Notes on TPfest
June 25-27, 2004 : NYC
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FRIDAY, part 2
Scott and I are woken up by Cathy, Isha and Alaina pounding on our door.
The rest of the people are arriving. Everybody piles on into our room, and
Patrick and Frank show up just a little bit later.
More character sketches:
Cathy and I have a major quality in common, which is that we're both hugely starved for attention. We both want everybody to be paying to us the whole entire time -- and not just everybody in our group, but everybody in New York City. We talk constantly, both in tandem and separately. We sing annoying songs. We do pseudo-sexy dances. If necessary, we start talking about how much we love someone -- where the important thing in the conversation, clearly, is not the person that we love, but how much WE love them. It's helpful that we're both there. Having one of us in the group would be unbearable after a while. Having two of us seems to kind of balance us out somehow.
Isha is a tiny slip of a thing, with
huge hair and huge dark eyes. In my memory, about 60% of Isha's body mass
is her head -- not because it's big, but because it's hard to look away
from her smile and her eyes. She tends to be on the quiet side when it's
the whole group together -- as if she could get a word in edgewise when
the Loudmouth Twins are around -- and then she's really funny and gabby
when it's one on one, or a smaller group.
The most important thing to know about Isha is that Isha can not hold her liquor. Do not give her beer and do not feed her after midnight.
Alaina, as Cathy later points out, is an old soul. She's 19 -- the
youngest person there for the weekend -- but she doesn't act 19 at all.
She continually busts out with cool talents. She can speak American Sign
Language. She can play the guitar (not that she brought one). She also
giggles like a mad thing every single time I speak in the Danny Monster
voice. I figure this out around mid-Saturday and use it against her. Her
running gag is that people hate her, which is funny because everybody
obviously adores her.
Patrick is quite possibly the most adorable person in the world. Everything he does is SO cute, even when he's trying not to be. He uses funny voices. Even his regular voice is kind of funny, low and gentle. He does a really cute little dance, swinging his hands around. There's one point on Saturday night when he just broke completely, laughing so hard and so long that he got all red and started shaking, and everybody else laughed just watching him. He's also a really talented puppeteer, and he's brought two amazing home-built puppets. It is agreed that Patrick is the cutest thing in sight. He is the teddy bear and we all want to hug him.
Frank is Patrick's boyfriend, who's been mentioned before, but none of us
had ever seen him. Frank is the one significant other who actually showed
up and hung out with us for most of the weekend. (Although he did take
some much-needed time out with friends.) Frank is a big ol' cutie.
Everybody took to him right away. He's obviously crazy about Patrick --
applauding and laughing when Patrick performed the puppets, even though he
sees it all the time at home. He was really one of the group, and everyone
was happy to hang with him. I also walked in on him when he was in his
underwear, and rrrowwwrrrrrr.
And now for the Stupidfriends' finest hour.
It's about 5:30. We're supposed to meet Craig at California Pizza Kitchen at 6:00. It's on 60th Street and the hotel's on 34th. Craig told me on the phone which subway to take to get us right to the restaurant.
Nah, Cathy says, we can walk there by 6:00. No problem! Let's go.
And that wasn't the stupid thing. The stupid thing was that we all agreed.
So we walk, and walk, and walk. Turns out it's not just 26 streets to get
there but also six long avenues. There's no way we'll be there in half an
hour.
At 5:45 it starts to rain.
And not just rain, but like a torrential downpour of big fuckin' RAIN. Biblical type rain. And we're still walking up avenues. And you know what else is really stupid about us? Not a single one of us brought an umbrella tonight. We all brought umbrellas on the trip -- everybody says, damn, it's in my hotel room -- but nobody thought to bring it along.
Another stupid event: Right as the rain is just starting, Cathy and I walk past a news-stand that's selling umbrellas. And we blow past it, saying, it's not gonna rain that hard. Let's just keep going.
Stu-pidfriends! We are the Stupidfriends!
Within a few blocks we are SOAKED. By the time we get to the restaurant, we are a sad looking sight -- eleven grown-up adults who don't know enough to come in out of the rain. We get mostly cleaned up, but everybody has wet clothes all through dinner. Craig laughs at us.
Our toast: "To moist friends!"
Anyway, we had a super time. Craig is such a funny guy, and he loves
telling stories. He's obviously used up all his stories on his friends, so
having a new eager audience makes him very happy. He tells us all kinds of
neat things over dinner.
For example: They're working on the Wizard of Oz movie, and it'll probably be the next thing that gets made. They'll be building the puppets in New York, cause that's the only place where there's still puppet builders. The workshop was shut down, so they'll probably use all of the Henson townhouse (which they haven't sold yet), setting up workshop space in all the old offices and rooms.
Also: The Jim Henson Legacy is working on another Muppet rarities night at the Museum of TV & Radio, maybe for the fall. One new piece that they've found is an Ed Sullivan appearance that they didn't know about, featuring Jimmy Dean and Rowlf. (They hadn't realized it existed when they catalogued the Sullivan spots, because it was listed as "Jimmy Dean and Rowlf" instead of "Henson's Muppets".)
