TAMIRoffal

The We & the I opens Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival tomorrow, and the first poster and trailer have been released. My name and Paul Proch’s name are on the poster, although blurry and in French (bottom line, over to the right). And this is a picture of (left to right) me [stupid hat, cool shirt], unknown intern, director Michel Gondry [scream of agony] and producer Raffi Adlan [red shorts] on the set, somewhere in the Bronx, last August. I think something was going wrong.

My friend Peshawari [not his real name] phoned me with a question. “Have you ever heard of a ‘Clam Letter?’”

“Are you saying ‘claim letter’ or ‘clam letter?’”

“Clam.”

“No.”

I asked for context. Peshawari had received an email from his buddy Joel Cairo [also not his real name], which contained a sentence something like ‘I was having this horrendous argument with my brother. I hung up on him. Then I said, ‘okay,’ and I sat down and I wrote him a clam letter. Then he sent one to me, and now it’s fricking DONE.’

I was already furiously googling, and coming up with nothing useful. I got 8 hits for ‘Clam Letter.’ One was a piece of fan fiction of some sort, and the clam-letter (hyphenated) described is possibly a letter written on an actual clam: “The elder was speaking of the earring..? Oceana placed her hands together and then apart, as if opening a letter. The gesture lacked clarity, but Oceana was asking for the clam-letter back from the blazing old lady.” (You can read the whole thing here. When I land in Hell, that will be the only page my computer will be able to display). The other hits appear to be either typos for ‘claim letter’ or letters about clams. The letters about clams qua clams do not seem germane to the situation, although one lists some excellent clam-based recipes, or says it does.

“Well, they’re fricking DONE,” I said, “So whatever the Clam Letter is, it’s basically the nuclear option.”

“That’s how I read it,” said Peshawari.

“Does he say ‘I sent him the Clam Letter, or a Clam Letter?’

“A.”

I wasn’t sure if this was significant or not. The Clam Letter would probably mean that there had been a famous Clam Letter, just as there had been a well known Riot Act. You don’t read somebody a riot act, you read them THE Riot Act. So the original Clam Letter would most likely have been a letter to or from somebody named Clam. “Sir! We are Fricking DONE! Your Servant, Lord Clam.” Something like that. (Googling turns up all kinds of stupid things for ‘Lord Clam,’ but they are all stupid and do not involve correspondence of any kind).

Maybe ‘Clam’ was some kind of an insult? A Clam Letter is a letter in which you call somebody a clam?

I also broached the possibility that a Clam Letter was not a piece of correspondence but a part of some alphabet, with vowels, consonants, and clam letters. “W” and “X” seem to be plausible clam letters, as do some of the more outré Greek letters, not to mention the Russian letter that looks like a ‘W’ with a little hickey thing sticking out of the rear end. Peshawari felt this was an unpromising direction, and I eventually came to agree that it was.

In the end, he called up Cairo and asked him point blank about the Clam Letter.

PESHAWARI: What the hell is a ‘Clam Letter?’

CAIRO: I’ll bite.

PESHAWARI: You told me you sent one to your brother.

CAIRO: I’ve never heard of a Clam Letter.

PESHAWARI: Then your brother sent one to you!

CAIRO: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

PESHAWARI: LOOK AT THE EMAIL YOU SENT ME! YOU SENT HIM A CLAM LETTER! THEN HE SENT YOU A CLAM LETTER!

CAIRO: [Punches up email] ‘…really got into it with my brother… blah blah blah… sat down and wrote him a cla—’  Yeah, it says ‘clam’ letter, but it’s a typo for ‘calm letter.’ I sent my brother a calm letter, and he sent one back, and now it’s fricking done. Of course it’s a calm letter. What the hell is a clam letter?

Okay, so there WAS no such thing as a clam letter. But it seems to me, we have always had a need for a clam letter. We had no word for the letter you write to somebody so when they get it, it’s frickin’ DONE. Now we do. THE CLAM LETTER. “Send that bastard the CLAM LETTER!” “I sent that S.O.B. The Clam Letter!”

