Little Victories

I'm not a comedian. That hasn't stopped me from participating in comedy shows. On Friday, Corey Cohen graciously allowed me to try a new character at Steal This Show. She was a 38-year-old library Aide named Beverly.

I find the mark of a successful character performance is being confused for the character after the show. When I first started doing "Little Jaime" at Bedtime Stories, I was approached by a fellow and his lady friend. She thought I actually was 12, and was concerned that I was drinking a beer. If I recall, I showed her an ID to prove that I was an adult.

Friday night, after a performance which culminated in my hitting on, then spilling a drink on Corey, offering to make casseroles for the gentlemen of the audience, and yelling out a fake phone number while dressed like Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5, a man I had never seen before started hitting on me. When I told him that I wasn't actually 38, he left awkwardly.

Hopefully there won't be any confusion this Wednesday, February 18, when Blaise and I will be performing in Bedtime Stories (now at the Ric Rac) with the help of the lovely Meg Favreau.

Manifesto

I read this piece at last night's Bedtime Stories.

Keeping up with the Jones -es has gone too far. It is an activity for those lacking imagination. My dad told me that there is a recession, and that we have to cut back. He is right, but for the wrong reasons. I think we value the wrong things in life. Getting an iPod Shuffle for Christmas is not as important as Matt Beverly thinks it is. We do not need videogames, or highlights for our hair, and I refuse to believe that getting a manicure is necessary before each CYO dance – especially since everyone just wears jeans anyway. We have been taught to lead lives of bourgeois excess. But we are young, and can still change.

It’s too late for our parents, the petty bourgeoisie. They have built entire lives and careers on one-upping each other, and looking like they know what they’re doing. I figured this out when my dad bought a new television, even when ours was just fine, just because it was a flat screen. He needed my brother to show him how to use the remote. My brother is nine. It isn’t just a problem in my family. My mom says that Bobby Cartica’s dad started his whole construction business just to spite his brother, who got into college. She says that he feels superior because he makes more money, even though he dropped out of high school. This is called class warfare, because the rich people are always trying to make the poor people feel bad, like when my mom heard that Mrs. Tierney gets new appliances every two years, even when they aren’t broken. She shouldn’t be upset that we can’t afford such waste. But, my parents, like all of yours, were taught to be materialistic, rather than introspective.

Karl Marx said that “the theory of Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” When he said this, he wasn’t trying to steal stuff, but to free the proletariat from the iron hand of the bourgeoisie. He wanted the people, like you and me, to change the world so as to make it better for themselves. His ideas are called Marxism. Marxism is different from Communism, because Communism doesn’t work. They do it in China, but really it’s Totalitarianism, and it’s bad, because they make inferior products and steal jobs from Americans. They also steal American jobs in India, but that’s called outsourcing. I learned that when my mom tried to call the cable company, and I had to sit on the phone while she was waiting for her turn. It was a very bad connection, and our cultural differences made it hard to understand how to restart our DVR.

As students here, we already wear uniforms. This makes us united in a way that encourages teamwork, as well as discouraging gang colors. I think that Marx was right about a lot of things. I do not advocate stealing from one another, but instead working together for a greater good. We can free ourselves from the rampant consumerism of our bourgeois parents. Instead of demanding more things, like for Christmas in a few weeks, we should demand something else – freedom, equality, communism. If we refuse to become cogs in the machine of commerce, freeing ourselves from the shackles of our parents’ misconceptions, we can set an example that could become a revolution. There is nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.

STUDENTS OF THE SEVENTH GRADE, UNITE!

Updates

In addition to ongoing work at Space Junk for Space Punks and next Friday's Toiling in Obscurity, I will be performing in Bedtime Stories on Wednesday, December 3, at the Shubin. I am also really into making crackers right now.

Oat Cakes:

2 c. Oatmeal
3/4 c. Flour
1/4 tsp. Baking Soda
1 tsp. Salt
4 tbl. Butter, melted
Boiling Water

Preheat oven to 400.
Pulse oatmeal in blender for a smoother texture.
Add wet to dry, using only as much water as is necessary to form a workable dough.
Roll flat and cut into circles.
Bake 10 - 15 minutes.

You can tart these up however you'd like. I made some with Rosemary (crushed, then worked into the dough), and some with Honey (1tsp. for a half-batch). They are delicious.

I Deny This Reality

I should preface this with a few facts. Despite years of threats, I have never seen Star Wars, or any of its subsequent sequels, prequels, or whatever George Lucas is calling “movies” these days. Aside from a handful of classic dystopian tales that have been assigned over the years, I have never been a big reader science fiction. I find the actual world hard enough to believe as it is. The last time I was likely to indulge in any sort of fantasy world was between 1989 and 91, when I was particularly enamored with The Little Mermaid. This isn’t to say that I lack imagination, or to deny that my childhood was spent buried in books, barely dodging insults. I only offer this as contrast.

