Clareified

A DAWN SUMMERS ORIGINAL PRODUCTION:

Spending Too Much Time With Republicans: Three Conversations

Me: My friend Pi wants interest rates to go up.
Pearatty: Me too! Then when all those people with their O% down adjustable mortages go into foreclosure I can buy their houses.
Me: Yeah…remember when dispossessing people was a bad thing?
Pearatty: Well, these irresponsible people are the reason prices are so high.
Me: That is true. Hmmm…and I guess I could pick up a rental property…

Me: If Israeli troops have occupied Lebanon, I don’t see how this isn’t a war.
Pearatty: Well, it’s the part of Lebanon that used to be part of Israel.
Me: What? Israel gave land back to Lebanon? WTF? This is why these countries keep attacking them, they are just too reasonable.
Pearatty: Yeah, I saw an interview with this guy who was complaining that the bombing campaign was unfair because ‘the last time we kidnapped the Israeli soldiers, they negotiated with us for their return.”
Me: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA…Now, they’re all “what’s up with our streets blowing up? What happened to the negotiations?!!!

Pearatty: Well, after Katrina, I seriously thought about getting a gun.
Me: To shoot the flood waters?

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED…

I so thought those two crazy kids would make it.

P.S.

By the way, Justin:
Timberlake’s second solo album, “FutureSex/LoveSounds,” will be released September12. His first single from the CD, “SexyBack,” began playing on U.S. radio outlets earlier this month.

“I didn’t want to be that ‘guy from the boy band,’ ” says Timberlake, formerly of ‘N Sync.

Go to hell. And see you on the ‘Nync reunion tour in three years.

AND IT’LL SUCK TO WALK 12 FLIGHTS UP TO MY APARTMENT…

I really shouldn’t say anything about the blackout in Queens.
Really, really, cause it’ll just mean a blackout in Brooklyn next week.
However.
I once wrote:

Indeed, Queens is not Jersey. No, Sir. Queens is Oklahoma. Or Kansas. Or…Poland.
Seriously.
The streets are lined with white picket-fenced houses, with little old ladies sitting out front. American flags jut out from every second floor. I cannot tell you the depths of creepiness reached when one gets onto a NYC subway car and gets off in Kansas.

Which might explain why the lights went out in Queens and nobody in the rest of the city noticed.

SILENT NIGHT

I must have fallen asleep.
I know this because the playlist is 34 songs long.
I quietly hummed my way through the Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat songs, and vaguely remember hearing the echoes of the “Once more with feeling” soundtrack play in my head.
But there is no memory of the Rocky Horror Picture Show songs, before I vividly start to hear my Avenue Q favorites.
A tell-tale four song gap.
I blinked in the darkness through the Beatles portion and now, awash in my country music selections, I am wide awake and ready for the day.
Unfortunately, it is 3:15 a.m. and “day” is a long way off.
Thus, once again we’ll commence with some “since I’m up” blogging.
Tonight was my West Coast party.
Every year…usually as I hover 30,000 feet over the middle of the country in a tin can, surrounded by strangers, with my face pressed against a plastic windowpane and my body shaking with sleep deprivation — I wonder at the sanity of my bi-coastal birthday affairs.
I’m definitely not doing this next year, I vow — squinting down at the landscape below and plotting how I will survive the certain plunge to the earth.
And then.
Well, and then I have a night like tonight.
A wonderfully hilarious sweet backyard BBQ illuminated with a string of Japenese lanterns replete with surprises –even though I planned every detail and handcrafted the guest list.
I’ll eventually get around to writing up my crazy wacky birthday season ‘06, from Pi volunteering and making a freaking five course meal for me and my closest twenty friends, to pearatty agreeing to bake a cake in 112 degree heat in a kitchen with no AC– “cooling plan” notwithstanding— and of course, F-train winning the Tour de Summers yellow jersey by making all of my birthday parties this year — a feat not accomplished since 2000 and made ever more impressive by its three state span.
But that will come later.
For now, I’ll leave you with the one thought that keeps playing my head (other than dear Lord in heaven, why, WHY is Dawn awake).
Pearatty went for a haircut this morning. While her hair was coiffed, primped, washed, cut and dried right back to exactly where it started from, I decided to get a manicure and pedicure. (People now check for the infamous “cokenail.” Which is, you know, awesome.)
I sat perfectly still under the nail drying thing for two cycles. TWO.
I opened the door with the palm of my hands and even had the nail lady velcro up my shoe for me.
I barely opened the car door with my pinky and had pearatty fasten my seatbelt.
So, imagine my surprise and horror when I splayed out my fingers for a final inspection and discovered a perfect fingerprint imprinted on my left thumbnail. The polish around it smudged and slipped in a permanent mockery of my patience and care.
“Yeah, that’s why I don’t get manicures,” pearatty said shrugging her shoulders at my now-pouting face.
But the nail is not important. I just thought you should know. And I keep staring at it as I type.
The actual story is this:

