Releasing My Inner MJ

Well, it was a month in the making, but “Thrill the World” finally happened on Saturday. I have to say, this is probably the most fun October I’ve ever had. We had our last Thriller class about a week ago. Jen and I both agreed that we had an empty feeling this week without it – Katie’s classes were so much fun.

Oh and props to Joe, who took all of these pictures:

There were at least 50 people in the last class. Niki, Adam and Jaime showed up for the last one. They learned the dance in an hour and totally rocked it. Fist bump!

Saturday was the actual event. Getting ready was tons of fun. We got to rip up our clothes, pile on spooky makeup and play with dirt and mud. “Thriller” was playing in the background the entire time, so people would wander over to practice every now and then. I liked running out in the hall and scaring the cute basketball players.

Getting ready for zombie dancing with Jen and Niki reminded me of getting ready for parties with Rachel and Lauren. They used to primp forever and while I am not a primper, I liked giggling in the mirror with people. Zombie primping is more my thing.

Unfortunately, I forgot the most important zombie element: Kool Aid Mouth.

I still looked fairly spooky in person, but in pictures I look like a tan battered housewife.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter what any of the zombies looked like because FREAKING LOOK AT FREAKING KATIE you guys:

It took Jen and I at least 10 minutes before we realized it was her. Amazing. Just… amazing.

I like to call this one “The Fiercest Foursome”:

Then it was time for the dance! We had to lay on the floor at the beginning, and I was right by Jen, Niki, Adam and Jaime. Adam wistfully remarked, “I wish we could wear zombie makeup all of the time.” Then he wondered if zombies could jump up from their backs like Bruce Lee, and we all got the giggles.

DUH-DAAAAA! DUUH-DUH-DUUUUH!

Here is the video!

I was in the back, so you can’t really see me. I’m the one high-fiving everyone at the end, in the upper-right corner. However, here’s us doing the Zombie Roar. This is what I look like when I’m totally into it and grooving:

All in all, there were about 45 zombies. It was seriously a great time and I had a weird sense of accomplishment from being a part of it all. Afterwards we had free pizza because we were CW 11’s Team of the Week. Amanda and Niki discovered a bunch of gymnastics equipment in the back of the gym. Zombies LOVE the uneven bars.

Later on that night, Katie, Joe, Jen, Ron, Niki, Dustin, Hannah, Meg and I went down to the Central West End. There are a lot of snooty bars in that part of town, and they have a big outdoor costume contest every year. It costs money to enter the contest, but Katie decided we were too cool for that. We took it to the streets:

Ron brought his kick-ass boombox, Joe and Dustin would be all like, “Oh my god, do I hear Thriller?” and then BAM – a crowd would form around us.

The first crowd was pretty big. We were afraid that people would just watch the contest, or that the big group of policemen would yell at us. However, everyone stopped and walked over and started cheering.

In the picture below, you may notice someone behind Jen. I swear to god this happened:

Someone jumped in and started dancing to “Thriller” with us in perfect synchrony. It was straight out of a movie. He knew every step, and when he jumped in all of the cheering got louder.

And? He was dressed like Urkel. I swear to god.

After the first performance, the crowd exploded in a way we didn’t expect. Other group-costume people like the wrestlers and the Spartan cheerleaders were inspired to do on-the-spot performances as well. All of the cheering and high-fives were intoxicating, so we immediately wanted to do it again.

We went to the street that actually faced the stage and had the most people. People were already approaching Katie to tell her that they loved her costume, and she was like, “Just wait.”

I wish I had pictures of the front of the crowd because there were so many people. I was totally freaked out, which I guess worked with the zombie ensemble. There were tons of people on the sides of the street, too. Then the crowd got bigger…

And bigger…

And then we were totally surrounded.

People were cheering and yelling, “Oh my god, they’re doing Thriller!” the whole time. During our best moves, the crowd would go “Whooooo!” Someone threw money at us. Everyone was smiling and clapping and taking pictures.

And then when we did the final pose, the crowd exploded again, only this time it was even louder. I will never forget that noise. We high-fived too many people to count. Katie officially became the coolest person in the Central West End and we were all so proud to be in her zombie posse.

I was really proud of Jen and Niki and everyone who was involved. I am now addicted to synchronized dancing and super amounts of attention. That was something I would have never done a year ago, and now I can’t wait until next year to do it again. The Year of Awesome is officially ready for the holidays, y’all.

