This Afternoon In Drama

Waiting for Godoats

I wouldn't consider myself a thoroughly manipulative person.  I mean, every once and awhile I'll make a perfectly calibrated sad face when Brent suggests we bake fish until he arrives upon the idea of going and buying me Chicken McNuggets, and it's been a really long time since I engineered that infighting amongst my sixth grade clique that led to my successful self-installation as its leader.  It's not like I go around thinking that my desires are so crucial that I'm in the right by bending others' wills to serve them.

But, look, I've wanted goats for a really long time.  When I moved onto this property and saw there was a patch of land in the back that would be perfect for a couple of them, I thought to myself, "Oh, wouldn't that be nice, wouldn't that be something."  But then, when my landlords started talking about getting a dairy cow for that patch, my will locked in tight-- GOATS-- and like the improbably sized black hole in the Star Trek movie, it began spinning and sucking, wanting to destroy anything in the vicinity that wasn't itself.

"Hey," I'd email my landlord, having just come back from the pet shop around the corner.  "There was this flier on the bulletin board saying that someone's giving away free goats!  Isn't that exciting?"  I reasoned that a free goat in the hand could spur action quicker than the cow in the bush that puts you out a few hundred bucks and is a pain in the ass to procure from that crazy stinky spot all the way up the 5 freeway.

Still, there was talk of the cow.  My landlord had started buying raw milk from a cow at a farm somewhere just outside Los Angeles, and she raved about the quality, sang the wonders of the skin that floats on top.  I was completely fine (and even happy!) with the prospect of a cow coming to live here, but felt we needed to keep our priorities-- our priorities being my strong preference-- straight.  Goats.  First.  Since a zero financial investment hadn't been coercive enough to bring those goats home, I began working on a more emotional tactic.  I preyed on possible feelings of underachievement, as my landlords often spoke about how much work there was to do around the property that they never had time to get to.

"Man, the yard sure does grow fast," I'd say when I took my dog out for her afternoon shit.  "You can barely see Christmas's little head sticking out above those weeds."  Christmas would help me out with the act, pretending to have difficulty finding her way out of the jungle.  Then, murmuring, I'd say, as if to myself, "Some goats would really take care of this overgrowth.  Yeah, [sigh] they sure would.  Some goats.  Cute motherfuckers would eat this all down."

A book arrived about cow-keeping.  The landlords announced that they'd checked with city ordinance to find out if they had enough acreage to legally keep a cow.  They did.

I found out that a nearby neighbor was keeping two goats in his front yard, and they were beautiful ambassadors for the species.  I emailed my landlord, giving her the address, "Oh my god, you need to go look at these goats!  You're going to fall in love!"  She did and came back gushing about the two, saying that they were "so cute" that she had to take a picture because they looked like they were just hanging out, talking to one another.  "So cute!" I agreed.  "So cute, right?"

The cow talk began to die down.  And was replaced by talk of chickies.

I found another goat living a few blocks up from us at a children's day school.  He was old and his bleating was just about the saddest thing you could ever hear, and I thought he might be perfect for igniting a certain generalized sympathy for goats.  "You should go see this goat as soon as you get home," I texted my landlord while she was across the country in New York.  I'd talk the old man up for awhile before I'd take the dog on a walk to go visit him.  "He's such a sweet, sad guy, he'll just about take your heart."  Inwardly, I wondered if we could take him home-- there was no way those kindergartners knew how to treat a goat right.  Then he died, proving me correct.

My landlords began to debate how best to build a chicken coop.

I'd hunted down some illustrations I'd done of goats (well, to be precise, one was a pirate goat) in high school that my mom had been keeping in her laundry room, leading to their slight water damage, and I brought them here to the mansion.  Maybe I had to get those goat reminders matted and framed and then hang them in the downstairs entryway that I share with the staircase to the basement.  Maybe my landlords had to pass goats every day for that desire to really sink in, had to undergo regular visual persuasion like that in A Clockwork Orange, except less violent.   I had just recently noted a big frame sale going on at Aaron Brothers to Brent, when--

I received an email from my landlord on May 12th that the property was getting two goats.  Lily and her daughter, Rosie, our beautiful Nubian goat princesses, arrived this morning.

Victory.  Now I can turn my energies elsewhere.

Homeward Bound

I've been busy because I've been down in Irvine while my mom has surgery.  Between the two of my parents, I've been to the hospital so much that when I walk in the door and the volunteer tries to direct me to my destination, I'm like, oh honey, go find someone who can make you useful; that's what keeps us all alive, feeling useful.  Inevitably I'll get in the elevator with a guy who asks me why I'm there, and I'll him I'm having quints.

In the meantime I've moved into my mom's house, which disorients me when I wake in the middle of the night and can't understand when or why I redid my bedroom in an all-encompassing nautical strip with floral accents.  It takes me a few seconds to say, holy shit, I'm in the den of my formative years.  It would be no better were I sleeping in my childhood bedroom, which my mom unfortunately took from "underwater wonderland" almost the second I stepped out of the house, only to turn it into into "surrender to sage."  Happily, though, even though she thought she got rid of it, I tracked down my favorite troll from my trip to Norway.  Norway in Epcott, of course.  My Dances With Whales poster was not so fortunate, maybe because it doesn't have the inherent luck of the troll.

While living here, I'm doing things that would make my mom crazy were she watching me because in times like this, even if we don't all have our health, we still have ourselves.  So there's really nothing left but to be true to those selves, which is why when my mom recuperates and finally gets to see the following picture, I'm going to celebrate the fact that she's calling me to yell about it.

