Notes on TPfest
June 25-27, 2004 : NYC
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SATURDAY, part 2
We've got about 45 minutes of down time, and then we all meet up again to
head out to the Avenue Q lottery. Guillermo, Jog and Patrick already have
tickets, so we're all going to put our names in and see if we can get
cheap tickets for the performance in the lottery. You put in your names at
5:30, and then at 6:00 they pull six names out. Each person they pick gets
the chance to buy two tickets -- $21 each for front-row seats. We've
already decided as a group that if anybody wins the lottery, Scott and
Martha should be the ones to get the tickets. Martha was left out the last
time we went to Avenue Q in February, and Scott is a huge fan of Avenue Q
and Stephanie. We all agree that they should see the show.
We all put our names in, and then we have to wait around on the sidewalk for the names to be drawn. We amuse ourselves by doing a little Tough Pigs forum trivia contest. Sample questions: What's Shawn's girlfriend's name? Who are the top 3 posters on the all-time list, in order? What did David B see on the Tony Awards broadcast that upset him? It was an adorable little game.
Now it's 6:00, and they pick the winners. The first name they call: Jog
Jalink! We all cheer. Jog goes inside and buys the two tickets, then
presents them to Scott and Martha. The two of them are so excited, they're
both red and shaking. It is SO cute.
There's a couple hours before the show starts, so we go a few blocks down and have dinner at Chevy's, the Mexican place where we all had margaritas after the MT&R seminar last fall. Cathy, Frank, Isha and Jog -- this is where the drinking starts for the evening. More on that later. Over dinner, Patrick tells us about the O'Neill Puppetry Conference that he went to a few weeks ago, where he worked on a video for Kathy Mullen and Mike Frith's Afghanistan project. Patrick is so freakin' cool.
As it gets close to showtime, the Avenue Q ticket-holders go to the theater. Frank also leaves for parts unknown. The rest of us -- me, Cathy, Alaina, Isha and Kellie -- hang around at the restaurant and gossip for a long time. Isha and Cathy have more Coronas.
Everybody tells the story of
the first time they posted on Tough Pigs. (Except me, obviously.) Alaina,
Cathy and Kellie all admit to being a little intimidated when they first
came on the forum; they lurked a bit before they posted. Isha says that
when she first came, she decided to just go ahead and post like she'd been
there her whole life, and try to fool everyone into thinking that she'd
been around a long time. Apparently it worked, cause I can't remember when
she wasn't around.
We're close to the theater where the Lion King musical is playing, so Isha wants to go see if there's a store nearby where they'd sell Lion King merchandise. (The Disney Store used to be right next to the theater, but they closed it a while ago.) We don't see anything, so Isha asks the security guard at the theater if she can go in and buy stuff at the theater merchandise shop. The guard says that they'll have intermission in twenty minutes; if we want to wait, they'll let her in. We wait.
Isha is very excited, and more than a little tipsy. She's like five foot
nothing, and she's had maybe three Coronas. She's hopping around,
grinning, and she keeps saying that she has to pee. But instead of finding
somewhere to pee, we hang out on the sidewalk.
We've been together for about 32 hours now, and we're all so into it by this point that we actually stand around in a circle, and Cathy says, Let's go around and say what we like about each other! and the rest of us agree that that is a great way for us to spend our time. And then we all go ahead and do it.
The Lion King's intermission starts, so Isha gets escorted into the gift
shop. The guard stays with her and watches her the entire time -- I guess
so she doesn't do something even crazier than what she's already doing. It
turns out to be a big moment for Isha's weekend -- they have tons of
Broadway-specific TLK merchandise, including African-inspired plush dolls
of Simba, Nala, Zazu, Timon and Pumbaa. Isha buys the whole set, along
with the program, a magnet, maybe a couple other things. She emerges in a
few minutes with a shopping bag -- 80 dollars lighter, and grinning from
ear to ear. "I love my beautiful toys," she says. We find a
place to pee.