Possibly you need to kick off the letter by calling the Clam-ee a clam. “You’re a frickin’ CLAM, pal, and this is a CLAM LETTER.”

Maybe they have to send a Clam Letter (or a letter with Clam Letter-like properties) back for it to be official. I don’t know. Details need to be worked out. But I think we’re almost there.

It’s time for my answers to yet ANOTHER movie quiz hosted  by Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. This time around the quiz has been cooked up by Suzie Bright and it’s called PROFESSOR SUSIE BRIGHT'S BRAZENLY CINEPHALLIC, UNAPOLOGETICALLY VULVACIOUS MOVIE PORN QUIZ .

As per usual I’m pasting the questions in so you don’t have to do any clicking, but in some cases I condensed the questions a bit after pasting, and I didn’t paste in any of the pictures wink wink, so you might want to do some clicking anyway.

1. Match The Quotes with The Writers-- Or Instead, Just Pick Your Favorite:

The only book here I read was Blue Movie by Terry Southern. And the quote from that is C: ‘Then she says, now dig this she says . . .” and he broke up laughing, a strange rasping laugh for maybe the fourth time since he started what was shaping up to be an interminable story, “. . . she says: “Listen, who do I have to fuck to get OFF this picture??!?” And he began his final light, his boss laugh, the kind that quickly, smoothly, turns into a monstro cough.’ 

2. The First Time You Peered Into a Peep Show— What Did You See?

 I don’t think I ever peered into a peep show qua peep show. The one time I attempted to do so, I was in a Times Square rat hole just up the block from the old Embassy, and I went into a booth where you fed quarters into a slot to keep a full length XXX movie going. I misunderstood the sign and thought it was a quarter to see the whole movie. Took me $1.25 to realize (1) this was going to be insanely expensive and (2) there’s lots of down time in these things. 

3. Jamie Gillis vs. John Leslie?

I’m going to say Jamie Gillis, because I saw The Opening of Misty Beethoven, and as far as I know I didn’t see John Leslie in anything.

4. Your Favorite Genre of Stag Film?

Jeepers!

I believe that the only stag films I’ve seen that were actually stag films in the classic sense were at the bachelor party held my sister’s fiancé. It was held in the back room of a bowling alley and the films were as classy as you’d expect. I wish they’d shown some  volleyball movies. So I will go with the volleyball movies. 

5. Who would you cast— living or dead, porn star or A-List— to play:

a) Linda Lovelace? The 25 year old Leslie Ann Warren. b) Linda Lovelace’s Mother? The 55 year old Leslie Ann Warren. c) Evil Porn Pimp/Linda’s Old Man? Charles Napier. d) Gloria Steinem? Tura Satana. e) Secret Linda Lovelace Lesbian Lover?  The 35 year old Leslie Ann Warren. And it is absolutely essential that Sammy Davis Jr. is cast as himself, of course.

“What’s the difference between a bagpipe and an onion? Nobody cries when you chop up a bagpipe.” –anonymous

THING I’VE BEEN PONDERING FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS (and have maybe figured out now): In the park where I like to take my walks these days, there is sometimes a guy playing bagpipes at the edge of the Lacrosse Field. He’s been appearing there at what I deemed random intervals since mid-February, honking and bleating his way through the standard bagpipe repertoire, which consists of “Amazing Grace” and “Something That Is Not Amazing Grace.”

I had not been able to anticipate when the piper would appear, but I believe that I did not encounter him very much during the recent dry spell and did encounter him way too much since it ended a week or so ago, leading me to conclude on the basis of far too little evidence that he prefers to do his practicing when it is drizzling. (He may be there when it’s pouring as well, but I am not). From this I have decided that he does this because he wants to annoy as few folks as possible, and so I salute him. It almost makes me enjoy his performance of what the late H. Allen Smith called “[The Scots’] horrible goddamn bagpipe music.” I do kind of like the way I become vaguely aware of it as I reach the north edge of the park, where all the bat houses are, and it gets louder as I circle towards the bagpiper, fading out as I reach the crest of the hill where the guy with the two standard poodles does not ever clean up after them.

