Santa Crotch, Conception Confusion & My Cousin Deb: Three FUN stories.

Baby, I swear I'm a virgin. I promise.

The scene: 4th grade. Miss Andriola’s classroom. Me wanting so badly to be as popular as the kids who didn’t have to buy IOU sweatshirts from the outlet mall.

After several of my classy fourth-grade peers noted that the hat I got for Christmas looked like one of Debbie Gibson’s {available for viewing here}, I felt it was necessary to tell them that, in fact, it was a Debbie Gibson hat. I casually mentioned that, you know, she was my cousin. I was met with disbelief, of course. Joey Galione shook his head and Katie Botsch rolled her eyes. I couldn’t let their skepticism win. That night, I begged and kissed my mom’s feet until she signed 100 squares of paper with the name ‘Debbie Gibson.’
She really did it.
How cool is my mom?
Didn’t work though. Well, maybe it fooled a few. But, as I proudly passed out my cousin’s autograph the next day, some jerkwad said, ‘I have a signed poster from Bop magazine hanging on my wall, and this signature doesn’t look at all like that one.’

This one comment set back my popularity a whole year. If only I could remember who said it... I’d take revenge now.
Not really. But I like to sound threatening sometimes. So watch out.


*******

I recently called my mom and told her that I’d found my first grey hair. “Is it down there?” she asked. In fact it was! She’s so wise (I'll tell you why in a minute). I guess that’s where they start in my family.

This made me feel very old, as I remember my very first pubic hair. It debuted a long time ago. A pioneer on its own, it poked through my underpants right around the same time people were just forgetting the whole Debbie Gibson debacle. I saw it in the bathroom of Fullerton Elementary and walked back to my classroom with my head held high because I had become a real woman. So what if I was ten? I was a woman. A woman with one pubic hair, but still a woman.

And now another pioneer hair has appeared on its own in a whole different color. Hello there, silver crotch fox.

I felt like this should be something I kept to myself, but the topic arose at a girlie brunch the other day, and I realized that there are other women my age with a similar vaginal changing of the seasons. Our solution is to stop waxing and shaving. We hope that more pioneers will come forth and soon change the entire color of our pubis.* At this point, we will grow our hair to be as long as a beard in order to create what we call Santa Crotch. Hopefully then our vaginas will look very wise, and we will be able to make a living by charging people to ask their lifelong questions to a sage in vaginal form. It’s amazing how big dreams can get over a long brunch.

*How great is the word 'pubis?'

*******

Poor cows. They need not worry about pubic hairs or celebrity cousins. However, they sure have a lot of flies by their eyelids. AND... the milking cows need to constantly give birth in order to lactate. Cow farmers of course don’t let these cows get pregnant on their own. No! They are on a tight schedule and have no time to waste for courting bulls or the typical female analysis required before insertion is allowed. So they inject them with sperm manually (which means hands, and cows don’t even have hands, so you know that I’m talking about a horrifyingly unromantic conception).

Doesn’t this make for some pretty confused cows? Don’t you think some are sitting around at brunch saying, "No! I swear I didn't have sex, mom. I'm sorry." or "I'm totally related to Jesus. All my 13 calves were immaculately conceived."

I’d be so angry if I got pregnant and didn’t even have the pleasure of going through the whole act of penetration. I bet if cows knew how to produce TV, they’d have so many shows based on reenactments of the times they didn’t know they were pregnant until they had a baby in the toilet. Sadly, humans are the only ones to have access to both TV production equipment and surprise babies in toilets.

*******

After reading these three stories again, I come away with this:
I hope there is life on other planets and that they are way more sophisticated than we are.

I carried a watermelon? Peaches would have sounded so much better.

I did my second stand-up show ever last night at The World Famous Comedy Store on Sunset Blvd (I call bullshit on the ‘world’ part. I don’t know if people in Nigeria really know about this place, but that’s how they sell it to you when they ask you to be in a show that requires you to bring paying audience members.) It did not go as well as my first show. People stared instead of laughed. There were crickets. Many of them.

And it reminded me of a young man who used to live on my childhood street.

He was older and cool. And every day after elementary school, he would say, “Laurenne is a blobule.” I didn’t know what that meant, but still I would cry. I thought he was wise (I mean, he was at least 12), so I figured I must have been a blobule. And I hated being a blobule. I wanted nothing more than to not be one. Blobules sucked, according to this mean kid.

