Now is the time for writing non-goddamn-stop. My days have become amorphous sessions of linguistic bloodletting. It is kind of tiring, and will be for a while, so these light and airy, happytime Glendale entries will be fewer and farther between. Sorry. Might I suggest going to one of the other Rudius sites for entertainment in the meantime? We have some pretty kickass writers.
Apology made. Now I can get to the point of this entry, to tell you yet another hilarious Ted Plank story.
Sunday night was Julien's 41st birthday. The plan was this: The Producer and anybody else she could round up (me, my friend Mike and The Producer's roommate who I will call "PropMaster" because he is a prop master on a show, obviously) were to take Julien to dinner for his birthday at this place in Korea town where they kill the shrimp right in front of you and de-tail them on a bed of ice, so while you're eating that shrimp sushi, the shrimp is watching you, twitching its legs and eyes all pissed off like, "Fuck you for eating my tail." They take the plate away and deep fry the bodies in Tempura. Then they bring them back out and set them among the other dishes you've ordered, which on this Sunday evening happened to be spicy blue crab soup, stir fried octopus, bowl of fish and sea urchin eggs (surprisingly yummy), and sashimi salad. This is pretty tame for a Julien/Producer dinner. Normally its beef lung, tripe, fish intestine and chicken fingers (the actual fingers and toes of a chicken). They're planning a trip to a restaurant that serves ant eggs and fried cricket bodies. I won't be going.
At the end of the dinner, one of Julien's castmates from the Beastly Bombing was to come "kidnap" him at the restaurant, dressed as Death. He did this buy bursting in and announcing that someone had died on the mushu pork, which did not please the waitstaff or chefs who clinched their knives a little harder, but he was dressed as Death, with the mask and the scythe, so clearly it was another silly gaijin joke. Crazy white people.
Julien was then taken to the theater, where a party was going on. No, sorry, a funeral. Death and Ted Plank put Julien in a coffin on the stage of the theater, and one by one, each of his friends stood at the podium and eulogized him. It was plenty fun and funny and we all had a good time. Ted Plank hurled obscenities at the various eulogizers, and when the funeral was through, we sat in the theater egging Ted on, trying to pull more stories like "The time I was obliviously wandering around shirtless in leather pants on Gay Pride Day."
He told a couple stories, which were funny, and then said "Oh! I saw a plane crash."
"Wha? Huh? How can that not be the first story you tell at all times?"
"Okay, so I was in New Hampshire, it was like 1985 or something...84 or 85? No, 85, and I was hitch hiking...somewhere. I can't remember where. I was trying to get back to New York, yeah. So I'm walking down this highway with my thumb up, and I turn to look at the traffic, and then WOOSH! This fucking plane goes over my head, no more than ten feet above it, and then I hear CRACK! and it wasn't a big noise, but the whole thing hit the freeway and cracked into a million pieces. So me and this other guy ran up to it and everybody in it was dead, but there was this one girl who was just smashed to shit, and her body parts were just everywhere. The guy went and got a blanket from his car and I covered her intestines and stuff up, because it seemed like the polite thing to do."
"Jesus Christ, Ted."
"I know. So fucked up."
"Did you go straight to therapy?"
"Nah, it never bothered me much. I think I went straight to a Cocteau Twins concert. Now THAT was fucked up, they SUCKED."
Posted by The Bunny at 2:50 PM