There were five people at my wedding: Me, my husband, two witnesses, and the minister—our roommate Eugene.
Eugene is a minister of the Universal Life Church, a group that supports freedom of religion and says they will ordain anyone. It takes three minutes and can be done over the Internet. But the website warns, “This is a serious matter and should not be used to play jokes on your friends. In our experience, people become very upset to find themselves ordained without their permission. It is not worth broken friendships, so just don’t do it please.” Because ordainment is so easy, and because there are no ritual requirements dictated by the state, the same process makes it virtually possible to marry people without their knowledge.
After being ordained, Eugene ordered a Universal Life Church ID card for $12. He brought the card to city hall and paid $5 to be officially registered in Ramsey County to perform weddings and other religious ceremonies. A week later, he married us in our dining room in a silent Buddhist ceremony, which was his idea. My husband and I entered the room between the two witnesses and bowed to Eugene. Eugene poured a glass of wine. We each drank from it, then bowed to each other. The ceremony was over; all that remained was to sign the paperwork.
Eugene’s friend Samantha has already married three couples. She became a minister of the ULC to help out some friends who wanted to get married but didn’t have the money to pay a real judge or minister. Her most recent wedding took place in the couple’s kitchen with the bride’s parents on speakerphone from Seattle. At her second wedding, which took place in a park in front of a large group of friends and family, she recited a speech she memorized 30 minutes beforehand, and then the couple jumped over a broom.
Samantha had some legal troubles before her first wedding. She brought in a printed email from the Universal Life Church to verify that she was an ordained minister, but this was insufficient proof for the county. She ordered a certificate from the church, which would arrive signed but blank, so she would have to fill her own name in, but it didn’t arrive in time for the wedding. She finally took a picture of the certificate from the ULC’s handbook, enlarged it at the copy store where she worked, and put her name on that one. The county accepted it. That afternoon she signed her first marriage certificate, in the presence of the bride and two witnesses. The husband was not there, but apparently he had consented beforehand, because he never contested the slightly questionable wedding. Whether he realizes it or not, he and his wife are legally married in the state of Minnesota.—Katherine Glover
If you weren’t at Sylvie Nides and Sampson Burke’s golden anniversary party this past September, you missed the event of the year, maybe even of the decade. After all, how often do you get the chance to see two dogs renewing wedding vows under a chuppah?
Jane Nides, Sylvie’s mom and a medical marketing representative, was the matchmaker who brought the panting couple together 50 dog-years ago. She got the idea for the wedding after she heard about a fundraiser called Dog Day Afternoon to raise money for DIFFA (The Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS) and the Animal Humane Society. Instead of just taking her dog to the event, Nides had a better idea.
“I thought, why don’t I add onto that event, and have my dog get married? And instead of people bringing gifts, ask for donations?” She called up her neighbor and friend Cindy, mother of Sampson, a pedigreed bearded collie, and tested the waters. Would Sampson be intersted in, you know, hooking up with Sylvie?
Few arranged marriages work out so well. The nuptials were held on July 27, 1996 at Midway Stadium in conjunction with Dog Day Afternoon, with more guests, bridesmaids, musicians, and cake than most human weddings.
Every year since then, Nides has hosted an anniversary party in her Linden Hills home, with Sylvie in her original wedding dress. And while the annual event is a chance to get together with friends, it’s always connected with at least one charity.
This year’s party raised money for the Alzheimer’s Association and the Humane Society. And being that Sylvie and Sampson were celebrating 50 dog-years of wedded bliss, Nides pulled out all the stops. As guests arrived on the warm September even-ing, they were asked to choose a dog tag, in-scribed with one of three legends to wear over their black-tie garb: “good dog,” “bad dog,” or “crazy dog.” Thus tagged, they were treated to wine, fine food, strolling musicians, and the commissioned work of Minneapolis mural artist Peter Bue, better known as Fucci.
When everyone was present, Nides announced on a megaphone that the ceremony was starting down in her newly created rock garden. The crowd stood in solemn anticipation as the steadfast couple renewed their vows under the colorful chuppah. Lawrence Hutera, the Twin Cities singer who serenaded the couple at the original wedding in 1996, sang the same beloved songs. After Sampson broke the wine glass (with the help of an unidentified size-9 pump), the lovers spent the rest of the evening mingling. After many hours of revery, guests were sent on their way with two lovely keepsakes: a “House of Fun and Fur” chocolate bar, and a lint roller to relieve themselves of stray Sylvie and Sampson fuzz.
The couple’s secret to keeping the puppy love alive? Having a little breathing room in their marriage. “Sampson moved away a while ago, so for the past few years they’ve only seen each other at the anniversary parties,” Nides explains. “It works well.”—Stephanie Watson
Benjamin has been looking for Erin for about four months. He met her at a party in August, and she hit his car two weeks later. But it wasn’t like that. There were no damages. Rather, Ben had a crush on Erin.
