Friday Funny: Fundamentalists, don’t fuck with ‘Frisco

Merry pranksters holding silly signs and blasting Lady Gaga vastly outnumbered the sad Westboro Baptist Church demonstration in front of the Twitter office in San Francisco last week. Fuckhead Phelps and brood subsequently cancelled their scheduled protest of Fiddler on the Roof (ha! ha! ha!) at the Golden Gate Theater, but that didn’t stop the music - the counter-protesters turned up anyway with signs and rick rolls. Brilliant.

Photo by sandwichgirl at the theater.

Photo by Rubin Starset from the Twitter protest.

Time

So the other day I was having coffee with my friend Mo and we got to talking about how you never seem to notice how those friends that you see all the time are aging. It’s only when you see pictures of them from back in the day that you go “Wow. You look a lot…more mature now.”

And then I started yammering about how the same goes for one’s self… except in my case I really don’t think I’ve changed all that much in the last oh, twenty years or so. Really, I haven’t changed hardly at all. Have I.

My friend Mo just sort of looked at me over the top of her coffee cup.

Fast forward to a few weeks later, as I am standing in the bathroom getting ready for work.

And I notice the grey hairs at the crown of my head, and the lines at the corners of my eyes, and the cheekbones jutting as the collagen drains away, and the skin beneath my eyes that is less elastic, and the tiny broken capillaries on my nose. And I remember how my knees and back and neck hurt more often, and how I have to work out a lot more and drink a lot less. And how I have to wear a hearing aid when I watch T.V..

In retrospect, I think giving me the “Poor girl, I don’t want to be there when the high wears off” look was probably the kindest thing my friend could have done.

Here’s looking at you, kid

Every year Kevin and I get season tickets to the UW World Music series. We rarely know any of the performers on the schedule and do no research on them beforehand. Every show is an adventure.

Last night in the theater lobby, we realized we were at least twenty years younger than the rest of the ticket holders. I told Kevin it was a good thing he knew CPR. He didn’t think his skills were necessary since every third person in there looked like a retired doctor.

It turned out that the evening’s entertainment was pianist Leon Bates and opera singers Louise Toppin and Robert Sims doing the best of George Gershwin.  I’m not a huge opera fan but who in cold, gray, drizzly Seattle can resist a hot summer night on Broadway? Even Kevin, who would rather eat ground glass than watch any sort of musical, was riveted. It was over too soon.

Walking back to the car, Kevin mused, “Why were so many of those old people staring at us?”

“My theory,” I replied, “is that people of a certain age have the guts to look strangers in the eye because they just don’t give a shit what you think of them.”

In Seattle, looking at strangers all, let alone staring, is an anomaly. Maybe it’s the Scandinavian roots, but the majority of people here are not overtly friendly en mass.They are perfectly fine one-on-one, like when you order your latte. But when they pass one another on the street, sit next to each other on the crowded bus, or mill about in theater lobbies, thou shalt not look at any human being you do not know longer than half a second, lest they look back at you and the dreaded eye contact is made. ¹

What’s so bad about eye contact? Well, it’s the subtlest form of acknowledgment. And no one wants to be the first to acknowledge someone who might ignore them, which is the subtlest form of contempt. This “ignore them before they ignore you” is a passive-aggressive kind of self-protection used by people who care too much about what other people think.

Who doesn’t care what you think of them? Small children. The homeless.

And the old folks, the true pirates in our communities.

When I am an old woman, I shall wear a pearl earring and look into your eyes.

A very beautiful old woman by pedrosimoes7

1. Current graffiti on the Why don’t Seattle-ites Talk to One Another? Facebook group: “If you ever see this face walkin’ down the road, please say hi! I can take it, promise!” [↩]

Friday Funny: The Apple of my fly

What are you doing New Year’s Eve? Part II

When last we left the wedding, Kevin had completed his Best Man duties with aplomb and followed the newlyweds as they scampered hand in hand down the aisle.  Their scamper was a short one,  given that the aisle ended at the luncheon tables the caterers had been setting up during the ceremony.  (The smell of roast chicken will always remind them of their wedding vows, which I suspect was all part of the mother of the bride’s evil plan.)

With the newlyweds standing slightly awkwardly at the end of the aisle, the minister instructed us to queue up to congratulate them. Half of us were still waiting in the reception line when he told us to report immediately to the beverage table to obtain a drink for the toast.

