I only made it to one outdoor movie this summer. It was a wet July, a wet August, so many screenings across many series were simply rained out. But I'd also seen most of the movies on offer -- with the possible exception of The Goonies -- a realization that was frustrating (who the fuck wants to see Speed at McCarren Park?) and a little depressing (oh no I'm so old I've seen every movie). So the one movie I made it to was Vertigo at Brooklyn Bridge Park. I always forget how deliberately icky it is. Stray observations this time around: Wow how gross is Barbara Bel Geddes when she visits Jimmy Stewart in the mental hospital? And right at the end, when the nun says, "I heard voices" -- what does that mean? Is she speaking on behalf of Scottie? I had to fight my way out of the office and so I got to the park well after sundown. There are several arteries leading from Old Fulton Street to the grassy slope where the screenings take place. I took one of the paths that's really a tube through the trees and vine canopy, and for a few seconds I was in almost total darkness. After the movie was over I met up with Katharine and Tom who'd been picnicking on the far side of the lawn, and we walked home together. We stopped at Katharine's dad's house, mere feet from the Promenade, and helped ourselves to cans of Diet Coke from an assortment in the fridge in the abandoned kitchen. There's a bridge that leads from the southeastern part of the park up over the Furman Street onto Columbia Heights. I don't know if it was engineered to wobble or whether it wasn't built to support the masses exiting the park, but wow. Nothing quite like the feeling of your feet slipping out from under you, Jimmy Stewart's stricken face spiraling up at you from the expressway below.
Nina and I had been looking forward to the Afropunk Festival all summer, not least of all because we found out that Unlocking The Truth and Big Freedia and Death would be playing. We went both days, because there was good stuff the whole time. Like last year, Commodore Barry Park served as the festival grounds, and we queued up by the BQE, turning down offers from entrepreneurs hustling nutcrackers out of coolers in full view of the police. Once inside, we hooked ourselves up with curry from the Madiba tent, served out of an entire scooped-out loaf of whole wheat bread. Unlocking The Truth went on right as we got to the Green Stage. They were pretty great! Their songs don't have lyrics (perhaps that's for the best) but were full of cool, ostentatious solos played on instruments that looked a touch too big for the players. The drummer (peering through thick glasses) kept doing funny pro moves like spinning his sticks mid-song. Obviously it's creepy to speculate -- like the emcees did after the set -- about the band's romantic prospects in middle school, but how can you not, a little bit, knowing yourself how the economies of kisses turn on the ability to plunk out a few notes of Come As You Are on a starter electric guitar. Imagine if you'd been able to shred.
The Heavy also played and they're good but we've seen them before.
The second day was really packed. We milled around for a bit, killing time until Big Freedia took the stage. How to describe? First of all, Big Freedia's act is Freedia herself, plus a DJ, plus two or three dancers. The songs are basically just rhythmic noise, over which Freedia raps a hook ("I got that gin in my system" / "Somebody gonna be my victim"). The dancers kind of loll around chewing gum until they're called upon to move, which they do sometimes all together, sometimes singly. If they're trying to conserve energy, I can see why: They were all skilled and vigorous twerkers, and could perform with shockingly facility all the moves people show off on YouTube. Twerking standing up. The downward dog twerk. The headstand twerk-against-the-wall, which is fucking nuts. What was even more nuts was that Big Freedia herself was probably better than her dancers, kind of effortlessly Fred Astaire-ing up and down the stage and flipping her butt up onto her back over and over again. There were clearly people in the audience who had dressed for twerking, perhaps even knowing that they'd be called up on stage for a participatory rendition of "Azz Everywhere." When Freedia summoned them, the Red Stage filled up with asses of all colors popping out of denim cut-offs. And some of the best amateur twerkers were dudes. The whole thing was funny and crazy and fun.
Then we went back to the Green Stage for Death, who were fucking great. They sounded fast and mean, and their on-stage production was exactly like what I've heard of their recorded stuff: Plenty of treble and reverb. I wish they'd played longer, but what are you gonna do. Festival sets. After them came a band from L.A. that I'd never heard of called Vintage Trouble. I was pushing Nina to go with me and find some cool BMX demos, skeptical of Vintage Trouble's name and provenance. And they're one of those bands that wears nice shirts, like fucking... Train. But then they started playing and they were crazy tight! The lead singer has a voice like James Brown and stage presence like James Brown, twirling and snapping his hips back and forth. I'm sure people say that about him all the time and I barely know what it means, but I was fucking hot-footing it to the very first song they played. After them was holy shit Living Colour. You better believe they opened with Cult of Personality. We wandered over to the Red Stage to check out Chuck D and DJ Lord. In between fragments of Public Enemy songs, Chuck D had a lot to say about the state of "commercial" hip-hop, none of it complimentary. He tried to mine way more laughs than were available from his deliberate mis-hearing of "Hova" as "Hoover," a joke so inappropriate for the age of the audience that I barely got it, and I'm an old 'un. He seemed like a guy who's got a rec room and watches a lot of VHS tapes.
