This Afternoon In Drama

The Men's Wearhouse Do Us Part

At the cryptside portion of my dad's funeral, we couldn't help but be distracted by one of the floor-to-ceiling/roof murals on an outward facing wall of the structure.  Brent's first impulse was to wonder, "Do people come and get married here?" and initially I was like, "Hmm," and then a second later I realized, "No.  Nooooo way."  No way do people rent out the Jewish cemetery like it's a Hilton ballroom.  So then we decided that this art was meant for the spouses in the crypts and the couple getting married in the mural must be dead, and what with all the grief and the shock and the sadness of my dad's death, we just left the analysis at that.

But then we went to go bring roses to my dad's crypt yesterday, and at first it was like, "Hey, that bride looks a lot like a young Barbra Streisand.  Check out that profile.  Yentl gets married," and so on and so on, but then I started to become more perplexed by the subtler details.  You'd think that if you made it up to heaven to remarry your wife or renew your vows or whatever [JUST DATE, YOU GUYS], you'd have a well-fitting suit by that point.  Those slacks are a nightmare.  (Fun fact: directly behind the groom's ass rests Milton Berle.)   You'd also think those two would have moved past the veil ruse.  He knows.  He knows about the nose already.  And because I'm figuring that the rabbi has to be dead too if he's up there to marry them, does he really want to spend his celestial eternity working??  If I were him, I'd be like, "Look, I spent forty years doing this at Temple Beth Israel with the Spock fingers and breaking the wine glasses and the speeches, and now I just kind of want to kick back and hang out and not get sucked into, you know, your personal drama."

It's a really weird vignette to put up in a cemetery.

So weird that you can't help but want to go and have your picture taken in front of the happy couple pretending as if you're their bastard child they asked to participate in the ceremony.  Trust me.  You can't.

What Came With My Credit Card Statement

"I do NOT want to go to a retirement home.  Up until now it's been all Snickerdoodles in tins and knitted blankets and sawbucks folded into the kids' birthday cards, but maybe that's given you some sort of false impression.  I realize that impression may be that I will not Fuck You Up.  But this mole under my right eye that you have always believed was a mole?  Paradigm shift.  It is an old burn scar from when my papa tried to send me off to boarding school at the age of nine, and he would not understand that I did NOT want to go.  We battled near the pot belly stove and in the struggle I may have gotten a hot poker to the below-eye, but at least I lived to see another day, meet your father, and let you out of the death-clamp of my vagina.  Maybe you want to put that brochure down.

Have you ever thought about these golden hoops I always wear?  I'm sure you haven't.  You've got your heavy bikram yoga schedule which has you, as you put it, "sweating out [your] brains," I know.  I'm sure you've merely considered them an old woman's pathetic attempt at adorning her papery lobes, but if you would have looked closer, you would have noticed that I wear them in my third hole.  Yes.  Third.  You may be surprised to know that I have nine holes in the left, ten in the right, and that fifteen of these were given to me, along with these hoops, by a Spanish Harlem street gang that nicknamed me "The Bull" after I gave their ringleader "The Oakland Special."  You might know this technique better as "Curb Stomping," seeing as how you're far too much of a pussy to have ever gotten anywhere near Oakland.

Did you chalk the sharp arch my eyebrows suddenly took during the last decade up to a laughable maintenance effort to combat the slippage of my face-skin?  I seem to have some news for you.  My above eye-hairs are long gone and what remains are tattoos I gave myself, prick by prick, after I burned off the originals while setting fire to the house behind me that was blocking my view of whatever the fuck's back there.  My eyelashes sacrificed themselves to the flames as well, and I now recreate the appearance of them using the charred finger of the homeowner who was sleeping inside.  I don't know what I'll do when I finally wear the souvenir digit down to a nub, but the Internet is really so handy and great, isn't it?, and I believe I will look into shipping myself a pot of Egyptian kohl straight from the source.

So perchance, while you came to me this afternoon and said, "Mom, there's something I'd like you to think about," you are now starting to feel as though you want to adjust that statement to something more like, "Mom, you've given me so much to think about."  And you might want to take that brochure and keep it on hand to roll up and swat at the flies buzzing around the animal carci (what's the plural of carcass?  All these years and all these carci (???), and I still don't know!!) that will show up in the funniest places around your home if I get one more message on my phone-machine from a woman suggesting that I come take a tour of her death-motel of active corpses.

I'm sure we understand each other by now, and I don't have to bother getting into why it is that I am wearing the bangs of the social worker you sent over to spy on me, which I took as a trophy and applied (along with a scalp strip) using a tube of fingernail glue I found in the junk drawer.  You thought I decided to higgledly-piggledy cut some after half a lifetime in the same hairstyle?  That's funny and cute.  I'll see you at Thanksgiving."