The very existence of bagpipes remains a puzzle to me. I’ve been told that music is a universal-type thing. Everybody yells, bangs on stuff, blows into stuff, plucks stuff, to create music. [By “everybody” I mean “everybody who has ever rented an apartment with which I share a very thin wall.”] Bagpipes look pretty complicated to me (there is a bag, plus there are pipes) and you would think that you could find a lot of other things that were easier to make than a bagpipe, even if your goal was to induce miscarriages, brain aneurisms, sterility in cows, and the other side effects associated (or so Science tell us) with bagpipe music.

But maybe not. Wikipedia says representations of the bagpipe can be found “on a Hittite slab” dated at 1000 BC, and the bag part was almost always made from animal skin back in the day, which kills my theory that the Scots came up with it when somebody misread the haggis recipe. Apparently it was the other way around. It was definitely one way or the other, because I am absolutely sure, again on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that haggis tastes the way a bagpipe sounds.

THING I SHOULD HAVE FIGURED OUT A LONG TIME AGO (but unfortunately did not learn until this morning): If you start sneezing while you are shaving, you should stop dong one or the other immediately.

…Which quiz can be found at Dennis Cozallio’s blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule but I’m pasting in the questions like it says, so you don’t have to keep clicking around between windows.

1) Favorite movie featuring nuns: Bedazzled. Unless there is a movie about lesbian vampire nuns, in which case I pick that.
2) Second favorite John Frankenheimer movie: Most folks are picking Seconds (1967), which I haven’t seen. (Everybody’s favorite, including mine, is The Manchurian Candidate (1962)). I’m going to go with the absurdly underrated French Connection II.
3) William Bendix or Scott Brady? Since I had to look up Scott Brady to see who the hell he was, it’s Bendix in a walk! Turns out I’d seen a lot of Brady flicks and he made no impression on me. (His brother, Lawrence Tierney, might have given big Bill a run for his money, especially on the basis of some terrific late inning appearances but I think I’d still give Bendix the edge).
4) What movie, real or imagined, would you stand in line six hours to see? Have you ever done so in real life? I haven’t, and I wouldn’t. 45 minutes used to be my absolute limit, but with a cell phone maybe I could stick it out for an hour if something really dynamite was on the screen, like two hours of the best YouTube Downfall videos or something.
5) Favorite Mitchell Leisen movie: Toss up between Midnight and Hands across the Table, which I believe are the only two Mitchell Leisens I’ve seen.
6) Ann Savage or Peggy Cummins? Peggy! Gun Crazy!
7) First movie you remember seeing as a child. In a movie theater? Could be Gorgo. I would have been six, though, and I must have been to the local theater for kiddie matinees before that.
8) What moment in a movie that is not a horror movie made you want to bolt from the theater screaming? I don’t do much bolting, or even thinking about bolting. I’m more apt to stroll. Even then it’s almost always boredom rather than horror, disgust, or whatever. However, I think Antichrist just might have turned the trick, which is why I’m still hiding from it…
9) Richard Widmark or Robert Mitchum? No offense to Widmark, who is great great great, but c’mon! Mitchum is at least four greats. Maybe four and a half.
10) Best movie Jesus: John Turturro in The Big Lebowski. (I think several people have already said this).
11) Silliest straight horror film that you’re still fond of: Dunno if Creature from the Black Lagoon is silly enough to qualify, but I love it unconditionally…
12) Emily Blunt or Sally Gray? Emily!
13) Favorite cinematic Biblical spectacular: I have fond memories of watching The Robe in the living room every Easter, as I do of watching Mr. Magoo’s Christmas each Yuletide. But I have to say my favorite is really John Huston’s The Bible. Everybody but me thinks it’s a big piece of shit.
14) Favorite cinematic moment of unintentional humor: For years and years I would have said the moment in Bride of the Monster when Bela Lugosi says ‘Don’t worry about Lobo—he’s as gentle as a kitchen.’ Saw it a few years ago, though, and really sounds like he says ‘kitten’ to me. But: there’s endless comedy gold running through The Oscar, starring Stephen Boyd. If the quotes on the IMDB page don’t convince you to see this, I don’t know what to say.

