Too much food (Too much Disney?)

I’m in Spokane, Washington. No, I didn’t lie about moving to LA just so I could move in with my parents. I leave for LA tomorrow!

I’m bummed I can’t be at Rodeo Bar or Hold For The Laughs tomorrow night (those were the comedy shows I produced in New York). But I am going to Disneyland on Friday, where I will go up to Mickey Mouse and say “I’ve waited my whole life to meetchu!!” just like the little girl in the commercial that plays before the feature on my The Santa Clause VHS.

When I am at home with my parents in Spokane, I can’t stop eating. I ate a lot in NYC, but it was on the proper schedule and I got a lot of exercise (walking). At home, I get bored, and when I’m full, I eat more. The food here is fantastic and not at all boring. Whatever you want, you just write it down on a piece of paper called a grocery list, and then it magically appears in a few hours.

In NYC, for the entire month of August and half of September, my breakfast was Mickey Mouse Shaped Chicken Nuggets. Oh god, now you think I have a Disney problem. No, that’s simply what they sell at Costco. I made it my mission to finish that large bag before I moved, and I did. And I lost five pounds or something. That’s my guess anyway, because I shipped my scale three weeks before the move. Maybe I should write a diet book about nuggets for breakfast? Readers, you may vote on that in the comments section of the blog.

The image I found of a Mickey Mouse Nugget looked gross, so I'm not using it.

But here in Spokane, trying to eat all the groceries is disastrous to my waistline, simply because there are so many groceries. I have tried to solve the problem by eating out, like I would in New York. But now it’s worse, because not only do I have groceries, but I also have leftover Italian and Chinese food.

Right now, I just had my second dinner. And I’m still full from my second breakfast!

LA will set me right again. How do I know? Because I’ll be with my boyfriend, whose favorite foods are broccoli and frozen blueberries.

Peptember Chorth

It’s my birthday! “Peptember Chorth” is the hint that several friends use to remember it. I haven’t talked to my mom today yet, but I have to remember to be sensitive. I was 9lbs when I was born, and that can’t be a pleasant memory.

Tonight, my friends who don’t have Labor Day Weekend travel plans will celebrate at the Cherry Tree in Park Slope. It’s one of my favorite bars.

I always go to a favorite bar on my birthday. My first bar birthday was at Rennies in Eugene. The next year, I was in DC with my parents briefly visiting them before my move to New York, and we went to this fancy little bar in Alexandria. I can’t remember what it was called, but it was one of my favorites because my dad paid for the drinks.

My first NYC birthday was at Bamboo 52. The birthday girl drinks for free, and her friends get a good happy hour. A friend from Iowa and a friend from New York hooked up in the bathroom that night. Worlds collide.

Last year, I was in Anchorage, Alaska for my birthday. I met my boyfriend’s wonderful family, went hiking, camping, and observed lots of moose. It was a difficult time for me emotionally, because a good friend had just had an accident two weeks prior and was in a coma. When I returned, I had my party near the hospital Joe was in, at one of his favorite bars: Rodeo Bar. It was a wonderful evening, even though there was some kind of small hurricane/major rain. Also, Joe couldn’t be there. But damn, those margaritas are STRONG.

Today, I’m making cookies. When I woke up, I listened to the cast recording of Bright Lights, Big City. Many people aren’t aware that it was made into a musical. Judge as you wish. I made the dogs’ airline reservations and walked to the store for cookie stuff. My dog, Donna, is being extra attentive to me, like she “knows” or something. And for the first time in years, I get to celebrate my birthday with my sister. I wish Joe could be there tonight, but I’ll visit him this weekend, and we’ll have some laughs. Dan can’t be there tonight either, since he’s working in LA, but knowing that we’ll be living in the same place very soon makes me the happiest. I have a very good feeling.

Celebrity Sighting

While I was working at the bakery, I was also working at the cafe at the Bowery Poetry Club. Very nice place and people, but it was my first time as a barista and I was terrible at it. And they had a juicer. When someone would ask for juice, I would plead with them to please order something else. “I hate the juicer!”

I worked there for about a month, and right after I quit, I would still go in sometimes for an apple cider (just in case the person behind the counter hated making lattes like I did). One night, I was really early for a date and decided to kill some time with a cider. The man at the door collecting cover charges for the band said to me, “Hey. I saw you in a play.”
“Oh, no. I haven’t done any plays here yet. I just moved here. You probably recognize me because I used to work in the cafe.”
“Nope. I saw you in a play. Last year in Eugene, Oregon. After Mrs. Rochester.”
“Really? You saw that?”
And then he started saying some of my lines in the appropriate British accent. “Mother! Open the door! Please, Mother! Open the door!” as he knocked on the wooden table in front of me.

