It’s so rare that I can requests for content that I leap at the opportunity. Oh sure, I’ve had plenty of requests to STOP, but cease-and-desist letters now go through my attorneys and Bartles and James Associates. And this request didn’t even come from a Canadian, so I’m getting love within my own borders as well. Who knew? I’m waiting for a Mexican faction to arise, and the I’ll truly be the NAFTA of the blogging world.
(Speaking of Mexico, the “I’m almost Eva Mendes, But I Got Hit By a Truck Halfway There” trophy wife on “24” bugs me. Someone needs to put her nose in the microwave, it’s not done yet. Just like 2 minutes on “Reheat” is all I ask. Anyways, I had to get that off my chest. Yes, I'm as shallow as an above-ground pool. Sorry. Moving on…)
Today’s request comes from my friend Kristen. Kristen and I were school together, back in the dayz. Kristen managed to seduce almost all of our mutual theatre friends to the Dark Side that is “Buffy”, leaving only Tim and myself to scratch ourselves off to the side, looking confused. OK, that was only me. Regardless, Kristen’s “good people”. Go to Webster’s Dictionary, look up “good people”, and there’s a picture of Kristen, holding up a sign that says, “Ebola is hysterical!” That’s Kristen.
She was too darn important to comment on my “Buffy quotes” article on Monday, but sent me the following via email:
***
From: Kristen
To: Ryan
Subject: If you really loved me...
...You'd be able to relate one of the following quotes to your life…
***
I’ll do you one better, Kristen. I’ll use all three. And hopefully embarrass you in the process, if I’m lucky. Let’s get to work!
Xander: Just think of my lips as the fruit roll-ups of love.
OK, I can’t even remember which episode had this in it, and I’m too lazy to look it up. But I’m gonna let my confusion lead my on to remember the time I was most confused around Kristen: namely, the two months she tried to transform me into a woman.
So there I am, minding my own damn business. It’s February, 1998. I’m entering my final semester of college, I’m dealing with 4 major design projects, a muddled female situation, the whole “what are you gonna do after graduation” thing, the “what would you do for a Klondike bar” thing….I mean, a lot of important stuff, right?
And I get a call from Kristen in my room. Back then, in the dark ages, we had “landlines”. These were phones, get this, connected to walls. Crazy, huh? So she calls me, and offers me a part in her show “The Valiant Villain”. See, despite thinking kids are super icky when coming forth from her own loins, she seems to have very little problem with other children, as evidenced by the Children’s Theatre company she founded while in school.
“Wow, me? Acting? No way!” I said.
“Yea, I think you’ll be great for this part,” she replies.
“What’s the part?” I ask.
“The villain’s wife.”
OK. This is the part where, if a movie, the camera does that “zoom in while dollying backwards” trick on my head, which now bears a panicked face. I wasn’t sure what about me possibly screamed “able to play female well”. Harvard scientists had seen me in a swimming pool and ran tests to see if I was the Missing Link. I mean, “Ryan” and “feminine” had never been uttered in the same sentence without “is in no way at all even close to” bewtixt them.
But hey, it’s Kristen, it’s seven lines, how hard can it be?
Now, by this point I had done a fair amount of designing and directing. All low-brow, amateur stuff, but one can be in amateur production with professional standards. Such as showing up to rehearsals on time. As director or designer, I had sat impatiently at many rehearsals, waiting for people to show up. I couldn’t believe what morons these actors were, making me wait and losing precious time.
So yea, I completely forgot about my first “Valiant Villain” rehearsal. Flat out didn’t go. Yea, go me.
So, instead of a group rehearsal, my first experience as an actor in college took place in the basement of a dormitory, in a dance studio, learning how to walk like a woman.
Poor Kristen. Forty-five minutes trying to get me to freakin’ walk. It was like the anti-“Wade Robson Project”. Cuz what I learned, see, is that I had to lead my walk with my hips, not with my…well, I had to lead it with my hips, she said, getting increasingly frustrated. Meanwhile, I pulled flexors I didn’t even know I had. Ouch.