Last October I was the secretary to an alarmingly inept young lawyer who looked like a khaki-clad (Hangin’ with) Mr. Cooper, and had the patience and intellectual capacity of a hungry toddler. I was unhappy, but that was to be expected. It was, after all, my first job out of college. I wasn’t supposed to like it. I was supposed to phone it in while I wrote my novel on lunch breaks. I wasn’t supposed to take it personally, but it was getting more and more difficult to leave work in that tiny, windowless office, where I was left alone with the abstract expressionist Ikea painting to field phone calls from my boss, asking me how to be a lawyer. I do not respond well to the sorts of demands that were lobbed at me; I was told in the beginning that my $10 and hour under-the-table job consisted of copies, answering the phone, and taking things to the courthouse, but it became clear within a month that my boss expected me to shoulder the burden of his responsibilities as an attorney. He wasn’t qualified to do it, so how could I be?

One drunken Saturday, after a couple of movies, the evening’s companion lurched forward with a VHS copy of Logopolis. “Just one episode, I swear.” I didn’t have a good argument, and he was bigger than me, so I allowed it. Maybe it was the wine, but with every chime of the cloister bell, I suspended a little more disbelief. By the time the Watcher faded into Peter Davison, something clicked.

I should now take the time to explain to the uninitiated, that I am talking about Doctor Who, the longest running science fiction television series in the world. Without going too much into history, the show is about The Doctor, who is a Time Lord, which is a kind of time and space traveling alien from the planet Gallifrey. During the 9th Doctor’s tenure, it’s explained that he is the last of the Time Lords, and Gallifrey was destroyed during the time war. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. All you really need to know is that he’s an alien from a race with the ability to regenerate —that is, instead of dying (most of the time) they become a completely different person in a different body. The Doctor retains his memories with each new incarnation, but has had several different personalities. There have been ten Doctors since the Kennedy Assassination. From the first episode, the Doctor has traveled in what appears to be a 1960’s police telephone box, but is actually his spaceship, the TARDIS, which is an acronym for time and relative dimensions in space, which translates to “It’s bigger on the inside.” All of this is probably news to you, unless you are British, or watched the show on PBS at some point in your childhood. I fit into neither category, so it was very difficult for me to explain to my friends, or even myself how such a thing had come to pass.

Like anyone with basic cable in the 1990’s, I’ve seen Back to the Future, and its sequels a hundred times, and therefore, have a casual interest in fictional time travel and young Michael J. Fox. My interest in space travel extends only as far as the 1970’s, and really only for Ziggy Stardust and Logan’s Run-style set pieces. I spent most of college proclaiming, “I have no suspension of disbelief!” as the stock answer to why I hated The Matrix and Lord of the Rings and your fantasy short story with the nowhere plot and several made up words that meant “dragon,” and “sword” that was somehow also about your ex-girlfriend. I was put off aliens almost entirely at the age of three by the movie E.T., not because of the scary government interference parts, but because E.T. looked as though he smelled awful. That was enough for me. Nothing in my intellectual makeup allowed for my almost autistic interest in the continuing adventures of the Doctor and his companions. But, in the past year alone, I’ve had six jobs, which is twice as many as I’d ever had before. Since quitting my secretary job in late November, I have been a temp, a linguistic annotator, a production assistant for an educational publishing company, an advertising copywriter, and am now, for the time being, a barista again. I have not settled into a single position, either because it was temporary, or because my sanity was too important to me.

We define ourselves by our goals, our jobs and incomes and relationships. When none of them give even the illusion of certainty, without a clear station or direction, it’s easy to lose track of things. It’s not any easier creatively, especially if your end point seems further away than health insurance. To be young now is to sit amongst the intangible, to be thoroughly separate from comfort and safety. It’s why our cultural and social milestones are so tied to our interests, why we update our MySpace and Facebook profiles – because they’re safe, and offer immediate, though shallow connections, and because, in some ways, they give a faint impression of a fully formed person with those few improperly punctuated lists. Man is not the sum of his interests, but without clear markers for growth or success, we’re limited to bullet points of our capabilities, lines on our resumes, and detailed explanations of extracurricular activities.

The Doctor has been ten different people. It’s not just a convenient plot device – it allows the audience to see consistency through change. We are born and become and remain ourselves. It’s not a simple or pleasant process, and it goes wrong as often as it goes right, but it’s what makes us human. He has been young and old and silly and serious. He has been an egomaniac, an asshole, the inspiration for (and salvation from) an evil computer bent on eugenics experiments in the outer reaches of space. It’s not real, and we know that, but it reflects some part of reality that’s hard to contain within television plotlines. Change is not something that happens in easy arcs with clear midpoints, step by cinematic step before our very eyes. It is often something that happens out of necessity which we accustom ourselves to later. The Doctor hasn’t our human luxury, and so all of his differences and similarities are physical, played out for all of us to see. Whether or not we agree with each casting, he’s the same character the audience accepted forty-five years ago. And I like that. I respect that.

With all that’s changed and changed and changed in my last year, it feels good to have some constant, an escape from thinking about how, at the rate I’m going, I’ll never finish this book or have health insurance or a savings account, or get anywhere close to touching what I’ve worked my whole life toward. Because while the world is not fair or kind, I know that the Doctor will always come back in the end with the answer that, might not be a solution, but does the least harm. It's a comfort to imagine some sense of kindness in the world, even if it’s by way of a fictional alien traveler with a soft spot for planet Earth. I’m only human, but there’s no one on earth with more faith in humanity than the Doctor.