PRESS RELEASE
April 13th, 2012

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Amie “JK Elemenopee” Aragones
CTRG Public Relations
860.385.2874
860.385.CTRG
pr@ctrollerderby.com

CT RollerGirls Announce Scholarship for Woman Athletes

WATERBURY, CT – April 13, 2012 – The CT RollerGirls (CTRG) will be awarding a scholarship to a dedicated and enthusiastic woman athlete this spring. CTRG has created the Cindy Luberto Scholarship to recognize young, woman athletes in Connecticut who have a passion for their sport, whatever it may be.

“Many of our skaters did not consider themselves athletes before finding roller derby, while others have a long history of participating and succeeding in sports. We think it is important to celebrate all types of athletes who embrace their passion for their sport, regardless of whether they are the star of a competitive team or a participant in less structured recreational or intramural sports,” says Kathleen Ebner, who skates under the name Ebolution, a player for CTRG’s Yankee Brutals and Physical Education and Health teacher at Woodland Regional High School.

The recipient will be selected based on a 250 word essay describing her passion for the sport that she plays, with emphasis on how her sport or her participation is unique. Each applicant also must provide a photo of herself in action or representing her sport. Eligibility and application information is available at www.ctrollerderby.com/scholarship or by contacting pr@ctrollerderby.com.

“Being passionate about an activity can change a person’s life. Our skaters have found something special in roller derby, and we want to celebrate that spirit with this scholarship,” says Alison Faruolo (Babe Vigoda), blocker for the Yankee Brutals. “The award is named for Cindy Luberto, the late sister of one of our league’s most positive and supportive former members, Jill Luberto (Paula G. ImNaughty).”

Furthering their commitment to empowering girls and promoting sportswomanship, earlier this year CTRG invited women and girls to observe a special open practice to recognize National Girls and Women in Sports Day and demonstrated how the skaters train for their competitive and demanding sport.

The CT RollerGirls, Inc (CTRG), is Connecticut’s only WFTDA-ranked roller derby league, and the state’s first established league. A 501(c)(3) non-profit, CTRG’s bouts are competitive, family-friendly, and action-packed. CTRG boasts skaters and referees from all walks of life, ranging in age from 18 through their 40s. Established in 2006, CTRG has made it part of their mission to have a group of strong, healthy, and diverse women that can be role models to girls of all ages, to instill a sense of family, loyalty, hard work, and competitiveness in all of their skaters, and to foster community, sportswomanship, and athleticism in their members, volunteers, and audience.

For more information on the CT RollerGirls or to view upcoming bouts and special events, visit www.ctrollerderby.com or www.facebook.com/ctrollergirls.

What a fantastic way to promote female athletes and encourage sportsmanship and passion. Does your roller derby league have something like this?

Pinterest.

PINterest. It’s on the Internet. It’s like, the most, the most, THE most amazingly successful website…EVER. Something like the fastest, hundred million, it’s like– do you know Facebook? Like TEN times that. Yeah.

It’s all about beautiful things and style.

Okay, what happens is like I see a picture or something I like. And I pin it. I pin it. ‘Pin.’ I pin it and then other people like it too, so they pin it. And then other people pin it. And then some are like ‘like.’

I’ve never been on Pinterest, but that is my understanding of it.”

That has also stayed in my head forever, so I will now share it with you. She said when boys pee they stand in front of the toilet, and there’s a “stream of pee space” that is created that is exactly where my head goes when I sit down to pee right after him.

* I need to work on not being so obsessed with the pee space.

* I need to figure out why there are wasps in my backyard, and not just decide that the entire backyard forever belongs to the wasps.