Eventually we left and went to go see The World's End at BAM Harvey, which was excellent, although I think it's a strong indicator that I should stop wearing my beloved motorcycle jacket lest I become even more like Gary King than I already am.
To celebrate the end of the summer, the folks at Lincoln Place herded us into a picnic at Prospect Park on Friday. I made "Spicy Taty Salad," essentially a riff on the basic potato salad in Joy to which I add chorizo and some pulverized chipotle peppers (purchased dry and soaked in warm water). Potato salad is my personal food Summer Jam, I've decided. I've made, say, four batches of it this season for parties and picnics and some just to have. At first I was chasing the mayonaisse-y but not-too-mayonaisse-y taste of the potato salad my dad made when I was growing up, but then I decided that I wanted to see how "smoky" I could make it without making it gross. I think I did a pretty good job! (Four chipotle peppers seems to be the right number.) Jill made a savory Morroccan vegetable stew; KT made brownies; Hanlon ordered a pizza. We got drunk on box wine and vodka lemonade secreted in a thermos and played with a copy of Catch Phrase that somebody'd brought. The sun went down, and a group of hippies down the hill to the north of us started strumming guitar and doing a kind of dance with glow sticks. When it got truly dark, Jill and Ted and I played a game called Sunglasses Foot Race, in which you put on a pair of sunglasses and then pound your way across the Nethermead, disoriented and giddy, each clomping step taking you an unexpected distance because you can't see the contours of the ground you're crossing. "We should come to Night Park more often," said Tom. Later he barfed.
The "real" end to the summer, though, was on Labor Day itself, when Nina and I had resolved to go splash around in the Douglass-Degraw pool. We'd invited people to join us but planned to go it alone, so it was like a dream when Jill and Hanlon stopped at the chain link fence to see if we were really there and then came back in their bathing suits. The pool was emptier than the last time we'd been, no doubt because people were out of town for the long weekend, and at times there were more lifeguards than bathers. They were horsin' around, doing things in flagrant violation of pool-side rules and regs: Running, heaving buckets of water at each other, and lobbing water balloons. One lifeguard (on duty in one of the high chairs) shut a pool umbrella around himself for protection. His colleagues tossed one up from underneath like it was a grenade.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Tommy
Okay, so it's wedding season. But first:
Nina and I took a combination of the G and a shuttle bus out to Long Island City last weekend to check out Warm Up at PS1. (As an aside, could the MTA be any worse at providing transit service? Really makes me go right of the dial. Or, wait, they're a "public-benefit corporation." So... left-er of the dial? Seriously, though: fuck those guys.) Been to PS1 before, but I don't think I'd ever done Warm Up. We waited on a crazy long line around the block, paid our $20 (!) and then we entered the big concrete-walled courtyard in front of the museum. They're doing a thing right now where they've got a portion of the courtyard set aside for a group of visiting artists who are living in trailers with solar panels and gray water filtering. Some kind of buzzy electronic act was playing at the top of the stairs when we got there, so we nosed around the enormous wooden water feature in the middle of the yard for a few minutes before taking advantage of our free admission to the museum. There were a lot of things to see (so many pencil drawings of folds in bedsheets!) but I think my favorite was The Drowning Room, a video shot in a house submerged in water. In every scene, the actors' hair floats around them and air bubbles escape from their noses and mouths, but all of the furniture and bric-a-brac is glued or weighted down, so the only other clue that the camera's underwater is the eerie way that objects recede from the lens into greenish darkness. RatKing was performing in the courtyard when we left. They sounded like yelling on top of noise. I don't know.
We stopped at Malu for ice cream. I got a flavor called (I think) "Baseball," which was a mix of all the treats you can buy at a ball game (peanuts, popcorn, etc.). Nina got a few scoops of a red wine-based flavor. As we chomped, we listened to a owner of Malu's chat with the guy who ran the newsstand next door. It turned out he'd only just replaced the store windows after someone put his ass right through the middle of one during an after-hours lovers' spat. We walked over the Pulaski Bridge, peeking into the secret hollows where the workers who work on Newtown Creek might go to enjoy a beer. We walked all the way down through Greenpoint to Metropolitan, and from there to Shea Stadium. I wanted to see Space Wolves, though Et al. was still playing when we got there. The lead singer of Et al. is a real angry young artist type dude, a lanky dork with frizzy hair like if Daniel Stern's character in C.H.U.D. had gotten a semiotics degree or something. In lieu of actual merch, he'd piled on the display case a bunch of copies of his "manifesto," in which he argued, essentially, that there are too many bands right now because it's too easy to start a band. Ugh. I don't even remember what they sounded like, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't impressed. Not a fan. Space Wolves were great, though. It's two dudes who dress all in white, a fucking great drummer and a guitar player who sings into an old-fashioned telephone handset. They're fast and tight, a bit like Punks On Mars, though their songs are much shorter; and their commitment to their manic stage personas put me in mind of The Hamburglars. Great band! Fan.
