Chapter Thirty-Six. The End.

     “The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending--the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending.” ― Orson Scott Card

     I hope I'm leaving it the right way. I really do. Tomorrow I celebrate (really? Celebrate?) 50 years of life. (Technically, my birthday falls on Sunday. But who the shit parties on Sunday?) I said I was going to finish putting the book online before my birthday, and I will at least have accomplished that. For those of you who have stuck with me from Chapter One, my appreciation and outright love for you knows no boundaries. And thank you to everyone who contributed financially, or simply by telling a friend or two about the blog, and passing these chapters along. If I ever get to see any of you face-to-face, I will hug the shit out of you. (That sounded way better in my head.)

     And so, here is the final chapter of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life, which is a book I wrote. And lived. And a book you read all the way to the end. Thanks for that.

Chapter Thirty-Six

When Shit Comes Around

One last Wishbone story for the road. Whatever religion or belief system you happen to be a part of, I’ll bet there’s a bit in there somewhere that says, essentially, “It all comes back around.” What you put out in the world is almost always what you’ll get back. What follows is the best example of that from my professional life, and one that still chokes me the fuck up, even as I’m writing about it. Bear with me, kids.

     The year was 1997. We were in pre-production on the second season of Wishbone. I’ve already made it evident how I was feeling about the corporate types at Lyrick Studios during those days, so I was none too happy when I got a call from one of them, a woman from the Public Relations Department. She explained to me that she’d gotten a call from the director of Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The story went like this:

      There was a family of missionaries, deep in the African bush, bringing much-needed medical attention to some very remote villages. One night, while the entire village was gathered around a huge bonfire, one of the children of the missionary family, a boy of about eight years, tripped and fell head first into the fire. The boy’s father reached into the conflagration and pulled his son out, severely injuring himself in the process. But it was evident to all that the boy’s injuries were life-threatening. The family piled into an old Land Rover, and drove four hours across rutted dirt tracks to the nearest town that had an actual hospital.

     No doctor in residence at that clinic could have saved that boy’s life. But it just so happened that another group of American doctors was at that particular clinic, at that particular time. And one of them just happened to be the head physician of the Burn Unit at Parkland Hospital, in Dallas. The doctor immediately commandeered a private jet, and flew the boy and his family back to Dallas that night. The trip was excruciating for all, but particularly the boy, who had suffered second and third-degree burns over 50 percent of his body.

     After days of treatment, and taking great care to avoid infections, the boy was finally able to communicate with his family. They were looking for anything to take his mind off the pain, and they asked him if he’d like to watch TV. And he said he’d like to watch Wishbone. Evidently he was a huge fan of the show. So much so that the friends of this family would tape episodes in the states, then mail them to the missionaries in Africa. But they had literally left all their belongings on another continent, flying home with their injured son with only the clothes on their backs. The director of Parkland Hospital heard about it, and he made a call to Lyrick Studios, and they made a call to me.

     The folks at Lyrick, to their everlasting credit and compassion, had created a gigantic gift basket for the boy. It contained every episode of the show that was currently available on video, several plush toys, custom book markers, advance copies of several of the new Adventures of Wishbone books for young readers, and various other little Wishbone toys and keepsakes. They wanted me to deliver the basket.

     I wish I could tell you I jumped at the opportunity. The truth is, I balked. I was scared shitless, actually. How would I react when I saw this kid? What if I freaked out? What if I did what I very often do in weird or awkward or tragic situations, and said or did something incredibly stupid or insensitive, and made it worse? Truth to tell, folks, I almost said no.

     But then the little voice started talking, the one that usually talks to me after I’ve fucked something completely up. This isn’t about you, asshole. Here’s a thought: why don’t you grow a pair of balls, and take a gift basket to a kid who could really use a pick-me-up right about now? You don’t have to be “on,” and you don’t even have to be comfortable. You’re not going to save his life, but you might just make him forget for a few minutes how much his life sucks right now. So man up, funny boy. (And yes. That’s how the little voice talks to me. Not like Yoda, or Mister Miyagi, or any wise old sage. Just a slightly smart-assier version of me.)

     If you’ve never been to Parkland Hospital, it’s easy to get lost. And I did. Twice. Fortunately a very nice receptionist walked me up to the Burn Unit, through a maze of corridors so bewildering, I was already planning on living at Parkland, seeing as how I’d never find my way out. We arrived at the proper room, and I guess I thought there’d be a suit or two from the Lyrick PR department to greet me. But there wasn’t. I knocked, and a very petite, weary-looking woman opened the door.

