Recently I was in a show at IO* and the “host” of the show that I was a part of was cracking me up.
*IO is short for Improv Olympic. The original one is in Chicago where I also took classes. The LA one is across from the Pantages Theatre on Hollywood and Cahuenga. It’s super tiny and a weird little hole where you can drink a beer and watch the freaks roll by behind the safty of a glass window. It was originally founded by Del Close, Mike Myers, yada yada yada. And that’s why I’m always like “Second City is lame!” because the cooler more interesting group of funny people made their own theatre. And it’s still cooler to this day. That should clear some things up.)
This silly host was obviously a crowd favorite. Everyone chanted his name AN-DY, AN-DY (neither of which are his name) and forced him to tell personal stories in between each performance. Things were shouted out like, “Tell us about your first kiss!” And he’d get a little lost and say, “No, guys, I have to introduce the next people?” And a different man would yell, “No you don’t Andy. TELL US A STORY!” So he would tell these little childhood fables that were super awkward and bizarre and he was always blushing. He will be mine…
An example of one of his mid-show stories:
“Oh, okay, so I knew I wanted to kiss this girl. And we were at the park. But I’d never kissed a girl before. So I said, “wait one minute, Penny!” And I ran away from her through the park and saw this older man sitting on a bench alone and asked him how to kiss a girl because I never had. He told me it's just like eating a pastrami sandwich. So I left Penny at the park and went home to eat one.”
He will be mine....
I force he and his friends to go to a certain magical place with my friend and I. It’s called… Birds. Next to UCB, across the street from some very good desserts at The Scientology Center. There’s a joke in there, but I can’t find it. The desserts were good but, a little creepy! No, that’s not it. The desserts were out of this world! From another planet! That we should pray to! There, that makes sense and is extraordinarily funny.
We went to Birds and I was in full-on terrifying, stalker huntress mode. Because he was cute and “seemed funny” (warning warning warning!) I assumed girls hit on him a lot. I don’t remember much of this because apparently I was “drunk” but I probably wasn’t. I was probably very sober and well spoken and people try to convince me I’m drunk because they’re insecure around my beauty.
What I remember most was that he smiled a lot, which I thought was cute and endearing, but later on I would find out that a constant giant smile isn’t what funny guys do, it’s what Crazy guys do. We made out on my Volvo and it was odd. Pastrami sandwich odd. Also, I’d just seen that trailer for the new show “Virgin Diaries” and lets just say, mmmm, similar.
He asks me out a week later and we go get Thai food. I get there first and the sweet, tiny lady asks me if I’m waiting for someone. Yes, a boy. She takes me to an area of about a dozen two-top tables, each with a different “guy” sitting at one.
“Any of these him?” I scan the array of the potential boyfriends, washed up on Hollywood’s shore and just looking for some pad thai.
“I’m sorry, I forgot what he looked like. Yes, one of these guys could be him.”
She smiles, a bit confused… No seriously I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I tried to give each of them a little nod and some direct eye contact. It made everyone except for the heroin addicts very uncomfortable.
And I’d made the tiny woman very nervous, taking up her time with my boyfriend tryouts.
(Note To Mackenzie Self: Good idea. Market a dating service that gets people together and you just look at each other for one whole minute but you don’t talk. Like speed dating but no talking, just staring. Yes, this will be my ticket…)
I needed to put the little woman at ease.
…
KAPUNKA!
Oh, Ha Ha! Kapunka!
And she was off.
That means “thank you” in Thai. One summer I went to Scottland…so…
I sit at the bar. Get a Singha. Ah, Andy enters with a face I recognize: it’s like if you took a classically handsome man’s face, and erased some, and smudged in a fair amount of Tony Shaloob.
We smiled, no-touch hugged, and sat down. He ordered a hot-Thai Iced Tea, which doesn’t exist. We’re in and out within an hour.
He’s so incredibly nervous we can barely have a conversation… And I though I was bad when I met Whoopie Goldberg with my fifth grade class…yeesh!
(This is the worst blog post. I think I’ve lost it… Lydia, what did you do to regain your braiding talents after you’d “lost it?” A tonic? Some Promotion Postion? Something with a little upward mobility?)
The moral of this story is, sometimes guys are adorable onstage and “seem funny,” until you realize they aren’t acting at all, they just have aspergers and no one tells you.
He lived down the street. Wanna come over? Okay, yeah, sure. It was like 8:30. I’m not sure if you’ve picked-up, but there is absolutely nothing threatening about this man, so I thought it was fine. It wasn’t fine that on the way to his place, he starts CRACKING up. Like out of nowhere. And says, “Oh, I just have to tell you. I have four swimsuit calendars on my wall.” More Joker-like-laughing. “But I’m not weird. I have them up because- hahah- because- hahaha- my Asian best friend just killed himself and he left them to me in his will. Hahahahah!”
I said nothing.
I get to his apartment building, and his power is out. I follow him up the pich black staircase post-hysterical suicide story and into his tiny-tiny studio because I’m a really smart person.
There are no swimsuit calendars. Just one horse calender.
I stand in the corner while he wonders out loud if he should take off his pants.
“Oh! Jeez! I almost sat on my bed! Uh! That’d be.. wow… good job, Andy, you sat on the SUBWAY in these pants. You almost got it all over your bed. I should change. No! That’s weird. I’m not going to change my pants.”
“You can if you want…”
“No, I won’t that’d be no wait yes, yes-yes I’m going to do that. He continues talking to me about God knows what while he changes in the bathroom. But he still sticks his tiny little Shaloob-y head out the door, I guess so we can retain eye contact during this fascinating conversation about all the Bibles by his bed I of course asked about.
There’s some weird shit to that story, but I’m not going to go into it because I’m a nice person and that’d be a “low blow.” I’m not George Lopez for fuck's sake.
He comes out wearing large, flannal, holiday pajama pants and I leave. Once again on the Volvo, I feel the need to pastrami/Virgin Diaries kiss him one… last… time… oh Andy. I feel so bad for you I almost didn’t write an entire story and then post it on the internet but then I did. Oh Andy.
Driving home, I ask my friend from Birds, “wtf. How did you not warn me.” She texts me back, “I don’t know, you really seemed to be into him. I didn’t want to tell you he had aspergers and was a virgin.”
Had I known this, would I not have given Andy this chance? I wonder... He’s out there right now, cold, pajama-ed, alone in that smothering studio. Dark, probably reading his Bible for twenty minutes because he made a pact with God that if he does that each day then God will reward him by not letting his parents get a divorce. Fuck you, Mackenzie Lopez. With people like you in the world, how will the sweet, innocent Andy ever “bed” a woman. You should just kill yourself and leave all your calendars of naked women to your friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment