ER Chiefs, Drinks, Drag = BFF

I'm sure you recognize Miss Gay Arizona in the center. The other two characters are Amy and Allie who did a marvelous job of enjoying themselves last night. Can't speak for Allie, but Amy is not having the best Sunday as a result.

But I know what you're really wondering: How well does Miss Gay Arizona dance to Kelly Clarkson songs? Pretty well my friend. Pretty well. I'm not really an expert in all things dance, but I feel like it's got to be hard to do any sort of leaping splits when you're landing in high heels. I know that Amy and Allie had trouble just walking in their shoes and they've been girls much longer than Miss Gay Arizona. But hey, obviously they don't just hand that crown out to anyone.

Which begs the obvious question: Miss Gay Arizona vs. Kent Nightwalker, who's it gonna be? Wow. Tough call. They're both leapers, I'll tell you that. I'm going to ring my agents up in the morning, see if we can't figure out some way to turn that epic dance battle into some sort of reality blockbuster. I don't want to jinx anything, but I think it's pretty clear that my ship is about to come in.

The End of Objects

I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m willing to bet that it’s somehow against the rules to love inanimate objects. I loved a toaster oven once. It was handy. Made toast. Pizzas. Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sandwiches. Then one day I pushed the button and it didn’t come on. I shook it, unplugged it, tried a different outlet. Nothing. So I put it in the garbage (I had a friend who’d just started volunteering at Goodwill and assured me that despite rumors to the contrary, they really didn’t want my junk). I’m not going to try to describe for you the hollow sound of that toaster oven hitting the bottom of my garbage can, but I will refer you to Prince’s song “When Doves Cry” if you want the flavor.

About a month later I tried the blender in the same spot (looking to fill the hole left by the toaster oven). It didn’t work. Nor did it work in the other outlets I’d tried the toaster oven in. Suspicious, I tried it in another room. You guessed it. We’d flipped a breaker on one wall in our kitchen. The blender, and by extension, the toaster oven, was fine. At that moment, and in many since, I got flash of Mr. Toaster Oven in a landfill somewhere, surrounded by garbage as a giant bulldozer bore down on him, screaming ‘Wait! I’m not dead’.

Today the tow truck hauled away another beloved object, my 1991 Toyota Celica. It was not running. It had very little paint left on it. And I’m sure it would have cost more to change those circumstances than I’ll get as a tax write off. Still. It was a tough call. It’s so much easier to get rid of things if they attack you first, like the dog that keeps biting you and crapping on your rug. Celica was nothing if not loyal, making countless trips across the country and back, often on too little oil and just enough gas. It was the first car I bought myself and even fifteen years later I’d have a hard time buying one that got better mileage (33-37mpg thank you very much).

When I graduated high school each of my best friends got an identical keychain. I stopped talking to most of those people years ago and they probably ditched their keychains shortly thereafter. Mine finally broke last week. It was not repairable. It was simply worn out. Dead. What struck me about it is how long it actually lasted. Much longer than the relationships it was intended to represent. Stuff does that. It lasts. So please join me in a few moments reverence for things. Cars, toaster ovens, keychains, they’re just along for the ride. And when you see them hauled off it’s hard not to dwell on the fact that some part of that ride is over. For both of us.

And… cue ‘When Doves Cry’.

Return Of Chloroform Incident

For those of you interested in the photos of canyonlands and our other destinations that don’t have our heads in them I’ll be trying to put them up at a rate of one per day over at my long neglected photoblog. Feel free to stop by marvel at how easy it is to take a good picture in southern Utah.

Call Me Lois

I often find myself wondering what it must feel like to be Lois Lane. Finally, after years of cross dressing and countless dollars wasted on wigs and makeup, I think I’m closing in on the answer.

Driving home this evening Amy and I passed a group of people in front of a stopped car. When we could see what they were staring at it looked like a guy was crumpled up on his bike in the middle of the road. I see fender benders all the time and rarely feel any need to stop, but this looked nasty. Again, on a normal night I’d just say, wtf am I going to do, I’m sure someone has already called 911. But tonight I realized I was sitting next to actual help. I had supergirl in my car. At last, my Lois moment.

Sadly there were no laser beams from the eyes, not even a car lifted over her head, but it was very impressive nonetheless. There’s something about seeing someone you know very well when they’re suddenly in their element that’s mildly reminiscent of watching them step into a phone booth and come out a new individual. It’s hard enough to picture most of the people I know well actually sitting at work doing their jobs. But it’s always been very hard to picture sweet, smiling Amy diving into blood and mayhem. But that’s apparently what she does, and quite well from what I’ve seen. The truth is, there’s little a doctor can do in the middle of a road if someone is breathing and has a pulse, but discovering that Mr. Bike Guy was breathing and did have a pulse was a big step over what anyone else on the scene had accomplished. As she did so you could hear the people around the scene, most of them in some stage of reporting the accident to 911, all saying, I don’t know, some lady is touching him, should she be touching him, do you want me to tell her to stop touching him? I mentioned that she was a physician and just like that they all said the same thing, “It’s okay, there’s a doctor here.”

My job was mostly to ask stupid questions. Is that a lot of blood? That looks like a lot of blood. Will he live? Do you think he’ll be pissed when they cut his clothes off? Do they impoud bikes? What’s it cost to get a bike out of impound? Seriously, does he have enough blood to just keep leaking it like that?

And that’s really the value of someone who has a clue in these kinds of situations. Even when there’s a minimal amount that they can do, they offer the rest of us reassurance that we’re free to stand around asking idiotic questions.

I constantly joke that despite the years of training Amy has very little to say when I report some sort of ailment to her. She counters that this is because most of my problems are imaginary. This debate is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. But what I do know is that if I’m ever wasted and riding my bike in the dark with no helmet and part of the sidewalk decides I should try riding the road on my head, I’ll be very lucky to hear sweet, smiling Amy calmly asking if I can open my eyes.

You know your friends. You know your family. You know what they do. But I don’t think you can really appreciate it until you suddenly see them doing it well. Whether it involves blood or protractors isn’t really the point. It’s seeing that person in their phone booth moment that stays with you. May you all catch someone revealing their inner S sometime soon.

Steamboat Finale

It’s over. We’ve traded the snow and trees for the dirt and sharp things. I could spend a great deal of time recounting how much fun it all was, but you’re probably at a desk somewhere and that would just be mean.

I will say that, yes, that is a beer in my hand in the picture on the right. We stopped off at the slopeside bar for some pitchers after one of our days on the mountain. Up to that point in the day I’d taken in exactly one powerbar and three sips of diet coke, so it didn’t really take long for the beer to cause issues. This photo was taken just before the nudity and snowballs. No. That’s not true. The truth is I went to bed at 5:30 in the afternoon. See why I don’t drink?

Regardless, it was an awesome trip and our deepest thanks to those who shared their time, space, and pitchers with us along the way. Until next time, and may it be soon, good night.

Nightwalker: Lord of The Dance

To say that we lucked into an incredible situation here in Steamboat would be a gross understatement. We lucked into a disgustingly fantastic situation, the kind that makes other people dislike you because it’s so unfair. In the interest of stoking your hatred, let me detail it for you.

Amy’s old Yellowstone roomate, Dawn, is not only incredibly perky and selfless, she’s in possession of a three bedroom house for the week just blocks off the main drag and minutes from the slopes. She’s been our personal guide on the mountain and off. If you want to dislike her for being too perfect, that’s completely okay.

More importantly, Dawn is a bellydancing teacher and on Saturday she invited us to the town’s annual dance show, which is apparently a pretty big deal. It was incredibly cool to get to visit a place like this and get in on something that made you feel like a local rather than a tourist.

Here’s what I learned: if you find yourself choreographing a routine for a small town dance show, it seems best to avoid trying to have a large number of your dancers perform complicated moves in sync. Better to just let them sort of freestyle as in many cases this is how it appeared. Not that I don’t respect the effort all the way around, I’m just telling you what to do if you find yourself in this situation.

Nightwalker: Middle back. Upside down guy: Wishes he was Nightwalker.

Also, you should get Kent Nightwalker to be in your show. I’m pretty sure he was the only male in the piece that he choreographed, and I have to say that I think he went a little overboard with the lipstick, but those weren’t the reasons you couldn’t take your eyes off him. Nightwalker simply owns the stage. He’s a leaper. A spinner. And does he have jazz hands? Hell yes he does. Seriously folks, if he comes to a town near you, it’s worth whatever it costs. Whatever else happens on this trip, I’ll always remember it as the time we saw Kent Nightwalker steal, then hold for ransom, then politely give back with an over-lipsticked smile, the show.

Rocks, Snow, Lasers

So far: We’ve hit the canyons and mountains. Canyonlands was incredible and almost completely empty. It’s so much more than a point and shoot can swallow, but I’ll post some of our efforts to nab it on my photoblog when I get back.

 

 

 

Then we headed over to Breckenridge for a little showsoeing. We treked back to this nifty little hut and signed the register. Amy left the comment up to me and then said she’d do a drawing to accompany it.

 

 

 

 

I kind of boxed her in by promising a picture of a deer with lasers on it’s antlers. I was thinking more of lasers that could be used to defend against hunters and such, but as you can see from the photo, Amy was thinking more like the Pink Floyd show as her lasers kind of go all over the place.

We spent a night with Monica and her husband and their very protective dogs. We learned that she likes gardens, he likes motorcycles and neither of them are wild about drywall. Invite us to your house as we can probe similar depths of your inner makeup.

We’ve made it to Steamboat where we hope to stay a few days and get in some good skiing/snowboarding. More to come.