     “Hello. I’m Larry Brantley. I work on the television show Wishbone, and I was wondering if I could say hi to Marcus.” (Not his real name.) The weary-looking woman (Marcus’ mom) smiled. They were expecting me. Everybody, that is, except Marcus. His mom walked ahead of me, towards the bed in the center of the room. Marcus was awake, and she quietly informed him he had a visitor. Then she stepped to the side. Seeing that kid for the first time and not losing my shit right there and then was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I’m fucking crying right now at the memory of it.

     His face was, miraculously, unharmed. But from the throat down he was completely covered in bandages. And he was in such obvious pain. My heart broke -  fucking shattered - for this kid. In that moment, all I wanted was to punch the throat of God himself, so great was my sense of injustice for this little boy. Instead, I said, “Hey, Marcus. I’m Larry. I brought something for you.” I held up the basket so he could see it. I won’t tell you that his eyes lit up like it was Christmas, and he’d just gotten that Red Ryder BB Gun he’d been begging Santa for. The truth is, Marcus was heavily sedated to ward off the unimaginable pain that accompanies severe burns. But he recognized it as a gift, and what I saw in his eyes was gratitude.

     My plan had been to simply drop off the basket, tell Marcus I hoped he’d start to feel better, and make a hasty exit. But then his mom pulled up a chair for me, so I sat down beside him. And that was when I realized that the TV was on in his room. And he was watching my show. I can’t remember exactly which episode it was (it might have been Robin Hood, possibly Ivanhoe), and it occurred to me that Marcus had no idea who I was. He only knew I was some guy who worked on his favorite show, who had brought him a gift basket. The remote was on his bed, so I picked it up and muted the volume. Without looking at Marcus – and while he was still looking at the screen – I Flipped The Switch in my head, and began doing a running commentary on the episode – as Wishbone.

     Until that moment, I don’t think most of the people in his room knew who I was. The looks of utter shock were priceless. But the coolest part of all of it was that, the whole time I was talking about the show in Wishbone’s voice, Marcus never looked at me. He continued to watch the screen, and a big, goofy smile started to walk across his face. When that happened, I saw his mom put her face in her hands. I knew she was crying. Turns out that had been the first smile Marcus could muster since the terrible events of days before. It was so cool, the way you could tell that he didn’t want to break the spell by looking at me. So we both watched the TV, and I continued Wishbone’s live commentary, talking about how we pulled off a certain shot, or how many times that particular take got busted because somebody laughed, or farted, and other behind-the-scenes nuggets – all in the voice of his favorite TV character.

     When the episode ended, I finally looked back around at him. In my own voice I said, “Pretty cool, huh?” He nodded, but even as he did I could see the smile leaving him. The illusion was gone; the reality of his situation was crawling back over him. And in that moment I remembered Tony Fucking Vilardi, the one kid in junior high school who hadn’t been afraid to say the honest thing to me, when he’d heard my dad had killed himself.

     I looked Marcus square in the eye and, with tears in my own, said, “I know, man. It sucks. It really sucks. Keep fighting though, okay? Keep fighting even though it sucks, because eventually it won’t suck anymore.” That was it. That was all I had. It had sounded lame as shit to my ears, but it was the most honest thing I could say. The last thing that happened that afternoon was that his family requested some photo-ops. I had to be very careful leaning into the shot with him, because protocol dictated that I couldn’t breathe on this kid, let alone touch him. But we got some satisfactory pictures, and I bid Marcus and his family goodbye, making promises to stay in touch, which of course I never did. I held it together long enough to make a dignified exit from his room, and then I hauled ass out of the Burn Unit, out of Parkland Hospital, where I jumped in my car and fell the fuck apart for the better part of an hour. When I finally decided I was okay enough to drive, I made the 45 minute commute back to my house, totally ignored my wife’s questions about how it went, and proceeded to get knee-walking drunk. The last coherent thought I had that day was really just a dirty, selfish little prayer: Please, God. Please don’t ever make me have to do that again.

     But it all comes around, remember?