Ted and I had been discussing options for a bachelor party for several months before Tom and Colleen's Wedding. There'd been an email thread on which we collaborated with Dan, Greg, and two of Tom's friends from high school -- Matt and Eric -- to develop a plan. Naturally, the discussion started with strip clubs, but there were some objections on moral grounds, and, to be honest, we are a pretty "women's lib" gang of dudes (to use Tom's expression). Tubin' was considered but not really seconded, and an adventure on a terrifying (for acrophobes like Tom and yours truly) "ropes course" almost came together but fizzled. Ted laid the foundation for a concrete party plan by finding and renting on AirBnB a cabin in Goshen that we could treat as our base of operations. He proposed an afternoon and evening of The rest of the structure of the party was decided at a very humid and boozy evening at the rooftop bar at The Rock Shop. I had two ideas that I feel very proud of. The first was this: We would locate and hire a Northampton "sex educator" to some kind of live session similar to a Passion Parties demo. The person I had in mind would be a cross between Mr. Van Driessen and John Cleese's sex educator in The Meaning of Life -- ideally, a middle-aged dude with a graying ponytail and a dissipated physique who'd show Tom how to perform cunnilingus on a blow-up doll. We searched for this person drunkenly on our smartphones to no avail. The other idea I had was that we would design and provision a LARP that we would go on as a group. And that is what we did.
The weekend before the wedding, he and I went shopping for supplies. We went Ricky's, Babeland, Bergen St. Comics, and finally Target. We were looking for bachelor party gear in general; objects to humiliate the groom sexually and both condemn and glorify his nerdy obsessions in specific. We managed to find some Eyes Wide Shut-style cat masks at Ricky's but Babeland proved to be a desert -- dildos, especially the ones with lovingly-modeled dick veins, are really fucking expensive. (Ted turned down my offer to train down to a seedy adult video store in Sunset Park to get a cheap plastic model.) Our goal for the comic book store was to gather a few dozen terrible comics and somehow impel Tom to protect them. Ted was inspired by his older brother's bachelor party, in which the stripper they hired shredded some beloved comics in the groom's face while giving him a dance. We were worried that, like Babeland, Bergen St. Comics doesn't sell no shit, until they directed us to their 25-cent bin, which was full of oh man just the worst garbage. At Target we were hoping that the "seasonal goods" aisle would already be stocking Halloween type things, but no such luck. Back to fucking school. So instead we dug into the toy section and made a great discovery: Styrofoam "pool noodles" on sale for a couple of dollars a pop! We bought two, knowing that they were long enough to cut in half to form four "short swords" for our adventure. Still, though, we were short a number of essential props. Ted was going to be upstate on "business" through the rest of the week, but I resolved to hit all the costume shops in town for reasonably-priced LARP gear. That Tuesday I used my lunch break to walk over to Abracadabra on 21st St. and ask them about "wizard robes." I didn't have to explain myself any more than that to the cashier -- she walked me right over to a nook in their costume section that was, like, all wizard gear. But it was expensive as hell, each robe averaging something like $70, so I asked if they had robes with a lower "price point." "Um," she said, "this is probably our cheapest selection of new costumes, but you can check downstairs in the remaindered section to see if we've got something cheaper." That's what I did. The basement of Abracadabra not only has the cheap, used stuff, but also a costume / prop repair workshop and a huge selection of really awesome stage-worthy rental costumes: Period dress, rubber monster suits, mascot heads of all shapes and sizes. It would make a great room in a text adventure, I thought. The remaindered stuff seemed to be a subset of their collection that was too worn or broken to be rented any more, and, true enough, it was much cheaper than anything they had upstairs. I agonized for a while over buying an enormous feathered headdress for twenty-five dollars or a full-body zip-up brown fursuit for thirty but decided against it: Holy shit bed bugs, for one, but also because looking over the used stuff, there still wasn't enough gear for seven dudes. So I went back upstairs and called Ted, and we revised the plan. We realized our budget could support a complete set of gear for one person, so if we split it across seven dudes, each person could have, like, one thing. And we could assign a different characteristic to each accessory. So I bought:
Ted and Nina teamed up on a car rental early Thursday morning, and we drove up to Northampton with Stephanie. No driving for this guy but I tried to do my part by running the iPod. Steph pointed out correctly that I have almost no lady bands in my library. We dropped her off at her hotel and then bought enough groceries to cook dinner for seven dudes. We dropped the food off at the cabin, which tuned out to be a beautiful five-bedroom wood frame house full of Zen Buddhist bullshit and sporting a rock garden, a hot tub, and a fuckin' jacuzzi. There was a resident cat named Mina, a tortoise shell with short little legs like Ted's old cat Lola. The place reminded me of the house my aunt built with her first husband in Shutesbury. We returned to the main hotel where there was a tailgate of sorts in progress: Vodka shots in Dixie cups outside the jazz lounge of the Northampton Clarion. In person, Matt had the beard and overall demeanor of a hobbit; Eric was a lovable goon. We caravaned to Walmart and bought a few more things, notably: A multi-stroke pneumatic air rifle, a paint ball "blowgun," three heavily-discounted Halloween masks of The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man, and a set of zip ties -- this last because, as Matt kept saying, "There are six of us."
