S-A-TUR-DAY-NIGHT!

Saturday night was Chicago's 103rd annual Twelfth Night Masque. Lots of costumes, lots of skits mocking current events.

We went as judges. This is because we had already attained fame and fortune long ago--due to our touching reenactment of the William Kennedy Smith post-Au-Bar beach pas-de-deux. That's how long ago it was ... 1991.

So now we're judges. We're grown-ups. We get to decide who wins and who dies. Plus, in the Grand March, the smart people bribe the judges, so you get lots of loot. I got ten bucks. And an Obama sticker. And a pair of red plastic handcuffs.

Now I don't have to figure out what to give Mr. Buxom for Valentine's Day.

Then the skits started. There was one with Obama and Hillary doing the Time Warp and ending up with the original cast of Saturday Night Live--here are Steve Martin and Jane Curtin and her floor wax.


But because it was a time warp, Britney Spears showed up, too.

(He won Best Costume--Male.)

Then the other big skit. This also evoked a 1970s disco theme:


You have to love the Afro. And the guy dressed as a CHIPS outfit.


It was pointed out to me that this Elvis was a 1970s Elvis, and therefore was period-correct. Thank goodness for that, or I would have had to take points off. Here he's performing next to Monica Lewinsky.


Here Monica and Hillary smooch. Unfortunately my cell phone didn't capture the actual embrace. Honestly! How can I become a paparazzo without a decent camera??

Oh, and it was black tie. Want to see what I was wearing?

A different book meme

Because I'm an original thinker. Even when I'm doing a meme.

I pilfered this a while ago from Babelbabe, who got it from 50 Books, where I lurk.

Except I can't really do this meme correctly, because it's supposed to be about books you've lied about reading, and mostly, when I was in school, I read the books I was supposed to read. I can't say that I was an especially hard-working student, but I was an English major; reading books was what I was there to do.

That is, except for a few in graduate school. Actually, a lot in graduate school. Bill Brown, I officially apologize for not reading a whole shitload of the books you assigned for that seminar on a justly obscure era in American literature; I blew off at least half of them.

But I blew them off so thoroughly that I can't remember what they were.

And now? People, I can't be bothered to fake anything, let alone something stupid like whether I've read a book. I've read Moby Dick. I've read Paradise Lost. About five times. I've read Dryden's Aeneid and Pope's Iliad and Odyssey and The Brothers Karamozov and Middlemarch and the Barchester Chronicles and Remembrance of Things Past, and basically, if some book club skank thinks I'm going to waste my time reading some middle-brow, wanh wanh, people-are-mean piece-of-shit best seller, she can kiss my fat white ass. Pretty much.

So instead of the books I've lied about reading, I'm going to list books in other categories.

I'm Amazed Nobody Ever Made Me Read
King Lear
The Red Badge of Courage
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Anything by Steinbeck
Anything by Hemingway

I've Never Been Interested in Reading
The Color Purple
The Lovely Bones
Beloved
One Hundred Years of Solitude
My Antonia
Sophie's Choice
The DaVinci Code
the one about the Geisha

I Never Managed to Finish
The Lord of the Rings
Catch-22

Books I Finished and Liked Quite a Bit, Although Going Into It, I Felt Extremely Wary
Buddenbrooks
The Magic Mountain
The Remembrance of Things Past
Ulysses
Humphrey Clinker
Tristram Shandy

Books for which the quip "Kill me. Now." was invented
Pamela (Servant girl acts coy; marries master. Helen Gurley Brown would have done a better job.)

Rasselas (Samuel Johnson at his least sprightly.)

A Pilgrim's Progress (An allegory! Quick, where's my gun so I can shoot it!)

The Canterbury Tales (The earliest version in English of ideas that had become pretty shopworn by the time I was in college, 600 years later. That these ideas are expressed in Middle English doesn't help.)

The Romance of the Forest (So boring I forced myself to read it in 75 page chunks. I wouldn't let myself get up to pee until I'd finished reading a section. Picture me in a carrel in the library with my legs macramed together trying not to wet my pants, and you get the general idea. I can't remember a word of it. If asked what the book was about, I'd answer "Not peeing.")

Waverly (Again, this was a first. In this case, the first historical novel. When it was written, the whole idea of the fictional protagonist (Waverly) dealing with historical personages (Bonny Prince Charlie) was new! And fresh! And yet, somehow, underwhelming in the extreme.)

The Princess Casimassima It's the only full-length James novel I've managed to choke down.

Sons and Lovers "Hate" barely begins to describe my feelings for D. H. Lawrence.

Eight (weird) Things

Blackbird tagged me with that eight things meme. Which I already did. I'm supposed to post the rules and then post eight things about me. But I'm not going to. Because I'm also on a quest to discover the weirdest thing about me.

So I've decided to post eight weird things about me, and then people can vote for the weirdest in the comments box. And I'm not tagging anyone because it didn't work the first time, so fuck it.

1. I don't watch television.

2. I don't understand why everyone is so interested in sex. Come on, people. It's just an orgasm. Sheesh.

3. As a consequence, I've never watched a single episode of Sex in the City. I understand it's about Sarah Jessica Parker having sex with Manolos, which is so nasty I simply can't believe you people.

4. That whole get married/have children/move to the suburbs trajectory? Totally my husband's idea. It's true. If you don't believe me, ask That Stud Muffin I Married. I was dragged kicking and screaming up the altar. I distinctly remember asking him. "Are you sure you're ready to get married? Don't you want to sow some more wild oats?"

5. I feel almost no affection for my mother. In fact, she drives me batshit crazy for, among other things, demanding that I write her a letter a week. So I print out blog entries and send them to her. (OK, I get rid of the swears and shit like that, OK? I don't just mail her a screen dump ... but yeah. My mother reads my blog. She just doesn't know it's a blog.)

6. I don't like gossiping. I mean, sure, OK, I can do it, just the way I can make small talk to the boring guy next to me at a dinner party, but I don't find it compelling or anything.

7. I don't like to talk on the phone. OK, people are fucking howling at this one, I can tell it. But people from the internet to whom I have talked on the phone--when we talked, did I call you? No, I didn't. YOU called ME (except for that one time with Badger) and naturally, I didn't want there to be one of those awkward silences, so OK, I kept you on the phone for two hours. But it's still your fault.

8. I didn't learn to drive until I was 35.

That last one is how I know I'm actually female. Because in a lot of other ways, I'm a man. Or maybe I'm in drag. Or at the very least, from time to time, I rustle uneasily in my transvestite clothing. To borrow a phrase from Laura Mulvey, whom I've only read

BECAUSE I'M WEIRD.