* I lost my glasses about a month ago, but I can’t seem to admit to myself that I’ve actually lost them. Since I only leave the house about 13% of any given week, it seems unlikely that I left them somewhere out there. I’m always here! How can I lose things out there? I’m so rarely out there, you guys! And now with the wasps, I’m even more in here than I was previously. I also lost my favorite bra, which just seems like something that shouldn’t happen once you don’t live in a dorm or with a roommate or go outside to do your laundry. I haven’t attended any ERA rallies; I haven’t gone to a Tom Jones concert in the Seventies. My bra should be easily findable at one of three locations: my underwear drawer, the laundry basket, or my boobs. And yet, no bra. No glasses, no bra. My very personal personal items are turning up missing, one at a time. If my coffee pot disappears in the next couple of weeks, THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

* I recently met a girl named “Machine.” This isn’t something about me that I need to work on, I just feel the need to tell absolutely everybody that someone out there thinks that her name is Machine. I say this because I don’t assume her parents named her that, I feel like she turned eighteen and was like, “I will now be called Machine,” or maybe some cult leader man blessed her with this name during a life-blood ceremony or something, but I keep thinking about how she was like, “Hi, I’m Machine,” and I know I wasn’t the only person who met this girl at that moment but — you guys — everybody acted like that was no big deal. Just a room full of people all, “Oh, hi! Sally. Paula. Have you met Machine?”

In her defense, I didn’t ask her to spell it. Maybe it was Mesheene or something like that. Misheen. That’s actually kind of pretty.

* I need to stop trying to mentally justify the crazy actions of strangers just to restore world order in my head.

* No, but for real: I really need to stop thanking stranger-ladies in the bathroom for leaving their stalls.

Sunday
Bovard Auditorium
3:00 pm
The Nerds Shall Inherit the Earth. (Panel 2093)
Maureen Johnson
Pamela Ribon
John Scalzi
Interviewer: Amber Benson

I love that this panel is coming right after the conversation with Anne Rice. I’m always next to her on bookshelves, so why not get slotted right next to her at a festival for books?

I’m extremely excited about my panel this year, and look forward to out-dorking myself. For those of you who remember the SE Hinton situation, you know I’ve set that bar pretty darn high.

Secondly!

I was the host of this past week’s Tonncast. Every week the Tonncast has a different host with very special guest Todd Robert Anderson.

The Tonncast with your host Pamela Ribon (Episode Twenty-two)

Celebrated novelist, screenwriter and blogger Pamela Ribon has a man in her house. His name is very special guest Todd Robert Anderson. He is terrifying. In an effort to distract the man invading her home, she asks him questions about anything she can think of, from zombie outbreaks to bizarre sex acts. This is not a podcast. It is a cry for help. THERE IS A MAN IN HER HOUSE! (Music by accessory after the fact, Adam Blau.)

Get the hour of NSFW fun here.

Okay, that’s it. I’m up early because I’ve got a pitch in a few hours, so now I’m going to lock myself into a small room and walk around talking like I’m trying to place in Dramatic Interp at District this afternoon.

(That was a shout-out to my fellow UIL Speech and Debate nerds. (PS: I won first prize that year. I’d crafted my monologue from the book “Sybil.” Yes, I was a lot to handle when I was seventeen, thanks for asking.))

So feel free to share with the DCPL Foundation a story about your first library or librarian, either in the comments here below, or when you make a donation to the DCPL.

I’ve lived in my new neighborhood for just about a year now, but I hadn’t had a chance to get to the nearby library. Yesterday I decided to check it out. Just take a look, no need to browse or pick anything out… and left with three books. I also saw dads helping their daughters with homework, lots of computers being used for writing resumes and sending job applications, a healthy selection of Young Adult novels (and graphic novels — including manga!), and even a copy of one of my own novels.

And then I narrated: “I can’t wait to take my mom here!”

But it’s true. My love of libraries came from my mother’s love of supporting my endless questioning, my unquenchable thirst for knowledge. When I was three and wanted to know what sign language was, she took me straight to the library and taught us both the ASL alphabet. I’ve known it for as long as I can remember. We’d go once or twice a week to the library to fill up on new stories, get excited about finding more books by a certain author, and help each other with our giant stacks of books we couldn’t wait to get home.

We still get that way about books, Mom and I. She gets so excited about a new Stephen King, you’d think he was a cousin of ours. It took a little prodding, but she did read the Hunger Games trilogy and is now the cool kid on her block, able to loan it to all of the johnny-come-lately friends and family members just now hearing about it.

