DEAD INSIDE/Rob the Mob

The only upside of getting sick is movie watching.  I seldom read when I’m ill.  Although I love reading, somehow when I have the flu or whatever, I afford myself the luxury of binge watching.  It is something I never do because my television isn’t hooked up and because I like to do creative things with my free time, oh ya and I’m weird.

At any rate, I watched this movie about a tough guy.  Tough guy is different than Bad boy.  I grew up in the 80’s where “bad boy” meant a metal or a rock guy with fucked up hair who drank & drugged.  Not my type.  I had rough boyfriends who always had weapons tucked away in various locations and had dubious ways of making money and dangerous friends, but never did I date a guy who listened to Metal.

In the movie, the guy gets out of prison.  His girlfriend picks him up.  They’re young-ish.  They get drunk, they have sex.  Next, he hashes out a heist.  They’re in love.  They’re in Queens.  They smoke a lot.  He gets a gun and they drive their giant Chevy Impala and act out their plan of holding up mafia social clubs in the neighborhood because he figures out that they have a lot of cash lying around these joints.

In act three, he looks at her and says “Florida is nice.  We should go there.  Marry me.”  This is the point of the movie where a girl tears up.  Me=nothing.  Nothing happened.  No moisture developed in either eye socket.  Doesn’t matter if you’re a broad from Boston or not.  There’s nothing like when a man softens enough to say that.  And these were great actors.  I mean they nailed this scene.  He is brutally handsome and the camera loves his face.  She is unconventionally pretty in a down to earth way.  She said yes.  I should have been balling.

But, nothing.  Am I dead inside ?

I had this marriage that ended badly.  I’ve learned over time, you can’t hold on to how you wish things could be.  (I used to have a line in my act, “I just want to go to my gay boyfriend’s house, listen to Peggy Lee and cry over what could have been.”  These days I'm less fag hag, more John Goodman.

Now that I’m older I see how you can’t long for the you that was lost in that time period, that elusive "you" that you can’t get back.  BUT, I’m also stuck.  I’m not dating.  It’s like I’m blocked.  Like a giant black box is covering my heart completely. 

I can’t help feeling there is something missing.  As if there is some seed within me that hasn’t been cooked yet that needs time before I am ready, really ready, to address the black box.  I sort of hate personal growth, gurus and motivational speakers.  I hate shrinks, I hate mediation and I hate the notion that we all need “fixing.”  Shrinks I hate because at the end of a session you feel awful and then you go, “here’s a hundred bucks.” 

Maybe it’s exactly what I need though.  Life is nothing if it isn’t paradox.  

I used to cry at episodes of Mad About You.  That was the young me.  It was a really well written sitcom about a married couple where they respectively resolved all the dilemmas that plagued their lives in under twenty minutes.  Not really sure why that did it for me, but it did.  I didn’t even cry at Casablanca (because boo hoo he’s gonna die). <--- that makes me seem shallow and vacuous, but I think romance like that plain doesn’t exist.   

Maybe I’m not dead inside but the old self in me is dying.  Am I headed for a re-birth?

Unofficial Bridesmaid

I have a roommate who I call No Tits because she broke my balls from the jump when she first moved in (having fits over tablecloths, not having boundaries, criticizing my belongings and just generally being a rude entitled frizzy haired wench).  Surprisingly, someone moved in after her who was worse.  The new roommate who moved in, I refer to as the premenstrual-dysphoric-disorder-riddled-Jihadist-Macedonian-with-borderline (Jihad for short) has become extremely difficult to live with, thus has rendered No Tits and I, buddies.  (Jihad actually replaced the former roommate who was an obsessive-compulsive-anorexic-vegan-germaphobic-violinist-singer).  At any rate, the other day, the Jihadist and I had it out.  It was a short burst of an argument that escalated very quickly, ending with me calling her a twat.  I haven’t been that proud of moment in a while.  As a result, No Tits and I have a new found almost friendship, and subsequently I was subjected to a long-winded story about the pre-matrimonial celebration of some other bird, whom I imagine is also from Queens.  (how revolting).

