Royal Wedding FEVER!

Two posts in one day. Whoa. WHOA. Relax, neither of them are very good.

So this morning Prince William and Kate Middleton got married, which means that maybe a respite from the non-stop and unnecessary coverage is imminent. I don't care who designed the bridesmaids' dresses or what brooch Camilla will be wearing to the ceremony. I would be interested to hear how drunk Prince Harry got at the reception - what a scamp that Ginger is!

Last night my friends and I got together to enjoy a pre-wedding viewing of the Lifetime original movie "William & Kate", a terribly-acted and ridiculously inaccurate 2 hour tribute to their romance. It was the equivalent of a Sci-Fi Channel original movie - except instead of laughable special effects and C-List actors; there was extreme overacting and terrible British accents. So we got all tipsy and MST3K'd it as best we could. (That's a valid verb now, right? MST3K? I don't care.)

The winner of the night was my friend Kat, who knocked it out of the park with every other comment she made. I can't remember all of them, because of alcohols. But her shining moment came in the closing seconds of the movie. The end scene was the romantic proposal Will made to Kate on the Serengeti at dusk. (Lifetime's version of the Serengeti looked an awful lot like a backyard in Kansas at dusk, but that is neither here nor there)

So Will is proposing, Kate is accepting, and he is putting the ring on her finger. The ring that some of you may remember belonged to his Mother, the late Princess Diana. And in this most tender of moments, Kat busts out with:

"This ring belonged to my Mother. It's lucky...."

Oh man, I couldn't stop laughing at that. Because it's time, right? Isn't it time to start laughing again? It's been 13 years. Laugh or the terrorists win.

Only In New York!!!

I hate that phrase with a passion. Dummies in NYC use it as a kind of weird declaration whenever something slight cool or slightly terrible happens; as if to convince themselves that the trade-off for living in one of the biggest and therefore toughest cities in the world is the promise of odd happenings in their daily life. Happenings that their relatives in Kansas could never understand, right? LOLz!

For example, one time last summer I was standing waiting for the bus. (Like a BOSS) I happened to be wearing a new dress that I had bought and really liked, and was feeling pretty great. As my bus began to approach, I suddenly realized that directly in front of the bus stop there was a half-full Gatorade bottle lying in the street. The wheels in my distracted brain began to turn, and I started to do the math - could that bus be pulling up directly in line with the Gatorade bottle? And if so, does that mean that I'm lined up perfectly with the -

My brain did not figure this all out fast enough, and the next thing I know, the bus most certainly did roll right on top of the Gatorade bottle. The pressure of the bus exploded the top off the bottle and expelled the entire contents at such a high and fast volume that I don't even think Mr. Wizard would have believed it. ("You LYIN', bitch!", Mr. Wizard would have said.) But I believed it, because every last drop of that Gatorade bottle was emptied directly onto me and my new dress. I stood there absolutely speechless and in shock, as what seemed like the entire population of Manhattan passed by with little smirks on their faces. Only one woman stopped, an elderly well-dressed woman with pearls around her neck. She stopped, looked me up and down with her hands on her hips, and then loudly proclaimed "ONLY IN NEW YORK!!!!!". Then she gave me a wink and carried on her merry way. I wanted to run after her and tackle her and smear my Gatorade soaked hands all over her surgically-enhanced face. Because no, Old Lady - that couldn't have happened "only in New York". A bottle could have been rolled over anywhere in the United States - nay! The WORLD. Unfortunate occurrences aren't exclusive to this city, so stop trying to act like New York is the center of the universe. I hope she got mugged on the way home. Not hurt or anything - but I hope someone stole her pearls.

This phrase popped up again yesterday morning during my commute. I was on the bus in, and all of a sudden a TORRENTIAL downpour started out of nowhere. Without any kind of warning, the bus driver got on the PA system and started singing to everyone. Some original ditty about how the rain doesn't bother him, because tomorrow is Friday, and that's when he sees his girl. It was harmless - if not charming. But then some big galoot turns around to address the whole bus with, "Only in New York, am I right?!?!", and that phrase immediately soured my mood. The guy next to me wasn't impressed with any of it either, because he pulls out his phone to call his wife:

"Hi, it's me. Yeah. Just thought you should know the bus driver is singing to us. No - SINGING. Yeah. And then I got an 'Only in New York'. Yeah. Because you should have DRIVEN ME LIKE I ASKED, that's why I'm telling you."