All of this appreciation for books and how they bring people together started with a love of the library. It is heartbreaking to think every kid doesn’t get this chance, this experience. It is, in fact, the entire point of the DC STAR program — teaching families that love is in sharing storytime.

That’s why I started what has become the Dewey Donation System, and that’s why whenever you help these book drives I get pretty emotional. Because it feels like you understand me, and as someone who went to thirteen schools and used to move every six months and the only place that ever felt like home when I was a kid was the library… feeling like someone understands you is a really big deal.

So thanks, and if you haven’t hugged your local library in a while, you might want to check in. I bet they’ve got something there you’ve been looking for.

Heather Askew is a long-time reader who once took a picture of one of my books at the Taj Mahal. And then she sent it to me. That’s a very special kind of fan love, you guys.

She went to Thailand through her church, where she fell in love with it just as much as I did, and ended up moving there to help teach English to kids. I checked in with her during their recent flooding, and found out what she’d been up to was nothing short of amazing, and speaks to the power of love. Read Heather’s story here.

Heather works with an organization called Taw Saeng (that’s Thai for “to shine”) that takes kids off the slums and streets of the red light district in Chiang Mai city and teaches them survival skills while providing a safe haven for education. They work hard to get kids and teens sponsored (or in Heather’s case, adopted) so that they can grow up without the fear of being forced into the sex-trade industry. Heather told me that their facility currently sponsors thirty kids, but would like to expand to over a hundred, and that their library could really use some help. I don’t know where books could be more important than at a place that is designed to teach kids, “It’s okay. We’re here. You’re safe. Now play.”

We were all set to launch our drive for Thailand, when the DC Rollergirls contacted me and were like, “Did you know it’s almost National Library Week? We want to raise money for our library through Dewey at our next bout, and we’d like to teach other WFTDA leagues how to launch fundraisers for their own public libraries.”

See, derby girls never stop at the first step. They always over-achieve. This is why I love them.

So we worked with the good people at the DC Public Library Foundation and they were thrilled to get some much-needed help sent to their brand-new STAR program, which encourages an early development of reading and reading comprehension skills by teaching parents with young kids how to read to their kids, what kind of songs to sing in the bath and –yes!– that they should narrate to their kids. Each family is given a children’s book that’s theirs to keep, and upon completion of the program they receive another. We’re aiming to send all 550 books they need to meet their program’s needs for this year. You can send a book for five dollars.

People. Five dollars.

I mean, if you can’t find a way to spend one day’s morning coffee’s cash on a child’s future at our nation’s capital, then maybe you can’t call yourself an American.

(Or maybe you can spend the money, but you can’t call yourself an American because you don’t live in America. Hi, people who don’t live in the USA! Thank you for all your support as well! You can call yourself whatever you want! I support you!)

And did I mention it’s my birthday? Because it is. It’s also my birthday week. And then it’s National Library Week. So if you’d like to give me a present, maybe shoot a couple of bucks Dewey’s way.

We’ll run this fundraiser for the next couple of weeks, so please spread the word: tell your friends, tell your co-workers, tell your churches, tell your Pinterest and Facebook stalkers.

If you would like to help us out by throwing out incentives or sponsorships (Hi, do you have a book you’d like to use for a giveaway? Want to be a secret matching gift moneybags donor? Want to challenge other groups who also like Game of Thrones or whatever it is you’re into, you beautiful weirdo?) please let us know.

What are you waiting for? Go help some kids! And thank you for being my hero!

First: I got internet scammed.

I am mad at myself about this. No, actually, I’m just mad at my brain. This isn’t all of me’s fault. But sometimes it’s late on a Friday night and you’re sitting too close to the television watching someone in HD who looks a little scary in HD and you start thinking about your own skin and the state of things, and how you recently did your taxes and saw the year you’re supposed to retire and it doesn’t feel far enough away to be impossible to reach.