The number he put into his cell phone never saved. He searched the phone’s memory again and again. Then he made some calls. But for all anyone knew, Erin was a figment of Ben’s imagination. There was no last name, no friend-of-a-friend connection. Nothing.
He took out an “I saw you” ad in a local paper and it ran the next week. “You hit my car in NE Mpls. You looked beautiful. Please call to discuss the ‘damages.’ My name is Benjamin.” It ran the week after that. And again the week after that. And again.
It’s January and Ben’s had no response. When the ad first ran, he checked his messages daily. He says he’s down to once a week now, and even then it’s a halfhearted effort. The hope is gone. “I don’t think anyone reads those things,” he says dismissively.
Ben is adamant about one thing: He’s not desperate. But, to be honest, it’s hard to meet attractive, interesting women when you’re a 28-year-old medical student. And even when you do meet one, well, there just aren’t any guarantees of lifelong (or even week-long) compatibility. Ben doesn’t know if it would be different with Erin. But in their fleeting, beer-infused moment in time, he perceived a spark in her brown-eyed self that Ben rarely sees in Minnesota ladies. There are just so few good ones available, he laments. And even if they are available, how do you meet them? Now she probably just remembers him as the guy who never called.
Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. His friend ran into her last week, but he forgot to mention Ben, his interest, or his search. And then she was gone. Again.
According to the 2000 census, there are 82 million people living alone in the United States. Forty-eight million of those people have never been married; another 20 million are divorced, and some 13.6 million are widowed. The census has no way of measuring whether these people are happy about their swinging singlehood, but human nature being what it is, it’s probably safe to assume that most would prefer to be coupled. Or at least try. After all, thousands of people vow every day that theirs is a union that will be different. They thumb their noses at the divorce rate and tie the knot. But we all know the statistics. The Census Bureau notes that, on average, people between the ages of 15 and 85 spend more years unmarried than married. Divorce plays a big part in that stat. But you also have to consider the additional ten percent of people who will never marry at all.
Ask anyone in their late 20s or early 30s why they’re single, and they will probably tell you there’s simply no one attractive or interesting or datable left. With the exception of the single person you happen to be talking to, of course, all single people on the scene are weird, ugly, unemployed, or sleazy. But get them talking a bit more, and the truth comes out. Regardless of whatever else they might be, attractive young eligibles are all one other thing: completely, utterly unapproachable. Why? There are lots of reasons, mostly having to do with the limitations of the would-be approacher, not the approachee: because you haven’t actually approached anyone since college; because there’s no one to approach when you work in information technology/nursing/business; because there’s no one to approach when you spend your nights watching prime time. Because you can’t approach anyone when you’re shy, insecure, or out of practice; you can’t approach anyone when you have an overwhelming fear of rejection; you can’t approach anyone when you’re wallowing in singledom; you can’t approach anyone when you’re emitting from every pore the saccharine scent of your loneliness.
Which is why, on a cold December night, a hundred of those despicable singles gather on the mezzanine of William’s Pub in Uptown. These singles are mostly white, and mostly white-collar. They each shell out $40 to spend three hours of their busy schedules as Fast Daters. If you’re shy, busy, or genetically predisposed to the bizarre, Fast Dater is the up-and-coming way to meet your honey.
The Rake goes inside the criminally overshadowed AV Club.
If The Onion is the nation’s class clown, the AV Club—the newspaper’s unheralded entertainment section—is its thoughtful little wallflower of a brother. Originally a wacky complement to the newspaper’s celebrated satire, the section grew into its current format under editor Stephen Thompson, who fought for a more serious critical focus when he took over in 1993. The specialty of the house quickly became long, free-flowing Q&As with notable celebrities, both up-and-coming and down-and-going. There are legions whose presence in an irreverent Gen-X publication like The Onion is nearly mandated by law—Penn & Teller, Henry Rollins, the creators of Mr. Show. But the AV Club is distinct for its focus on completely forgotten B-listers. Long before Behind the Music and Fear Factor, they let the Vanilla Ices of the world steal a little overtime in their 15 minutes of fame.
The AV Club’s new book The Tenacity of the Cockroach collects 68 interviews with such diverse figures as Joan Jett, animator Chuck Jones, film director Russ Meyer, and novelty-music king Dr. Demento. These folks have little in common, other than their scars from years of showbiz struggle, and their hard-won place in popular culture—even if that place is far out on its fringes. Tenacity explores that theme through the widest possible cast of characters, moving from embittered cranks and recluses to focused pros to those grateful just to be here. The Rake recently turned the glare of the Q&A spotlight back on AV Club editor Thompson.