     Flash forward ten years. 2007. I was in my “Jesus Is My Homeboy” phase, and my family and I were part of a very large church in North Texas, where I was known, not as the Wishbone guy, but rather as the guy who appeared on stage in any humorous sketch that was a part of that week’s sermon. One Sunday after the last service, while everybody was milling around in the “worship center” (when you’re non-denominational and hip, you have a worship center, not a chapel), my friend Scott, the Worship Arts Pastor (aka the guy who chose the songs each week) came up to me, and began to tell me a story about going to a “Meet The Teacher” night at his daughter’s elementary school the previous week. In the classroom of his daughter’s reading teacher, he noticed something of a relic on top of the bookshelves: an old Wishbone plush doll, in his Romeo and Juliet costume. Scott, clearly in an effort to look like a badass in front of his kid, remarked to the teacher that he just so happened to be friends with the guy who provided the voice of Wishbone on the television series. And that was when, according to Scott, the teacher got very still, and very quiet, and he saw tears welling up in her eyes. And she proceeded to tell him a story: that ten years ago, she and her family had been missionaries in Africa. That her son had been terribly burned in an accident. And, while lying in the Burn Unit at Parkland, awaiting what would be a series of painful reconstructive surgeries, he had been paid a visit by a guy in a flannel shirt and a baseball cap, with a giant gift basket and a familiar voice.

     As Scott was recounting this tale, he reached in his jacket pocket and withdrew an envelope with my name on it. The envelope contained a letter, written by Marcus’s mom (the teacher), and two photographs. I will not reprint that letter here. Those words of appreciation are between me, and the family of a boy I was fortunate enough to make smile, during the worst moments of his young life. The first photograph I remembered well: a slightly askew picture of Marcus and me, I with my perpetual dopey grin, him with just a slight smile only around the eyes. But it was the second photograph that drove me to my knees. It was a picture of a seventeen year-old Marcus, in full marching band regalia, blowing on a trumpet like he was Dizzy Fuckin’ Gillespie. He had the special gloves on to protect his still-growing new skin. But he was in the fucking marching band, man. And he was killing it. It had sucked, and he had kept fighting. There were words written on the back of the pic that said, simply, “Thank you, Mr. Brantley!”

     And with that, it came back around.

Here Endith The Shit

The author, and the young lady to whom this book is dedicated. Love you, Boo Bear.

Chapter Twenty-Nine.

That pretty much sums it up.

     There's nothing quite so self-awareness raising as writing a memoir. Some people can't believe I actually post some of this shit about myself. Others simply don't believe it. They believe, as the name of the book suggests, that I'm just making shit up. I'm not. That's some James Frey shit. If you never heard of him, he wrote a book in 2003 called A Million Little Pieces, which was published as a memoir, and went to the top of the NY Times Best Seller List after Oprah made it a "Book of the Month" selection. Then a little while later, a rag called The Smoking Gun did some investigating and discovered that James Frey was full of a million little pieces of shit, and that an awful lot of what he claimed happened to him never did. And then that poor fucker had to go back on Oprah's show, and receive a very public bitch-slapping from a mad black woman. 

     I think the chances of Oprah ever picking my memoir for her club are about the same chances I have of winning the lottery, and getting mauled by a polar bear. On the same day. Still, I'm not taking any chances. The shit I write about my life actually happened, and I've written it down as accurately as I can remember. You hear me, Oprah?

     Anyway. Off we go...

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Competitive Speech, Lipstick, and The Great Drift

 

   The first time I got the idea that I could actually DO something with my humor – other than entertain my classmates and annoy my teachers – was in Mrs. Anderson’s speech class at Travis Jr. High. I believe it was 1981, and my father’s suicide was still a topic of conversation. Mrs. Anderson’s class was primarily a “how-to-give-a-presentation-in-front-of-your-classmates-without-shitting-your-pants” kind of thing, but for those of us with a penchant for crowd-pleasing there was something called Humorous or Dramatic Interpretation; basically, acting out a scene from a play or book, in which you play one or more characters, without the benefit of costumes or scenery, or any of the other trappings of theater performance. (I realize that I have previously explained Humorous and Dramatic Interpretation earlier in this book. But you know those people who, even though they missed the start of the movie – like, the first fifteen or twenty minutes - will come traipsing into the theater, anyway? Blocking the screen, and dumping half their buttered popcorn in your lap while shuffling to that one empty seat in the middle of the aisle? I have to believe there’s some guy out there who does the same thing with books. The above explanation was for him. Quit being late to books, asshole.)  This struck me as an interesting challenge. I had to pull people into a little world that I created all by myself, and make them believe it.