So, show eventually comes, and at the last performance, I see a few kids who had been there for the first show of the run. We were encouraged to talk to the audience after each show, and I walked up to the kids. “Hey, great to see you back!” I say, in my character’s high-pitched Southern drawl.
At this point, the mother of the pair speaks up. “Yea, I had to take them back. All they’ve been talking about for three days is the guy in the dress.”
So, Mrs. Lady, yea, you know now where to send the bills for their therapy.
Willow: Do you see any goats around? No, because I sacrificed them.
See, here’s the thing. I’m not truly convinced Kristen is actually female. It’s not just because she never put out to me, which is a historically true statement. I tried again this summer while at her parents’ summer rental out here in Gloucester, and all I’m saying is call me Jackson, cuz I was Stonewalled. It could have something to do with us being really good friends. I’m hoping it’s not because of all those lewd voicemails I’ve been leaving all these years.
No, I say this because I think I have more of a maternal instinct than she does, and she’s the one with the breasts in this equation. I keep thinking age will decrease this proclivity of hers, but nay, it ages like fine wine. Her basic attitude towards babies seems to be: “Fun for dropkicking!” OK, I’m exaggerating here, because that’s what I do. Kristen has a sense of humor that’s as unique as it is sexy, and just like Willow, she has a hard time just flat out accepting when people recognize her full-on stud-dom. (Well, except in my case. She accepts my monetary tributes via her Swiss account.)
So what’s the connection between Willow, Kristen, and myself? We’ve all slept with John Stamos, first and foremost. But above and beyond that, I pick up on Willow and Kristen’s fundamentally warm-hearted attitude towards people, coupled with a dose of cynicism and apprehension aside. Maybe not the type of people you’d pick out of crowd, but would definitely gravitate towards at a party once you get to know us. Then again, they are both much funnier than I am, so I’d just hope to be able to hang with them if we ended up at the same party.
In terms of bacchanalian goat-slaughtering, I can clearly see Kristen, in the fall of 1998, double-fisting on the dance floor a bottle of port and a bottle of sherry. Her eyes are closed, and she’s swaying to the music. (It was her cast part, so I’m assuming 80’s music here. Hell, this girl took “Shut Up and Dance: The Paula Abdul Remix Album” off my hands, for crying out loud.) At one point, she opens them, looks at me, and goes, “This is the best night ever!” And then she killed the goat. And by “killed the goat” I mean “drank more”.
Kristen drops some of the best deadpan email humor known to Man. I drop mad flava here on the website. (Apparently the flava is “Canadian bacon”. Who knew?) Willow drops into severe vein mode and almost ends the world. It’s like, so eerie, these similarities.
Xander: I'm seventeen. Looking at linoleum makes me wanna have sex.
OK, so here’s one of my favorite Kristen stories.
You have to understand, I’ve got just under a foot of height and more than 100 pounds on this girl. She’s hardly a wee lass, but for the story to make sense, you have to get a sense of the size differential. It’s early 1998, and it’s her 21st birthday.
I volunteer to take her out. Now, at the time, there’s barely anyone at school, since most people were due back in 3-4 days. We were there, along with the Commander and others, since we were all involved in some way or another with the Commander’s production of “Antony and Cleopatra”. But Tim doesn’t drink, and no one else was legal, so it was just the two of us going out. It’s a Friday night, and we are scheduled to be at set-building the next morning around 10 am.
She wants to go to the Hong Kong for Scorpion Bowls. For those of you who have never experienced this libation, the easiest way to describe it is a “Big Blue Bowl of Death”. So near as I can tell, this sucker was Kool-Aid mixed with Everclear and gasoline, only all you can taste is the Kool-Aid. The 47 umbrellas in this thing didn’t help matters. Kristen and I down one of these bad boys, and I think I have a few more drinks. She abstains from further drinking, because she’s a lot smarter than I am.
So, now, it’s around midnight, and I have to walk her back to the Quad. The Quad is Harvard’s answer to, “Exactly how far can we put the dorms from the main campus before we reaaaaallllyyy piss them off?” About a quarter-mile into the walk, the Scorpion Bowl initiated “Operation Double Vision” in conjunction with my traitorous liver. Kristen, meanwhile, is fully coherent, wildly eloquent, and mocking me for being a lightweight. Half a mile later, I start talking in tongues. Luckily, by this point, at least she’s not sober, but if this were a marathon, I’d be a Kenyan, and she’s be P. Diddy.