Hey Katie – during November, can you give lessons on how to be a Total Badass? Cuz you are.

Thrilling And/Or Appalling Confession #2

I updated my resume and sent it to cities I’ve always wanted to live in.
Do I like my job? Yes. Am I qualified for these new places? Maybe, maybe not.

Some days I’m in the mood to Go For It in general, you know?

Champs and Chumps VI – Freddy’s Dead

I was going to call this “Champs and Chumps 666”, but my years in Sunday School still won’t let me joke about stuff like that. So you get a Nightmare on Elm Street reference instead. You’re welcome. Sidenote: the sixth installment of Friday the 13th is called Jason Lives, which makes me wonder if they did that on purpose.

Champs

Jen: Jen said something to me after Thriller class that was so nice and encouraging, and it was at a time when I really needed to hear it the most. I wish I knew how to be as good of a friend as she is. I’m only good at that stuff on paper. If I tried to tell Jen how awesome she is in person, I’d probably end up crying or something. Champs to Jen for being awesome, and chumps to me for being wussy.

Gorilla Munch Cereal: Yum yum yum. This has always been a favorite. Gorilla Munch tastes just like Kix, except it’s organic and has 3 ingredients. Plus: proceeds go towards endangered gorillas. Double plus: I get to look at cartoon gorillas every morning.

Spud: This book is pretty good so far*. It’s about a boy named Spud and his friends and their hijinks at boarding school, but it’s set in South Africa in 1990 when apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Heavy and interesting, but still manages to be cute and funny.

Jason: Because he’s playing that roller coaster video game “Thrillville”, and there’s a part in the game where you have to be a dancing cheerleader with pigtails. He just got this game today and as I was typing this Ashlee Simpson started blaring through our speakers, and Jason is all, “Hey, I’m a good dancer!” He scored a 94 in Poise and an “Awesome!” overall. We can’t stop giggling:

Boys: Sometimes I forget that you guys are not my best girlfriends and therefore, there is some stuff that I shouldn’t write about. But MAN, those are the things I want to tell you the MOST. Daaaaammit. I have many stories to dish, plus dates that I am really excited about. It’s a great time to be an old maid.

I will divulge this: I think I am close to picking a boyfriend. I’ve narrowed it down. Get ready for the Mangent, it’s going to be hot.

Dresses with Pockets: I’m a fidgety person. If I don’t have a sleeve or a hem or a hoodstring to play with, I get pretty self-conscious. So I’ve avoided little dresses until recently. Dresses with pockets solve that problem, and somehow I turn into a little dancing machine when I wear one. Also they get me lots of phone numbers and dates. I can’t stop buying them. Hooray for fashion!

Nike Air Pegasus: Dood, these shoes are hot! Not hot like sexy (decent running shoes have butt ugly reflectors and mesh) but hot like high tech. Check out the specs on these puppies.** Last year I wore my soles all the way through and gave myself a serious stress fracture, so now I always make sure to splurge on sneakers. I’m excited to start running seriously again – it makes me sleep better and I’m just happier in general.

Blue Toilet Water: It dresses up your toilet and makes flushing pee-pee feel fancy.

2gether: Lately Iain and I have been having those phone conversations that go on forever about basically everything, and the subject of 2gether came up. 2gether was a late 90’s TV movie (and short-lived series) about a fictional boy band. Chris Farley’s brother played “the fat one”, which should give you an idea about how awesome it was. It premiered on a night when I was home with the flu, and I could not believe how much it made me laugh. Anyway, the conversation inspired me to look them up on YouTube, and it made me happy. So here you go:

Me: Because I wrote something the other day about the iPhone and I used the phrase, “oSnap, iPhone!” I believe this is the funniest thing I have ever written. Yes, it’s probably been done before and it’s not that funny. Don’t write to me.

Perez Hilton: Girl, what would I do without you? It’s like you just know.

Chumps

Me: Because I still haven’t written about Warren’s wedding and I promised you I would. Also I haven’t run since Sunday. Also I’m slamming a cup of coffee right now. Bad.

Vegan Cheese: I’ve been buying soy cheese because I love cheese but I don’t want to eat a lot of it. Soy cheese is the perfect balance of “cheesy, yet too gross to eat by itself”. Pure vegan cheese, however, is horrendous no matter what I put it on. I have a big imagination but I can’t fake this. I miss cheese.