I was pretty flattered. Turns out, he is friends with the lovely Dakota Witt and he was doing poetry slam stuff in Eugene that weekend. It was still strange that he recognized me. I had to dye my hair dark for that show, and when he saw me that night, I was very blonde.

I finished my cider and walked over to meet my date at the Comedy Cellar.

Cookie seduction

My first job in New York was at a bakery. The owner said she thought I was on a “management track.” I was the only white person behind the counter. I was paid more than anyone else I worked with, even though I was the only one who didn’t go to pastry school. I quit after two weeks.

But the cookies were great, and any cookies that weren’t sold went home with us (or were thrown away). I really liked the “Blueberry Everything” cookie. It had everything!

I was standing on the subway platform in my black pants and hot pink collared shirt, holding a bag of cookies. I spotted an attractive, mid-twenties blonde man wearing a suit 15 feet away from me. Another man was playing the violin in between us. The man in the suit dropped some bills in the other man’s violin case. I dropped some bills in too, and smiled. Then I turned away a little and started flirtaciously eating a Blueberry Everything, slowly, in case it took him awhile to notice. On cue, he approached me and said, “You got any more cookies?”

We shared the cookies on the subway train back to Brooklyn and he asked me out on a date. I was thrilled, and I was pretty sure we had an appropriately adorable story of how we met in case he turned out to be my soulmate.

I met him for dinner that evening. The conversation was pretty good, but then it turned to politics.
“I’m a Republican,” he said.
I told myself that shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. If he is smart about the issues and respectful of my different political views, I can respect his views too.
“So you voted for George W. Bush in the last election?”
“Yep, I like him.”
(I had had a few glasses of wine). “I see. You like him. What conservative issues do you specifically support?”
“Oh. Yeah, see I don’t really know too much about politics. I just like him. Because he’s like, the underdog. And I always try to root for the underdog.”

There was no going back. He said that, and as much as I tried to pretend that he hadn’t, I would always remember it. The date ended after dinner. He offered me a bunch of free perfume/lip gloss/beauty products that he got from Victoria’s Secret Corporate Office where he worked.
“Take whatever you want. I’ll give my mom whatever you don’t want.”

He asked me out on a second date. I reluctantly agreed, then cancelled four hours before via text message saying I had “to go to Whole Foods, sorry.” He texted me back that I was “sketchy and weird.” I deserved that.

“

Bushwick

“I live in East Williamsburg.”
“Which stop?”
“Montrose.”
“That’s Bushwick.”

No offense to my pals who live in Bushwick. I’m told it’s nicer than it was three years ago. When I moved out after only five months, I wondered if I would ever have a reason to go back. I doubted it. This was before I started comedy. Turns out, over 50% of NYC up and coming comedians live in Bushwick, do jokes about it onstage, and throw parties on their roofs. So I do make it out to Bushwick occasionally and the roofs are very nice.

At least on the Montrose stop, not much has changed. Cafe Moto is still there, that’s a nice place. When I first moved there, all I had within 10 blocks was five chinese restaurants, six laundromats, a karate school, and a Papa Johns. “Duck Duck” opened just before I moved out of Bushwick, and I’m sorry Duck Duck fans, but those bartenders were so rude to me and my boyfriend-at-the-time, we left the establishment in favor of Papa Johns.

How did a wide-eyed optimistic girl from Iowa end up in Bushwick? I was not a comedian. Who would recommend this neighborhood? A few days before I planned to go to New York to look for places with the couple I had agreed to live with, I get a call from the girl part of the couple.
“We found a place! It’s perfect! It’s in Williamsburg, just two stops off the L”
“Does it have a bathtub?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sold!”

And that was it. In September 2006, I went to New York and took the L two stops. It looked pretty cool. I started walking. Asking for directions to Manhattan Ave. I walked for about forty-five minutes, got to see the Marcy Projects and also some really sketchy areas. Turns out, my apartment was not the 2nd stop on the L. It was the 5th. I had left time to explore the neighborhood, which was good, because by the time I got to the apartment, it was exactly time to meet my landlord. He was an hour and half late, so I just waited for him at the Papa Johns.

I was pretty worried at this point. The neighborhood was sketchy. The landlord showed up and I saw the apartment. My room was small, but had “roof access.” Roof access meant that the landlord had not put bars on the windows for my safety, but I would be able to go out onto the small, dirty roof that didn’t look entirely secure. I avoided the roof and signed up for renter’s insurance.

The mailbox was on the outside of the building. It’s the kind of mailbox you put on your house in Iowa, no lock. So all the mail would get stolen every day. The landlord would talk excitedly about the new mailbox he was planning to install INSIDE the building. For a month, he talked about this mailbox and how it would solve our mail theft problems for good. One day I came home and saw that a new mailbox had been installed. Not inside, where the landlord said it would be, but outside, in place of the old one. It looked just like the old one, except that it had a lock and key. The landlord gave me the key, but I never bothered to use it. It was simply easier to reach into the slot in the mailbox that the mail carrier uses to insert the mail. The slot was just wide enough for someone, perhaps me, or perhaps a thief, to reach his/her hand in to retrieve the mail each day.

