Fuck all ya’ll — my family RULES.
Top this, goddamnit. If that’s not a brilliant, double-Jabberjaw sharkface — executed with passion, genius, and FULL COMMITMENT right there in broad daylight on Burbank Blvd. — well, then, I just don’t know what is.
My gorgeous sister, Jenny, and her toothy little friend:
My One True Love in a $7 cowboy hat and a plain white T. Be still my wicked heart!:
Hey, kids, it’s time once again for “The Significant Other Meme”! I totally loved doing this one — because it’s all about a subject on which I just love to wax poetic, ad nauseum: Gregory!
1. They are watching TV. What are they watching?
Oh, god…Gregory has such a talent for this. Every time he turns on the television, no matter what time of day or night it is, it is a mathematical certainty that one of the following shows will be on. It’s spooky because it’s almost as though he conjures them out of pure desire: Iron Chef, Man vs. Wild, Mythbusters, Southpark, and his new favey fave, Weeds. But his most beloved shows of all time are Extras and Get a Life. Oh, and because our oldest daughter is a fashion design student, he has been a devout Project Runway acolyte since the first episode of the first season. Yup. He called it long before it was cool.
2. You’re out to eat. What kind of dressing do they get on their salad?
He will either get bleu cheese or a wet and dry dressing, i.e., balsamic vinaigrette and olive oil with bleu cheese crumbles on top.
3. What’s one food this person doesn’t like? What’s one food this person could not live without?
Loathes: The humble and hideous lychee nut (they smell like LOAD.)
Loves: Cheese. All kinds. The stinkier, the better. Ah, The Feet of the Angels! We followed our noses throughout Europe, stopping at every odiferous cafe, cave, market, and fromagerie we could find. He occasionally threatens to quit his job and become a full-time cheese monger.
4. You go out to the bar. He/she orders…
A Heineken at a bar, a Guinness black and tan at a pub, a Sapporo when out for sushi. Apparently, he’s a very thematically appropriate drinker.
5. Where did he/she go to high school?
Lexington High School in Lexington, Massachusetts.
6. What size shoe do they wear?
10 or 10 ½.
7. If this person were to collect anything, it would be…
Hands down: Art. Modern, such as Picasso, Klee, Miro, Pollock…or, conversely, work from The Dutch Golden Age. Just as he has a brilliant ear for music, he also has a brilliant eye for art. His taste in all things aesthetic is absolutely impeccable.
8. What is their favorite type of sandwich?
Turkey and avocado on some delicious, interesting, exotic bread.
9. This person could eat ______ everyday.
Sushi. In fact, we have actually made a pledge to each other –- to someday be successful enough to afford to eat sushi everyday. Spicy Tuna makes our hearts race and our pulses quicken. That’s some incentive to succeed, I gotta tell you. Breath Like Prom Night for the rest of your natural life. Bring it.
10. Favorite cereal?
Shredded Wheat or Raisin Bran.
11. This person wouldn’t be caught dead wearing?
Ha! We actually joke about this all the time. Sandals, a Hawaiian shirt, and what he and I hatefully call a “Zydeco” hat –- such a fucking Boomer uniform. Fuck the Boomers! Never!
Some anonymous Boomer in a slick, expensive Zydeco hat — thinking he looks ICE COLD, no doubt:
12. Favorite sports team?
The Boston Red Sox. And yes, our son the sports writer-to-be is a to-the-death Yankees fan. And yes, I realize that this means war.
13. Who did he/she vote for?
O’bama.
14. What is their sign?
Cancer…and all that that implies.
15. What is something you do that he/she wishes you didn’t?
And speaking of applied astrology, I suppose I am not always as vigilant about taking care of my health as Cancer would like me to be, i.e., I am not always as thorough as I could be about making sure I take the necessary pain and preventative medications when it becomes unbearable. I like to pretend that I have perfect health, you see. It’s more fun that way.
16. How many states has this person lived in?
Four: Massachusetts, Minnesota, Washington, California.
17. What is his/her heritage?
Russian Jew…with a little Romanian thrown in just for good vampiric measure.
18. You bake them a cake for their birthday. What kind do you bake?
Chocolate with chocolate frosting and chocolate sprinkles and chocolate filling and chocolate lube oozing from my cooter as I serve it up in a chocolate licorice t-back thong. This is a motherfucker who likes chocolate.
19. Did he/she play sports in high school?
This question actually made me belly snort out loud. If guzzling hooch pilfered from one’s parents’ liquor cabinet, endlessly listening to Bob Dylan records, and staggering through the woods of suburban Boston yelling into mailboxes with drunken buddies qualifies as a sport, then the answer is a resounding yes. He lettered, even.