See you back here soonish.  In other internet activity, my former student Jane has put up an interview she did with me at Coco's.  I learned all over again that I use more "like"s than the Jonas Brother day player who's been pretending to be John Mayer's girlfriend.  Oh well, there's nothing left to do but go drown my compounded sorrows in liters of Sprite.  Let it be.

Dancing With The Chairs

I always liked Cloris Leachman as an actress, but I didn't become really interested in her as a person until she came on Jimmy Kimmel's show after being ousted from Dancing With The Stars.  She walked on the stage in her sherbet ombre dancing dress and banana colored evening gloves, already laughing the second she sat down.  Before Jimmy could attempt to start interviewing her, she began analyzing the logistics of how she should sit because her feet couldn't touch the ground unless she struck an awkward pose.  She turned around in her seat, her back to Jimmy, and suggested that she just put her feet up on the next chair.  He was already smitten.  She then got on her knees on her chair, bent over, and put her elbows on his desk, her face in his face.  Still unsatisfied, she lifted up the chair's cushion and sat down in the frame.  Her feet dragged on the floor.  Jimmy had moved past smitten into true love.  She slid down to the floor.  Jimmy said that he thought he should just come around to the front of the desk and sit with her.  She leaned against his shoulder and did her interview from the carpet, correcting Jimmy's grammar throughout.

When we went and saw Cloris talk at the neighborhood library this week, she did some more of these furniture gymnastics.  Worried that the people in the back rows wouldn't be able to see her in a normal chair, she began dragging a large, round table from the side so she could climb onto that.  Climb onto that backwards, slapping her ass and cracking herself up.  Concerned, the library event organizer came over with one of those high rolling chairs that goes up and down, and Cloris then climbed onto that instead, holding onto the back of the chair while kneeling.  And then she began to spin herself round and round until finally, her son stopped her for the interview.

I've long been bothered by the idea of people being treated as if they're funny or cute simply because they've gotten so old that society cycles back to the beginning for reference and infantilizes them again.  The woman introducing Cloris at the library spoke to her as if she were a five-year-old ("and we hear you've just come from the dennnnnnnntist!"), but the reason that Cloris's humor is not cute-funny is because it is, for one thing, very calculated.  She knows what she looks like climbing onto a chair and she knows it works every time-- not only did she do the bit on Jimmy, but she did it to Tom Bergeron, in the library, and I'm sure frequently at the Christmas dinner table as well.  This isn't the surprised humor of the kid who happens upon something funny and keeps repeating it to make adults laugh, and it isn't the patronized humor of the senior who still displays some form of spunk that gets everyone going about how hilarious it is that she's doing something besides gumming carrots.  What differentiates Cloris's humor is that when Cloris climbs on a chair and spins herself around in a circle while spanking herself, there is nobody in that room who is more amused than she is, and that's what makes you laugh.  She gives a fuck that she entertains you, but she doesn't give a fuck if you're not entertained by the same things she is.

So, at the library, Cloris spun around in the chair (the photo at left comes courtesy of Timothy Rutt).  She took notice of a seventyish woman in pigtails and Mary Janes who kept piping in with comments, badly wanting Cloris's attention, and so Cloris read the poem the woman gave her aloud.  And made fun of it.  "Does anybody understand a word of this?" she asked and burst out in a honking round of laughter.  Still, the woman loved her because you can't not.  First she tried to give Cloris the floppy denim hat she was wearing-- "I bought it at a thrift store" she said by way of encouragement-- and Cloris, after asking if the woman had washed the hat, pressed it firmly back onto the woman's head with a there, there tap..  When the woman then tried to give Cloris her cardigan, Cloris said, "Oh, I don't want that," and secured it tighter on the woman, and the refusal was somehow both funny and kind while cutting too.

She talked about having just worked with Quentin Tarantino on Inglourious Basterds, and she asked the audience, "His face is like...who's that artist?" and seconds later answered herself, "Picasso.  He's like a Picasso.  He's looking at you straight, but still it's like everything's on sideways."  And then cracked herself up.

She got into politics a little, discussing how worried she became when Bill Clinton became very fat, prompting her to call the White House and talk to his secretary for forty-five minutes about his health.  She asked if anyone in the room liked Nancy Reagan, and then, without waiting for a response, started laughing wholeheartedly and said, "I hate her!  She's the biggest pill!"  Laughing some more, she said joyfully, "And she looks terrible!"

She talked about the line of chiffon tunics she launched, and which she models in the latest Us Weekly.  She instructed us on the many ways you can tie them up or down, depending on your mood.

In the middle of the talk, she got on her cell's speaker phone to her ex-husband, George Englund, and when he asked where she was, she laughed hard and told him in delighted bewilderment, "I'm in Altadena, George!" as if she were calling from Antarctica.  I haven't finished her book yet, so I can't tell you why they divorced, but he seemed just as endlessly entertained by her as he should be, and he also seemed smart not to have let her out of his life when I can't imagine a person who wouldn't kill to welcome her into theirs.

When it came time to sign books, we waited and went up to Cloris, and I asked, "Will you make it out to Andrea and Brent?"  Without hesitation, she began drawing arrows down the middle of the title page, explaining, "This way you'll know where to split it if you break up."  And then she cracked herself and us up.  I don't doubt that she hasn't done this routine in some other couple's book before, and I don't doubt that it amused her just as much the first time she came up with it as it did when she was drawing in our copy.  "No, no, I'm sure it will work out," she said as she handed it over, and the delivery of that line had us all laughing again, because it was another perfect joke.