July 28, 2022

In the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX. Mitch and I finally going on our tenth anniversary trip on the bring of our twelfth anniversary. I want to write a post everyday while we're gone. That seems like a good thing to do. 

To kick off, though, wanted to write a little bit about stuff that's happened in LA recently. 

First, I went to Courtney Pauroso's one-woman show called Gutterplum. She does clown. The frame of it was a woman's whole life starting out when she was a tomboy. She invites an audience member up to the stage to kick the can with her. (She's in the market for a new best friend.) Then she finds a backpack in the woods with beer and cigarettes and strippers heels. Low and behold, she's gotten her period. Her dark curls come off and her hair goes blonde. She's a teenager. She's at a party. She invites the audience member back on stage. She gets pregnant (from the teenage version of playing leapfrog.) And it continues. She becomes a woman, a butt doctor like her mom. The audience member comes back on stage and they get married. 

In that segment, as a grown stressed butt doctor, she goes nuts and gets topless -- "you want to see my tits??" -- and crawls around in a bridge using a deep growly voice like she's possessed. Then she scarily asks if we want to see her pussy. And the audience is like... ? The lights go all the way out. She gets naked and then runs to different parts of the stage and flashes a flashlight on her pussy. So you get these quick flashes of vaginal maw. Wild. 

Courtney and the audience member have their 25th wedding anniversary. He dies. 

Then she gets old, draws wrinkles on her face, has long grey hair (head, nipples, pubic). She dies. The audience member is there for her in heaven. They kiss. 

The thing was so nice. And sexy. And cringey. But the audience guy did so good, and by the end you could tell he felt real tenderness towards her. It reminds me of that short story I like (that I can't remember the name of, but I do know what book it's in and where that book is on my shelf) where two people meet at an airport. They don't know each other, but are making some kind of luggage transfer or drop for a friend. There's a wait and they talk. And they end up imagining a life together. It's like it actually happened. And then they leave, feeling old. 

It's like that Star Trek episode too. The one where Picard gets sucked into the artifact of the alien civilization and lives a life as if he were a member of that planet. The chance. The chance. The chance. 

The only other thing I wanted to say -- not about the show -- was that the other Saturday I went to the park to shoot around with some folks from my basketball team. It ended up being just me and two other guys in their fifties. We played Pig and Horse and did all the stupid shots you used to do in the driveway or on the playground. It was good.