I took a programming class in college and have had this inside joke url ever since
It took us a while to get around to it, but The Slutcracker cast party finally exploded on the Oberon dance floor last Thursday. Ammon DJ’d for us; there was improvisational pole dancing, a slutty award ceremony, pink panther/cop burlesque, and I finally got to wear that mustache I’ve had laying around forever (alas, unpictured).
Erik licks my boot (Larger)
I love you (Larger)
Full album: (somewhat unsafe-for-work, especially if you’ve got your Flickr preferences set correctly) here.
1.) Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays. These are the ideal evenings for a first date. Thursdays may also be permitted if we’ve been eyeballing each other longingly for years and are essentially already in love with each other.
Fridays and Saturdays, however, are completely unacceptable choices. No one can live up to that expectation on a first date; why even try? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be dancing.
And on the seventh day we rest. (I need groceries.)
2.) Sweatshirts. I will wear a sweatshirt on my first date with you. Don’t get me wrong: it’ll be clean, I’ll smell nice, I’ll pair it with some tiny pants and tall boots. It’s not even that I don’t mostly own fancier clothing. I could really bust out the big guns and pair a blouse with some pearl earrings and I could sit across from you at the candlelit dinner table all glowingly and hyperventilate all night!
But let’s be clear on this right away: I hate static, cold, and itchiness. Nice outfits are for job interviews; performances; Friday/Saturday nights. I own and often wear sweatshirts.
3.) Make-up. Man, I used to feel really unattractive without make-up. But now I don’t! Isn’t that great?
4.) Eating. I have never understood why first dates so often involve dinner. For one, it’s expensive, and if we’re dating you’re probably poor too. For another, eating is intimate. And not like . . . fun-intimate. It’s weird-intimate. There are all these squelchy and crunch sounds, and sometimes slurping is required. Slurping, for Christ’s sake! Sometimes said slurping splashes stuff. If there’s bread beforehand it’s all up in your chapstick and the crumbs make little dandruffy piles on your lap. Personally, I have poor motor skills and tend to miss my mouth if I’m not concentrating.
So, I propose we do anything but eat together on our first date.
5.) F-bombs. This is something I can do very little about. I will curse like a motherfucker on our first date, especially if we’re around your friends.
This hot chocolate is fucking delicious! Man I love this fucking weather, it’s abso-fucking ridiculous, let’s build the fuck out of a snowman, what do you say? (Cue: fuck yes!)
Four months ago I thought I’d rent a car and disappear into the night: pack my things and drug the cat and drive halfway across the country to my home city, where I belonged. There’d be no need to tell anyone, I thought, retarded with the novelty of grief. Not my friends. Not my recently-exed. I would just show up at my parents’ door, sleepless and insane. Knock knock. Hello. I just had to come.
It seemed like the most immediate and appropriately drastic solution at the time, and its potential reality — the fact that every day, any day, I could just do it — allowed me to stay, breathe, deliberate, for one month.
Three months ago I went to our first Slutcracker cast meeting, where everyone was smiling and excited and giving high fives. And in retrospect, if I hadn’t been open to staying, why would I have subjected myself to that? Could I have possibly thought “the people here will convince me to leave”?
I said “okay. So I’ll stay through December.” and I dragged my Aerobed to a third floor I couldn’t really afford as a sort of promise: I will eventually leave you.
Two months ago my friend Sara visited for a few nights with her baby. They slept on my air mattress, and I slept on a different air mattress, because when you want to keep your options open and live in the moment it usually involves lots of uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.
Anyway, so in this fashion a child was temporarily in my life. Days spent with a parent and child are different from the four-hour babysitting stints I’d once known so well. In a matter of days, things start repeating themselves. Baby goes to sleep. Baby wakes up. Baby crawls around. Feed the baby. Baby goes to sleep. Baby wakes up.
And I know they grow up so quickly or whatever, but in a couple of days a child’s existence and needs acquire a sense of cyclical endlessness. That was fun for a while, but. What, we can’t party now? You want to go see some movie about murder or something? And with this re-evaluation of what it meant to be a parent, I began to re-evaluate a lot of the presumptions I had about my alleged future.
“I’m going to wash Miriam’s hands,” Sara said. “I’ll be right back.”
I sat down at my computer. Sara re-entered the room, baby cooing. “You know what I’ve always meant to do,” I said, “is apply to Salt. And I just decided that I’m going to do it today.”
“Sheesh Adrianne,” Sara said. “I was gone for like one minute.”