The guns came out as soon as we got to the cabin. We took aim at rocks and small targets in the woods circling the house, trying to figure out safely whether or not BBs were coming out of the air rifle, and how to get the paintballs from the blowgun to actually, you know, pop -- this in particular was frustrating and difficult, since the blowgun was really just a thick straw with a small stage for the brightly-colored paintball (careful, don't inhale it!) and even when we blew with all our might, the paintballs would often just fall impotently out of the end of the barrel. We started to worry about accidentally hitting Mina, who was out in the yard hunting sparrows, so we took the party to the road, and from there into the woods across from the house, where we used the shattered remains of a tree to hold our targets: Cans of PBR, an empty whiskey bottle. Some conventions of play emerged. When a rifleman (wearing a Lizard mask) successfully punctured a PBR can, his "second" would sprint over and drink as much of the spraying beer as possible. While this was happening, anyone who could lay hands on the blowgun was free to shoot stinging paintballs at the drinker. There are cell phone videos of me and Ted loping and ducking through the ferns sasquatch-like, hooting and covered in beer, to the shrill laughter of the group. It was a little bit scary how much fun this was. But we knew we still had the LARP ahead of us, so we cleaned up the cans and shards of glass, and returned briefly to the cabin. Ted and I arrayed the props on one of the beds, and we made our selections. The people who chose pool noodles were the warriors. The people who chose the bitchen skull scepters were the ages.
By the time we returned to the forest, the sun was about to set, and we were all quite drunk. The woods were lit only by a kind of ambient glow, and our eyes were saturated with green. Everything was ferns and moss. That's my strongest memory of the proceedings: Wading and tripping through a fern sea with a pool noodle in my hand and a can of PBR stretching the back pocket of my jeans. Yes, I thought. This. We'd refined the rules such that our game was a modified Capture The Flag: Each time arrayed their gold coins around their base, and set their intent on liberating the other team's gold from their base about 200 feet away. The mages could paralyze a foe with a spell (birdseed thrown from a plastic baggie), setting him up to be dispatched by a whack from a warrior's pool noodle. I was on the team with superior numbers, having two mages (Tom and Dan) and two warriors (myself and Eric). We enacted two skirmishes, and I think we won both of them, although drunken confusion over the rules muddied the tally a bit. I ran over a log concealed by ferns and fell hard into forest rot. Dogs barked somewhere far away. Matt caught a salamander and two small frogs. The game lasted an hour, maybe two. I wished it could have gone on forever; it was ecstasy. But it was getting dark in the woods, and people were afeared that someone'd sprain his ankle. So we went back to the cabin and made dinner. We'd bought steaks that Ted set about grilling on a comically small grill; using his recipe I made a pesto that I was proud of (no small feat without a food processor) which we applied to some grilled zucchini. After dinner we stood around the glowing embers of the grill in the dark telling jokes. I stole all of mine from Andy Breckman.