The Rake: What valuable life lessons can we learn from celebrities?
THOMPSON: Obviously I don’t think Rachael Leigh Cook has a lot to teach us, or Ashton Kutcher, God bless him. But if you select wisely, and talk to celebrities that have an interesting perspective on their work and how it fits into the culture, there is potential. We probably share a certain skepticism about the tendency to make a celebrity’s story universal, like we can all learn about what it’s like to have a baby because Celine Dion had a baby. If you remember when Celine Dion had her baby, it was like this triumph of the human spirit because Celine Dion had managed to breed, and her baby was of course a kind of miracle baby. (Laughs) How ridiculous is that? I mean, obviously, Celine Dion had difficulty conceiving and I’m glad she was able to have a baby. But it was this ridiculously overblown thing where we were supposed to take this great uplifting life lesson because a pop singer went through this.
The comedy section of The Onion gets far more attention than the AV Club. Do you sometimes feel like you’re the redheaded stepchild?
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a little bit, over the years, but I’d never in a million years expect to be acclaimed the way the comedy section has been. That’s perfectly understandable. We’re not doing groundbreaking comedy. I think we’re doing a very good entertainment section, but there are so many entertainment sections. At the same time, it bothers me when long articles appear about The Onion and don’t mention that there is an entertainment section.
How did the AV Club evolve, relative to the rest of The Onion?
We launched the entertainment section in 1993. In 1995 we renamed it the AV Club. Originally everything was written by me and the comedy writers, and eventually I brought in my own entertainment staff as I found people. It was trial and error. And there were certainly conflicts. It was originally going to be just a wacky entertainment section. And that idea I didn’t think had ever been particularly well executed. Over time the idea became, why don’t we just do a really smart, interesting entertainment section that has The Onion’s directness and economy of phrasing, has the spirit of The Onion, but is a real entertainment section that would be taken seriously and would enhance the value and the voice of the paper. It took years to figure that out and a ton of fights. My feeling was, why bother having an entertainment section if the jokes you’re putting in aren’t particularly on target? We can be cutting and clever and still provide people with some sort of service. A consistent set of opinions and a clitoral — I mean critical — perspective.
You’d probably get a lot more press with the other one.
(Laughs.) Yes, we’d be faring better today.
There’s a school of thought that a clever interviewer can draw out something universal in just about anybody.
Everyone has a story to tell and everybody’s unique, but finding people who can articulate what makes themselves interesting is a little bit trickier. We try to make sure that our interviews don’t dwell on just a current project, but to do general career overviews because that’s what we’re more interested in to begin with. It helps that our favorite sort of interviewees tend to be a little older, to have a large body of work. And in a lot of cases, they’re people whose work we grew up admiring. We have jokes about interviewing bitter, jilted cranks and geriatric comedy legends. We all have our niches. So the fact that everybody has the tenacity of the cockroach, that they have survived in entertainment, that’s the product of the mentality we’ve always taken into the interviews. We seek out people whose work we’ve enjoyed for a long time.
How does your style differ from journalists doing similar long-form interviews, like Charlie Rose or Terry Gross?
I think they do fine work. Because we’re in print, it’s definitely a different art. Terry Gross and Charlie Rose have to talk much more articulately than we do. You can edit an audio interview, but in print you can really polish it up into almost essay-like clarity.
How did you come to the long-form Q&A interview as the AV Club ideal?
That’s the standard block of space between ads in our Madison, Wisconsin, edition, which is a silly thing to base interview lengths on, but we just found it was right. Too much longer, your eyes would glaze over. A lot shorter, the interview barely registers. So we like to do a nice long big meaty feature length interview, but for that to work it has to be interesting. You can’t disguise a boring interview if you’re doing Q&A. Not that we’ve never done boring interviews.
I personally find Q&A more readable. When we started doing interviews, they were essays, which can read kind of flat. The subject gets de-emphasized, and the writer does all this paraphrasing. When I read an interview, I want to read what the subject has to say.
It always seems to happen on a Friday. The phone rings and someone says, “Do you speak Latin?” and I reply “Well, I teach it,” or something equally noncommittal. Then comes the question. “What is the Latin word for ‘color’?” Phew, that’s easy. “Color, spelt the way Americans spell it.” “Well what’s the Latin for enhanced?” “It depends what you mean.” “Okay, then, what’s the Latin for shampoo?”
That one was a local soap company brainstorming the name of an enhanced product. Over the years, I have furnished love-legends for engraving on wedding rings, an inscription for a cake for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and translations of choice phrases in a doctor’s letter to his patient’s lawyer (sui generis perversus, that sort of thing), which had clearly been left in the chaste obscurity of a learned language for a good reason.