So you start thinking about The Soap and remember that someone recently sent you an email with a subject line “The Soap” and a link to get it, and yes it’s late and you have had a glass or two of wine, but you go there and it’s all kind of half in English and half not, but so is The Soap. So you pay for it with PayPal and not your AmEx, which you never normally do for an internet purchase, but you tell yourself, “This is good for me” and you even email someone else who was asking how to get The Soap and you think you’re being so helpful and then two weeks pass and suddenly that website has vanished leaving a note that basically says: “Thank you for your cash, Pamie. You’re an idiot.”

Did you guys know that “pastime” means something you do to pass the time? Of course you did. But not me. I thought it was something you did in the days of yore. You know: during a time in the past. (“His favorite pastime was rolling a hoop down a hill with a stick.”)

I have lived a number of years on this planet and only two days ago did I figure out that while, yes, old people seem to have way more “pastimes” than young people, that doesn’t mean it’s something that only old people can have. History books are filled with lists of pastimes, but it wasn’t until I was staring at the word THIS WEEK that I realized it wasn’t about a past time, but a way to pass time.

Speaking of words, I came up with one I think we should all be using.

Shituation.

As in: “We are having a full-on shituation with your kid’s diaper.” or “I didn’t tell you to call her! Things were fine and now you’ve turned this into some kind of shituation I’ve got to deal with. Thanks a lot, Becky.”

Look, I’m not terribly proud of it, but I think it could have some mileage.

Finally, yesterday I figured out exactly why I often come off as a dork when there’s no reason for me to look like anything other than a human being doing a human task. Like, say, when I’m getting into my car at the valet.

People do this every day. Multiple times. Usually without a problem. I should be able to do it without at one point having to apologize to the person handing me my key. Only yesterday did I figure out exactly why I turn a normal situation into a dorkstorm.

I narrate.

Why do I narrate? Why do I tell people what I’m doing as I’m doing it? And when exactly did I start to do this? I don’t remember always being like, “Okay, that is my car, yes, thank you, and I’m going to find you your tip which I had but now I can’t find it’s in my purse somewhere just one second sorry oh it’s not — that’s my tampon — nope not gonna hand you that so I’ll just give you this Sacajawea coin and I’m sorry.”

I’ve started calling my mother when I’m on long drives to meetings and the other day I found myself once again narrating every second of my life. “Okay, Mom, I’m probably going to have to let you go because I’m entering this parking garage and I bet I’ll lose you but oh, it’s really crowded in here so I think… maybe I can fit into that spot… but I will have to… turn around… right here… and then I move my car like this… and then I turn the wheel here and even out and slowly pull up until… I am now you. I have turned into you, Mom. I just officially turned all the way into my mother.”

I have to learn to keep my mouth shut and just do things. That’s how cool people do it, right? They just walk over to things and get in them or stand in a line without having to make any kind of comment. I bet they ride on planes without feeling forced to say hello to the person sitting next to them. They must have such internal freedom, the ones who don’t narrate. They never have to tell a stranger on the street: “I almost fell just now!” They probably don’t even tell the lady at the post office why the box they’re mailing is so heavy (“I’m returning boots that don’t fit because my calves are too big”). I bet they don’t feel compelled to tell the waiter why they’re asking for a to-go box (“I had this huge lunch way late because I was trying to not eat and then I did”).

The non-narrators must go through life feeling pretty good about themselves every day. This is not what happens to me. What happens to me is I feel the pressure to go get a manicure and pedicure because my feet, to quote Samantha Who?, were looking like apricot scones. So I go with a friend and then decide I should maybe get my eyebrows done, because that’s what ladies do and I don’t know how eyebrows are supposed to be shaped if they aren’t shaped like my eyebrows. This would be the second time I’ve ever gotten my eyebrows waxed, but why the hell not. Be a lady, Pam!

So I get a pedicure but I wore boots, so I have to wear these paper flip-flops as I go get my eyebrows waxed. This is where a quiet lady pulls off what appears to be just the slightest amount of my head skin along with my eyebrows. I am trying to quietly shuffle home from this brutality when my friend’s husband demands I have lunch with them right then, because he wants to introduce me to his friend and business companion.