By this time, Avenue Q is about to let out, so we head over to the stage door and wait for everyone. We see Peter Linz and Barrett Foa walk out first. Nobody else recognizes them, but obviously we do. Cathy calls out, Hi Peter! and Peter turns around, clearly expecting to see some people that he knows. We're all standing there in a little knot, and nobody really knows what to say next. He starts to walk towards us, but then realizes he doesn't really recognize any of us, and we're all being too stupid to say that we're from Tough Pigs, or that we're friends of Kynan's, or David's, or whoever might indicate to him that we have friends in common. So he sort of awkwardly smiles and waves, and then walks away. And then we realize that that was a really stupid thing to do. Ah well.
Then our friends come out -- Jog, Guillermo and Patrick are giddy and
excited to meet the cast, Scott and Martha less so. Turns out there was an
"incident." Scott and Martha were in the front row, and Martha
sneakily took a few pictures of the set before the show started. Scott
kept his camera in his lap, and shot a few more pictures as the show was
going on. Apparently somebody could spot it, and the stage manager came
and confiscated the camera. They deleted all his pictures before returning
it. So now Scott feels stupid, and guilty, and he didn't really feel like
meeting the cast.
Other folks in the group hang out and meet John, Jen, Rick and Stephanie; they get autographs and pictures. I'm trying to comfort Scott and get him to go over and meet Stephanie, at least. Stephanie finishes with her round of autographs, and starts walking -- passing directly in front of us. I say hi, and she says, oh, there you are! I knew you were supposed to be here tonight. And I introduce Scott and Martha, and Stephanie is friendly and energetic and so cute, and now everything is okay again.
We all hang around in a big group and talk to Stephanie for a really long
time, maybe half an hour. She asks if we've all been buying lots of Muppet
stuff this weekend, and I show her the greeting cards that I have in my
bag. She doesn't really like the anime style -- it's too weird looking and
cold for her; she likes the warmer vintage style, like it used to be. I
make a joke that she shouldn't be like the kids at Muppet Central: things
change, Stephanie! To my horror, she takes this completely seriously
and gets insulted, embarking on a minutes-long defense of her position.
I'm embarrassed that I seem to have insulted her, but totally amused that
she understood "Muppet Central" as the most awful thing I could
have said to her. When she winds down, I say, y'know, I was just joking,
babe. You can like anything you want. She says, "I know, but still.
Muppet Central. Don't you Muppet Central me! I know what that
means."
Then Stephanie talks about working on Sesame Street, and being disappointed that she never got to really establish a character of her own. She was very frustrated with the way they dropped both Lulu and Elizabeth, for no real reason. She rolls her eyes about Elmo's World -- we may like watching it, but it's apparently hell to shoot. Anything that involves lots of green screen is just really hard on the performers, and not as satisfying as just doing the regular characters on a set. She also has nothing but venom for Monster Clubhouse, which she absolutely hated doing. At the time, the producers were thinking that it would be the next big thing, but the performers knew that it sucked: It was just ten minutes of constant shouting. Plus, the direction was essentially: Step forward when you have a line to say, and then step back when you're done saying it. Stephanie is very happy to be performing in Avenue Q, and to have the new opportunities that she has, but there'll always be a twinge that she never got to do what she originally got into the business for, which was to be a real part of the Muppets.
We snap some more pictures, and then we let Stephanie get home. It was
really sweet of her to hang out with us and talk for so long; we all love
Stephanie.
On the way back to the hotel, Cathy decides that what we need is more fuckin' beer. She buys six big ol' bottles, and distributes them in people's bags so we can bring them into the hotel. Bless her heart. We all head up to Cathy and Martha's room.
I go up in the elevator with Patrick, and first we stop off at his room to see if Frank has come back. Patrick opens the door of their room, and we both say hi. Frank calls: "I'm not decent!" Oh, really? I say, and I come in to look.
As I'm heading across the threshold, my cell phone rings. I answer it, thinking that it must be the other guys, telling us what room to go to. I chirp "Hi!" as I walk in, and start giggling because I now see Frank lying on the bed in his underwear. It's nice, too; the guy takes care of himself. But it turns out that the person I'm talking to is Michal, who's called from camp to talk to everybody, and this totally takes me by surprise. For a second, I'm like, wait, is Michal here? And I have to run through who's here in my head before responding. And Michal is saying, Hello? Danny? And Frank is sitting up and generally trying to cover himself, and Patrick is laughing, and I'm saying, "What? Michal? Hi, um... Can I call you back? I just walked in on Patrick's boyfriend."