The most engaging inquiry was also the most serious. Someone rang from the Medical School (again, a Friday afternoon) wanting to know the origin of a word meaning “pain during intercourse.” He was doing research and wanted to coin a similar word for pain during anal intercourse, and please could I oblige. The term we came up with was proctalgia, derived from Greek “alge,” meaning pain (as in analgesic) and Greek “proktos,” denoting the posterior passage (as in proctophone, one who speaks through that part of his body). Proctalgia is surely a word which deserves a broader usage, for instance, in reference to a tiresome acquaintance, “the fellow gives me acute proctalgia.” I leave it with you.
One hopes that local government appreciates such pleasing contributions to our land grant mission, but it certainly does not discharge a fraction of the service to the state which is rendered by the University’s Classics Department. The hard humanities are as necessary as the hard sciences.
But such telephonic repartee does inspire me to go straight from the office to the new sushi shop to sample the exact pleasures of contrasting fish. (It is, after all, still Friday). Seafood supposedly inspires a kind of cognitive precision, especially sushi. A molecule of mackerel follows a soupcon of salmon. I am reminded of the Latinate epicure newly arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport anxious to sample the local New England delicacies without delay. “Take me,” he said to the cabbie, “to where I can get scrod.” “That’s the first time I’ve heard that in the pluperfect,” came the reply.
A sushi-enhanced sharpness of mind should lead you, too, to the 2002 Sauvignon Blanc from an Argentine winery called Bodegas Norton. This is a light and pleasing wine, a fine complement to raw fish (it would be overpowered by anything smoked or canned). The color is pale, the taste is clean, with a faint fizz, and a hint of the blackcurrant flavor which is more pronounced in, say, Pouilly-Fumé, a wine from the Loire valley in western France, made from the same grape. Above all, it is young and refreshing, serious without being intense.
For all its youth, this is a wine with an interesting history. Sir Edmund Norton was one of those bold Victorian engineers not afraid to take his art to the undiscovered ends. In the late 19th century, Argentine agriculture was transformed by being able to transport its produce to distant markets, not least to Britain and the United States. Immigrants arrived to work the land—readers of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia will recall the communities of Welsh cattlemen with names like Pedro Evans and Sancho Jones. The secret of this success lay in the railways, largely British-built, and Sir Edmund Norton designed and constructed railway bridges. He married a local woman and settled in the wine country; Bodegas Norton is in the upper Mendoza valley, three and a half thousand feet above sea level, in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains.
Those who want the Sauvignon without the sushi can find it for less than $8 all around town. You do not need to be a Latin lover to like this wine. (Remember how Dan Quayle was going to find his Latin handy in Latin America?) But it certainly will put a spring in your step. This wine says “Thank God it’s Friday.”
My inner Mothra would be so proud. I had no fears that the gorgeous Icelandic woman sitting next to my husband at a dinner party was any competition for me, but that didn’t stop me from engaging the table with jokes told in rapid-fire English that I was sure she couldn’t get. It’s not bad to remember in this, the sappiest of all months, that there is a dark side to love. My dark side happens to be defined by monster movies along the lines of King Kong. Mothra may be my jealous side, and surely Gamera is present on my “less calm days.” But in every dark side there exists the glimmer of good, as in Godzilla. At first he may seem to want to pillage and burn urban centers of commerce and hydro-electric plants, but he can be turned and tamed, for the good of all.
This strange and spicy side of love is often ignored, and certainly not explored by amateurs, much like the wasabi sitting on that Bjork chick’s plate. I’m sure she saw it as merely a green glob of pasty yuck that need not be introduced into her safe meal. In fact, she seemd to be refusing to try it at all. As for the rest of us monsters, we choose to dance with the Japanese condiment’s bright heat and dinosaur roar.
These days it’s easier to find wasabi than a good print of Godzilla. Not only has the proliferation of sushi restaurants throughout the country raised wasabi awareness, but the word itself has been turned into a moronic ad campaign by those clever marketeers at Budweiser. And while more and more people are embracing the neon green, sinus-clearing paste of love, few really understand what it is. An informal dinner-party poll yielded these speculations as to what wasabi might be: fish guts, seaweed, Japanese mountain grass, flower pollen, and—my personal favorite—spicy wheat. Time to cut off the sake, I’m afraid.
Wasabia japonica is, as its scientific name implies, indigenous to Japan. It is not a member of the “spicy wheat” family, but a perennial herb of the Cruciferae, or mustard, family. It grows wild along stream beds and on river sand bars in wet, cool river valleys in the mountainous regions of Japan. The geographic range of wild wasabi runs from the northernmost islands to the southernmost, but production of the plant is centered on the interior section of the Izu peninsula and the Azumino plain tucked between the Japanese Alps in Nagano. The plant produces a rhizome, or an above-ground root-like runner, which is harvested and grated to form powders and pungent pastes.