The next morning we rose groggy but largely intact, and Ted and I cooked breakfast for the group. We tidied the house, to the extent, we hoped, that it wouldn't be quite so obvious that we'd thrown a drinkin' party. We said goodbye to Mina, who was already hunkered down over a freshly-killed sparrow. The boys dropped me off at the Clarion, where I waited for Nina and ran into Maggie and Cliff. Together, we embarked upon a whistlestop tour of the Pioneer Valley's charms. The first stop was the dinosaur footprints on the banks of the Connecticut River, which Cliff and I were sure would be awesome but turned out to just be a some dents in some granite slabs next to a little kiosk with a can of Budweiser stuffed into one of its brochure slots. No luck trying to visit the Dead Frog Circus at the Wistariahurst Museum -- some people were getting married (!) there that weekend. Instead we stopped at Herrell's Ice Cream in downtown Northampton, where a placard below the list of flavors proclaims Steve Herrell as the inventor of the, uh, topping, which Herrell's refers to as a "Smoosh-in." The ice cream was very good. We had to drive quickly back to our hotel to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. We passed a storefront with a sign in the window advertising something called the Beer Can Museum. Cliff sighed as if he knew he was missing his one opportunity to visit. The rehearsal dinner was at something called WWII club. The boys and I showed off the videos of our antics. Tom's iPod playlist for the evening included a Bel Argosy song! I left my suit jacket at the ballroom. After dinner we returned to the Clarion. It's a strange hotel. Walking the narrow halls it seemed more like a minimum-security prison or a summer camp than a hotel, the dormitory areas made of cinderblock covered with a generous helping of latex paint. There were three enclosed atria that were always a surprise to find yourself in coming around a corner at night: A miniature jungle of towering office plants; a haphazard "rock garden" of craggy boulders and small stones; and a clearing filled with dorm-room chairs and nothing else. Weaving through those corridors at night was like being inside a persistent dream. We tried to rally Maggie to test her legendary skill against the claw machine in the hotel's neglected arcade, but the night porter had come by to turn it off before we could do so. We sat in deck chairs in the indoor pool room, which looked like a haunted greenhouse or an abandoned gymnasium being reclaimed by nature, while Ted and Jill frolicked in the pool with some old ladies and a woman with Downs Syndrome. At our urging, they (Ted and Jill) acted out an underwater tea party, an underwater yoga class. Night swimming.
The next day I worked with Ted and Dan and Greg on a four-man toast, and then hurried back to Hadley to iron my shirt and slip into my suit. Tom'd arranged for a shuttle from our hotel, but the driver didn't know where he was going nor how to get there, so we had to feed him the directions to the Unitarian Society. Our hotel-mate (and role-playing companion!) Bo described his treatment for a new Bill & Ted movie on the way. The ceremony itself was maybe the shortest I think I've ever been party to. Colleen looked great; she never doesn't. Tom wore his Radagast Brown suit. His sister officiated. Their vows were sweet and funny. "Before I met you," Tom said to Colleen, "all I ate were pizza bagels." (True, more or less.) Their parents had brought scoops of earth from their respective home states, and they dumped these into a small pot and pressed some seeds into the dirt and watered them. I got to be friends with Tom when Emma and Katharine made me his Secret Santa the Christmas of our sophomore year in college. I bought him a small jar of jam and a shower glove, with some hand-drawn instructions diagramming their suggested use. It was a gamble; he could've been offended. It boggles my mind that twelve years later I would be sitting in a pew behind his mom and dad and watching him get married to a very nice lady.
Ted and Cat and Nina and I walked to the reception at the Smith College Conference Center, which looks out over the Mill River and the Smith College track and field grounds. We drank and ate and when it was time to give our toast, I think the gentlemen and I did a pretty good job. "Tom used to waste time he could have spent socializing playing video games," Greg said, as part of the bit where we explained to Colleen how Tom had changed since meeting her. "Now he ruins social situations with fancy European board games." (This is true.) Improbably, we were able to dance after all of the eating and drinking, and we did so, on a removable wooden dance floor in the basement of the Conference Center. Tom and Colleen danced alone to the wonderful song "Bless The Telephone" by Labi Siffre, and then everybody joined them. "Empire State of Mind" made its inevitable appearance in the playlist, as did that ol' "Streetlights, People" song. The dancing ended when we Conference Center closed. Tom and Colleen had arranged for a shuttle to take people to the hotels, but it made an unannounced stop at Ye Ol' Watering Hole, home of the Northampton Beer Can Museum! The place sure had a lot of beer cans. They were arrayed in the hundreds on mahogany shelves up by the ceiling where a more pretentious establishment might've stored, I don't know, books. The Watering Hole sold us beer until we were drunk again, then served us water 'til we sobered up. We left the bar at 1:00 AM but didn't manage to get a cab until 2:00.
Ted drove us home the next day after brunch. We had to surreptitiously ferry the air rifle, which is extremely threatening and real looking, into our apartment building from the curb. I'll find some way to dispose of it later. But there's a shopping bag full of LARP scepters on the landing that I can't bring myself to throw away.