So there I am wearing giant sunglasses and paper shoes, trying to act like I’m the kind of lady who is so cool she doesn’t get embarrassed when strangers have lunch with her right in the middle of a beauty routine. And I know I’ve got about fifteen minutes before my face is going to swell and turn red with anger, and I don’t have any ibuprofen, so I duck to the side and place my ice-cold water bottle against my brow for just a second — and it’s all it takes.

My face swells so much, my skin gets so blotchy, that when I sit up I have no choice but to rip off my sunglasses and explain: “I AM HAVING A BIT OF A REACTION TO THE WAXING.”

And of course the people at this table recoil in horror, and of course they don’t know what to say, because this isn’t how normal people react so I just keep narrating, because I hadn’t been narrating and it was held in too long and it made something inside break.

“THIS IS WHY I DON’T LIKE TO WAX MY BODY PARTS. THIS IS WHY I SHOULD BE HIDDEN AT HOME. I AM GOING TO GO THERE NOW. I GOT INTERNET SCAMMED RECENTLY. HEY, DON’T BUY CHINESE JAPANESE SOAP ONLINE IF YOU CAN’T READ THE WEBSITE BECAUSE IT’S NOT IN ENGLISH. THAT WASN’T SMART. INTERNET SHOPPING USED TO BE ONE OF MY FAVORITE PASTIMES. ARE MY EYEBROWS BLEEDING? I HATE THIS COLOR NAIL POLISH ON ME. ANYWAY, IT WAS NICE TO MEET YOU. WHATEVER WAS IN MY CREPE IS MAKING ME CRAMP UP SO I’D BETTER GO. CAN SOMEONE HELP ME PUT MY SHOES ON?”

I can’t even blame my mother for that one. That monologue of shame was all me.

You guys, how do you keep from narrating? I think I’m doing it to make people feel better about what they are observing, but I’m only making it worse! Do you just stay silent while they look on in confusion? Or are you not making these kinds of public mistakes? Do you just pay for the valet and get in your car and drive off? How are you so cool?

[Front image from when I was recently on The Cheshire Cat's radio show. I'm awkward because I'm trying not to narrate while posing for a picture.]

Today’s Weekly Procrastination is for you.

Barbara has the distinction of being the first person to make me feel Twitter-famous by retweeting something I wrote about the plane I was on because we were on the same plane. I tweet-manded she introduce herself and we made small talk at baggage claim. She would perhaps be higher on my list of cool things that have happened to me on planes if it weren’t for Bjork.

Okay, so Pam the TV Writer is lucky because she does wear a few other hats. I currently have (paid) work both outside and inside the TV world, even though I’m not allowed to talk about them yet because they wrote in their contracts that I can’t. So that’s part of TV Pam’s writing world, the secret projects that actually pay cash. Those are great and I’m very grateful for them.

But here’s what I mostly do right now:

I take meetings.
I prep to take meetings.
I take more meetings.

I also write things to send out that get me meetings, but that’s more about features. Actually, that’s not exactly true. I have a pilot script that’s going around to introduce me to producers I haven’t met before to see if they’d either like to attach themselves to that pilot or meet with me to discuss something new we could do together. That means: more meetings. I am watching television and reading pilot scripts like some kind of monkey in a cage because I’ve got to be ready to talk about shows and meet on shows and be like, “Yeah, I’ve totally watched all six seasons of your show. It’s my favorite.” (But, I mean: It does become your favorite once you find out it likes you.)

I meet with people who like what I write and we talk about what kind of show I could bring them that we could pitch together. I go back to my house and write up pitches. I take more meetings. I get meetings rescheduled. I prep for more meetings. I work with my agency to let them know which meetings would be good meetings to try to get set up for me. I pitch ideas and concepts and generally try to figure out what kind of workload I’m about to take on. In the meantime I go on meetings for features, which is more about sitting over a cup of coffee talking about something way less specific. “We’re always looking for something, so if you ever come across an idea of anything, please let us know.”

This is a very exciting time of the year for the UPS delivery man, because he finds himself saying things to me like, “Hey, you’re not wearing pajamas!” or, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you!”