Norway: I’ve been reading a lot about Roma (gypsies). The diaspora and persecution of Roma is shocking and rarely recognized, particularly their experiences during The Holocost. I wasn’t expecting to find as many horror stories as I did, covering virtually every time period and every part of the world. Norway was especially deplorable and I don’t want to go into detail about it. But that’s what’s in my doghouse. Chumps to Norway.

Not Smoking: Aside from Warren’s wedding, I haven’t smoked in over a month. My friends are camping this weekend and I really want to go, but I know I’ll be chain-smoking by the end of it so I’m probably just going to stay here and go on a date.

I do not smoke anything, which means the only vice I have is the one where I’d have to pull my pants down repeatedly to pee behind a tree in 40-degree weather. Not appealing, that.

Also: this camping trip is special because the band Dub Kitchen is playing a set in the stockade (which is a gigantic super-fun fort in the woods). This will probably be an awesome show and a big party, so if you know Ron or anyone in his universe, you should ask him how to get there. However: I dated a hippy for two years and refuse to listen to reggae in the woods ever again. Sorry, folks.

*It’s been called “the Catcher in the Rye of South Africa”. However, that’s what they said about Norwegian Wood and Japan, and I hated Norwegian Wood (although to be fair, it’s probably better in its original Japanese). And I wasn’t a big fan of Catcher in the Rye to begin with. But either way, Spud is great.

**Is it right to call them puppies if I’ll be wearing them on my dogs?

Adventures In Recycling

Today is Blog Action Day, so I’m supposed to write about the environment. Now, I already wrote a Sludgie today so I’m kind of eco’d out. And since Shortcake is usually about my life and things going on in my world and mememememe, I thought I’d talk about the recycling center in my hometown, the Francis Scheidegger Recycling Depository.

I was going to write something about Francis Scheidegger, but I couldn’t find much… just this link from the Missouri Recycling Association, which I didn’t even know existed.