Michal is totally confused, and she says, "I thought
you guys would all be together." "Yeah, we are," I say,
"but it's... I'm sorry, this is a really complicated moment. Can I
call you back?" Frank is struggling into his jeans. Michal sounds
hurt because of the weird brushoff she's getting, but I can't help it,
this is too weird. I hang up on her.
When we get to Cathy and Martha's room, I tell them what happened, and somebody calls Michal. I apologize to her, although I still have a hard time explaining what happened.
So we're all together at this point, it's Saturday night, and the party pretty much consists of art supplies and beer. To our great credit, we manage to have a good time with that.
The first thing that Kellie and I do is hunker down with our little
Moomintroll toys. There's five different sets, and we coo over every
single little piece. Each set is a little tiny scene -- the first one is
inside Moomintroll's house, and Moominmamma is serving dinner to
Moominpappa, who's sitting on a chair and eating soup. And he has a little
spoon, and there's a little soup bowl, and then there's a little bowl of
bread, and a little stove... We're very happy in our tiny world. We must
have been cute as shit playing with these, because people snapped about
four hundred pictures of us.
Cathy, Frank, Alaina, Jog and Isha get started on the beers. They drink the beer that Cathy bought, and I think at some point they went out and got more. The rest of us make do with Rice Krispies Treats or whatever we had there.
We haven't been able to watch any of the many videos that we brought, because we don't have a VCR. Alaina and Isha actually brought a TV/VCR with them, but they left it in their car, which was valet-parked at a garage at least six blocks away. I've been trying to talk them into going and getting it for two nights, but they refuse to go wandering the streets late at night, looking through strange parking garages and then carrying video equipment back to the hotel. They are completely unreasonable about it.
We all draw pictures for the forum, to show everybody that we were
thinking of them on our trip. The pictures are heartfelt, even for those
of us who aren't very accomplished artists. Jog does a very nice Pepe and
Gonzo, Patrick does a great Grover. The rest of us stumble through.
Isha draws her own picture of Pepe, with the words "I am loving this, okay?" It's not a great likeness. Jog laughs and says, "It's Donald Duck as a bug!"
And this somehow sets Patrick off on a HUGE laughing jag, which is so infectious that it gets the rest of us going too. The boy just breaks. It's one of those times when you can't stop laughing -- even when you're getting red in the face, which he is, and that is so damn cute. The rest of us are cracking up, just watching him. At a certain point, he calms down, shakes his head and says, "Donald Duck as a bug!" And then that sets him off again.
It's such a perfect moment that "Donald Duck as a bug!" becomes a favorite catchphrase for the weekend, and it's immortalized on Sunday with its own group-scat song (although retitled "Donald Duck Is A Bug"). Well, he is.
By the way, Alaina is one of the people drinking tonight; she happens to be sitting on the floor next to the empty bottles, which just helps to highlight the fact that we're contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I point that out to her. She shrugs. I forgot that Alaina is actually older than the rest of us; what was I thinking.
So we're all having fun, laughing and drawing pictures and having a little
light flirting, and then at a certain point Isha sits down on the floor
and is absolutely drunk off her ass. We should have seen this coming;
she's a tiny slip of a thing, and she's been drinking like a fish all
night. But it just gets to her, and before you know it, she's in the
bathroom and she's starting to cry. Or maybe she was in the closet first
and moved to the bathroom, it's hard to remember. But there was bathroom,
there was closet, there was crying and some hysteria-tinged
sobbing-laughter. Cathy was comforting her through most of this. The rest
of us just sort of sat on the bed and shrugged and felt a little weird
about the whole thing. We tried to draw pictures and talk about other
things until Isha got through whatever she was going through. Turns out
Scott has really small feet.
That takes us to the end of my notes on Saturday night, except for a page that says "WHAT A FUCKIN' MESS." But it wasn't really a mess, it was just wacky teenage fun, like I used to have in high school. I for one haven't had a good night of wacky teenage fun in years. It felt good.
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