Haha! Comments like that are only heard ANYWHERE. Anywhere that passive-aggressive marriages are still alive and well.

I Know What Roger Murtagh Was Talking About...

This past week has seen me in various situations better suited for 23 year old me, rather than 30 year old me. It started last Thursday when my friend and fellow comedian Ryan Conner and I went to see a mutual friend's play. We had been warned by our friend that the play was going to be bad, but this warning proved grossly inaccurate. It was worse than bad, which meant that Ryan and I adored every second of it. We were the assholes in the back row of the theatre drinking booze we snuck in and laughing at everything. Ryan wrote a pretty comprehensive recap of the experience, you should check it out here.

The nonsense continued when my friend Kathriona came in from Ireland for a visit. Kathriona and I were both drunken menaces to society when we lived in DC about 7 years ago. She has since grown up - gotten married, bought a house and had two beautiful kids. On the other hand I have since purchased the entire box set of "Eerie, Indiana", arguably the greatest TV series from the early 90s (Who would ever argue that?), and have every intention of some day watching it:
So obviously, we've both really grown as people. But this time Kathriona came in for a visit without her husband and children, which meant she was sans responsibility for 4 whole days. This in turn meant that she should be spending the majority of those days drinking heavily. And good friend that I am, I decided to join her.

So Friday night we were out until about 3am, which is crazy enough. 3am? That's blurry-infomercial-watching time, not drunken-CVS-shopping time. And what is the appeal of a 24 hour store when you're wasted? I wasn't even looking for snacks or anything fun, I was swaying back and forth in front of their scotch tape selection, wondering aloud how much scotch tape is too much.

Saturday night was even more eventful - after spending a good many hours at a bar in Astoria with friends, Kathriona and I hopped in a cab to meet up with her sister in Sunnyside. The cab ride was only 10 minutes, but it was more than enough time for me to lose my cell phone. At least, I think that's when I lost it. Who knows - I may have thrown it at a lamppost that I thought was disrespecting me, such was my state. So we get to the final bar at around 3:30am, not holding out too much hope that they'd still be serving since bars close at 4am in NYC. Well, it was our lucky (ridiculous) night, because when the bar closed at 4am it did so with us and about 20 other people in it. It was a lock-in, and it was surreal: everyone was smoking (Indoors! Heavens!) and everyone was dancing to some weird European techno and for a solid 6 minutes I was convinced everyone was rolling but me. So we kept drinking and dancing and probably throwing bones; until about 5:15am when I looked around and realized the sun would be coming up soon, and that I had lost my phone, and that there was a gentleman to my right at the bar who kept asking if he could braid my hair. And those were all very good reasons to take my leave.

The next day I suffered through an all-day hangover that seemed to disprove my belief that chanting "liquor before beer, you're in the clear" gives you a free pass on monster headaches.

And then last night I continued my "I'm still young and hip, LOLz and WTF and Spring Break!!" week, when dinner with my friends Doug and Gina turned into bar trivia night. I remembered that no contest is too meaningless for me to get overly-competitive about, something I learned at an early age when I accused my CCD teacher of cheating in a class game of 7-Up. So while I'm telling everyone to listen to me because I know a thing or two about European capitals (I don't) and toys from the 80s (I really do), I am simultaneously shooting down everyone else's suggestions with snide comments like, "What are you, some kind of expert? Some kind of human body expert, Dr. So-and-So? Whatever. You're an anesthesiologist, you don't know shit."

In the end we came in second place, which won us a free round of shots. These free shots helped dull the pain of losing, though not as much as keying the car of one of the guys who won. Or so I would imagine.

What a week. Time to take a break. As Roger Murtagh famously said in Lethal Weapon 2, "I'm gonna die on a toilet, aren't I?"

Wait, what? That doesn't relate to me at all. Fuck you, imdb.com.