SAMPLE:

Frankie Fane: You a tourist or a native?

Kay Bergdahl: Take one from column A and two from column B, you get an egg roll either way.

Frankie Fane: [laughing] I have a feeling I'm not gonna get anywhere with you.

Kay Bergdahl: All depends, where you'd like to get.

Frankie Fane: Mostly I'd like to get alone with you somewhere
.
15) Michael Fassbender or David Farrar? I only know Farrar from Black Narcissus, where he’s excellent. Gotta buncha Fassbender movies coming up on my Netflix queue and I may change my mind, but for now it’s Farrar.
16) Most effective faith-affirming movie: Night of the Hunter.
17) Movie that makes the best case for agnosticism: Um. Crimes and Misdemeanors, maybe?
18) Favorite song and/or dance sequence from a musical: ‘Shanghai Lily’ in Footlight Parade. There’s also a burst of tap dancing from Jimmy Cagney in the pre-code William Wellman movie Other Men’s Women, it must last all of three seconds, which worth an entire reel of That’s Entertainment! (It also has Joan Blondell telling some guy at the lunch counter, “As far as you’re concerned, I’m strictly A.P.O.—Ain’t Puttin’ Out.”)
19) Third favorite Howard Hawks movie. Number One: The Big Sleep. Number Two: Bringing Up Baby. Number Three… Jeepers. Some days it would be The Thing. Some days it would be His Girl Friday. But today, it’s Ball of Fire.
20) Clara Bow or Jean Harlow? Gotta go with Jean, once again pleading not nearly enough first hand knowledge of Clara’s movies.
21) Movie most recently seen in the theater? On DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming? Oh dear. I’m afraid it’s The Three Stooges for part one. But I was compelled to go by a beautiful woman!! Most recent streaming movie (last night!) was Into the Abyss.
22) Most unlikely good movie about religion: I dunno. ‘Unlikely’ is messing me up here. Is Song of Bernadette unlikely? Passion of Joan of Arc?
23) Phil Silvers or Red Skelton? Phil, on account of he’s Sgt. Bilko. Red’s charms have eluded me for decades, although the Harry Cohn funeral line is pretty great.
24) “Favorite” Hollywood scandal: The strange death of Thomas Ince.  
25) Best religious movie (non-Christian): Groundhog Day.
26) The King of Cinema: King Vidor, King Hu or Henry King? (Thanks, Peter): King Donovan!!
27) Name something modern movies need to relearn how to do that American or foreign classics had down pat: Previous excellent answers have included: witty dialogue, sophisticated comedy, intelligent framing, eliminate pointless exposition, and I agree with them all. My favorite answer was BRANDON’S “Reel changes subliminally affect[ed] structure (like built-in commercial breaks that make the best TV so addictive even without the commercials).” We jettison supposedly arbitrary structural devices at our peril. It’s been a long time since I purchased a CD of new music, but the last ones I did, assembled without the built-in constraints of  a two sided LP (and the need to put together two programs of music with good openings, changes of pace, climaxes, and a satisfying outro) were front-loaded, crammed with filler and not much fun. Well, I’m old.
28) Least favorite Federico Fellini movie: Casanova.
29) The Three Stooges (2012)—yes or no? As I noted while answering (21), I actually saw it. No. And I voted ‘yes’ on Human Centipede. (That said, I have to admit that on its own terms it’s pretty good, and it’s not mean spirited. But do I care? Nah. I enjoyed the appearance by a couple of faux-Farrelly Brothers before the end credits to explain that the hammers are made of rubber, and no eyeballs were really poked).
30) Mary Wickes or Patsy Kelly? Yet another case where I have no idea who one of the contestants is. So this one’s all yours, Patsy.
31) Best movie-related conspiracy theory: That Louis B Mayer deliberately sabotaged John Gilbert’s career by altering the pitch of Gilbert’s voice on the soundtrack of his first starring talkie so that it sounded high and thin.
32) Your candidate for most misunderstood or misinterpreted movie: If you mean misunderstood by ME, I have to admit I have absolutely no idea who the killer in Basic Instinct is.
33) Movie that made you question your own belief system (religious or otherwise): Russ Meyer’s Supervixens.