I spend my day getting ready for the rest of the year, either by finishing up the projects from last year or getting a jump on what’s to come. And on top of all of this: at any time I must be prepared for the sudden, seemingly random meeting to interview to write on an existing show — which would immediately toss out most of the prep I’m doing. (But that’s a good thing.)

I could also get called in for punch-up, because lots of people are currently prepping their pilots for production. Once they settle on their cast, they will find out that their cast has opinions, strengths, weaknesses, power. (Sadly, sometimes only opinions and weaknesses.) They will have their cast do a read-through and find there are things that need to be changed. They will do rewrites. And they will be tired and want some help.

This is when those writers will have to scroll through their ever-dwindling list of friends, hoping some of them owe a favor or two. They will bring in writers they know, writers who have been recommended, and writers they are testing out for a possible job later if the show gets picked up. A punch-up runs like a writers room, except nobody’s getting paid in anything but free food and maybe a small thank-you gift in the mail later. Invitations to punch-ups also come last minute, sometimes in an email the night before. “HERE’S MY LATEST PDF THANK YOU THANK YOU SEE YOU AT NOON YOU CAN EMAIL YOUR COFFEE ORDER TO MY ASSISTANT AND IT WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU.”

Then you go to the punch-up, sometimes for one day, sometimes more, where you watch a run-through, scribble in your script the changes you’d suggest, listen to the showrunner complain about the notes from the studio and network and then gently try to suggest changes to the one script that showrunner’s been working on since he or she started pitching it in July, which means he or she has only had to work on this one twenty-four minute story for about seven months, so they sometimes just start shouting: “IT’S NOT LIKE I HAVEN’T ADDRESSED THAT NOTE AT THE TOP OF THE SECOND ACT! I MEAN, IF THEY WANT TO JUST MAKE IT SHIT, THEN WHY NOT SAY, ‘I’D REALLY LIKE THE SHOW TO SUCK ASS BY THE END OF THE FIRST ACT. THAT’S MY NOTE. CAN YOU DO THAT?’ YES, I CAN DO THAT. I THOUGHT YOU WANTED THE SHOW I SOLD YOU, BUT I GUESS NOT.”

Punch-ups can be testy. And yes, showrunners are kind of always stress-yelling.

Oh! And all my friends who have been staffed over the past year are about to go on small hiatuses right around March, which means I will also get lunches and brunches and dinners with all of my friends I haven’t seen since last summer, when they were like, “I might get on this show — have you read it yet?” These friends will be lost and shell-shocked without the scheduled chaos of their rooms. They’re unused to doing anything on their own. They will be so relieved to be out of work, and yet: so worried they’ll never work again. They will complain about how hard their room was and moan about about how much weight they’ve gained and then they will guilt-pay the check. It’s fantastic.

Irwin Handleman wrote about what has happened to him now that the show he pitched was sold but not picked up, how sometimes your last year can become your this year, and it’s a very familiar story. I, too, had to go through the, “Do I want to change this half-hour to an hour? Wait. Do I really want to make a show about roller derby be more ‘male-oriented’?”

But the part that I truly identified with is when Irwin writes about how weird it is to pitch a show over a busy table in a deli during a meal.

I hate having to pitch over food, but not nearly as much as I hate pitching in a conference room. It’s always a giant table in a room that appears to be designed solely for the purpose of telling thirty people they aren’t getting their Christmas bonuses. At least during the pitch over food you can pretend you’re telling someone about a movie you saw the other night that you loved, but at the sad, echo-y, always-cold-to-the-touch conference table that may or may not have some people dialed -in on a slightly delayed video feed, there’s no good way to deliver jokes. It’s comedy death.

Plus I’m always on some kind of swivel chair thinking to myself, “Don’t spin. Don’t spin. Don’t rock. Don’t swivel. Just sit. Just pitch. Stop sweating. You have lost your place. These people aren’t listening. Why are you sweating when it’s so cold? Why are you here? What have you done? Okay, one little swivel, then stop. Hey, how about a random Madonna song stuck in your head right now? Gonna dress you up in my love. All over, all over. Your pitch is all over. You have nothing new to say.“

Okay, so to recap: I take meetings, I prep for meetings, I stay available for unexpected meetings and I write all the other things I have due that I got while I was taking meetings last year. I answer my email, I work on my fitness, I bring clothes to Goodwill, I think about learning Spanish, and then I write some more. And then I go take a meeting.

