andy Dick, whose sudden appearance in the room is strangely unsurprising because he seems so at home crashing a Jewish wedding while totally wasted.  After paying a visit to the open bar, Andy is accosted by a few of the Hotel Roosevelt's earpieced security guards, summoned by the neurotic wedding coordinator, and he is asked to leave the room.  I watch, entranced, as he tries to keep his head from falling off his neck.

I notice my side of the room empty considerably, having been formerly abuzz with the groom's "jovial" friends, and one of the guys at my table informs me that they are taking Andy up to their room to drop acid with him.  Will I read tomorrow that tonight was the night Andy finally suffocated on his own vomit?  Maybe...

Over salmon I have a conversation with the best friend of the groom about the crystal (as in "shiny, decorative rocks," not as in "crystal meth") shop he owned until recently, when something happened with his partner and a pretty girl and some cocaine, necessitating the end of the business.  We have a moment of shared peace over Gem Auction TV, which I always return to watching late nights while I'm working on a new novel.  The band picks up again, and I say, "Ooooh, xylophone."  The crystal guy corrects me saying, "No, marimba."

Toward the end of the evening the lead singer pulls out a cowbell, to which I exuberantly exclaim "Cowbell!" knowing that this time, I'm on top of my shit.

I eat the delightful red velvet cake, then book it.

Don't Feel Like Dancing Either, And Yet This Weekend I Have A Wedding To Attend

There's a song by the Scissor Sisters called "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'," which undercuts itself by being a dance song.  Blogging to say "I don't feel like bloggin'" is an exercise in the same kind of contradiction.

And I don't.

But what I do feel like doing, after receiving the InStyle Makeover Fall 2007 issue and browsing the page of beauty contributors, is taking my ass into a court and filing a petition to beef up my first name and drop my last.

(tam)Pon de Replay

The prominent "wicked good" first caught my eye in Tampax's newest advertorial outing.  I'd never heard "wicked" used as a synonym for "totally" until the late nineties, when I went to Rhode Island for school, and haven't heard it all much in the years since Rachel Dratch and Jimmy Fallon left Saturday Night Live.  So, I thought, "Strange choice."  And then my eye refocused on the soft blue background, where I realized there was a cat with its paws raised in the air like it just didn't care, perhaps mewing, "Yo yo yo"- another one I haven't heard in awhile.

And although I can't, for the life of me, get into Sodoku or the Sunday crossword, I'm such a fucking sucker for a puzzle of a tampon ad.  In most of them you can practically see the wheels turning in the ad team's head, except the wheels never stopped before they got to the execution phase and so the final message came out dizzied.

This is what I can gather from the use of Clueless-era lingo "whatever" and "wicked good": Tampax decided that teen girls from a decade ago should know that cardboard tampons are more exciting than they used to be.  I'm unclear on what's up the illustrated girl accompanying the "whatever," but she's either using an older, less space-age version of a cardboard tampon or she's into plastic (Whole Foods clientele raises a disapproving eyebrow).  Either way, she's at home on the couch in her depressing bunny slippers.  They smell not like feet but like ass.  There's no one to share the gigantic bowl of popcorn from which she lackadaisically eats; a few pieces have fallen on the floor, slovenliness just a further indicator of depression.  Even the cat (I didn't mean to cut its top half off while scanning but am too depressed to redo) is disillusioned with its owner.  It has flung itself across the back of the couch and looks upon the girl with an expression that says, "Your tampon bores me."  The girl's tampon has so wilted her identity that she wears a shirt bearing a "O," demonstrating a raging self esteem problem.   And to reinforce the message like built-in backup (TM) skirts reinforce its tampons, Tampax has labeled the vignette "boring" in a courier font.

But, hey, wake up vagines- it doesn't have to be so!  Cardboard is a party in the pants.  After the gynecological swap-out, the illustrated girl has changed into a polka-dotted frock with a nipped waist and a chunky bangle.  Also, looks to me like she cut layers.  The "yo yo yo"-ing is in an italic font, usually employed to suggest quotation, so she and the cat are probably dancing to what the kids call hip-hop.  Or maybe the tampon is what's being quoted, since there are props (popcorn, bowl, couch) in the other tableau, whereas this one is free of worldly markers.  No boom-box, no accident.  The girl's feet aren't planted firmly on the ground but on the cusp of the anti-slip grip porthole.  She is in tampon ether.  The cat might be floating itself.  It doesn't loathe the girl anymore.  It wishes it weren't spayed.

And apparently, skirts are the new trend in tampon advertising because Playtex's latest offering has consumers picturing tampons as pink girls who go up inside you and then twirl, twirl, twirl!

Demi Moore And The Blog Go In For Facelifts

Well, to be fair, Demi just probably went in for a facelift consultation. 

Since today I hit what I think is the halfway point of the new book, it's time to chuck the To Feel Stuff blog theme and go with The New Book one.  By the way, the book isn't actually going to be called The New Book.  It has a title, but I love it so much and am so concerned that someone else might use it before I officially can that I'm keeping it under wraps for awhile longer.  Still, if you look at the elements of the new blog design, you can kind of tell what the book's going to be about.  Maybe.  Or at least the, uh, "texture" of it.

As you've probably noticed, things are going to be quiet around here during this month since I'm working to finish the new book by my birthday in the fall and am also working on the second draft of the Panda script.  And am consulting on novel manuscripts and providing advice for the young alumni of my alma mater and prepping my syllabus for my fall intermediate fiction class at Loyola and reading the 600+ page books I always said I would (why now, I don't know) and running like a fiend and cooking instead of heating dinners and trying to book a long-needed haircut.  Good thing I mysteriously lost my ability to sleep or I'd be in really deep shit.