While the plant occurs naturally in the wild, cultivation for commercial use is a trickier matter. For high-quality wasabi to flourish, it needs to be continuously washed over with pure, cold water. Obviously, glacial run-off allows for great irrigation in the upper regions where it is grown in terraces on sloping hills. But the plant is also being grown in the plains, with flat beds which must be banked by streams or diverted waters. Soil cultivation of the plant is also being explored, but this method has real problems. Even in ideal conditions, a wasabi plant will not reach maturity for 15 months—an awful long wait in the plant world, and an eternity in the human one.
Time is of the essence, because, like the three-headed alien Ghidrah, wasabi is taking over the world. Demand is up and there is high competition for the goods. In order to meet the needs of the current marketplace, there have been some adjustments to the traditional recipe. In fact, chances are the wasabi you’re eating contains no authentic wasabi whatsoever. Most commercial pastes sold in supermarkets and used at sushi restaurants are made from horseradish powder, mustard, and food coloring.
Compounding the demand for real wasabi is the mounting research that tells us how darn good the stuff is for you. The same compounds that provide the nostril-searing rush are known to be an effective treatment for food poisoning—thus it’s no accident that the Japanese use it so prevalently with raw fish. Asthma, blood clots, and even stomach cancer have all been treated successfully with wasabi, which has been used medicinally in Japan since the 10th century. Then there’s the really important application of wasabi—as a snack food. Dried wasabi peas and peanuts are invading markets across the country, and making special inroads in the coop community. The spicy little bar snacks can be found locally at Schuang Hur market on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis.
Wasabi may just be the monster crop of the new millennium. Pacific Farms in Oregon is currently the only producer of fresh wasabi in the USA. Their moist climate has proven to be a boon to farmers looking for a fresh crop. New Zealand is also exploring their wasabi growing potential, and even looking for people to come over, start a farm, and take a chance. If you think you want to start small, The Frog Farm will provide you with seedlings and cultivation instructions. (They glibly make it sound like a piece of ricecake).
Chino Latino, in Minneapolis, is currently using fresh wasabi from Pacific Farms with their sushi creations. Compared to the wasabi found in most joints, it does have a brighter snap and a grainier texture. Mainstream sushi-eaters often mix their wasabi into their soy sauce and then dip their fish. This masks the green monster’s potency a bit. The truly daring and the super-heroic plop a dollop right on top the fish, and go head-to-head with the dark side.
How did I get so slovenly? Can I blame it on my upbringing, fraught with stringent housekeeping rules and rigorous cleaning chores from an early age? Is it the necessary byproduct of a creative temperament? Or am I just lazy?
I leave my dishes in the sink, on the table, or worse yet, in the bed. I toss my coat on the back of the nearest chair and my shoes in the middle of the floor. I tuck my keys wherever I’ll be least likely to find them again, and I abandon my purses in the seats of grocery carts as a karmic test to the next shoppers.
The cheese and cracker crumbs on the kitchen counter are mine, the stray toothpaste cap was my doing, and my coat pockets are overflowing with forgotten lipsticks, receipts, stray beads, and hairy lintballs.
Don’t jump to conclusions. My home is a pretty place. For one thing, my partner keeps house like a doting granny. But even I value a beautiful, orderly environment enough to work against my own nature. I clean in fiery, maniacal bursts. The bleachy smell of a clean bathroom lifts my spirits. I paint, I arrange, I rearrange, and most of all, I hide things. I am a lover of drawers, especially. Some people use desk drawers for pens, pencils, and paper clips. Mine are stuffed with more fascinating debris: yarn bracelets, loose potpourri, candle stubs, rocks, stale candy, paper wads, photos, sugar cubes, grapefruit oil, empty match books.
My younger sister, a self-described obsessive, finds this intolerable, and has long claimed that my tender-heartedness toward little dishes and baskets and bowls of odds and ends with no discernible purpose—pretty or not—is the root of all evil. But I’m not convinced. Sometimes doo-dads pay off. A few years ago, I got seized by the irrational impulse to clean out the kitchen junk drawer in the wee hours of Christmas Eve. I was short of cash, and worried about the modest sum of money I’d spent on gifts for my kids and family, and maybe I was channeling that anxiety into the desire to make the house perfectly tidy right into its crevices. In any case, when I’d finally emptied the drawer, wiped out the last crumb, and sorted every coin, coupon, scrap, petrified gum stick, and old check stub, I discovered one stub that was in fact an uncashed check from two years prior, for exactly the amount I had just spent on Christmas.