We stopped at Malu for ice cream. I got a flavor called (I think) "Baseball," which was a mix of all the treats you can buy at a ball game (peanuts, popcorn, etc.). Nina got a few scoops of a red wine-based flavor. As we chomped, we listened to a owner of Malu's chat with the guy who ran the newsstand next door. It turned out he'd only just replaced the store windows after someone put his ass right through the middle of one during an after-hours lovers' spat. We walked over the Pulaski Bridge, peeking into the secret hollows where the workers who work on Newtown Creek might go to enjoy a beer. We walked all the way down through Greenpoint to Metropolitan, and from there to Shea Stadium. I wanted to see Space Wolves, though Et al. was still playing when we got there. The lead singer of Et al. is a real angry young artist type dude, a lanky dork with frizzy hair like if Daniel Stern's character in C.H.U.D. had gotten a semiotics degree or something. In lieu of actual merch, he'd piled on the display case a bunch of copies of his "manifesto," in which he argued, essentially, that there are too many bands right now because it's too easy to start a band. Ugh. I don't even remember what they sounded like, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't impressed. Not a fan. Space Wolves were great, though. It's two dudes who dress all in white, a fucking great drummer and a guitar player who sings into an old-fashioned telephone handset. They're fast and tight, a bit like Punks On Mars, though their songs are much shorter; and their commitment to their manic stage personas put me in mind of The Hamburglars. Great band! Fan.
Ted and I had been discussing options for a bachelor party for several months before Tom and Colleen's Wedding. There'd been an email thread on which we collaborated with Dan, Greg, and two of Tom's friends from high school -- Matt and Eric -- to develop a plan. Naturally, the discussion started with strip clubs, but there were some objections on moral grounds, and, to be honest, we are a pretty "women's lib" gang of dudes (to use Tom's expression). Tubin' was considered but not really seconded, and an adventure on a terrifying (for acrophobes like Tom and yours truly) "ropes course" almost came together but fizzled. Ted laid the foundation for a concrete party plan by finding and renting on AirBnB a cabin in Goshen that we could treat as our base of operations. He proposed an afternoon and evening of The rest of the structure of the party was decided at a very humid and boozy evening at the rooftop bar at The Rock Shop. I had two ideas that I feel very proud of. The first was this: We would locate and hire a Northampton "sex educator" to some kind of live session similar to a Passion Parties demo. The person I had in mind would be a cross between Mr. Van Driessen and John Cleese's sex educator in The Meaning of Life -- ideally, a middle-aged dude with a graying ponytail and a dissipated physique who'd show Tom how to perform cunnilingus on a blow-up doll. We searched for this person drunkenly on our smartphones to no avail. The other idea I had was that we would design and provision a LARP that we would go on as a group. And that is what we did.
The weekend before the wedding, he and I went shopping for supplies. We went Ricky's, Babeland, Bergen St. Comics, and finally Target. We were looking for bachelor party gear in general; objects to humiliate the groom sexually and both condemn and glorify his nerdy obsessions in specific. We managed to find some Eyes Wide Shut-style cat masks at Ricky's but Babeland proved to be a desert -- dildos, especially the ones with lovingly-modeled dick veins, are really fucking expensive. (Ted turned down my offer to train down to a seedy adult video store in Sunset Park to get a cheap plastic model.) Our goal for the comic book store was to gather a few dozen terrible comics and somehow impel Tom to protect them. Ted was inspired by his older brother's bachelor party, in which the stripper they hired shredded some beloved comics in the groom's face while giving him a dance. We were worried that, like Babeland, Bergen St. Comics doesn't sell no shit, until they directed us to their 25-cent bin, which was full of oh man just the worst garbage. At Target we were hoping that the "seasonal goods" aisle would already be stocking Halloween type things, but no such luck. Back to fucking school. So instead we dug into the toy section and made a great discovery: Styrofoam "pool noodles" on sale for a couple of dollars a pop! We bought two, knowing that they were long enough to cut in half to form four "short swords" for our adventure. Still, though, we were short a number of essential props. Ted was going to be upstate on "business" through the rest of the week, but I resolved to hit all the costume shops in town for reasonably-priced LARP gear. That Tuesday I used my lunch break to walk over to Abracadabra on 21st St. and ask them about "wizard robes." I didn't have to explain myself any more than that to the cashier -- she walked me right over to a nook in their costume section that was, like, all wizard gear. But it was expensive as hell, each robe averaging something like $70, so I asked if they had robes with a lower "price point." "Um," she said, "this is probably our cheapest selection of new costumes, but you can check downstairs in the remaindered section to see if we've got something cheaper." That's what I did. The basement of Abracadabra not only has the cheap, used stuff, but also a costume / prop repair workshop and a huge selection of really awesome stage-worthy rental costumes: Period dress, rubber monster suits, mascot heads of all shapes and sizes. It would make a great room in a text adventure, I thought. The remaindered stuff seemed to be a subset of their collection that was too worn or broken to be rented any more, and, true enough, it was much cheaper than anything they had upstairs. I agonized for a while over buying an enormous feathered headdress for twenty-five dollars or a full-body zip-up brown fursuit for thirty but decided against it: Holy shit bed bugs, for one, but also because looking over the used stuff, there still wasn't enough gear for seven dudes. So I went back upstairs and called Ted, and we revised the plan. We realized our budget could support a complete set of gear for one person, so if we split it across seven dudes, each person could have, like, one thing. And we could assign a different characteristic to each accessory. So I bought:
- A pilaeus cap, plus the two cat masks and a Mardi Gras mask from Ricky's: Protection from noodle-hits to the head
- Brown felt gauntlets: Protection on the arms
- Brown felt boot covers: Protection on the legs
- Black plastic shield: Protection anywhere you can swing it
Ted and Nina teamed up on a car rental early Thursday morning, and we drove up to Northampton with Stephanie. No driving for this guy but I tried to do my part by running the iPod. Steph pointed out correctly that I have almost no lady bands in my library. We dropped her off at her hotel and then bought enough groceries to cook dinner for seven dudes. We dropped the food off at the cabin, which tuned out to be a beautiful five-bedroom wood frame house full of Zen Buddhist bullshit and sporting a rock garden, a hot tub, and a fuckin' jacuzzi. There was a resident cat named Mina, a tortoise shell with short little legs like Ted's old cat Lola. The place reminded me of the house my aunt built with her first husband in Shutesbury. We returned to the main hotel where there was a tailgate of sorts in progress: Vodka shots in Dixie cups outside the jazz lounge of the Northampton Clarion. In person, Matt had the beard and overall demeanor of a hobbit; Eric was a lovable goon. We caravaned to Walmart and bought a few more things, notably: A multi-stroke pneumatic air rifle, a paint ball "blowgun," three heavily-discounted Halloween masks of The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man, and a set of zip ties -- this last because, as Matt kept saying, "There are six of us."
The guns came out as soon as we got to the cabin. We took aim at rocks and small targets in the woods circling the house, trying to figure out safely whether or not BBs were coming out of the air rifle, and how to get the paintballs from the blowgun to actually, you know, pop -- this in particular was frustrating and difficult, since the blowgun was really just a thick straw with a small stage for the brightly-colored paintball (careful, don't inhale it!) and even when we blew with all our might, the paintballs would often just fall impotently out of the end of the barrel. We started to worry about accidentally hitting Mina, who was out in the yard hunting sparrows, so we took the party to the road, and from there into the woods across from the house, where we used the shattered remains of a tree to hold our targets: Cans of PBR, an empty whiskey bottle. Some conventions of play emerged. When a rifleman (wearing a Lizard mask) successfully punctured a PBR can, his "second" would sprint over and drink as much of the spraying beer as possible. While this was happening, anyone who could lay hands on the blowgun was free to shoot stinging paintballs at the drinker. There are cell phone videos of me and Ted loping and ducking through the ferns sasquatch-like, hooting and covered in beer, to the shrill laughter of the group. It was a little bit scary how much fun this was. But we knew we still had the LARP ahead of us, so we cleaned up the cans and shards of glass, and returned briefly to the cabin. Ted and I arrayed the props on one of the beds, and we made our selections. The people who chose pool noodles were the warriors. The people who chose the bitchen skull scepters were the ages.
By the time we returned to the forest, the sun was about to set, and we were all quite drunk. The woods were lit only by a kind of ambient glow, and our eyes were saturated with green. Everything was ferns and moss. That's my strongest memory of the proceedings: Wading and tripping through a fern sea with a pool noodle in my hand and a can of PBR stretching the back pocket of my jeans. Yes, I thought. This. We'd refined the rules such that our game was a modified Capture The Flag: Each time arrayed their gold coins around their base, and set their intent on liberating the other team's gold from their base about 200 feet away. The mages could paralyze a foe with a spell (birdseed thrown from a plastic baggie), setting him up to be dispatched by a whack from a warrior's pool noodle. I was on the team with superior numbers, having two mages (Tom and Dan) and two warriors (myself and Eric). We enacted two skirmishes, and I think we won both of them, although drunken confusion over the rules muddied the tally a bit. I ran over a log concealed by ferns and fell hard into forest rot. Dogs barked somewhere far away. Matt caught a salamander and two small frogs. The game lasted an hour, maybe two. I wished it could have gone on forever; it was ecstasy. But it was getting dark in the woods, and people were afeared that someone'd sprain his ankle. So we went back to the cabin and made dinner. We'd bought steaks that Ted set about grilling on a comically small grill; using his recipe I made a pesto that I was proud of (no small feat without a food processor) which we applied to some grilled zucchini. After dinner we stood around the glowing embers of the grill in the dark telling jokes. I stole all of mine from Andy Breckman.