My friend Macaroni is getting married.
Soon.
To look at her tonight, wearing an simple elegant black dress, with perfectly french manicured nails (no fingerprint smudges anywhere!) and flawess makeup, you could scarely tell that she was in the midst of such a dizzyingly gigantic undertaking as coordinating the arrival and care of a hundred relatives (old and new) in a strange city and the start of a marriage and ostensibly new life with her fiancee.
However.
Mention the wedding and she will animatedly tell you the following story:
She and her maid of honor went out dress shopping. When the girl, a childhood friend, tried on the strapless gown, her apparently six years of underarm hair growth protruded confidently from beneath.
And here Macaroni’s face takes on markedly distressed crinkling of the forehead as she says that before she could get a handle on the…umm…hairy situation…her maid of honor preemptively stated that she wouldn’t shave it. The hair was who she was and she wasn’t changing for anybody.
Well, after some back and forth, Macaroni resolved that the hair and the dress would not do.
And well, it was her wedding, so the dress was staying.
She approached her friend again with the diplomatic: “you’ve got to do something with it or we’ll have to find a new role for you in the wedding.”
Her friend agreed to a trim of sorts.
At the story’s end, Macaroni was out of breath and obviously still stressed about the whole matter.
“Can you believe that? Am I just being a crazy bridezilla or was that ridiculous?”
We all nodded sympathetically.
“Well, I know the thing to do is say I agree with you,” Ilsa said, “but you need to let it go. Underarm hair is not going to ruin your wedding.”
The discussion continued into the night, but the simple truth of Ilsa’s statement stuck with me.
A “don’t sweat the small stuff (and it’s all small stuff)” for the new millenia.
That I somehow managed to fingerprint myself in my newly manicured nails or go on an impromptu midnight gift bag hunt (or have blogger eat my first draft of this post) was annoying, but did not mar my totally fun night of beer tasting and finding ever creative ways to flip the bird.
(However, if Rick Blaine is found beaten about the head and shoulders and stuffed into the passenger seat of a locked light blue Porsche, it wasn’t me. I was home all night watching TV. Or in Atlantic City.)
So, as my birthday season comes to a close, and as I face at least another six hours of inexplicable awakeness, my wish for all of you (besides a backyard full of people willing to perform preliminary taste tests on your behalf and fabricate positive results, (including fake sounds of deliciousness and tummy rubbing) so that you will suffer as they suffered) is that you remember that underarm hair is not going to ruin your wedding.
Or something like that.

NOW THAT’S A SUPER MOVIE

My super ex girlfriend was super fantastic! Uma is great. Owen is a hilarious straightman. I finally laughed at something that sidekick dude from the Office says…just great.

Walk…run…fly…

Sigh…if only I could throw sharks at people…I would be unstoppable.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

pearatty: I admit, I haven’t taken any math classes since the 80s.

Me: That’s ok. I haven’t understood any of my math classes since the 80s.

HEY…

What is Senator Coors up to?

WHY IS DAWN AWAKE?