So while a dear, well-meaning friend once whispered to me in a cautious way that life’s journey is less stressful in a clean car, I find something potent about small pockets of clutter, something fertile. When left undisturbed for long enough, they become still life artifacts of the past in a way a journal can never quite achieve. Recently I emptied out a closet to move my enormous and unwieldy collection of clothes from one hanging rack to another, and I discovered an old handbag that I haven’t used, according to the receipts it contained, since 1998.
The zinc throat lozenges had liquefied in their wrappers and the lacy ankle socks are now far too small for anyone in the family, reminding me with a cold punch that I no longer carry anybody else’s tiny socks on my person. But the four dollars in loose change was legal tender, and the small pewter statuette of the Virgin Mary was an enigma.
Based on my own eccentricities I cannot very well expect my kids to be neatniks, nor have I loaded them up with chore charts or subjected them to the dreaded ritual of Saturday morning housework. My guidelines are far less clear but ultimately more authentic for a slob like me: Put your shoes away when you walk into the house and help out cheerfully when you’re asked. Most of the time, this works fine.
It’s not too hypocritical and it reflects the basic standards I set when my oldest child was just learning how to speak and think and sort out the oddities of growing up with a mother like me. We were riding in the car, me at the wheel and she in her car seat, and she dropped whatever sticky thing she was eating onto the car floor. She shrieked for me to pull over and give it back to her.
“No,” I explained, “you can’t eat it now. It’s dirty.” “I don’t care!” she yelled. “I like dirt!” “But Sophie,” I reasoned. “It’s on the floor of the car, it’s covered with icky stuff.” “Like what?” she demanded. “Like . . . dog hair,” I offered.
She contemplated in silence before pointing out that we did not have a dog. Fair enough. But she did quiet down, and as far as I can tell, I convinced her to avoid eating scraps from floor mats, which is good enough for me.
I have a clock radio from 1978. It has two volumes, “Way Up” or “Silent.” The alarm is stuck between KQRS and buzzer, and after the Exxon Valdez coffee/hairspray spill of 1989, the on/off button is gunked up and doesn’t work. So I either plug it in, or I don’t. But it still does the job. It’s more like a time bomb I set for myself every night, so I can be assured of dragging my can out of bed when it’s absolutely necessary.
But this is a story about a morning when I didn’t have to get up. A day off. I got up anyway. Because I forgot to unplug my alarm. One moment, I’m dead to the world. The next, the alarm goes off. I was shocked into Bachman-Turner Overdrive. With so much adrenaline coursing through my body, I had no choice but to stay awake. Because it was my day off, I was at loose ends. I decided to call my mother, who is the only person I know personally who is up early in the morning every day for no other reason than that “it’s the best part of the day.”
My mother is old. And I’ll let you in on a little secret about old people. They don’t sleep. They put on their pajamas like you or me, but it’s all for show. If you called my mother at 2 a.m., she’d answer on the first ring and conduct a lucid discussion on the subject of the Marie Osmond doll collection versus the Precious Moments figurines. (Just an aside here: I don’t like how, at a certain age, dolls become socially acceptable collectibles again. My grandmother has an entire roomful of two-foot tall Victorian villagers. Not one of them has kung fu grip, or can wet their knickers. Inaction figures. If this weren’t bad enough, she also has a “shame baby.” This is a doll who is perpetually in a “time out” position, standing in a corner, hands shielding its eyes in eternal disgrace. I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to immortalize this particular childhood rite of passage, and then I figured out that maybe my grandmother is nostalgic for yelling at children. At any rate, the last time I was there, when Nana wasn’t looking, I carefully posed a steak knife in the dolls’ little foam hand, so it could at least look like she had done something worth being yelled at for.)
Back to the story. I looked at the clock. It was around 5 a.m. I dialed the number, and to my horror, my father answered. My father is the original strong silent type. He distrusts the telephone. When the telephone rings, it’s either trouble, or somebody who wants to talk. And either way, that’s trouble. Small talk is out of the question, because it implies a weakness of intent in life that my dad finds unsettling. Quickly, I decided to talk to him about something that I had recently purchased, because the one thing that is sure to engage Dad is the threat of expenditure.
Right down to lunchbox apples, no purchase is too mundane for my dad to wrestle over. He’s got a system, and it’s served him well. The Four W’s. If you want to buy something, ask yourself, why, why, why, and why. If you find that you can answer all four questions clearly, wait three weeks and see if you’ve forgotten what you wanted in the first place. And if you must spend, before you crack open your wallet, think “double duty.” Two years ago, my dad bought each of his kids a case of Jimmie Dean Lambrusco, an amber vintage the color of iodine, with a sausage-y afterthought. He proudly read from the back of the box: “Says right here this wine goes with beef, chicken, and fish!” My Mom interjected, “I’m pretty sure it would go with franks and beans, too, Hon.” Still high from his splurge, my father replied, “You know, it doesn’t say anything about pork, but let’s try that tonight!”