The next morning we rose groggy but largely intact, and Ted and I cooked breakfast for the group. We tidied the house, to the extent, we hoped, that it wouldn't be quite so obvious that we'd thrown a drinkin' party. We said goodbye to Mina, who was already hunkered down over a freshly-killed sparrow. The boys dropped me off at the Clarion, where I waited for Nina and ran into Maggie and Cliff. Together, we embarked upon a whistlestop tour of the Pioneer Valley's charms. The first stop was the dinosaur footprints on the banks of the Connecticut River, which Cliff and I were sure would be awesome but turned out to just be a some dents in some granite slabs next to a little kiosk with a can of Budweiser stuffed into one of its brochure slots. No luck trying to visit the Dead Frog Circus at the Wistariahurst Museum -- some people were getting married (!) there that weekend. Instead we stopped at Herrell's Ice Cream in downtown Northampton, where a placard below the list of flavors proclaims Steve Herrell as the inventor of the, uh, topping, which Herrell's refers to as a "Smoosh-in." The ice cream was very good. We had to drive quickly back to our hotel to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. We passed a storefront with a sign in the window advertising something called the Beer Can Museum. Cliff sighed as if he knew he was missing his one opportunity to visit. The rehearsal dinner was at something called WWII club. The boys and I showed off the videos of our antics. Tom's iPod playlist for the evening included a Bel Argosy song! I left my suit jacket at the ballroom. After dinner we returned to the Clarion. It's a strange hotel. Walking the narrow halls it seemed more like a minimum-security prison or a summer camp than a hotel, the dormitory areas made of cinderblock covered with a generous helping of latex paint. There were three enclosed atria that were always a surprise to find yourself in coming around a corner at night: A miniature jungle of towering office plants; a haphazard "rock garden" of craggy boulders and small stones; and a clearing filled with dorm-room chairs and nothing else. Weaving through those corridors at night was like being inside a persistent dream. We tried to rally Maggie to test her legendary skill against the claw machine in the hotel's neglected arcade, but the night porter had come by to turn it off before we could do so. We sat in deck chairs in the indoor pool room, which looked like a haunted greenhouse or an abandoned gymnasium being reclaimed by nature, while Ted and Jill frolicked in the pool with some old ladies and a woman with Downs Syndrome. At our urging, they (Ted and Jill) acted out an underwater tea party, an underwater yoga class. Night swimming.
The next day I worked with Ted and Dan and Greg on a four-man toast, and then hurried back to Hadley to iron my shirt and slip into my suit. Tom'd arranged for a shuttle from our hotel, but the driver didn't know where he was going nor how to get there, so we had to feed him the directions to the Unitarian Society. Our hotel-mate (and role-playing companion!) Bo described his treatment for a new Bill & Ted movie on the way. The ceremony itself was maybe the shortest I think I've ever been party to. Colleen looked great; she never doesn't. Tom wore his Radagast Brown suit. His sister officiated. Their vows were sweet and funny. "Before I met you," Tom said to Colleen, "all I ate were pizza bagels." (True, more or less.) Their parents had brought scoops of earth from their respective home states, and they dumped these into a small pot and pressed some seeds into the dirt and watered them. I got to be friends with Tom when Emma and Katharine made me his Secret Santa the Christmas of our sophomore year in college. I bought him a small jar of jam and a shower glove, with some hand-drawn instructions diagramming their suggested use. It was a gamble; he could've been offended. It boggles my mind that twelve years later I would be sitting in a pew behind his mom and dad and watching him get married to a very nice lady.
Ted and Cat and Nina and I walked to the reception at the Smith College Conference Center, which looks out over the Mill River and the Smith College track and field grounds. We drank and ate and when it was time to give our toast, I think the gentlemen and I did a pretty good job. "Tom used to waste time he could have spent socializing playing video games," Greg said, as part of the bit where we explained to Colleen how Tom had changed since meeting her. "Now he ruins social situations with fancy European board games." (This is true.) Improbably, we were able to dance after all of the eating and drinking, and we did so, on a removable wooden dance floor in the basement of the Conference Center. Tom and Colleen danced alone to the wonderful song "Bless The Telephone" by Labi Siffre, and then everybody joined them. "Empire State of Mind" made its inevitable appearance in the playlist, as did that ol' "Streetlights, People" song. The dancing ended when we Conference Center closed. Tom and Colleen had arranged for a shuttle to take people to the hotels, but it made an unannounced stop at Ye Ol' Watering Hole, home of the Northampton Beer Can Museum! The place sure had a lot of beer cans. They were arrayed in the hundreds on mahogany shelves up by the ceiling where a more pretentious establishment might've stored, I don't know, books. The Watering Hole sold us beer until we were drunk again, then served us water 'til we sobered up. We left the bar at 1:00 AM but didn't manage to get a cab until 2:00.
Ted drove us home the next day after brunch. We had to surreptitiously ferry the air rifle, which is extremely threatening and real looking, into our apartment building from the curb. I'll find some way to dispose of it later. But there's a shopping bag full of LARP scepters on the landing that I can't bring myself to throw away.
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