So there you go. Missouri has a recycling association, and you can recycle stuff 24/7 if you live near me. Blog. Action
~~~*~~~

I try to recycle. I am addicted to magazines of all sorts, so I like walking to the center with a backpack full of them every month. It’s a good workout. And whenever I eat a TV dinner, I save the cardboard box. I certainly don’t recycle as much as I should, but I’m getting there.

This all started about 6 or 7 years ago, when I was dating a jolly alcoholic*. He really wanted to recycle, so during every party he would force us to rinse out our beer bottles and place them back in the cardboard case.

“Are you really going to recycle these?” I’d ask him daily, peering underneath the bar in his parents’ basement.

“Baby, of course I’m going to recycle them. I’m saving the planet,” he’d say, and then he’d flash that smile that allowed him to get away with everything, including calling me “baby”.

Well, fast forward about 3 months… the bar was basically packed with empty 12-packs and other assorted bottles. Every brand you can think of was present. All beer-making countries were represented. It was a glorious collection, but it had to go. So one day while he was at work, Pammy and I went to his house**. His stepbrother gratefully let us in, and we started packing the bottles into my car.

Here is what we collected:

• 32 6-packs of beer
• 19 12-packs
• 3 grocery bags of cans
• 12 40 oz bottles

Imagine about 450 bottles clinking at the exact same time. Now imagine this noise confined in the space of a 1989 Honda Accord. Now imagine that happening over and over, every single time I hit a bump in the road. Did I mention he lived a half hour away from me?

Also, I was only 20 years old. Pammy was like 18. Can you imagine if I had been pulled over?

To top it all off, we happened to roll into the Francis Scheidegger Recycling Depository during lunch hour on a weekday, which is when all of the local businesses like to drop off their recycling boxes from the copy room at the office.

Pam and I spent almost an hour running back and forth from the car to the bins, yelling for “more green ones” or “more brown ones”. Eventually a crowd of bemused businessmen formed in the parking lot to watch us chuck bottle after bottle into the dumpsters. *** I bet we looked like two cool chicks. When we got to the big box of 40s, they actually cheered.

Since then, I’m always gotten a lot of joy out of the recycling center. Also I try to avoid dating potheads and/or drunks, no matter how adorable they are.

*”Jolly alcoholics” are the alcoholics who never get violent or crash their car or anything… but when you stop and really think about them, you’re like, “Jesus, they sure drink a lot.”

**Ra was supposed to go with me, but this was right around the time that she started dating Ty and she ditched me to hang out with him. This became an ongoing theme in their relationship and it still pisses me off to this day even though they have since married other people.

***They let you throw your own bottles into giant pits of broken glass and it’s seriously fun stuff. I highly recommend it if you’ve never been.

Guess What’s In My Pants (And Other Things Worth Sharing)

That’s a four. A FOUR. WHAAAT. Um, I went shopping. I still hate the mall, but I hate the act of shopping a little less. It’s fun when you try on a bunch of clothes, bring them out to that girl who sits there and announce, “They were ALL TOO BIG.” Here’s some other fun stuff:

THRILL THE WORLD

Thriller school is SO MUCH FUN, you guys.

That guy in the white shirt tried to stay in character as a zombie for the full hour, which Jen found both awesome and distracting. Personally, it was hard to keep a straight (or undead) face at all when doing dance moves like “Air Guitar to the right”, “Oh Snap” and my favorite, “Booty Bounce”. KTJ is a great teacher and the whole vibe of the class is so silly yet cool. I’ve been practicing my Thriller at least 3 times a day and I think I’m getting it. Not bad for a girl who STILL doesn’t know the Electric Slide.

Updated to Add: we’re in the paper!

SLUDGIE

Francis is going on his honeymoon and he left me the keys to Sludgie!! Woo! Party at Sludgie! Let’s take it over and blog about boys! Just kidding. I posted the very first Sludgie that I ever wrote. It’s about pink dolphins. Go look.

GONZO GOES FOR IT

Warren is getting married tomorrow. Out of all my high school friends, Warren is the absolute coolest, nicest and smartest. He was also my next-door neighbor for two years and it was such a blast having him around all of the time. His special lady friend Sarah is a total sweetheart, and she’s been my friend for years, too. Tony asked me to be his date to the rehearsal dinner tonight, which was super sweet and thoughtful of him. I’m friends with everyone in the wedding party, I think, so I’m glad I get to hang out with all of them before the big day. But for once*, Tony is not my date to the wedding… my date is Super Awesome Ted. This is going to be so fun!

CALIFORNIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

So I wrote something random about maybe going to California sometime soon, and I got emails from basically all of my friends in Cali asking me “When? When when when?” So since it’s been almost 15 years since I’ve been out that way, a trip is due. I can’t go til after the holidays, so I’m thinking mid-January? Oui? Non? So to Iain, Kyle, Conor, Coire, Francis, Emily and the rest: get ready, and hold me to this because I really want to do this.

*NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT

Last weekend my roommate was out of town, so I had a few friends over. Three straight girls and two gay men. Somehow, we ended up watching an entire season of The L Word. None of us had seen the show before. It was pretty great. Cybill Shepard is hysterical, Pam Greer is awesome, and we all agreed that we want the character Alice to be our best friend. However, we all found ourselves strangely drawn to the character Shane, played by Gwenyth Paltrow’s cousin Katherine Moenig. It took a few episodes before anyone admitted it, but that’s all we could talk about once it was out in the open. I mean, all six of us like boys, but we all kind of wanted Shane to buy us dinner. It was a magical emotional journey, complete with 4 bottles of wine, 3 pizzas and a lot of awkward pauses:

“My brain keeps mistaking her for a cute boy,” one of us said.

“I know what you mean. Like, not my type of boy…”

“… but like one of those girly Italian models. Like a guy wearing Dior.”

“Like Jared Leto when he’s wearing eyeliner.”

“Right! Or like that weird-looking guy from Dazed and Confused who tried to throw a kegger.”

“Exactly. Not my type of boy but still… a really hot, tall lanky boy.”

“This is making me question everything.”

“So? This is making me question everything AGAIN.”

“I know what you mean. My mom will be so happy.”

Our conversation about Shane went on for so long that we actually had to call over J, our mutual friend who happens to be a straight male and therefore the only person in the room who is attracted to women.

“J. J. J. Look at the TV, J. What do you think about her?”

“She’s hot.”

“No no, not her. Her. With the brown hair.”

“That’s a girl??”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm.”

“See guys? A really cute boy. We’re okay.”

“Is this seriously why you called me over here?”

The magic was killed an episode later when Shane took off her shirt (All: “No! NEVERMIND! NO!”) but it was an interesting way to kill an afternoon and bond with some pals. I feel so much closer to all of you.