But after some years, I realized that blobules weren’t that bad. And, in fact, they didn’t even exist. But the kid had moved away. So, I spent lots of sixth grade recreating that situation. I could have said, ‘No, you’re a blobule” or ‘Blobule Shmobule’ or ‘Dorkface’ or I could have simply made up a story about how Debbie Gibson was my cousin (which I did later).

This was one of the first of many conversations I would rebuild throughout my life. You know the ones that you rewrite in your head over and over until you almost convince yourself that you actually did sound a thousand times more intelligent than you really did (Otherwise known as an ‘I carried a watermelon’ conversation)? I’m a professional post-conversation rewriter. At least I used to be. Until a therapist told me that if everyone’s so worried about their part of the conversation, then nobody’s really worried about your part.

Wise, those therapists are. Way wiser than that blobule who invented blobules. (Blobule isn’t even a good name. How naive I was to be insulted so uncreatively.)

Flubbing your first joke in front of a crowd of strangers at The World Famous Comedy Store can guarantee you some intense in-brain rewriting, no matter what any therapist says. It's agonizing.

I have mentally rewritten my set about 4,352 times since I said it on stage just 24 hours ago. (If only I had added the word 'Jesus' more often, etc.) And before that I probably told my jokes to the invisible passenger in my car about 6,412 times. And neither made my performance any better. This whole anxiety-ridden journey has led me to some revelations:

*A surefire way to tell whether you performed badly is if the very first thing your friend says afterward is: It was not you. Totally the crowd.

*Not everyone thinks jokes about dead dads are funny.

*The 'comedian green room' sounds cool but really means a roachy box with stained couches and stale snacks. Still, I felt pretty cool.

*Taking anything too seriously makes it not worth doing.


This stand-up thing could be really fun (jokes are fun!) or it could be this thing I do that is stressful and hard and has to be done perfectly for fear of my bastard ego, Lawrence, showing up to tell me how I could have done better, looked better, or made more people laugh, which is no fun at all.

And, since I’m one who learns lessons, I should probably take this one and use it in as many aspects of my life as I can. I should have more fun. Always. And you should too. Because why not? Stuff without fun is so much less fun than stuff with fun.

From now on, I must remember: It’s okay to suck at something. As long as you’re having fun while sucking. Jenna Jameson agrees. That joke wasn’t at all funny. But at least I had fun while writing an unfunny joke. Man, I’m a fast learner.

As long as they laugh, it's all ok.

When I was 13, I was deathly embarrassed of my mom. Not because she wore puke green dresses and too big eyeglasses (she did). But mainly because, no matter where we went, she talked too much. It wasn’t just that she brought up the weather in every single elevator or complimented someone’s shoes in every line for popcorn. She also told strangers all of our business. Someone would comment on how we were dressed up, and she would tell them all about how I had just graduated from junior high with a 4.0 GPA and that my grandmother was in town and that we deserved a treat and we were going to get pineapple shakes right after the car wash and the video store. She told every detail to surely uninterested strangers. I would cower. I wasn’t a comic book nerd, but I still pretended to put on an invisibility cloak. How. Embarrassing.

The other day I told the story of my first blowjob to a room full of strangers. And I write this blog where I recently wrote a story about how my dead father’s rotting body smelled like Korean leftovers. I have clearly surpassed my mother in the lack of discretion department. My 13-year-old self would be mortified. And have braces.

Now I’ve found a way to be even more revealing, even more honest, and even more embarrassing to any future children I may have. It’s stand-up comedy. And I think I love it. It’s like welcoming hundreds of people inside the chamber of the brain that holds all the secrets. And damn, it’s liberating. I’m seriously hooked. I walked off stage Monday night, and I wanted to immediately walk back on.

It took 12 weeks of class with 8 other students under the direction of Gerry Katzman (who teaches the best stand-up class in LA) in order to get our sets in order. On the first day, Gerry asked us to come up with a personal topic around which we would write 16 jokes. I thought the fact that I drive a scooter was interesting. No. That’s not what he meant. He was more interested in the fact that I only date unmotivated men who don’t have jobs and make me pay for them and how I do so willingly because I feel like I have to take care of them.
Oh, that.
Then, he wanted to know why and when and how. And THAT’s when the jokes got funny. The deeper you dig, the better you get. I was into it. A scooter? Ha.

