'WYGstock

Photo by Dan Rhatigan.

Oh, what a night! Last night's WYSIWYG Talent Show was totally fantasmagorical. (That's right Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - eat it!) Everyone was hilarious - the audience was awesome - and who doesn't want to perform on a chartreuse green snack shack in front of stadium seating? PS 122 is the best. (p.s. - no pun intended... who knew Claire Danes could dance? That dude who won the membership to PS 122 is a lucky bastard! You got tickets to Claire Danes' after party and all this pregnant glory? Now that's $7 well spent, mi amigo!)

I shall, in all fairness and tradition, now give a shout-out to all my fellow performers:

Chris - Way to start us off, chica! And not only that but keep your fierce persona throughout the show wrangling that Wild Turkey. Nobody f*cks with a dyke's pussy! Mrow!

Frank - As you know, you made history last night with the mess heard round the world. I'll never look at my KY the same way. What a talent you are!

Jon - I'm so glad we're on the same cycle! I almost died when you talked about gay guys and straight girls being bad roommates. Both my roommates junior year of college were gay and one kept trying to rub my titties while the other kept stealing my tampons. Gay as the day is long, though! You tell me...

To all the gays I've lived with before
Who traveled in and out my door
I'm glad you came - along
Singing Madonna and Cher songs
To all the gays I've lived with before!

Dashiell - Em-PHA-sis on the second Syl-LA-ble cuz you know you got soul! You are Balki Bartokomous without the accent, and I mean that in the "it's 1989 and Perfect Strangers is so hot it caused a spinoff" kind of way. Funny and adorable!

David - 9x6 and filled with farts. I think that's how my kid must feel about her illustrious surroundings... "Everyone knows all bi-sexuals are liars" was priceless - and provocative! I'm surprised you didn't have to blog yourself this morning!

Rachel - Former lawyer, excellent writer, professional blogger, actress, hottie - and a nice roommate to boot? Who needs a shout from a cranky comic when you've got a resume like that?! ;) Your piece was a great way to end the show. "Bye, Jew!" goes down in infamy!

And lastly - here's my piece from last night. Read it and weep, kids.
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WYSIWYG Talent Show: World’s Worst Roommates
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 – PS 122

Preface: My piece is not just about having a horrible roommate – it’s also about having a horrible landlord who was just as bad if not worse than my roommate because she lived in the building and was so constantly up in our shit it was like she was our roommate. So, here goes:

Picture it. New York City. October 2000. There I am in my U-Haul truck, crossing the Verrazzano Bridge en route to Astoria. I’m 23 years old, my whole life ahead of me, my entire collection of salami behind me, packed neatly in boxes next to the giant wheels of cheese. I can’t wait to move into my first New York apartment! I call the landlords, Maria and Louis S. (25-XX Crescent Street, 718-721-XXXX – when you call tell them I said HEY!)* Their daughter, Tina, answers. I ask her where I should park the truck. Without even a flinch, she says, “HANG ON.” All I can hear are the emotional strains of a foreign language in the background – it sounded like Greek to me. It was. I waited the way you wait for a job interview or a particularly difficult poo – nervous, sweaty, tense. When Tina came back on the line she said, “My parents said you can’t have the apartment.” Silence. I said, “WHAT? I’m on the bridge! I’ve been driving for days! I had to go through New Jersey to get here!” She said it was because my roommate and I never put down a security deposit. I said that was because she and her mother both assured me that one was not necessary over what seemed like some very official baklava. I’m Italian – you’re Greek – we ate food together – in Greco-Roman tradition, we’re practically family! Frustrated, I said, “I’ll be there in ten minutes so we can talk about this in the front yard.”

I called my roommate Angie who was also on her way, and after we both arrived at the place we started pleading our case. Well, Angie started pleading our case. I just kept running around going, “I’ll sue! I’ll sue their fucking asses off!” Angie was raised super-Catholic, so after enough prayers and tears for Maria’s liking, the Greek gods smiled on us and we moved in. But not before handing over 1700 unplanned dollars in security deposit, of course.

It was dark by the time we even started unpacking the truck, and Tina led us up the stairs in one of her nighties that came with matching plastic and maribu slippers – but without any underwear. She didn’t need to turn on the hall light to see, she just slid the key in the door by the light of the moon. My husband, Mark, who was my boyfriend at the time, said, “Did you? Did she?” I nodded silently, and that was that. It’s worth noting now since it’s referenced later that my husband is slightly older than me and had been my college professor. That’s a whole 'nuther story that you might be able to hear at the April WYSIWYG, “Scandalous! True!! Confessions!!!” Unless March’s show can be renamed from “Starfuckers: Close Encounters of the Famous Kind” to “I fucked my teacher and all I got was this lousy baby.” I’ll leave that up to Chris.

Now, as I mentioned, this was a three-bedroom, and as you’ve probably noted, my roommate Angie and I were the only people moving in that first day. We figured we’d have no problem finding another nice girl to move in with us – even if this was New York City and she was bound to be a stranger. Single White Female was just a movie, right?

Angie found our first roommate, Chris, who shall remain last nameless – not because I give a shit about protecting her identity, but because in order to preserve my sanity, my brain wiped it away like Kirstie Allie wiping gravy off her three chins. They met on the subway platform, which is probably not the best place to meet a roommate. Angie’s not exactly what you’d call a discerning judge of character, since she also met her Overeaters Anonymous sponsor on the subway, who later convinced her eating a piece of cheese every three hours according to a stopwatch and moving to CT to make T-shirts in the group’s “facility” while helping her raise a Chinese baby sounded like a good idea. Shortly after Chris moved in, Angie left to go on tour with a French-speaking Moliere troupe, and I was left with Chris. C’est la vie!