Anyway, as soon as Dad answered, I launched into a filibuster about my broken clock radio, hoping to either trick him into conversation, or trick him into handing the telephone to my mother. In record time, he handed the phone to my mother, who, hearing my voice, breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, I thought it was your grandmother.” “Why? Is there anything wrong?” “I think she’s going batty. She called us up at 3 a.m. last week because one of her dolls pulled a knife on her.”
Just like a three-year-old defiantly staring down a plate of overcooked Brussels sprouts, I told the world I was not going to write about race stuff this month. I even promised my 16-year-old son that no matter what, I was not going to be The Rake’s resident “spook by the door,” spewing endlessly about skin color. However, that was all before president Bush ordered his Justice Department minions to prepare a brief opposing the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action plan before the United States Supreme Court. (I am a graduate of that law school—go Blue!)
In 1978, a pre-med student named Allan Bakke convinced the Supreme Court that the University of California gave his spot to a “less qualified” minority student. According to the Court, affirmative action, if it meant setting aside spots for certain kinds of people, was bad. However, taking race into account was still okay. Now “W” says it’s not okay.
The Bushies don’t understand two crucial points. First, the term “affirmative action” is a misnomer that does not convey the duplicity of our legal system in perpetuating racial discrimination. Second, Bush does not seem to understand that making sure Americans of all hues get into our nation’s universities adds value because it enhances the education of all students. That’s a goal to be achieved in itself.
Lyndon Johnson was one of the first to use the word “affirmative” when, as he signed the 1965 Civil Right Act, he challenged America to actively reverse the legacy of government-sanctioned discrimination. I think LBJ would have done us all a favor if, at the time he signed the bill, he had said something like the following: “My fellow Americans. We are taking certain corrective measures because our society screwed over black people in a very big way. This ‘corrective action’ we are taking should be considered a ‘settlement in lieu of a lawsuit.’ We all know America stole hundreds of billions of dollars in free labor from our fellow African Americans. We raped their women and lynched their men. If they were to get together and sue us over slavery and its aftermath, it would beggar us.
“In fact, if there was ever a case for reparations, this brutal treatment would be exhibit A. However, there is not enough money in the world to compensate them, so we are going to make sure that our Negro citizens have places in our nation’s colleges, universities, and professional schools. We are going to do it to make up for the hell we put them through and because it enhances the education and training of all Americans to make sure that black people sit at the educational table, too. We are not giving them anything other than the opportunities that slavery and Jim Crow robbed them of. And, unlike Reconstruction—which was done half-heartedly and was undermined by unrepentant Southern whites—we as a nation are going to do this thing right. It will take some time—generations.”
Words like this from the beginning of what we now call affirmative action would have made it clear that America was finally taking responsibility for what American society had created. With the University of Michigan litigation, “W” has a golden opportunity to do the right thing by reminding Americans that we still have much to do. Bush could use the Michigan case as a teachable moment by emphasizing that higher education will best fulfill its mission by having racially diverse classrooms where students teach each other how to thrive in a multiracial society. Instead, the Bushies exploit “affirmative action” and “race-neutrality” (the current phrase of choice) to conjure up images of black people getting something they do not deserve, while at the same time eviscerating constitutional safeguards against discrimination.
Finally, as the University of Michigan fully understands, there is no better way to correct the ravages of past discrimination than to ensure that our nation’s universities contain black and brown Americans. Our presence at the country’s top schools adds value to the education of all students. As long as Michigan can demonstrate that race alone does not give one a spot in its law school and that, once there, all students must meet the same standards, then “W’s” cries of reverse discrimination are exposed as the shrill, race-baiting taunts they are.
The sign said, “All life on Earth, including human beings, was originally created scientifically in laboratories by the Elohim—an advanced people from space!”
“Tell me more!” I said to the sexy French Canadian woman boasting ample cleavage. She was running the Raelian booth at “A Gathering of Light,” a new age convention. “The only person the Elohim communicate with is Rael,” she explained, with sincere conviction and a cute French accent.
Glancing at the back of his best-selling book, Message Given By Extraterrestrials, I noted that Rael himself is an older French man with a ponytail. And he used to be a racecar driver! Now Rael is the head of the Raelian religion. According to the person I took to be one of Rael’s terrestrial girlfriends, the main mission of the Raelian religion is to build a $20 million dollar space embassy so the aliens will return. It’s not clear why a $10 million dollar space embassy wouldn’t work. There was a way to find out, though: Travel through time and space to their headquarters in Montreal. I booked a flight.
Through the Raelian website, I located their headquarters on Earth, and planned to attend one of their weekly organization meetings. I pictured myself sitting in a large room filled with dozens of new Raelian recruits. I was excited to learn more about a religion that performs the minor miracle of making Scientology look reasonable.