     I was competent enough at it that Mrs. Anderson registered me for my first competitive speech tournament. There were several categories, and I can’t remember which of them I competed in, save one: Impromptu Speaking. Contestants drew a scene out of a hat. They had one minute to think about it, then had to perform a three-minute sketch based on the scene. I made it to the Finals, and I can still remember the scene I was given: you are the captain of an airplane. In the middle of the flight, you lose an engine. Now, this could be played dramatically, of course, but fuck that. I decided to take a scene of a fully loaded passenger plane in the process of CRASHING, and make it funny.

     And I killed. That was the first competition I ever won. When I stepped onstage at the awards ceremony, and was handed a cheap-ass medal to commemorate my victory, it was as if they had handed me the Grail. That was also probably when I started craving the adoration of the entire planet, as I was getting nothing of the kind at home. Finally, here was a way to use what came naturally to me, and get recognition for it –the good kind of recognition. It didn’t make me any more popular with girls, but it would do.

     I competed all through seventh and eighth grades, sometimes in the categories of Prose or Poetry readings, always in Impromptu, and always choosing material that was funny. I also learned pretty quickly that Competitive Speech people were very different from Drama people, and rarely did the two groups comingle. Drama people tended to be purists, and viewed any acting that wasn’t performed on a stage, with lights and sets and costumes, as beneath their artistic integrity. And Competitive Speech people thought that Drama people were mincing little pussies.

     When I got to high school I continued to compete. The competitive speech coach my freshman year was a woman named Martha Roach. I never really liked her, and not just because of her name. But I do owe her thanks, because she pushed me out of my funny-zone and into Dramatic Interpretation. This was also the year I actually had to start performing with somebody else, which began my life-long love of creative collaboration, maddening as it can sometimes be. I was to compete in the Duet category with a girl named Shawn Day. She was two years older than me, and crazy beautiful. She and I developed a love/hate relationship, which must have translated well to performance. We were given a scene from a play about the final hours of the life of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, whom he beheaded for convenience. The scene takes place in the tower in which Anne is locked away, awaiting her execution. It’s one last conversation between king and queen, and at the end of the scene they kiss. Now, I had no problems with kissing. By this time in my life I thoroughly enjoyed kissing. And Shawn was game too, especially because that kiss never failed to produce a gasp from audiences when they saw it (keep in mind this is Texas in the 80s, and even the more liberal speech judges were usually dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who believed that high school students should never hold hands in public, much less make out at a school-sanctioned event).

     The problem was Shawn’s lipstick. She insisted on this blood-red color that made her lips pop as if she’s just eaten a handful of roses. And when we kissed – and it was a for-real, lip-mashing, grab the back of my head and hang on kind of kiss – that shit would smear all over my mouth, so that when we parted my face looked somewhere between circus clown and transvestite. I’m sure lipstick technology has come a long way since then, but in the 1980s it had the consistency of congealed bacon grease. I never really minded though, because I was getting to lock lips with easily one of the prettiest girls in school. And everybody knew it.

     Ms. Roach left after freshman year, and was replaced by Mom Murphy. She began letting me experiment in Humorous Interpretation with pieces that Roach wouldn’t let me touch. As for Duet, her belief was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So the first tournament of my sophomore year I was back performing as Henry VIII, with Shawn as my Anne Boleyn. As luck would have it, we made it to the finals. (Not just luck; we’d gotten pretty tight by then.) But there was another duet in the finals from a school that had a new speech coach: Martha Roach. She ran straight to the judges to point out a technicality that competitors could not perform the same piece within a certain amount of time after the previous season had ended. She got Shawn and me disqualified from the finals. Now, you can say she was just abiding by the rules. But I’ll call bullshit. She was vindictive as hell, and she knew we were better than her duet, and I swear when Mom Murphy delivered us the news, and Shawn burst into tears, I looked a few tables over at Roach and caught her smiling.