Right after that happened, the front door broke. The landlord, concerned for my safety, told me to be very careful walking home. He thinks someone broke the door on purpose because he is mad that the landlord “owed him a lot of money.” That landlord still owes me a lot of money. I should have seen it coming. Anyway, if I was ever walking back to the apartment and it felt like someone was following me, I should not stop at my apartment, but keep walking so I would trick the criminal. Then, when I felt like no one was following me, I should then go to the apartment.

Shortly after that, I left the sketchy apartment, the crazy landlord, and the abusive couple and I moved to Manhattan. I do go back to Bushwick from time to time for comedy parties, and my friends who live there have much better apartments than mine was. Sure, they get mugged from time to time, but they’re comedians, and getting mugged is “material.”

I left Bushwick, moved to Manhattan, and now I live in Brooklyn again. I haven’t been to Papa Johns since.

Goodbye for now, New York!

Big news! I’m moving to Los Angeles in three weeks. I woke up yesterday still planning to switch off every two weeks between New York and LA (long distance relationship), and I went to bed with visions of Los Angeles Craigslist housing classifieds dancing in my head.

On September 12th, I will have lived in New York for three years. I love it here. I’ll live here again, certainly. I’m one of those people who really really wants to raise kids in the city. I have wanted to live in NYC since I was nine years old. I begged my parents to ship me off to a boarding school out here, and when I was fifteen, I encouraged my dad to purchase an apartment in the city that I could perhaps make good use of as a college student at NYU.

Every day for the next few weeks, I’ll recount a funny New York story on this blog. That means you won’t get to hear about when the pregnant masseuse walked on my back during a Swedish massage in the Philippines, or when I threw a martini at my ex-boyfriend at a wedding I attended in Portland. Just the New York stuff. Get ready!

This picture captures the sweet naivete of a new New Yorker. September 2006.

The Meaning of Wife

What am I most excited about in August 2009? This show.

I’m producing The Meaning of Wife with Theatre Témoin at the New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC). It stars two terrific women, comedian Erin Judge and actress Ailin Conant.

Erin and Ailin have been friends (and sometimes, ahem, more than friends) since college. Now in their mid-twenties, these two women both find themselves in the unexpected position of being somebody’s wife. Ailin also HAS a wife (which is pretty confusing for people’s grandmothers), while Erin has a husband, matching towels, and a huge white dress that she has justifed holding on to by doing this show.

The Meaning of Wife is part sketch comedy, part public relations campaign, and all way too much information about Erin and Ailin. This funny and brutally honest piece explores what marriage looks like in some of its newest manifestations (read: gay ones) and its most traditional (read: a white dude and a white chick), and what every kind of marriage has to teach us all about what it means to be a wife.

“It’s hilarious, it’s topical, it’s fun, and, most of all, it’s our true story. We enjoy using humor to reveal the absurdities of what kinds of marriages are sanctioned by law and what kind are not. And we’re out to challenge what people think of when they hear the word ‘wife.’” –Erin Judge

FringeNYC is one of the most fun ways to see theatre, and I urge to see as much as you can. Some shows will be great, some will disappoint, but The Meaning of Wife is definitely a winner.

The Meaning of Wife runs August 21-29th at The Actor’s Playhouse. Learn more about the show and incredible performers here .
Buy your tickets in person at FringeCentral (Crosby between Spring and Broome) or online from Ticketweb.

For recommendations on other great Fringe shows, check out Hyreviews.

8 Inches

4th of July 2007 I was single. That summer, I had dating escapades of all varieties, but one of the most memorable guys I was seeing that summer took me out for the 4th of July. It ended up pouring down rain, so we didn’t have a romantic evening under the fireworks. We went out to sushi and one of my favorite bars, which I won’t mention since he was pals with the bartenders there and they might just tease him forever.

Sushi was good. Have you ever tried to eat one of those giant rolls loaded with ingredients in just one bite, but the piece is so big your mouth becomes paralyzed with the amount of food and you can’t even chew so you listen to your date talk about his job scared out of your mind and praying that the food will magically dissolve before it’s your turn to speak? Yeah, that happened to me that night. I remember thinking, “At least it won’t get any more embarrassing than that was.” He laughed. Then he one-upped me.

“Oh, I’m noticing you eat two of one kind of sushi roll then two of another then two of another, like a pattern. You’re OCD like me!” he said.

Assuming he was just overusing the word OCD as a joke, I laughed. “OCD, yeah. Never noticed that before,” I said.