So that movie thing, which I first wrote about here and then here.

Well, it’s the opening night selection of Directors Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. I am assured by a lot of people who know about *Stuff* that this is a Really Good Thing, even though the films shown on Directors Fortnight are not in competition for awards at Cannes, and the selections tend to be loopier. Mean Streets and In the Realm of the Senses are DF alumni (as is this Portuguese horror movie I just saw on Netflix, which consists of a crazy girl running around a creepy old house without the camera ever visibly cutting so it looks like it was all done in a single take) (I have no idea why).

It’s amazing to me that the movie (the one I co-wrote, not the Portuguese one) is actually finished, and about to be released. Paul and I are not going to be attending the premiere because the producers blew the travel budget flying ten of the kids in the movie to Cannes. (My suggestion that they just send eight kids was ignored).

Then there is THIS, from a website devoted to Oscar predictions. If you don’t want to click on it, The We and the I—which, to my shock, continues to be the name of the movie—I would have lost that bet—is listed in the third tier of possibilities for an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, 24^th overall. If (1) they expanded the number of nominees to 35 or 40 and (2) the guy who wrote this had any idea what he was talking about, we’d be shoe-ins. Much more exciting than being a long shot for an Oscar in the opinion of somebody who probably looks like Comic Book Guy and smells like cheese doodles is the fact that OUR NAMES are there, as they are in this story in Variety. So there’s that.

And now, some links:

This is part one of the Philip K. Dick interview conducted by John Boonstra, which I mentioned a while back, 55 minutes of PKD recorded just a few weeks before his death.

This is Part Two. (I keep mentioning it because if somebody doesn’t download these things every so often, they get deleted).

The exact intersection between Kurt Weill and Martin Denny  is this here Marika Rökk, about whom I know nothing, except she makes my jaw hit the floor.

THIS is an article by Ray Bradbury about why he digs Disneyland. ‘Inspired,’ if that’s the word I want, by an article in The Nation about what a tasteless shithole it is. Three paragraphs are devoted to going to Disneyland with Charles Laughton. The writing is Ray at his most insufferable (“It is a good memory, the memory of the day Captain Bligh dragged me writhing through the gates of Disneyland…”) but still… Charles Laughton in Disneyland!

This page features appallingly bad (= incredibly great) covers from cheesy freak-sploitation books of the late sixties. (via Arthur Hlavaty)

“Pensive Crackle” is is Broadway Melody (1929) with all the songs and dialogue cut out, and what remains (5 minutes) slightly reordered. It was done as an April Fool joke but it’s a wow.

25 Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses features 25 celebrities that look like mattresses, with the mattresses they look like. I am in awe of the mind that conceived this.

THIS is the only full color Fleischer Betty Boop cartoon. She’s a red head!

Did ya know that somebody took a buncha poems by Billy Collins and adapted them as cartoons? Somebody did. Here they are, introduced by Billy, who follows up reading a poem so animated that animation would be superfluous.

Speaking of superfluous, HERE are ALL the itchy and scratchy cartoons, one right after the other. Clear your calendar, this is going to take a while.

There were three lawnmowers in the garden shed. The wheels on one are canted at unusual angles and the fuel tank has a slit or gouge in the bottom that makes me suspect it is not everything I want in a fuel tank, so I’ve never tried to start it up. I gave some thought to cannibalizing it for parts when #2 started to go, but at that point my ex-wife gave me mower # 3, maybe the biggest piece of shit lawn mower I’ve ever bonded with. I had to take the casing off and spray starter fluid directly on the carb to get things going, every time. (More details about mower # 3 can be found here.) It was taking upwards of 45 pulls to turn over, excellent for my biceps but kind of lousy otherwise. Towards the end of last summer it died and I switched back to # 2, which responded by belching white smoke and spewing hot oil out of the exhaust. I was leaving little flaming puddles around the yard while I was mowing, which was cool. “Mowing” is maybe the wrong word, because I think the blade was immobile. I was sweeping the taller grass down, more or less.