One month ago, I wrote you a letter. I love you in the most casual sense of the word. I love you so that if there were a tornado coming, I would usher you into a basement. I love you if it would cheer you up.
We clarified, this doesn’t change anything.
Three weeks ago, I got the acceptance letter from Salt.
I cried, “Hurraaaaay!” Then, “Ahhhhhhhhggghhh!”
Last Friday, after I’d convinced myself Wells Fargo would make this entirely fiscally irresponsible/impossible, and I’d come to terms with what now seemed a gloomy return to Minneapolis — another loan suddenly worked out. My dad called at eleven at night to let me know. I went to Portland the next day to sign a lease.
I asked my new landlady, “so while I live here, can I borrow one of your 14 cats?”
“We used to just include a cat with the apartment, actually.”
“Yessss.”
On the ride home, I turned to you. “Visit me?” I asked.
Yesterday, I mailed in a check for my full tuition. I move at the end of the month, and start classes as a photography student (!) one week later.
Cast-wise, the show was nearly twice as big this year, with twice as many performances. Sundays — days of both matinee and evening shows — got to be a little rough. On our last Sunday, between our second-to-last and last performance, I managed to get thoroughly wasted off a single free beer from the theatre lobby, stumble down into the basement, and pass out on one of the dressing room couches. When I awoke, someone was querying: “is it true Lacy has six toes on each foot?”
“I think . . . she has four,” came the response.
This party is out of control (Larger)
Controls (Larger)
Pixy Dust and Lolli Hoops (Larger)
“We were worried,” Sugar said at one of our curtain calls, “that, this year, with the added performances and with it being a repeat of last year, that some of the magic would be gone. That you guys would get here and just go through the motions but not really feel it, or that some of the excitement would have to go away. And it just hasn’t happened. The magic of this is still here.”
The massive gold curtain swayed heavily behind her, and behind it, the massive red curtain, and behind it, a 900 seats of jostling, whispers, cat calls.
After we went to his parents’ Thanksgiving (truffle oil and roasted garlic mashed potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce, life-well-spent turkey, chocolate bourban pecan pie, chestnut stuffing) we went to my friend Jourdan’s potluck Friendsgiving (three different kinds of cranberry sauce/relish alone), and around 9pm we reluctantly stood to leave her warm, sweet-spiced kitchen for some far away party. The door swung heavy behind us.
I stared petulantly at the windshield wipers as he started the car. “What if . . . we just went back to your place and fell asleep?” I proposed. I often propose this, actually, especially as it gets dark earlier: it’s one reason it either sucks or rules to date me. I am sleepy as hell.
“Yeaaaah,” he stalled. “We could do that. But . . . I think we should go. It’s probably going to be pretty amazing. And I brought my digital recorder for the bonfire.”
I sighed. “Okay. But, I might nap on the way up.”
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing in to the wilderness.We were on dirt roads and had gotten turned around a few times before we suddenly saw a house, glowing through the trees like an elven palace. Porches were stacked in utilitarian squares, illuminated with bare light bulbs. Everything flickered through rustling leaves.
“That’s the house Damon built. Well, is building. That’s where we’re going.”
“Oh.”
The car rumbled around one final bend in the road, and he pulled off to the side, the wheels hovering over a ditch, maybe, or a half-frozen muddy pond, or a half-buried body. I never know what to expect from rural Massachusetts. “You ready for this?” he asked, arching one eyebrow.
The moon was full, glazing surrounding pine trees in a hollow light. In the distance, we could hear drum-playing, screeches of laughter, the pop pop of burning wood. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a nightmare I’d once had. (There are shadows chasing us, don’t look back; never, ever, leave the car!)
“Let’s do it.”
I pulled on my hat, filled my chest with air.
He said “oh, just so you know, everyone here will call me by another name.”
“Hmm?”
“There’s still goat left, if you want some,” a dude leaning against the garage door said. Raw light flooded out from the room behind him, illuminating the outline of stubble on his cheeks and casting the rest of his face in shadow; he kicked the rocks and dead leaves at his feet, exhaling smoke. I am immediately attracted to people like this, probably because I grew up in the ’90s.
“We missed the goat roast? That’s a shame.”
“Yeah,” he grinned at us, teeth shimmering. “But, the pianos are still in the field, waiting. Hey, have you guys gotten the tour yet?”
And my hand was taken. “Yeah, I’ve been here before — I can show her.”