“I’m OCD about the number 8,” he continues. “I love to work out, as you know, but my inspiration is the number 8. I work out so that every body part is a multiple of 8.”

I laughed again, because that’s ridiculous. I even managed to keep myself from making a male enhancement joke, even though I was drunk.

“For example, my head is 56 inches around the skull. 8 x 7 = 56. And my neck is 16 inches. 2 x 8 = 16.”

He went through all his body parts from head to toe (literally from skull to foot), and also skipped any jokes about male enhancement, which I appreciated. He ended by taking off a shoe to show me the poorly drawn tattoo of eight flames that covered his entire right foot.

Tattoos gross me out (I can’t explain why), but the creepiness of the body part measurements trumped that one for the night. But of course I agreed to go on another date with him, because it usually takes some time before stuff like this really settles in enough to make me lose interest. “It’s a unique case of OCD, but not that big of a deal if we turn out to be soulmates, right?” said my brain.

July 8th was our next scheduled date. I cancelled that afternoon, and then went to an open mic in Greenwich Village to do standup for the first time.

My Old Flame

I attended a good friend’s wedding reception in Iowa last weekend. It was amazing reunion of friends of mine since junior high school that I haven’t seen all together in many years. I could describe my good friend in many ways, and one of them would be “first boyfriend.” I attended my first boyfriend’s wedding reception in Iowa last weekend.

What is a first boyfriend? It’s a boy you meet when you are eleven, performing in your first play, Peter Pan. Two years later, he calls you on your parents’ cordless phone to ask you on a date. Then he asks you your favorite color, which you say is blue even though it’s really pink but you are afraid pink is not a cool thing to say to a boy. Your parents drop you off at the movie theater, you meet him, his best friend, and his best friend’s girlfriend in the lobby, and purchase the tickets to Daylight with Sylvester Stallone. While the other couple is “making out” next to you, you stare at the screen. The boy does the same. As the credits roll, the boy turns to you and says, “Will you be my girlfriend,” as he pulls a small blue ring out of his pocket and confidently puts it on your finger.

There is one thing I really regret about those junior high school years. I really wish my best friend Heather and I didn’t have the routine of taking notes we got from boys, reading them aloud, laughing and crying at the embarrassment we felt, and finally ripping the notes into tiny pieces and flushing the pieces down the toilet.

Luckily, I have a really good memory.

I remember two things about the notes I got from Daniel. 1. On the back of the note he would draw a maze for me to follow during study hall. 2. One note he gave me said, “You are so hot. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being really ugly and 10 being Nicole Kidman, you are a 6.”

And I knew he meant that as a compliment.

The day before I left for Iowa, I found a note that I’d written to Daniel in high school. A love letter that somehow managed to move with me into six different apartments in the last seven years, just hiding away for me to discover. I had the brilliant idea that I would give the note to Daniel at the wedding reception. But I decided against it when I remembered how I really like his wife and would like her to continue to like me also. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea here! It’s a pretty funny letter. It’s written on United Airlines drink napkin. Here is an excerpt:

I’m probably creeping out the other passengers on this airplane as I write on this napkin while eating airplane pretzels and drinking airplane water. But I don’t care. Just so you know, I am listening to the John Mayer song of the week, “Comfortable,” and it will most likely be on repeat until I land in Denver.

That’s the least embarrassing part of the letter.

This is what Daniel and I looked like when we were boyfriend and girlfriend:

 

Yay!  Daniel and Jessica, I wish you all the best. Congratulations!

Michael Jackson

Everyone is all a-twitter (and all a-facebook status updating) about Michael Jackson’s death. And from Park Slope to Herald Square to Times Square to Harlem to Randall’s Island (the places I’ve been in the last 24 hours), people are talking about him and playing his music from the stores and from their cars.

It’s nice that the overall vibe is positive, as opposed to the all the negative words people said during his trial a few years ago. I remember watching the trial and being relieved that he was found not guilty, but it seemed like most people felt the other way. It turns out, many of my NYC friends were feeling that same way I did, I just didn’t know them yet.

I have many fond memories that relate to Michael Jackson. The students at my college who performed Thriller over and over all day long every year on Halloween. Becoming a fan of Weird Al when I was 9. Reading Zlata’s Diary, “the Anne Frank of Sarajevo,” who mentioned being a big MJ fan in the book. Choreographing Beat It for a neighbor kid to perform on my porch when I was 10– he abandoned the choreography during the performance and just spun around and bounced off the walls and it was wonderful. Dating a guy who called me PYT. Writing my own parody of Heal the World, with lyrics that joked about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. That VH1 original movie about the Jacksons (which I think I saw playing just last week on someone’s tv in Iowa). I could go on.

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson! The world loves you.