'Til The Cows Come Home

You Can Go Home Again! (But You Probably Shouldn't)

As promised, here is the full text of my performance at last night's WYSIWYG Talent Show. Enjoy. Also, check out the WYSIWYG Blog for links to other reviews and comments about the evening, as well as some photos (including a rather disturbing one where I seem to be fiddling with my waddle).

Update. And speaking of photos, my second promise has been fulfilled, and there is a new gallery of pictures posted for your enjoyment. See the side bar at right for all of my various galleries. And now, on with the tale:

Close your eyes and imagine if you will: You’re not sitting in PS 122, in the East Village, in New York City. Clear your mind of all the images associated with big city living and envision a sleepy little suburb just outside of Cleveland, or any other Midwestern city. Now, picture a traditional, Midwestern holiday get-together. A family gathered around the dinner table, heads bowed in prayer as the patriarch gets ready to carve the turkey. Or sitting under the tree on Christmas morning, unwrapping presents and watching the snow fall outside the bay window. Can you picture it?

Good. Now, add a healthy dose of vulgar language, sexual references and eye-rolling and you’ve just joined the K_____ Family, the sort of American clan that could make John Waters proud…and strike abject fear into the hearts of everyone else.

Oh sure, we used to be that traditional Midwestern family, and our outward appearance seems to still indicate that we have some degree of wholesomeness. But somewhere down the line, something changed. The origins of our slide into tawdry family fun can probably be traced back to one Christmas morning when I was in college. See, I had this ex who had wanted to get his nipple pierced while we were together but the thought kind of turned me off so I asked him not to do it and then he dumped me for one of our best friends so naturally I went and got my nipple pierced out of spite and he heard about it and begged to get back together and I just laughed and said “Hell, no!”…um, sorry, where was I?

Oh, right. I had gotten my nipple pierced and decided to make the grand unveiling to my family on Christmas morning. The last present had been unwrapped and we were ready to settle into that blissfully materialistic “I’ve Got New Stuff” coma.

“Well, there is one more present,” I said, loosening the belt of my robe, “I did get myself a little something.” As I did a Janet Jackson and popped out my left boob, there was a brief moment of silence.

“Did it hurt?” Mom asked.

“No,” I lied, opting not to tell everyone that I had actually passed out during the piercing.

“Hmm, well,” she paused for a second. “You know, when I can see my belly button again, I’m going to get that pierced.”

You could almost hear vertebrae cracking as my sister, brother and I all whipped our heads around in shock.

“Oh yeah,” my Dad chimed it. “That’d be hot.”

The next sound was that of three jaws hitting the floor and landing in the basement. In my attempt to scandalize Christmas morning and be the rebellious middle child, I had been beaten at my own game and unknowingly opened the floodgates of inappropriate family conversation that has not stopped to this day. Looking back on it now, that incident was tame by comparison and just the tip of the iceberg.

It doesn’t just have to be a holiday for my family to work blue. Since I lived so close to where I went to school, I would often invite classmates over to my parents’ house for pre-finals study-and-slumber parties. Mom, who worked on campus in one of the dining halls and was on a first name basis with most of my friends, would prepare a nice home cooked meal for us.

It was at one particular finals weekend meal when the subject turned to who was and wasn’t gay. We were a bunch of musical theater majors, so this topic provided countless hours of entertainment and speculation. The topic eventually turned from outing our classmates to the nature of homosexuality.

I didn’t realize that I should have steered the conversation elsewhere until, somewhere between passing the gravy and getting more biscuits out of the oven, my mother said, “You know, I think the reason Matt is gay is because, when he was little and got sick, we used to take his temperature rectally.”

Suffice it to say that was the last time we had study weekends at my house. But that story will be told at class reunions for the next fifty years.

Now before you start to think that all we ever talk about in my family is sex, sex, sex, let me reassure you that we make every effort to select a diverse range of topics. For example, and as this is the Holiday WYSIWYG Show let me revert back to that theme here, every year at Christmas dinner, my mother tries her best to invoke what she calls a “new K_____ family tradition” but is really just something she ripped off of some “A Very Merry Kathie Lee Christmas” special. It involves going around the table and having everyone answer some question like “What’s your favorite Christmas memory?” or “What’s the best thing that has happened to you since last Christmas?” You know, shit like that. None of us really enjoy doing it, but we submit because there are children at the Christmas dinner table and since we ought to talk about something, even we have sense enough to know that our usual repertoire would get us arrested if the authorities ever found out it was presented in front of the kiddies. We do know how to be conservative…once in a while.

That being said. It’s time that I share with you the best and biggest of all inappropriate family gathering conversations in modern history.

Last year, when I decided to make a last-minute trip to Cleveland to surprise my family, my sister arranged a dinner party for friends and family. For whatever bold reason, she decided to invite the couple that had just moved into the new house across the street. They were from some other, far away Midwestern hamlet and didn’t have any family in Cleveland. But they were about to meet ours.

The booze and the bawdiness were flowing more freely than usual, and it was only a matter of time before someone crossed the fine line between “tasteful” and “oh my god you did NOT go there.”

I’m not even sure how we got on the topic, but suddenly my sister blurted out, “Hey, Mom, do you remember when you asked Matt and I what pearl necklaces are?” I can’t even tell you how that conversation came about, only that it started with someone wondering if black men were better hung and everyone in the room turning to me for proof. But I digress. I should have known, then and there, that we were all in way over our heads, as should have the new neighbors whose faces had gone expressionless and pale.

The mention of pearl necklaces seemed to jolt my aunt out of her whiskey-induced haze, and she said, “Someone got a pearl necklace?” Evidently, she was confusing this conversation for one about the other favorite topic among the women in my family, shopping on QVC.

“No, no, not those kinds of pearl necklaces,” my sister explained. “You know, when a guy…” Fill in your own mental recreation of the process it took to explain to my aunt what it is we were talking about. It was a fairly elaborate process that involved hand gestures and pbbt pbbt noises.

“Well why would anybody do that?” my aunt inquired.

“What else are you going to do with it,” someone else said.

“Oh come on,” said my aunt. My fabulous, 60-year old, chain-smoking aunt, who has a string of fabulous ex-husbands and boyfriends, who was the first person to suggest that I read Tales of the City and who at the last Christmas party decided to assign everyone in the family their HBO Original Series altar ego. “Everyone knows you always swallow.”

And there it was. Even within our quirky and disturbingly frank family, nobody had ever really gone into personal gratification technique before. We were suddenly in new territory. Nobody knew what to say. Except for my brother-in-law:

“Well at least SOMEONE in this family does.”

As my sister reached for the nearest sharp object, the family erupted into laughter and nobody noticed the new neighbors slipping out of the party, putting up a For Sale sign on their house, and moving.

Far, far away.

Posted by mak at November 17, 2004 11:10 AM