beautiful, funny, sad & true

When I was seventeen/eighteen/nineteen, I was in a band called Iron Horse. I’ve written about them before. Making videos and TV shows was among our favorite hobbies, and since one of the members of the band and one of our close friends worked at various television stations, that was a pretty easy itch to scratch.

Our friend would film us at shows, at rehearsals, out on the town, anything we wanted. He was very good at what he did (he’s even better now, by the way), and he was always up for trying new ideas, or coming up with his own too.

One of the ideas we dreamed up was to make a spoof of all the action-packed sports drink commercials that were all over TV at the time. We thought it would be funny if there was a drink that not only looked like urine, but actually tasted like it as well. And so, Tinkle was born.

The Tinkle commercial starts in slow motion black-and-white, with two guys sweeping a driveway with large push brooms, and the caption “Manual Labor” appears at the bottom of the screen. The guys wipe the sweat from their respective brows and walk toward the cooler, whereupon they find themselves both reaching for the single remaining bottle of a sports drink. The camera pans in tight, and moves from person to person:

Guy 1: “Only one Tinkle left.”

Guy 2: “Play you for it?”

Guy 1: “You’re on!”

Cue music: It’s the strummy guitar part from the Rush song “YYZ.” (It’s the part that starts at 1:42. . .) The scene cuts to the two guys playing maniacal one-on-one basketball, for about twenty seconds, with one of the guys sinking the winning lay-up, punctuated by the last four notes of the song. The voice-over says, “He shoots, he scores!”

The jubilant victor runs over and reaches into the cooler for the bottle of Tinkle and takes a huge swig, only to spit it out in disgust. “This stuff tastes like PISS” is what was actually said, but once we started writing this little scene, we decided that our families would probably see this, and the public, and it also might be funnier if we actually didn’t say ‘piss’. So we came up with the idea that the winner would say the word ‘piss’, but the voice-over would say something different. The catch was that the winner would keep trying to say the word ‘piss’, but he would always be foiled by the voice-over, no matter how many times he tried. So the word we ended up substituting was “WEE WEE.”

Incidentally, that was another huge discussion we had; what to substitute for the word ‘piss’. We came up with all the usual euphemisms, and I even recall the phrase ‘yellow liquid bodily excretion’ (or something similar) being bandied about too. Luckily they were all vetoed, because ‘wee wee’ is really childish and funny.

So here’s the result:

“This stuff tastes like (WEE WEE).” The winner is surprised that his word is censored; he tries saying ‘piss’ again, but ‘WEE WEE’ is what is heard. He tries again. His mouth is clearly visible, saying the word ‘piss’, but ‘WEE WEE’ is heard again. He looks around for the source of the overwhelming voice, and tries again, in vain: ‘(WEE WEE). . .(WEE WEE)’. . .aaaaaand, fade to black.

Caption, in yellow: “TINKLE: For athletes who can’t afford to lose those precious body fluids.”

You see, this is high comedy.

Why did it occur to me to share this?  Well, because the phrase ‘This stuff tastes like (WEE WEE)” randomly popped into my head the other day, and just thinking about it made me laugh hard enough that I sent a text message to Blaine to remind him about it. He laughed hard enough that I thought it was worth noting and sharing here as well.

Ah, if only I had the technology to upload the actual video (which is trapped on antiquated VHS) up here into my blog. I know that it exists, I just don’t own it yet. It will be a good day when I do, however, because it means you’ll get to experience all of this flotsam and jetsam first-hand, without me having to write it all out in script form.

OneYearAgo

Tonight was the best play-reading group night ever.

The play we read tonight was the one about Leon Theremin, written by one of the members of the group, and I got to play a real theremin. The music and sound effects were very much scripted into this play, in a way that they have not been in the other plays we’ve read. Not in the notation sense, but there were cues like, “Tuning” or “Ether”, or the actors will say, “What’s that sound?” or “Dance, and your body will control the instrument,” and that was my cue to make an appropriate sound happen. Total blast.  I also got the opportunity to read the part of a Soviet bureaucrat, which I’ve said a million times is fun to do.

Saussha came to the reading with me, and she expected to just sit and watch the proceedings, but instead she got asked to read the part of Theremin’s (second?) wife Lavinia, a Jamaican socialite and professional dancer who lived in Russia and New York. Talk about a challenge!  But she pulled it off adeptly, like the total professional that she is.

A good time was had by all.  I know I’ve already mentioned how much I love this group. . .but tonight was the most fun I’ve had yet.

Pretty dang good weekend.

Spent Friday evening with Joan.  We intended to watch a movie, but it took so long to make dinner, and we had such a late start, that she ended up leaving after that.  Saturday I cleaned my apartment and did about a million loads of laundry, then I had a gig with Susie, and we stayed out too late drinking and talking.  Sunday I talked on the phone a lot, and then finally got the new tubes put on my bike.  Went to meet Joan again after all that, and we went to a good, cheap sushi place on Northwest 21st, then decided to go see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  It was a very touching and emotional movie; many people in the audience were sniffling or choked up.  I certainly was.  I can’t wait to read the book, and I highly recommend the movie.

Yesterday I took the day off from work, in order to play accordion on a radio show with Breanna and BassistChris for the Local Music Spotlight show.  As soon as Breanna posts the song on her MySpace page, I’ll post a link to it here for you to check out.

When you first walk into the building, there are five large-screen televisions in the lobby.  I turned to Chris and gestured to them.  “Wow, there sure a a lot of TV’s for a radio station,” and then we both turned around to see the huge sign proclaiming NewsChannel 8, the NBC TV affiliate.