     The problem – my perennial problem, it seems – is that I could never fully commit. Performance came easy, and, as such, I felt no great need to actually work to get better at it. Also, remember, I was choosing pieces that I wanted to perform, not pieces that were likely to be respected (or even recognized) by judges. As successful as I was, Mom Murphy pointed out (correctly), that I would fare even better if I would just suck it up and perform something more easily recognizable; something more mainstream. To me, “mainstream” meant “boring,” and I spent most of my high school years doing exactly what I wanted. Only my senior year – the very end of my senior year, actually – did I agree, at the last minute, to switch what I was going to perform for NFL District. (That’s National Forensic League. I stopped playing football in junior high.) I was going to perform yet another collection of Monty Python sketches, but Mom Murphy convinced me to switch to a monologue out of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. I think I literally had two days to work on it before the competition. I made it to Finals, but came one spot short of qualifying for Nationals, beat out by two students who had clearly put in the time and effort needed to be successful. I would not be performing on the national stage. Once again, my lack of ambition had placed me right where I deserved to be.

     I wish I could tell you that I learned from that experience, but that would totally be making shit up. I believe my response to that episode was something along the lines of, fuck it. Who needs it? I finished out my senior year, blew up my relationship with my girlfriend, graduated mostly unknown in a class of over 600 seniors, and spent my summer hanging out with my friends and practicing (and teaching) Tae Kwon Do. Thus began a phase of my life known as The Great Drift.

     The night of my graduation, the high school held a party/dance. I went to the party/dance, because that’s what everybody else was doing. I did not party. Nor did I dance. I sat at a table, mostly alone, with one thought running around and around the hamster wheel in my head: what the fuck am I supposed to do now? I was teaching Tae Kwon Do, and making next to nothing. My mother had remarried my sophomore year to a guy I hated, mostly because he was a huge enabler of Mom’s alcoholism. So I didn’t want to stay at home. I sat there absolutely confounded as to how to proceed with my life. I might have sat there all night, but a friend who was a junior invited me back to his house, as his parents were out of town and the hot tub was already fired up. I wound up in a Jacuzzi with several other couples, and a girl who might also have been a junior, and her name might have been Stacie or Stephanie. She was quite pretty, and either she thought I was good-looking enough, or she felt sorry for me, and we ended up making out until the sun came up. I never saw her again.

     The next morning I had a vague recollection that I was on the hook to some upper-middle class Junior League Ladies’ Club, because I had entered some sort of competition from them for a college scholarship, and I had won. A whopping two-hundred and fifty dollars, which unfortunately they would not give me in cash. Since I could think of nothing better to do, I scraped together a few more meager funds, enough to enroll for one semester at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Which, coincidentally, is also home to the prison where Texas carries out all its executions. In addition to general courses, I also registered for their competitive speech team.

     I hated the entire experience. I was pretty miserable in high school, but at least it was a familiar misery. Now everything was new again: the campus, the students, and the teachers (which you couldn’t even call them “teachers” anymore; they were “professors” now). It had taken me four long years to make even a handful of friends in high school. I found that I just didn’t have the capacity for it in college. I dropped out of the speech program almost immediately. And I remember taking a history course where I actually spoke the entire semester with a Russian accent. I have no idea why.

     I don’t believe I actually finished the one semester of college I enrolled in. (That doesn’t keep the SHSU Alumni Association from asking me for money two or three times a year, though. I still don’t know how those fuckers manage to track me down.) One morning I just couldn’t stomach the thought of getting in the truck and driving the 35 miles to the campus. I just stopped going. I kept on making no money, kept living at home, kept my familiar misery.

     Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE.

Chapter Ten.

     Merry Christmas, you guys! My gift to you this year is the same as it was last year: a super-embarrassing - yet - totally - true story from my life. This one also happens to be the next chapter in my memoir, Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life, and is one of many reasons why I should stay the hell away from Hollywood, and famous people.

     Wherever you are, and whatever kind of shit you're up to, I hope this finds you healthy, and - dare I say it - hopeful, at the close of the year. Thank you for continuing to come back to this space, and encouraging my bad behavior. You're the best.

Chapter Ten

Smelling Angela Lansbury

  

      I smelled Angela Lansbury once. Like, I didn’t just walk up to her, stick my nose on her neck, and take a big ol’ drag. We both happened to be in Pasadena, California, at the Television Critics’ Association’s annual gathering. This is when the networks and the press get together in some really posh place (it was the Ritz Carlton, and, yes, I was Gomer Freaking Pyle for a week), and the networks announce their fall television lineups, and what are the new shows, and who got cancelled, etc. They trot out their stars so the press can fall all over themselves with the possibility of running into Courtney Cox in the hallway, or having a conversation with Dick Wolf about cutting-edge crime drama while figuring out how to take notes AND eat the complimentary shrimp cocktail.