So fall happened, and then winter kind of didn’t, and by early March the grass was ready to be cut again. I told my landlady I needed a new mower if she didn’t a frigging rain forest in the backyard, and to my shock she got one.

GREAT mower, but the instructions called for me to change the oil after the first 3 hours of mowing (after that, it’s every 50 hours or so). I reached the three hour mark this week, and in an unprecedented move, I carefully followed all the directions.

To drain the old oil, I was supposed to disconnect the spark plug and then pour the old oil from the top spout into an ‘approved’ container while the engine was still warm. I approved an empty 2 liter Rally Cola bottle. But first, the fuel tank had to be empty, on account of the still warm engine might explode in my face if there was gasoline slopping around when I titled the lawn mower 180 degrees or so.

The directions said you should empty the fuel tank by running the lawn mower till it stopped. The directions were possibly written when gas was like $2.50 a gallon. I decided to siphon the gas, just like we did with Mr. Sisparo’s car in the PVHS parking lot in 1972 some teenagers did in some movie or other.

You need a (relatively) long flexible tube to do this, and I was thinking that I didn’t have one, and then I remembered my cheap exercise band. When I started doing the p90x thing a few years ago, I bought this rubber tube with handles on each end, the cheapest one I could find, for travel days, figuring I wasn’t going to lug my dumbbells around with me. The first time I put tension on the tube it snapped. I didn’t bring it back and demand a refund. I bragged about snapping it. I explained to various people that the problem wasn’t that the tube was crap, it was that I was so powerful. That tube is worth its weight in gold, which is why I still had it despite the fact that the two halves were tied together with a Sailor’s Knot.

I cut two feet out of the tube and set about emptying the fuel tank. I sucked some gas into the tube, plugged the hole in my end with my tongue, stuck the other end in the red gas container, and unplugged the hole. In this manner I siphoned off 4 fluid oz of gasoline every half hour or so. The tube was opaque red rubber and I couldn’t see how much gas I’d sucked into it so I was being really careful, because I’d heard rumors that swallowing gasoline is a bad idea. Technically it wasn’t a rumor, it was a Daffy Duck cartoon. But why take chances?

Eventually I got the gas level so low that I could read the manufacturer’s name in molded plastic at the bottom of the tank. I capped it and ran the mower to finish it off. I mowed the lawn I had just mowed, for 47 minutes with no discernable fluid in the tank. Then it stopped, and I poured the oil into the soda bottle.

It was jet black, so I reluctantly concede that the manufacturers’ specs were at least plausible.

My upstairs neighbor got into a fender bender around three months ago, with no grave consequences beyond a messed up car alarm. She parked the car on the turf behind our building, abutting the parking lot next door. The car alarm would go off at random intervals, for two minutes or so. The intervals being random, you might go a day and a half without a peep, followed by five eruptions in a half an hour.

It took several days for me to figure out that this was the situation. The parking lot serves a combination liquor store / deli, so beeping car alarms are not rare, although they usually get shut off after a few seconds. It took, I dunno, 5 days for me to notice that the same car alarm was going off all the time, and once that happened the part of my brain whose function is to focus on things that will fuck me up if I focus on them kicked in. When the car alarm went off I was annoyed, when a different car alarm went off I was more annoyed, and when no car alarm went off for a couple of hours I’d wander over to the kitchen door and wait for it to go off, at which point I would triumphantly holler, “Do you believe this shit?!” to my Chia Pet.

Eventually the source of the car alarm was identified, the car was repaired, and the “Fuck You, Jeff” lobe of my brain had to find a new hobby, which it quickly did.

The building next door has been unoccupied since the occupant inadvertently set it on fire last summer and rendered it unoccupiable. For a while people were going in and out cleaning up or removing things and then it was locked up, and then it was SERIOUSLY locked up, with bolts and padlocks and stuff.