20. This person could spend hours…
Watching “Lawrence of Arabia”, reading about “Lawrence of Arabia”, and talking about “Lawrence of Arabia” –- and has. And this is just reason #672 of why I absolutely adore him!
21. He/She wants a new…
Season of “Extras” — though, of course, that’ll never happen. That flabby, brilliant, British ship has sailed.
22. The CD I would probably find in their vehicle is…
Anything by Frank Black, Elvis Costello, Radiohead, Stereolab, Queens of the Stone Age, The Breeders, The Shins, and The Like.
23. What can you do that will guarantee a laugh from him/her?
Wear a big, fuzzy mouse suit whilst smoking a cig with a bored, jaded look on my face. Lays him out every time.
24. Does he/she get along well with their family?
Well, they’re still alive, aren’t they? Define your terms.
25. If money wasn’t an option, I would buy him/her…
A life of non-stop travel, discovery, and adventure; a life lived out of a suitcase. A life of unlimited railpasses and unlimited dreams.
My Great Uncle Pete was a pretty famous Western painter and rodeo cowboy in the earlier part of the 20th Century, and his ever-present paintings provided some of the mightiest and most memorable images of my childhood. He worked out of Tuscon, Arizona and legend has it that he and the uber-butch actor, Lee Marvin, used to regularly get pissed together in The Tap Room bar at the now historic Hotel Congress. Apparently, several of his paintings still hang there. Despite the official word, knowing my family, they were most likely traded as payment for bar tabs run amok. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
From their website:
The Tap Room has been popular with the locals since its inception in 1919. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the Tap Room was given its touch of western class. Pete Martinez was a famous artist and rodeo cowboy. While he roped & bucked with the best in New York, his artwork was featured in art exhibits, including the lobby of the Garden & Woolworth Galleries. He retired in Tucson with his wife. Though it’s been suggested that Martinez painted pictures to pay for his keep here at Hotel Congress, they are just rumors. His paintings grace the walls of the Tap Room for one simple reason — it was his watering hole. He enjoyed the company and the drinks so much that he bestowed some of his art to show his appreciation. Many celebrities and regular folk collect Pete Martinez’ work — in fact, we are regularly asked to sell his work to collectors. We always smile and say “No”. We want his work to remain where he felt at home.
Yeah, right. Way to clean up the filth for the unwashed masses. Even though Uncle Pete was certainly one of the more savory characters in my family’s tawdry, madcap history, he was no saint, either. He is, after all, related to me.
A few years ago, I was casually thumbing through a ragged copy of Architectural Digest magazine in my Rheumatologist’s waiting room and was pleased and surprised to find that apparently one of the most avid and enthusiastic collectors of his work is the actress Diane Keaton. She has several paintings of his hanging in her exquisitely restored Spanish Colonial home in Los Angeles, including a rather uncharacteristically large piece of his that serves as the aesthetic centerpiece of the living room.
When I saw the pictures, it made me smile to discover that one of my delightfully scandalous clan actually excelled at something other than crimes committed or time served.
Hurray for Great Uncle Pete.
RULES:
* 1. Post these rules.
* 2. Each tagged person must post 8 things about themself on their journal (that other people don’t know)
* 3. At the end, you have to choose and tag 8 people
* 4. Go to their pages and send a message saying you tagged them
* 5. Fuck off, lady. I don’t tag.
Hmmm…now what don’t you adorable bastards know about me?
1) I have a whole slew of really marvelous Ethiopian friends that I used to waitress with way back when I worked at Bob’s Big Boy in Fresno. I have not seen them in years and miss them fiercely. So connected were we that one evening over a traditional Ethiopian dinner, they all got together and collectively decided that I qualified as an official Ethiopian — and they even bestowed upon me a name in their lovely language of Amharic: Denkenesh Tesseme. From what they told me, Denkenesh means “you are wonderful” and Tesseme means “and the whole world will know about you.” So humbled and honored was I that to this day, whenever I am fortunate enough to meet an Ethiopian in my travels, I always remember to introduce myself in my Amharic name — and they always belly laugh and get a huge kick out of it. Bring on the injera, motherfuckers!