We played two songs, and were done and out of there in about forty-five minutes, with CD in hand.  Apparently the songs will start being played on the air in June, at approximately the same time that the radio station’s compilation CD – on which one of Breanna’s songs will be featured – will be released.  After we were done, we went and had sushi at the same place Joan and I had been to the day before.   That’s how good it was.

I rode my bike to work today, which was the first time I’ve been on a bike in about two years.  It felt great.  That is, it WOULD have felt great if I’d eaten dinner last night, and drunk any water at all, and gotten more than four hours of sleep.  I totally bonked as soon as I got to work, and instantly gulped down three bottles of water before even having to use the bathroom once.  (Don’t you just love my blog?)  Ate a huge chicken burrito for lunch, and kept drinking water for the rest of the day, which made the ride home MUCH easier.  I’m not gonna lie, though.  I’m pathetically and comically lazy and out of shape, ever since I got my car.  But not anymore.  It’s a whole new spring, and time to shake off this lethargic winter.  This experience was a reminder that there’s a right way to exercise, and that I have to plan in advance in order to have enough energy reserves to do what I want my body to do.  Looking forward to a lot more riding!

And much more spring.  After many freezing weeks, it looks like spring is finally going to come, and the weekend is supposed to be hot and beautiful.  I, however, will be in Port Townsend, Washington, to play accordion with Fenbi, the Irish band.  I’m sure it’ll be just as beautiful up there.  Love that town.  The best pastry shop I’ve ever been to in my entire life is there.  Why, that would be the Tyler Street Coffee House; I’m glad you asked.   If I lived in Port Townsend, I’m sure I’d weigh four hundred pounds from eating there all the time.  So f’ing good.

Today at work, a friend surprised me by giving me six CD’s.  They’re almost all by groups I’ve never heard of, too, which makes it even more exciting.

I find myself, again, at a loss of how to tie up all these little loose ends, and come up with a really good name for this entry.

Well, since this was just a plain old good weekend, all around, I suppose that means that the name should be. . .

I got an e-mail the other day from someone I haven’t heard from in about four months. It was nice to hear from her. She wrote me because she saw a web site that reminded her of me, and she wanted to share it. The guy who made the web site is an artist and a photographer, and he had a funny and slightly odd (but honest enough) idea, which was to just ask people for money, directly, so that he can go do things. In return, the person will get a letter, or a photograph, or a smallish gift, or even one of his art works, in exchange for their patronage.

And his scope is broad, too. If you send him a dollar, he’ll ‘sit in silence and think about you’ for one minute, and if you send him $4,444.00, he’ll go to the island of St. Helena and ‘take a picture of the sky and mail it to you from there. Nothing else.’ Some of his ventures are more altruistic than others, and those are the ones that seem to be the most successful. I mean, if most people have an extra four grand lying around, they’ll take themselves to St. Helena, and take a million pictures of everything, but lots of people like the idea of giving away chocolate chip cookies to strangers. I think it was his idea of buying and handing out copies of the Little Prince outside of the Stock Exchange that reminded my friend of me.

What I love about this idea is its simple ingenuity. He’s very honest about what he’s doing. It seems like he’s a slightly lonely but decent guy, who’s stumbled upon an unusual and cool way to reach out to people, and to do his art at the same time.

So I say gawd bless him. I plan to follow up on him, and I’ll even go so far as to post a link to his page in my blogroll, to make it easier for all of us to chart his progress.

Here’s the link to his page.

I woke up this morning with this ancient They Might Be Giants song burning a hole in my skull.

I thought it would make for better (and funnier!) reading, if I would edit it a bit, and then just turn it into a miniature short story.

A woman came up to me and said, “I’d like to poison your mind with wrong ideas that appeal to you, though I am not unkind.” She looked at me; I looked at something written across her scalp, and these are the words that it faintly said, as I tried to call for help:

“There’s only one thing that I know how to do well, and I’ve often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well, and thats be you. Be what you’re like. Be like yourself. And so I’m having a wonderful time, but I’d rather be whistling in the dark.”

A man came up to me and said, “I’d like to change your mind by hitting it with a rock, though I am not unkind.” We laughed at his little joke, and then I happily walked away and hit my head on the wall of the jail, where the two of us live today.

There’s only one thing that I like, and that is whistling in the dark.

Hilarious. If I was any kind of graphic designer, I’d have found a picture of a woman with a shaved head, and Photoshopped that quote around her scalp in Gothic calligraphy. (I know, I know, ‘photoshopped’ isn’t a real verb! It’s called artistic license.) Perhaps that kind of picture manipulation is a skill that you have, and you’d like to take on this little project. Perhaps you’re a tattoo artist, and you will one day be lucky enough to find some woman with a shaved head who would like to have “There’s only one thing I know how to do well. . .”, et cetera, emblazoned on her head forever. You just never know.

After all this, of course, I wanted to know what the phrase ‘whistling in the dark’ really means. A quick search showed that it means “confident that something good will happen when it is not at all likely.”

Hunh.

What a strange morning this is already turning out to be. And now it’s time to eat breakfast and pack for my trip to Seattle.

Speaking of which, through a beautiful example of irony, my brother and his family, who live in Seattle–and whose house I’m staying at–will be in Portland this weekend for a little getaway, so that means I’m going to be up in their town while they’re down here in my town at the same time.

Praise the Lord for the gift of laughter.