After that first day, I knew I’d love peeling off more and more layers of myself in order to get to the jokes. It was easy for me (the being honest about myself part) since I grew up with a mom who talked too much and have a blog where I already share everything. This blog made it easy. Thanks, everybody. I wrote jokes about dead dads and trying to be spiritual, and how it’s hard to be single and/or masturbate, and my mom, who has since stopped buying clothes in puke green (for the most part).

After writing and rewriting every tiny part of every joke, it all came out on stage on Monday night in 9.5 minutes. There’s a silence you can feel while you’re telling a joke where you realize that you’re holding a microphone and everyone is waiting to hear what you have to say. And then you say something important about your life. And it’s out there. And it’s accepted. And it’s ok. You can admit anything up there, and it’s ok. Because you're on a stage. And because even the deepest darkest secrets find other people in the audience who can relate. That’s what comedy is all about: Saying things that other people feel but are too scared to admit.
Once the people laugh, it’s all really ok.

So I’m hooked. And excited. And ready to do it again.
But I’m not so sure how I’ll feel when I get up there and share my secrets and nobody laughs. I know that’s going to happen. Any day now. Probably as soon as I start performing without my friends in the audience. And that’s going to be hard. And painful. But probably still pretty liberating. We’ll see. If anything, I'll just quit and be that lady who unloads information on strangers in elevators. Whatever the case, I still won't be like my mom. Because I do not wear puke green.

Stand-up class 2010 in post-show bliss. We know everything about each other now.
We can only become either best friends or sworn enemies. We'll see. Not so sure I trust the Koreans.

Yes, this thing is on.

Today is big. It’s the culmination of summer nights spent indoors, neglected friends who think I hate them, and randoms in LA coffee shops who've helped me answer the big question: Is this funny?

It's my stand-up comedy debut.
On stage.
Under lights.
In front of people.

I have jokes that will offend the men I’ve dated, jokes that will offend hippies, jokes that will offend all religions, and, mainly, jokes that will offend my mother. The one thing that all these jokes have in common is that I’m not sure they are funny.

I have spent the entire summer writing them. And rewriting them. And then second-guessing them. And then rewriting again. And I still don’t know if they’re funny. I guess we’ll see when I’m on stage in front of 50 of my friends. If they don’t laugh, then I’ll finally know that my friends are dumb.

One thing I know that's funny for sure is that, while absent-mindedly eating a PBJ sandwich today, I chewed it into the shape of a terrier. This was not intentional. My teeth are just natural artists.
That’s funny, right?
Is it? I don’t know.

The Paradox of Books About Paradoxes

I hate choosing shampoo. Or toilet paper or rice or jeans. I’ll even wear the same crusty boots into the ground because I can’t stand the idea of picking out new ones. The thought of making decisions truly immobilizes me. And with more and more to choose from every day, capitalism is causing me to panic at the grocery store.

This Pantene says it’s for normal hair, but mine is not really that normal. It’s more dry, but Suave for dry hair is too cheap to actually work and the bottle is pink. I hate pink. The Aussie shampoo smells good, but I don’t want to buy it because they’ll think their advertising is working and then they’ll make more of those horrible commercials that make me want to kill every kangaroo and hate every Australian. I should actually just stick to natural formulas. I’m gonna go Burt’s Bees. No, wait. I’m not paying thirteen dollars for that tiny tube of shampoo. Actually, I don’t even need to wash my hair. Forget it.

The same thing happens with cars and apartments and men. Sometimes I choose out of exhaustion, sometimes I talk myself into the wrong thing, and sometimes I just close my eyes and pick, which has gotten me into some really damaging relationships. There’s a constant pros/cons list writing itself in my head along with a looming fear that I’ll miss out if I make a bad choice. If I go with the veggie omelet, I’ll forgo the french toast and the french toast might be better. If I choose Luigi from Chicago, then I’ll miss out when Javier from Buenos Aires comes along, and everyone knows he'll be better.

And then there's that whole job dilemma. In the sixties, women's career choices were limited: Teacher, Nurse, or Secretary. Now, I could give manicures to dead people or bathe apes or run for president (ok, vice). Is it really that great that we have so many choices? Everyone I know seems to be wondering what to do with their lives.

This topic interested me so much that I bought a book on it: The Paradox of Choice.
I couldn’t wait to read it, but I put it on my shelf while I finished another. And that was five books ago. I still haven’t read it. And that’s because every time I saddle up to my bookshelf to pick out my next read, there are so many books from which to choose.

I bet there are some really good insights in that book about how certain things are overlooked when there are too many options.