2) I am a proud, defiant high school drop-out. One morning, early in my junior year, I was hurrying to class and just stopped dead in my tracks in the hallway outside Geometry. At that moment, I simply made the decision to stop attending. I wanted to learn what I wanted to learn — not the useless, meaningless, uninteresting horseshit they were blowing up my cerebral cortex. So, for the duration of what would have been my high school career, I hopped my fatass on the bus everyday and headed on over to the Fresno County public library — and just started at one end and worked my way through. It was truly the most glorious sort of education: the kind fueled by passion, ambition, insatiable curiosity, and a really long-running, hilarious, byzantine dodge of the various bumbling truant officers who hunted me for almost two years. Despite stalking me relentlessly, I was like some sort of slippery, smirking, belly laughing fox in Famolare sandals who always managed to evade their authoritative snares; they never managed to take me down. Don’t get between a bitch and her books, I say. As you can well imagine, I am an ardent supporter of libraries, librarians, and the culture of books in general.
3) My hilarious sister, Jenny, made me unexpectedly BELLY LAUGH and spray Pellegrino at dinner the other night when, between the first and second courses, she proudly announced to the table that when she doesn’t bathe for a day or two, her undercarriage smells exactly like a “rat cage.” As soon as my ribs stopped aching and I mopped the fizzy water off of my chin and chest, I helpfully suggested that she employ the same method our mother uses when faced with the same substandard hygienic conundrum: the now infamous Scope mouthwash douche.
4) Because a pock-marked babysitter once forced me to eat an immense bowlful despite my earnest pleadings that the earthy, throaty taste of it made me sick — and because I then threw it up all over my mother’s nicest plastic tablecloth — to this day, I still do not eat mushroom soup. Aside from a handful of exotic meats, and the “economy cuts” of regular domesticated creatures that I patently refuse to consume (the ones Chef Anthony Bourdain refers to as “The Nasty Bits”), mushroom soup is one of the few foods of which I will absolutely not partake. If truth be told, I find overly-picky eaters to be some of the most annoying bastards on the planet and I certainly don’t play that shit in my own home. I give everybody a get-out-of-jail-free card on just five foods — FIVE. Anything above and beyond that is irritating, unreasonable, and simply not happening. Big Fattie don’t play.
5) And speaking of chow, I have probably the healthiest diet of almost anyone you know — hateful, judgmental, dreadlock-sporting, co-op-belonging, patchouli-reeking, tahini-drenched, hippified motherfuckers included. My husband, along with the plethora of medical specialists who treat me, always scratch their heads and ask me the exact same question: “How on earth is it that you are fat?” Just lucky, I guess.
6) Despite it being a wholly unremarkable film by most standards, the scene in Far and Away where they show The Oklahoma Land Rush takes my breath away, reduces me to tears, and brings me to my knees every time. There is something so pure and beautiful about all that it represents — all those determined people literally racing towards their dream. It exemplifies what is best about our country and our culture. It is America:
7) Aside from my Great Grandma Mary — who was a goddamned saint in black witch shoes and a sensible floral housedress — all the women in my family are notorious whores…myself, of course, included. We got no shame! Don’t like it? Wanna judge me? Fuck off, lady! You don’t know me!
8) And speaking about being a shameless hooker, I was recently asked who, in my opinion, is the sexiest man who ever lived. Coincidentally, my answer also happens to be one half of the most adorable couple who ever lived.
Honestly?
I don’t remember the last time I fucking belly laughed this hard.
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Just one of the amazing things about living in Los Angeles — aside from sniffing cantaloupes next to Rodney Bingenheimer at the grocery store, having to nicely ask Ashley Olsen if she might please take her Marlboro red elsewhere as her smoke was billowing directly into our window and choking my friend, Billy, and I out of our hotel room at the Chateau Marmont (she apologized sweetly and quickly relocated her skeletal self to across the courtyard), and savagely screaming, “WE LOVE YOU SALLY STRUTHERS!” at ol’ Sally as she came teetering precariously out of Fatburger on six inch platform shoes — is that there are always numerous cameras rolling somewhere in the city at any given moment — and what that means is:
AWESOME EARTHQUAKE FOOTAGE
As I was watching this, I found myself absolutely riveted and unable to take my eyes off that hilarious robot face — and all I kept thinking to myself was that underneath all that cardboard, tinfoil, and duct tape that person was probably thinking to himself:
“Motherfucker. I have spent my whole life being a kind and true and dignified person — and now this building is coming down on top of me and when they dig my fucking body out of the rubble three weeks from now, I AM GOING TO BE WEARING THIS CHEESY GODDAMNED ROBOT SUIT. This is not how I wish to be remembered.”
Your profane, yet humble, correspondent in front of Faneuil Hall…proudly presenting some famous, oversized Bostonian’s heavy metal schvontz, April, 2008
Goddamn, this made me belly laugh out loud.
Whereupon my beautiful lively daughter…
looks exactly like my beautiful dead sister.
muffy bolding 