It is way past my bed time even by California time standards…however, I woke up this morning in Brooklyn. Then traveled forward back through time.
Yet, here I am.
Pearatty is off to bed. Beating me at Scrabble is tiring, what with all the crying and temper tantrum throwing which follows.
I think I’ll kill her in her sleep. Hmm…but she has to bake the cake tomorrow…ok, will kill her in her sleep the following day.
Well, since I’m up…
As per tradition, I flew West for my annual surprise birthday party. (Shh…don’t tell Dawn).
But of course, since poker is legal in the great state of California, I headed straight to the casino from the airport.
I have been obsessing about an internet poker “show” called Live at the Bike. They basically show people playing poker at the Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens.
And I wanted in!
Last year, I took the bus to The Commerce poker room, don’t believe the hype, people. You will not find love in Keanu’s arms taking the bus in L.A.
So, I decided to take a shared van this time around.
“I’m going out to the Bike.”
“To what?”
“The Bike.”
Dispatcher continues to stare blankly.
“Uhmm…the Bicycle…Casino…here…it’s in Bell Gardens.”
Sheesh, if I had a poker casino in my state, I would know all about it!
(For directions to Turning Stone Ask Me!)
He finally gets all the info down and twenty minutes later I piled into a shuttle van with nine children and two sets of parents and one grandmother.
Apparently, Bell Gardens is on the way to Anaheim.
When the shuttle pulls off the freeway and makes the turn into the Casino driveway, one of the tykes — no older than six — stands up and looks around.
“Is this Disneyland, mum?”
“No, we will go to Disneyland after the lady gets off at the Casino.”
The word hangs in the air. Accusingly.
Gulp.
I now have eighteen pairs of eyes staring at the me.
The roadblock to Mickey Mouse.
I grab my bags, avoid all eye contact and stuff the money into the driver’s hands.
Just.Make.Them.Stop.Staring.
Jeez…did they have to put the word Casino in such gigantic electrified letters?
Was that a lightning bolt I just saw?
I skulk off into the lobby and call pearatty to let her know I had arrived.
The girl I went to high school with and I have a casino poker playing motto of sorts.
It goes “at the tables by…”
As in…as the last of my birthday party guests called cabs and headed for the subway at around midnight…”hey…so, if we leave by 1, we could be at the tables by three…a.m.”
Or when the phone rings and I groggily answer on a Sunday morning, the voice on the other end says: “So, if we leave right now, we could be at the tables by noon.”
I so need to remember to hire Ron Lad to answer these calls.
Anyway, as I planned my day today, I figured that since my flight arrived at about noon…I would be at the tables by one.
Sigh…it was now almost three o’clock.
Not only did my Delta plane arrive late (ironically, it was the same late ass redeye that I flew two weeks ago), but there was a 30 plane-long line on the runway to fly out of JFK.
After we took off, the pilot apologized and added “we got a break because the Jetblue airbus in front of us had to turnback to refuel. Be grateful that you’re flying a 747.”
So, when pearatty asked what time I wanted her to come get me, I told her not to rush. We settled on six.
I told her to call me when she reached.
At six, my phone still hadn’t rung.
And of course, I was going to get as many hands in as possible.
At 6:10, I decided I would go outside to check.
At 6:15 I decided I was definitely going to go outside to check.
At 6:19 my cellphone alerted me that I had missed three calls and had voicemail.
WTF???
Indeed, pearatty had called when she was a mile away, then when she got there, then when she was waiting, then when she had to drive around to the back parking lot…
Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap…
I picked up my stuff, cashed out as quickly as is humanly possible (still really slowly, by the way) and went outside to look for her.
This is going to be “arrested outside the Commerce Casino” allll over again.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry” (Sorry -ed.)
“Just don’t listen to those last voice messages I left.”
Uh oh.
“How many languages did you curse me out in? Polish, English…French? Did you get some French in there?”
“And Japanese.”
When did she learn Japanese????
Then a bunch of stuff happened.
Of course, I decided to check my voicemessages.
Well…remember all that stuff that happened? Well, it pretty much happened all over again.
Seems that pearatty left her cellphone on the whole time after I entered the car up until I decided to retrieve my messages.
So, we got to relive the whole sorted mess again.
Including my adept changing of the subject from my being totally late to why will it be 112 freaking degrees in L.A. this weekend.
“Really? That doesn’t sound right. I expect to remain a balmy 98.6 degrees all weekend long.”
To my explaining that I’ve started wearing the glasses that the optometrist prescribed for me a few years ago.
“Yeah, I’ve been leaning in closer to the computer and I have to drive closer and closer to street signs to read what they say, but what really did it, was that I couldn’t see the suits on my cards. You think you have a flush but really don’t, just one time and it’s hellloooo glasses! How you doin’!”
Too bad Jan didn’t play poker.
Ok…well, the night/day/night is finally catching up to me…
G’night.

P.S. How is remap not a word? How are you supposed to express that you have mapped an area again?

TIED FOR QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Racism is funny.”

“That ride was really jolty.*” -pearatty

*54 points on a triple and “aren’t you going to mention that not only did I get 54 points, but then you challenged and lost your turn?” Me: No.

NOT SO RANDOM THOUGHT

I’ve got like four moods: confused, bitter, angry and whimsical.

Usually in that order.