We get back to her dorm, but for some reason, we have to go to her boyfriend’s room. He’s there, and has been mainlining tequila with his friend Rachel. I’m doing JJ Walker impressions by this point, if JJ Walker were “Drunk Girl” from “Saturday Night Live”. So now we have three extremely drunk people in the room, with Kristen neither winning, nor placing, nor showing in this particular race, which is of course all for the best. At some point, the boyfriend gets Kristen out of the common room, leaving Rachel to full on attack me.
Which would of course ruled all, except I had a girlfriend at the time. And Rachel was co-producing “Antony” with her. Theatre: it’s smarmtastic!
So, I’m got my conscious, and it’s all, “Ooooh, bad Ryan. Leave now.” And I’ve got the Scorpion Bowl taking a steel chair to my morality like a WWE heel. Luckily, my morality got pulled out of the ring at the last minute by its tag team partner, Conscious, and escaped. Needless to say, as I tried to get Rachel to leave, she whispers, “Room 414. Just, like, so you know.” And leaves.
Somehow I make it back to my girlfriend’s place that night, and God love her, she took care of me. This is the night I thought, “Wow. She’s really great. Maybe this will work out.”
Three hours later, I was still vomiting. Two weeks later, we had broken up. I was a stupid, stupid boy. I’ve done a lot of growing up since, though. Now I’m a stupid, stupid man-child. All about evolution, baby.
So Rachel was linoleum that night. But look, just cuz we wanna have sex a lot at that age (OK, at this age), doesn’t mean we’re gonna. I mean, I go to bars all the time. I see people eating appetizers I would like. I don’t go over and snatch their plate up and take it. I mean, what do you do? Room 414. Prolly coulda gone, had drunk fun, and lied about it. I mean, I lied about it easily enough later on, right? Not proud of it, but I did it. Xander has a chance in Season 2 to have sex with Buffy, which up until that point in the show had been his primary hormonal objective, but wouldn’t, because she was “under the influence” of a spell. I didn’t worry so much that night about Rachel being drunk as my girlfriend home alone and sober.
Now, I can say in hindsight that worrying about the whole booze thing should have been a bigger concern. One of my basic policies in “ first kiss etiquette” is, “Make sure they’re sober.” A good rule of thumb for a first of any physical type, I suppose. We all have the physical urges, it’s about figuring out how to control them. Hardly a revolutionary statement, but one application to Xander, Kristen, and myself. Xander is ix-nay on the Uffy-bay, I resisted Rachel that night, and Kristen somehow resists the hot sexy beast that is me.
The sex thing is all weird now for me. I mean, you know it’s bad when your own mom tells you that you need to get laid. While you’re in a steakhouse, no less. I mean, that’s just odd. But hey, that happened to me recently. Another one of those things that makes me…well, me.
In some ways, I’m still, and always be, Linoleum Boy. (Saying “Linoleum Boy” is a bit like saying “Boy Boy”; this I realize.) But priorities are shifting, lately. Not about going to bed with someone; it’s about waking up next to that person. The latter just seems more important to me. I mean, my body pillow is great and all, but something a little more substantial, sooner rather than later…well, that’d be pretty nice. I mean, that's the goal, right? Someone with whom we "fit"? In any and all situations. I think spooning is a great place to start figuring out that interpersonal jigsaw puzzle. That's just me, though. As usual, I could be very wrong here. Don't think so, though. Not on this point.
(As a post-script, Kristen made it fine and dandy to set-building the next day, and her, Tim, and others took turns listening to my moth-mouthed explanation on one person’s voicemail about how I was too hung over to even contemplate getting out of bed, never mind construct Cleopatra’s mansion.)
****
Well, Kristen, I hope I proved my love. As for the rest of you, if you have questions or topics for me, fire away. I’m populist that way. (I’ll look at any and all t-shirt designs as well.)
Posted by Ryan McGee at November 04, 2003 11:28 PM