No Tits informed me that she would be partaking in her best friend’s wedding as an “unofficial bridesmaid.”  It is not clear why she was given the less than desirable title of an un-thing.  I suspect that the bride had too many candidates to choose from and did not want to create a hierarchy or pit members of the would-be bridal party against each other.  It’s as if she is saying, “the matching dress thing I can do without, but I still need someone to do all the pre-wedding party stuff, so we’ll have to call her something pretty close to bridesmaid.”  So, No Tits doesn’t get a real title.  She does all the work without the glory. 

Bridesmaids usually are kind of strange looking with their weird taffeta dresses and goofy up-do’s.  I often wonder what happens to them, because you know what they say; once a bridesmaid . . . . she’ll probably get an abortion and move to Reno . . .(and I imagine she goes on to live a sad, loveless life as an alcoholic residing in some small town with an old powder blue Chevy Malibu on blocks in the front yard, sad and forgotten about, like the love she'd always wished she were pretty enough to know). 

No Tits planned the engagement party, the bridal shower and the bachelorette party.  Lack of being blessed well endowed aside, she is doing a service to her friend out of love and she informed me that the other bitches are chiming in, because they don’t like her having a position of power (however unofficial it may be).  They drop comments.  They dis her planning.  They walked out of one event because it wasn’t open bar, leaving No Tits with a $300 alcohol tab, which she paid.  Proper etiquette dictates that the family of the bride should host the shower.  According to Emily Post, “it is not within the responsibilities of the bridal shower to do so, although they can if they want.”   Also, I’m pretty sure the maid of honor shouldn’t be doing all three events i.e. everything. 

Because of the mother’s absence, the other fraulines should have stepped up.  Instead they criticized the almost bridesmaid who is handling all three events.  Poor No Tits.  I can’t believe I am feeling compassion for someone who caused me much grief in the beginning of our relationship.  She is grinning and bearing it for her friend.  No Tits is a bigger person than me, because I wouldn’t have lasted through the first half of the not open bar engagement party as an unofficial bridesmaid.  I’da been all “I don’t think so sluts.”  Not because of lack of booze, but because these people have no class.     

The problem with this unofficial bridal party is that every female should be working together to pick up the slack to make the celebration happen, where the mother clearly has dropped the ball.  But instead, they are being outright rude and entitled.  Maybe they’re pissed they weren’t bridesmaids. 

I got all this information in the kitchen, which is where N.T. and I usually converse.  At the end of her story, she divulged that she will be wearing a very low cut dress for the bachelorette party, but that it didn’t matter because she has no tits.  Life does take strange twists and turns, but I honestly found my way around from really not getting along with this roommate, whom admittedly, I gave a terrible nickname, to cheering her on in her battle over the senseless gaggle of nit-picking hens.

reference:  emilypost.com/book/emily-posts-wedding-etiquette/

MID-40s PHENOMENON

Here’s what being in denial that you are in your forties is about.  I have an extreme aversion to the opposite sex and I have two unsuccessful half careers.  (I’m being dramatic) (and then there’s office gigs - Oh, the humanity!)  All this while I’m spiraling towards a narrow margin where people feel compelled to comment about my reproductive functionality, “well, you still have time to have a baby,” which is downright impolite, never mind implausible.

What is also happening is that I’m beginning to loosen the grip some.  Who knew?  Getting older has wisdom?  No kidding.  Trying to manage a creative career can be maddening.  I also just up and moved to New York City.  I always like to make things complicated.  My life consists of doing standup gigs, often travelling for them on the weekends.  I will do some writing and go do a set somewhere a couple of nights during the week.  At times, I also work an awful full-time job, so my schedule can be grueling.  I’m also a visual artist, but lately, I almost never have time and I currently have no studio to make art (the other half career).

