In addition to seeing my mom in Monterey this weekend and going to the always fantastic aquarium, I spent a long weekend in Sunnyvale and San Jose with my very talented friends at the good old ABL, who were doing a very complicated photo shoot based on The Importance of Being Earnest. I was there to lend moral support and do the catering and just to generally kick it freestyle, as is my wont. I got home real late last night and am feeling a little incoherent but I wanted to at least give you a sense of what my weekend was like…other than just telling you it was one of the best ones I’ve had in a long while. So far when I’ve tried to tell people about it words have failed me, though, so I am going to have to rely on numbers.
Times I used the phrase “Back that ass up”: 20 or 30
Times I accompanied the phrase “Back that ass up” with an illustrative dance movement that involves a sort of backwards jump where you bend your knees a lot and emphasize the part of your anatomy that really needs no emphasis at all: two or three hundred
Amount of hot people, just milling around: a lot
Amount of nudity I witnessed for practical reasons: also a lot
Amount of nudity I witnessed for no reason at all: a real lot
Number of times Anna yelled “GRIP!” when she needed the shade structure moved or a cold drink or a turkey sandwich or whatever: two hundred bajillion
Degree to which that was really funny: A really high number
Degree to which it’s going to be even funnier now that the shoot is over and she’s going to be all in her kitchen trying to get the flour off the high shelf and yell “GRIP!” and no one will answer her: An even higher number
Times I went to the store “for more pork products”: two
Percent of time on Saturday and Sunday I wore a shirt: about twenty? At night, mostly.
Percent of time on Saturday and Sunday I wore shirt alternatives: uh, the rest of it.
Pretty pregnant ladies I got to hang out with: two
Number of discussions I had about the shortcomings of the Rabbit Pearl: three
Number of times I consulted the Japanese rope-bondage book: five or six
Backrubs I gave: seven
Foot and hand-rubs I gave: four
Backrubs or foot rubs or whatever kind of rubs I received: none, because I feel kind of weird getting rubbed by someone who isn’t a) mandated to for relationship reasons or b) some sort of licensed professional. I feel fine giving them, just not getting them. I don’t know why.
Amount of relationship advice I gave that could be neatly summed up in the phrase: “Do as I say, not as I do”: Like an hour or two’s worth.
Sesame-honey almonds I ate: all of them in the world
Cookies and chips and sandwiches and sushi and lemonade sodas and crackers and chocolate-covered raisins and It’s-It’s and sausages and salmon and steak and grapes and pineapple and muffins and croissants and hot chocolates and popsicles and delicious, delicious cheese and roasted veggies and cheesecake I ate: also all of it in the world
Power ballads to which I sung every word while making appropriate hand gestures: Nine, including that “I’m the one who WANTS to BE with YOU” song, too, which I haven’t heard since at least 1991 when Amy’s then-boyfriend put it on a mix tape for their anniversary or something…yet I STILL knew a lot of the words
Musical numbers in Labyrinth to which I knew all the words: all of them
Times I temporarily took leave of my senses and thought that perhaps a drag on a clove cigarette (!!) would be a good idea but then I turned away just as I was bringing it to my lips because I was all “IT’S ON FIRE! IT’S A ROLLED-UP PIECE OF PAPER ON FIRE AND I’M GOING TO PUT IT IN MY MOUTH!”: just the once. My lungs remain free and clear, thank goodness, and I also remain free of any goth taint that may be lingering around me from the early nineties when I was carrying around a poetry journal everywhere I went and hiding behind the night-dark curtain of my hair
People who attempted to give me hickeys because I thought I should have something to show for my weekend: at least three
Hickeys I actually sustained: maybe one, near my left collarbone. I thought Patri was going to burst the vein on his forehead giving it to me but it still doesn’t really show. It’s like a tiny little line that could also be mistaken for a bug bite. I was trying to give myself one on my upper arm and that didn’t show either. I guess I don’t get hickeys very well. This is not usually a problem in my life.
Times I used the word “tumescent” in a sentence: four. Not the same sentence though. Four different sentences.
Degrees it was on Saturday and Sunday, when all the actors were dressed up in their full period-authentic Victorian clothes and the rest of us were wearing bras and sarongs and still sweating as if there were some sort of sweat quotient to be met: two MILLION degrees
Actors who actually got the vapors (or, you know, a heat stroke) in a very period-appropriate manner: one
Time in the afternoon it was when we were all sitting out back at Dave and Chrysa’s and decided that the sun was going to be too hot to shoot in all day and so obviously what we needed to do was pick Rob up at the station, butter him up with some gelato, and then make him build a shade structure starting at eight in the evening with his bare hands after he’d been at work all day: about 4:00
Time in the afternoon we came to our senses and decided that maybe we’d just use the shade structures Chrysa already had physically at her house: about 4:30, in the van when we were on the way to pick up Rob
Number of muscles in my body that feel sore for no reason I can elucidate unless it was those times I tried to ride the stripper pole in the back yard without stretching properly: most of them
Amount of people who slept piled up like puppies in the back yard after dinner on Saturday: eight or nine
Amount I was able to actually sleep during the piled-up-like-puppies night in spite of the THUNDEROUS SNORING that reverberated through the cabana like a tornado ripping through my inner ears: hour, hour and a half
Times we all said stuff like “This is a lot like Burning Man, except for it has running water and a Safeway down the street”: eight or nine
Times we said stuff like: “Maybe we should just have Burning Man in Dave and Chrysa’s back yard next year because maybe then Dave will grill out for us again plus we can take showers”: eight or nine hundred
Times I thought about love and sex and Oscar Wilde and old friends and new friends the things you think you know about people and then the things you really do know and and about being lonely in a big group of people and wondering where your place is in the world and how it all fits together, maaaaan: two million
Ways in which I am so proud of and happy for Anna and Rob for putting together this huge project and for having such long attention spans and for being absolute rock stars and letting me participate this past weekend and being good kind sweet creative and awesome friends: two hundred bajillion million
Odds that I won’t fall asleep during shimmy drill at bellydance tonight because I am just seriously so tired: Low.