     I was there representing not only my show (Wishbone), but also PBS. And, yeah, that’s as sexy as it sounds. Don’t get me wrong; I love PBS. With a passion. Public television introduced me to the wider world, which most significantly took the form of British humor and science fiction. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Benny Hill Show, and The Goodies made me laugh, and Doctor Who made me believe in the possibility of other life forms. And also killer fucking robots that still occasionally haunt my dreams (up yours, Daleks!). Not to mention Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Zoom. So I am, and always will be, down with PBS. But in the greater scheme of the TCA meeting, where you were bumping into celebrity boobies every two minutes, we were like the ugly smart girl that nobody wanted to dance with, but you had to, anyway. Not only was PBS announcing that Wishbone was returning for another season, but we also had won the TCA award for Family Programming, which I guess essentially meant that parents could watch our show with their kid and not want to gag or intentionally ram their head into the corner of the coffee table to get out of having to watch a “kid’s” show.

Betty Buckley (WISHBONE producer) and self. She's beautiful; I'm drunk.

     The evening of the awards banquet, I also learned that Angela Lansbury was receiving some kind of lifetime achievement award, probably because they had started producing Murder, She Wrote around the end of the Civil War, and it was still on the air. Whatever the reason, I found myself backstage, standing right next to Angela Lansbury. And here is something you need to know about me: I am a straight sucker for an English accent. Especially if the English accent issues from the mouth of a pretty lady, and even though Angela Lansbury is old enough to be my grandmother, she was still very pretty. Another thing you need to know about me: I have the uncanny ability to take an awkward situation and make it even more awkward. So we’re standing backstage, and she turns to me, gives and me a dazzling smile, and asks, “Are you with that wonderful show with the little dog who teaches children about classic literature?” And right at the second I was about to answer, I caught a whiff of her perfume. And – I realize this is a strong word to use about a woman who is old enough to be my grandmother, but it’s the only word there is to use – it was intoxicating.

     It was just the right amount of flowery, and citrus, and springtime, and British, and proper (but slightly saucy), and I just kind of got lost for a second. And as I looked at her, I suddenly remembered she had asked me a question – and I had no god damn idea what it was. And I wasn’t about to go, “I’m sorry, could you repeat the question?” because she asked it a second and a half ago and she was standing right in front of me. And I couldn’t explain that I was literally so into how she smelled that her question, the one she asked three feet from my face, had just suddenly fallen out of my brain, because my brain was busy trying to catalog that wonderful scent. Her scent. And then my brain screamed at me to say something, for God’s sake, because you do not leave Angela Lansbury hanging. Make some shit up!

     And so what I said was, “You smell divine.” But when I heard it come out of my mouth, it sounded like I was channeling Hannibal Lecter. It was the creepiest fucking thing I could possibly have said. I might as well have followed up with, “And I would like to eat your liver, with some fava beans, and a nice Chianti.” I desperately turned to my inner voice of self-preservation, to help me find some way to salvage the situation, but he merely threw up his hands and said, “You’re on your own, asshole.” Fortunately at that second a stagehand came to whisk Ms. Lansbury off to receive her award.

     Later that evening, I had an altogether different kind of olfactory experience. After the awards ceremony, the TCA held a big reception in the grand ballroom of the Ritz Carlton. I would have happily spent the evening there, because it was open bar all night, but I was too afraid I’d run into Angela Lansbury again. I decided to call it a night and go back to my room. I had just gotten on the elevator and pushed the button for my floor, when a very well known comedian and actor got on at the last second. He nodded, pushed his floor button, and as soon as the doors closed he hotboxed the elevator car. Or, to put it another way, he farted. Loudly. Violently. In an enclosed, small space. And I don’t mean a “one-cheek-sneak” kind of fart. He let one rip that sounded like his ass was deliberately trying to tear itself apart. The back of his pants started to melt, and I seriously considered pushing the fire alarm. But I was trying to be cool, because this dude was a celebrity, and I didn’t want him to think that I was shocked that famous people not only have flatulence, but evidently have world-destroying, soul-eating flatulence. As the edges of my vision started to blur, he looked back at me, and looked forward again, then said over his shoulder, “I guess I can’t blame that one on the dog, huh?”

     Awesome.

     Next Week, Chapter Eleven: Doing My Best, God and Country, Law of the Pack, and Stupid Fucking Crafts

     Make a contribution to the book Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life by clicking HERE.