At which point the battery in their smoke alarm began to die. It’s a really loud battery, a mournful BEEEP that goes off every 30 seconds. I hear it when I walk past the building, and it’s got to be right in the hallway of the place, which means that I share a wall with it.

This has now been going on for three weeks, and the really annoying thing is that I have never heard this dying battery while I am in my apartment. It never wakes me up, I never notice it when I’m puttering around in the kitchen, I never catch a faint echo when I’m trying to untangle the plastic thing that you have to yank off the neck of the milk bottle from the toaster heating coils. Not a peep.

It’s making me crazy. The messed up part of my brain really wants to hear that beep, and will give me no peace until it does. Then I’ll scream, ‘THERE YOU ARE, YOU SON OF A BITCH!! I KNEW!!” And then we’ll be okay, me and the messed-up brain part. The both of us.

All three of us, if you count the Chia Pet.

The first year that I ran the Union County Teen Arts Festival Comedy Writing Workshop (entitled “What’s So Funny: Humor Writing 101,” because they wouldn’t let me call it “Pull My Finger: Humor Writing 101”), I did three workshops on each of the two days. You can read about that here and here, the latter link featuring all the stuff I wrote on the blackboard. The past couple of years it’s been an ‘on-going’ workshop, and the focus has shifted from How to Write the Humor Column for a High School Newspaper to How to Write Whacky Sketch Comedy (or even sit-com scripts) since nobody has the slightest interest in writing the humor column for the high school newspaper. It’s not clear to me that high school newspapers exist anymore, in a form that I would recognize. Nor is it clear to me that they should, he added wistfully.

So I opened up the tote bag I got from the Medical Center, expecting to see (1) a cardboard mailer (2) a length of ‘collection’ paper (3) a zip lock specimen pouch with absorbent sleeve and (4) the Specimen Collection Tube, with a Grooved Sampler built into the inside cap of the Specimen Collection Tube.

Instead, I saw (1) a cardboard mailer [so far so good] (2) a full size SPATULA, with a rubber blade (3) what looked to be a change purse and (4) a tube of lip balm.

Hmm.

Among my initial thoughts: they ran out of the regular Specimen Collection And Return Kits, and had either given me some sort of super deluxe version or a quickly assembled bunch of stuff that had been lying around the employee lounge. I looked for a torn envelope or a post it note with scrawled instructions like “In place of the missing ‘collection’ paper, take enclosed ‘spatula’ and turn so that ‘blade’ is parallel to the ground…” (The coin purse was obviously included in lieu of the specimen pouch. The purpose of the ‘lip balm’ also seemed self evident. Maybe even thoughtful).

I could not locate the instruction sheet. Well, maybe it’s in the cardboard mailer, thought I.

It was not, but the actual  Specimen Collection and Return Kit was. All those other things were just… gifts. Like the baskets of expensive swag they give the presenters on the Oscar telecast. Not exactly like them, they get Rolexes and stuff like that. If Angelina Jolie got home and opened her Oscar Presenter’s Goodie Basket and there was an 89 cent plastic spatula in it, I think things might get really ugly really fast. Although maybe not. Maybe she’s got a great sense of humor.

I doubt it, but you never know.

I completed my sampling and put the kit in the mail. Something else occurred to me.  I called up the lady at the Medical Center and asked, did everybody get the spatula and the lip balm, or did some people get really cool gifts?

Very long pause.

She asked me if I were unhappy with the spatula, and I said no, not at all. I just wondered if all the kits were exactly the same.

Yes they were all exactly the same, she said, sounding very tired.

I said okay. And the other thing I wondered, do you ever get calls from people who opened up the bag and were puzzled when they saw the spatula?

Were you puzzled by the spatula? She asked.

No, I said.

I may have paused a tad too long, because she asked, Did you think the spatula was part of the collection kit?

No, of course not, I said. And I chuckled at the absurdity of the question. The chuckle came out kind of like “Haw! Haw!”

She did another one of those long pauses and said they were looking forward to receiving my sample.

She thanked me for calling but she did not sound thankful.