Once I got to Montreal, an evil acquaintance of mine planted some very bad information in my head, which would not come out: He said the Raelians hold wild sex parties filled with beautiful single women. Though I might not fully believe humans were created in a laboratory by aliens, I can always appreciate French-speaking hotties who like having unattached sex. A little paranoid, I made sure others knew where I’d be for the next hour and a half.
I went to the second floor of a warehouse off St. Laurent Street that also housed a discount futon outlet. A door with a picture of a large alien head swung invitingly open. The turnout for the informational meeting was less than I expected. Inside, two sad men on couches looked surprised at the appearance of a willing human being for the 7:30 weekly meeting. So, where were the hot French chicks?
One of them appeared to be the leader. He had a mullet a lot like Michael Bolton’s, and he was wearing a vest with no shirt (maybe the Raelian uniform?). He signaled for me to sit down. I made my way to the farthest couch. Michael Bolton signaled for me to sit snuggly next to him. I got the uneasy feeling he might try to touch me. I tightly held onto my Dr. Pepper can, in case I needed it as a makeshift weapon.
The other Raelian looked like an elf-alien hybrid. He remained silent, staring straight ahead. Then began the heavy talk, the unblinking eye contact. “Did you come all the way to Montreal to meet with the Raelians?” Michael Bolton asked. He too had a thick French accent. I mentioned that I’d seen a few UFOs, had a few encounters. “This is not a group for spotting UFOs,” Michael Bolton explained. In Montreal, he said, the organization is 5,000 strong. Both he and the elf wore a symbol around their necks that resembled a Star of David, with outer space stuff in the middle.“It’s the Symbol of Infinity,” Bolton said. It once had a swastika in the middle, but for some reason, people didn’t respond favorably to that. “In 1975, Rael was taken back to the Elohim planet,” Michael Bolton said in a way that invaded my personal space. “Wow, how long did it take to do that?” I said. “Two hours!” “That’s amazing!” I said. I decided to improvise: “When aliens took me back to their home planet, it took over three days.” Michael Bolton was unimpressed by this. The elf stared straight ahead. “In all religions, there’s one prophet who returns to earth. We believe it is Rael.” “So what you’re saying is, all the prophets of each religion have been agents of the Elohim?” “Yes!” “And the reason Rael was visited by UFOs is because he is a prophet?” “YES!”
Now, I turned the tables. “Maybe I had an encounter with a UFO because they came special to see me!” I puffed out my chest, insinuating that I, too, might be a prophet—perhaps their new Messiah. Michael Bolton looked aghast. Even the elf looked over. “NO! Rael is the only prophet on Earth. Rael is the last prophet!”
“You never know,” I said, giving my best I-might-be-your-new-Messiah smile. With distaste, Michael Bolton quickly wrapped things up. But not before inviting me, in a perfunctory way, to their weekly Raelian bowling night. “You’ll have fun,” Bolton said. “We’re a little crazy.” He made little circles with his finger at his temple. That was the understatement of the millennium.
I was excited about the prospect of bowling with Raelians. I went to a place called Jillian’s, which turned out to be the coolest bowling alley I’ve ever seen, with large music video screens at the end of each alley, and multi-colored balls under disco lights. French-speaking people can even make bowling seem chic. There were a few groups of happy bowlers. None of them wore the Symbol of Infinity. “Raelians?!” I yelled, to see if this would get anyone’s attention.
Gathering courage, I approached an attractive woman just lining up her sights for an easy spare.“Excuse me, but are you a Raelian?” She looked at me like I had poohed in my pants. I went to the payphones and dialed. “You have reached the Raelian religion. Stay on the line. Someone will answer to you.” Moments later, someone picked up. It was a French Canadian woman who couldn’t speak English very well. I told her Michael Bolton and the elf told me to be here for Raelian bowling night; I was wondering where everyone was. She said the Raelians should be there. “I don’t see the Symbol of Infinity.” She told me to call back in ten minutes. In the background, I thought I heard giggling. I called back in ten minutes. No one answered. Suddenly, I realized they must be having a wild sex orgy for the recruits who had made the cut.
There’s nothing lonelier in the world than being stood up at a bowling alley by Raelians. Couldn’t they have cloned some attractive, low-ranking members and gotten their asses down here and into bowling shoes? Would Jesus or Muhammad abandon one of their disciples, crushed, with pins still in formation and shoes unrented, on their prospective bowling nights? I looked toward the heavens, unto the next solar system, and I spit with disgust.—Harmon Leon
Harmon Leon is a comedian, actor, and writer living in San Francisco. He recently published “The Harmon Chronicles” (ECW Press).