I said to myself “for reals I’m out” which translates roughly to “I want to quit.”  Actually, I had arrived at this conclusion as a result of wanting to rid myself of worrying about money, and to live in a nicer apartment.  So I entertained the idea of letting go.  It’s not performing that is difficult.  The “grind” is working some job that takes up all of your energy, and then writing and performing anyway.

I emotionally gave up comedy because I wanted to see what it would feel like.  I wanted to just live life for a minute and avoid furiously trying to stay relevant.  What I noticed is work floods in.  When you’re not frantic and trying so hard, it puts you in the space to step aside and allow the universe to do its thing.  This new found detachment also allowed me to be freer on stage.   

I can’t really fool myself.  I’ll never give it up.  But in my false quitting, I noticed that finding contentment with exactly where you are has a lot of power.

It’s not evident whether my uterus will be all for naught.  I can’t seem to get the online dating thing to have significance, particularly because, gross.  But, perhaps when I am in the right state of mind, I will consider a relationship.   As far as my half careers go, I don’t really have an answer.  Writing, performing and making art are really just about doing it.  Living in New York makes me scoff at such liberties because it is so expensive.  I’m telling you, I was born in the wrong era.  I would have been perfectly happy being a mafia moll with a tommy gun.

More About Art+Comedy/ADD Rant & Lorna Doones

Blogging is perfect for women because we over-analyze everything.  I’m revisiting Carol Leifer’s book.  She’s had a great career in comedy. Which brings me to standup in general, and why we do it.  Recently, a friend asked me if comedy was something that I always knew that I would do.  I directly answered “no.”  I said that I originally wanted to be a successful painter.  I could always draw.  I majored in studio art in college.  I discovered that I was meant to paint when I was twenty years old and I did a semester in Italy.  After I graduated, I set out to try and become an artist.  I remember how daunting it was to have a job and then paint at night and weekends.  I enrolled part-time at Mass Art, because I was so petrified of it all.  Becoming an adult and trying to make it as an artist in an economy and social atmosphere that does not value artists was a tall order.  And the contrast was evident from my visit abroad where artists are respected and celebrated.   I burned out before I was thirty, due to the fact that I wasn’t selling a ton of art and I didn’t have a dealer that was representing me. 

I’m not entirely sure the answer I gave him is the most accurate.  I did get frustrated with art, but comedy was in my life from way back.  My father was a huge fan of comedy.  He loved Rodney Dangerfield, and of course, Carson, and he always had a list of street jokes available that he could share with his old buddies from Phili.  I used to listen to Spike Jones records and grew to become a huge Carlin fan, both by way of my dad.

If I had my way, and, left to my own devices, I would be in my art studio, rigorously making paintings with the kind of ferocity that comes from having a psychic space to create.  I loved how in the studio you make discoveries, you ruin paintings, and then you rediscover in another painting what you didn’t resolve in the first, and stuff like that.  In this hypothetical scenario, I would have a huge studio and no day job.  I would hide away and read shit like Susan Sontag’s Memoirs and Notebooks and then get drunk with other artists + writers and argue about the validity of Roy Litchenstein’s success.  What’s funny is there is not much difference with comics; just replace Litchenstein with Larry the Cable Guy.

But comedy is like being a painter.  You’re the creator.  I’m not singing Sondheim.  I’m the writer of the lyrics and the melody, and the performer. 

I would love to write for television.  That’s on my radar.  More writing in general might be the key to unlock my current state of feeling stuck.  And, my God, do I miss painting.  So much ADD today.  I had like 15 windows open in my browser.  I will list here all that I was trying to accomplish:

Create listing in TimeOutNY

Log in to stupid online payroll

Write this blog

look at Why My Cat Is Sad twitter page

I think I’m too tired to list the rest. 

It’s a boring list anyway.  More ADD i.e. on to the next thing (or things) such as:  1. Find Lorna Doone cookies; and 2. Tweet about someone’s demise and cats (and Lorna Doones).