Also: Craig has a neat idea for a Muppet movie that he's in the process of
pitching to Disney.
So, cool stuff. There was also some kind of naughty conversation with Cathy involving having sex with stale crullers that I didn't hear myself and couldn't quite get a handle on.
At one point, Jog pulled out his three puppets. Jog put on Nergil, I had the giraffe and Scott had Wicked Pissah. WP, as always, was loud and foul-mouthed -- until Scott realized that there were kids at the very next table, turning to watch him. Wicked Pissah suddenly changed into a sweet-voiced girl named Fran.
Craig, naturally, was completely humiliated at being at a table with grown people playing with puppets. He hid his face. I couldn't really blame him. I asked him not to tell his cool friends about that. His response: "You are my cool friends."
Awwww. Isn't that sweet? Craig is the best.
When we left the restaurant, Craig took off, but we planned to meet up with him again tomorrow at Toy Tokyo. He walked us to the subway, and we made it back to the hotel without serious incident.
Back to the hotel, where we get out of our wet clothes and into a dry martini.
We gather at Cathy and Martha's room -- people, puppets and Playstations. We're mostly sitting on the bed, as comfortably as eleven people can sit on one king-size bed. Martha baked cookies, and Cathy baked Rice Krispies treats, so we're munchin' on them. We have all the stuff that Ryan left, which is still to be distributed. I pick up one of the Muppet Babies activity books, which I figure will be full of activities for us to enjoy. Sample activity: "How many words can you make from Very Best Friends?" Our answer: "Very... Friends... Friend... Best. The answer is four."
We flip through the yearbooks that Martha made, looking at everybody's pictures and paying tribute to all our friends who couldn't be with us. Yes, we talked about all of you. We said you were keen and that we liked you.
Patrick brings out his puppet, Toho, a completely fabulous looking puppet with working hands. (Frank performs the right hand for a little while.) Toho interviews us, for some reason, asking what we're all doing here, and then we interview him for a while. He reveals that he's always wanted to work with the Muppets, but they never wanted him to join them. I pick up one of Ryan's leftovers, a Canadian McD's hockey Animal doll. Hockey Animal suggests that we help Toho with some creative visualizations, we can all be Muppets and help him experience what it would be like to work with the Muppets.
This turns into a movie called "Toho in New York," filmed by
Guillermo on his video camera. I'm hoping that very soon we'll be able to
get this video online, cause I for one want to see it again. I won't spoil
the plot, such as it is, but here's the main cast as I remember it. Toho
was the star; he played a detective. Hockey Animal was the director and
also Toho's police chief. The Baby Kermit with a rattle in its head was
the murder victim. Scott performed a beanie Oscar, who played a senior
citizen go-go dancer for some reason. Jog performed another detective, but
I can't remember what the toy was that he had. Isha was the stunt double
for the kickboxing scene. You'll like it, just wait till you see it.
Scott and I want to play Playstation games -- that was the whole impetus for us suggesting TPfest in the first place, was that we wanted to play Muppet Party Cruise with people. We set up the Playstation on the TV. Nobody else is the slightest bit interested. We cajole Guillermo and Isha into playing with us. They don't enjoy themselves that much. After a while, it turns into the obvious grudge match between me and Scott, which everyone else is forced to sit around and watch. After a while we just turn it off. Scott and I have promised each other that at some point we're going to just get together on our own and go head to head on Party Cruise. I will kick his ever-lovin' ass.
Patrick has another puppet, Marvin, who's a cute young nerdy guy. Marvin has a huge crush on Martha Plympton, which is funny for some reason that I can't at all explain. At one point, we end up having a press conference with Wicked Pissah -- I don't remember how that happened, but it's that kind of night. I'm doing the Little Baby Giraffe, Patrick's doing Marvin. We're asking Wicked Pissah questions, but we have to start every question by saying, "Mr Wicked Pissah, Mr Wicked Pissah! Marvin, NEPA Daily News." Something about the way Patrick says that just cracks me up.
We ended up on the phone with David B somehow; I forget if he called us or if somebody called him. I think we were still playing Party Cruise at that point, and I was hitting Scott with a fish.
We also decided, somewhere around 12:30am, that we would call John on his cell phone. We thought it would be funny if we prank called him and told him that he had to come to New York because one of us had died, and we needed him to help us hide the body. Then we changed our minds and decided maybe that wouldn't be funny at all, so instead I just left a message on his answering machine telling him that we were thinking about prank calling him but had decided against it. Again: That kind of night.
If you're reading this and feeling left out because we didn't call you,
just remember this: It would have been after 12:30am, and it would have
been a really stupid and possibly frightening prank call. Count your
blessings.
At some point after 1am, we just completely poop out. It's been a long day, and Scott for one has only had two and a half hours of sleep in 48 hours. We go back to our rooms.
Back in our room, Scott lies down on his back -- with his feet hanging off the end of the bed -- and groggily murmurs about how much he likes everyone. "Martha's the sweetest person ever... Patrick makes good puppets... Joggy's, like, this funny type of funny, funny man..."
Yeah, it's time for bed all right.
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