Our toasting “drink” turned out to be the sweetest Kool Aid I have ever had — and that’s saying something, given that I survived many a childhood summer in South Dakota.

After another five minutes, we were told it was time for lunch.

“No toast?” I asked Kevin hopefully, wondering how many rot-free years the beverage had already shaved off my teeth.

Kevin shrugged, which is code for “Hold your sugar water, woman.”

So we filled our plates with a variety of free food, which included what the woman ahead of us in line referred to as “Nuptial Jello.” We’d just sat down when our by now harried-looking emcee came over and whispered, “The bride and groom are making this up as they go along–” [I gasped in mock surprise and Kevin gave me the stink eye] “–and they would like Kevin to make a toast after the music.”

All this and entertainment, too!

After a young lady with a nice, if a bit churchy, voice had performed a few songs, a gentleman took the stage.  I recognized him as the elderly Chinese man who frightened me in the hall.  Confused no more, he had the unmistakable bearing of a Family Patriarch in his element, but just in case anyone was fuzzy on that, he opened with, “When Roger came to me to ask if he could marry my sister Pru…”

What followed was his interpretation of Bette Midler’s “The Rose.”

You know that scene from the movie “A Christmas Story” where the family goes out for dinner on Christmas and get serenaded by the Chinese waiters? “Deck da halls with boughs of hah-ry! Fa rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah!” It was more or less exactly like that.  And you know that high note at “Some say ROVE! It is a hunger…” Well, he couldn’t quite make it but he tried really hard.  Yet the song was so heartfelt that everyone was pretty riveted and he got a huge round of genuine applause when he finished.

Just after the last petal fell, Kevin was summoned up front to give his Best Man toast. It was very good - or at least we think it was. We couldn’t hear it because he didn’t use the microphone until he was mostly done. When he finally did speak into the mic, we got the Reader’s Digest version, which went a little something like this:

“….Well, I was just babbling about how I met Roger. Just to cut this short, I wish him and Pru a very happy life together.”

His applause was a little less enthusiastic but everyone knew his heart was in the right place.

The groom’s brother also gave a toast, which we also couldn’t hear, this time due to the half-dozen children that were running amok on the stage screaming yah! yah! yah! as children are wont to do when they are all dressed up with no place to go ruin their clothes.  At one point there was a loud, rhythmic BANG! BANG! BANG! and I nearly had a heart attack.  Turned out one of the little geniuses had found a basketball (in a gym? no way!) and it was careening its way down the aisle toward a camera set up on a tripod.  Mommy finally appeared and subdued both child and ball; I guess it’s only fun until something really fucking expensive gets hurt.

Charred toast was followed by about ten minutes of dancing, which nobody did except the bride and groom. I am sure that’s because they are awesome ballroom dancers (that’s how they met) and nobody was going to volunteer to look like the Scarecrow from Oz by comparison.

After a while, when there were no more whispered obligations or runaway basketballs, I started to relax.  The end was surely nigh! I swigged my sugar water and ate my Jello with gusto. Which of course is precisely when a photographer hauled my ass up on to the stage with the rest of the “wedding party.”

Naturally, he had me stand right beside Pru in most of the pictures.  So now the poor bride is stuck with wedding photos featuring some girl she doesn’t know from Adam with a red Kool Aid mustache and blue Jello in her teeth.

Shortly after the photo session, Kevin and I went back to our table to plot our escape. “We must be stealthy so they are not insulted,” I hissed. “They mustn’t see us.  Leaving before the newlyweds do is considered very rude!”

Just then the Patriarch booted us out of our chairs so he could remove their decorations and cram them into a garbage bag.

“I don’t think we have to worry about that,” said Kevin.

Kermit’s x-ray is vaguely unsettling

Friday Fucket Bucket

“Casual Fridays” - that’s so ’80s. Where are these pengquins working?

Wet

This weekend I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at underwater photography on Flickr.  I collected a few of the best images into galleries. Check ‘em out if you have an extra five minutes and enjoy that sort of thing

Beauty Under Water
Married To A Mermaid
A Mermaid Fair

The titles of the mermaid galleries come from poems by Arthur Lloyd and Lord Alfred Tennyson.

Friday Freudian

Interesting how “man” is singular but “women” is plural. So many tunnels, so little time…

Via the reliably hilarious Failblog.

Help for Haiti

Today I donated a humble sum to Mercy Corps, a Portland-based non-profit that is sending an emergency response team to Haiti. I hope you, too, will give to one of the organizations listed on the What Gives!? site if you can.