Chris was not a very smart girl. She was a very blond girl, and a very buxom girl, but not very bright. Which was okay – since she was a flight attendant and gone most of the time, anyway. That is, until she met James, her Barbadian-British gold and diamond encrusted toof’d thug of a boyfriend who was pretty funny at first – for a drug dealer. I remember the first time I found little plastic baggies all over the house I thought to myself, “Hmm, he must be very organized.”

Since flight attendants are only allowed to fly 11 days out of the month and drug dealers work “on call,” they had no real schedule – no responsibilities and no respect for anyone. Every night, Chris and James would make out on my couch, watching my TV and screaming with laughter – or orgasm, I’m not quite sure. I’d come out of my room and politely ask them to quiet down, and they would, for about 2 minutes – then I’d come out again and they’d do it again until they finally moved into her bedroom for the night.

Apparently when you have as much sex as Chris and James did, you need to take a lot of showers. Or at least that’s what Maria told me. Maria was anal retentive. She’d bring us fresh bread, stuffed peppers and huge chunks of feta cheese just to be able to peak inside the apartment. “Here you go, girls – I brought you this – let me just put it in the kitch – uh! You take the aluminum foil off the stove? I put foil around every burner to keep-a the stove clean and you take it off?! You going to kill me, you know this? Malaka!” Needless to say, if this is how she reacted to minutiae, you can imagine how she reacted to having a cockney hooligan in her house everyday.

“The boyfriend – I no like-a dis boyfriend. He take-a the shower all day long! I got wada coming into my kitchen – I tell my daughta – she tells him – he no listen. You need to tell them, Caroline. What happened to the Angie, huh? She was the one I liked. She was the one who prayed, not you. Malaka!” So, to avoid getting kicked out, I confronted James and Chris about their behavior. James looked me dead in the face with his gold capped tooth and said, “You know what? I fink dat you’re just upset because you have to go to work everyday while Chrissy and I lay here on the couch.” Wow! Good job, Scooby – you solved the case! Now take your Doobie and Do get out.

After a few more months of things escalating, Chris couldn’t take it anymore, and she moved out one day in a huff. When I got home that night there were notes everywhere – taped to the walls, inside cupboards, closets, drawers, and they all said things like “I hope you die” and “God hates you.” I never knew girls who fucked drug-dealers were so tight with the Lord, but hey! Who am I to judge? There was one particularly long note left in the hallway closet that said “Anyone who would fuck their teacher is sick. You must be pretty desperate if that old man is the only one you can find to have sex with you.” Because a faux-gangsta with b.o. and a gold capped tooth is so much higher up on the food chain. If that was the case, Angelina Jolie wouldn’t be fucking Brad Pitt, she’d be dating Flavor Flav.

I was scared at first that Chris would send James and his gang over to do something terrible, but that fear subsided after a while, and when Angie came back and we found someone normal to take the third room - a nice Mormon girl with a big smile and bright eyes who worked for Cynthia Rowley. We still keep in touch. Jeanie lived with us for a few months until we all decided to move out after 9-11, which, by the way, according to Maria, the Greeks had known about for months. Thanks for the phone call, Athens. Nice work.

Mark and I moved into a one-bedroom in January that Angie picked out for us while I was on tour October-December. It was on the corner of Steinway and Astoria Blvd. above the Grand Central Parkway. I knew we were not living in the lap of luxury when I heard myself give directions to friends as they were getting off the train. “Okay, are you on the 24 hour Burger King/scary Russian Dance School/Liquor Store side, or are you on the stinky fish market side? Stinky fish it is – okay. No – it’s just water, don’t worry. Well, if there’s fish guts in it just walk in the trail of broken glass from the abandoned cars instead – that’s what I do. No, no – that truck has been there, it’s okay. It’s Greek Easter. Well, I’ve never seen a skinned lamb with a face before either but that’s how they do it. I know, it looks like Joan Rivers. I know. Okay – can you see the club on the corner? Look for the 16 year old Greek kids beating each other over the head with broken beer bottles. Right underneath the railroad bridge. Yeah – across the street from the gas station. You see it? That’s right next door to my house! The last pump that’s next to that window – that’s my living room! I’ll come out and get you because if you ring the wrong doorbell and my Afghani neighbor who lives in the basement comes out the FBI’ll be here again. No, he’s not a terrorist. He just plays drums all night with strangers. It’s fine. I’ve seen his place – he’s only got like 6 cots down there. Yeah, the ConEd guys turned him in just because he has a picture of Bin Laden. Whatever! Racists.”

But, despite the poor conditions, the love inside the house was rich. After living there for six months, Mark and I got married and a year later moved to East Harlem. Life in the ghetto couldn’t be betta. Now we just have to wait for our new roommate to arrive. Three people in one bedroom is bound to be cosy, but hopefully she’ll be nice and do the dishes. As long as she doesn’t bring home a drug dealing boyfriend, I think we’ll be fine.

*It's one thing to say their names and info out loud, but I just couldn't post it on the blog. It's not fair. Plus, I'm afraid of the Greek mafia. I've heard they throw fish.