Hey, I did that one without any yelling!

If you have a question about writing or television or novels or screenplays or any of these places where I write words and other people read them, send an email to pamie at pamie dot com with the subject line: YOUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION.

That’s really all you have to read, but I’m going to elaborate.

I have been out of tea for a while because I don’t drink it.

That’s not exactly true. There are three hundred packets of stale Lipton tea in my pantry right now because I buy a new box for my mother every time she comes to visit, but nobody I’ve ever met other than my mother drinks Lipton tea. This spans more than one continent, because when my mother was in Paris she told every waiter we had that they didn’t have “the good tea.”

I occasionally have some chamomile on hand for days when my stomach’s a little upset or I feel like I’m catching a cold. Green tea can go fuck itself. Why do people drink this tea that tastes like metal shavings? I do not get it.

But I understand that sometimes I should drink things that aren’t coffee or wine. I want to be able to do this, I just haven’t found anything else as satisfying. I haven’t given up.

I don’t fast or cleanse or detox because I am honest with my ability to have the willpower required to starve myself for days. As animals, our most basic instinct is to make sure we eat. We kill things every day just so we eat, and we always have for as long as we’ve existed. Those things we kill also kill things every day just so they can eat. The only reason I can imagine we need to take a day or a week off from eating is because we are trying to enter some kind of hallucinatory altered state that comes just before you lapse into a coma. Since I’m not seeking that kind of miserable enlightenment, I eat food at least once a day.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to achieve all this “I FEEL GREAT” bullshit people who are high off cleansing (or, as science calls it: “starvation”) claim to be experiencing. I would love to know that my organs were detoxing, that free radicals were sloughing off my innards, that with every hungry minute I was becoming a healthier person.

That’s why they make herbal teas, right? So you can do that with just one cup a day? I mean, honestly, I can’t figure out any other reason to drink green tea. It is the worst.

So I’m wandering through the “ethnic foods” aisle the other day and I came across a section that could have been called “Bags of herbs and dried leaves you don’t understand because you do not have a Mexican grandma.” And it looked like the kind of magic I wanted. And there was one that was like, “For your liver and your gall bladder.”

Hey! I drink coffee and wine almost every day! (almost = sometimes more than once a day) I bet my liver needs some tea-relief! If I could drink this liver tea, opening the secrets of the ancients inside my intestines, then it’ll be like I went on some kind of four-hundred dollar, GOOP-approved scam-sham! All of the cleanse, none of the cash. This box costs two dollars? Sign me up.

This is how I ended up bringing home a box of Boldo tea. Boldo! It’s kinda Peruvian! I’ve been to Peru! I am worldly! This is what worldly people drink! Worldly, healthy people. This was going to be the first step toward the way-detoxed, super-skinny, glowy-skinned, pristined-livered me.

So the other night, instead of pouring a glass of wine to sip while watching Justified, I got all Gwyneth on myself and was like, “No. I will have a cleansing cup of tea.”

As soon as I removed the plastic wrap surrounding the box, I knew I had made a mistake. It smelled like feet. The whole kitchen immediately smelled like the inside of an Ugg boot. But I persevered. Maybe it wouldn’t smell that way once it was brewed. Maybe it tasted better than it smelled, especially once I added half a lemon’s worth of juice to it.

I’m just going to skip to the part where I tell you that it didn’t. It somehow tasted worse. It tasted like a licorice stick someone found inside their Ugg boot. One that had been dipped in lemon juice.

But I tried. I tried holding my breath while I sipped. I tried imagining I was drinking a potion made by a healer and focused on my liver squeezing out years of martinis and vodka tonics.

I got about three sips and one scene into Justified before I called the whole thing off. At one point I thought I was going to throw up, which would definitely count as cleansing, but ultimately I ended up just sitting around whining and complaining, which everybody knows is a form of stress relief.

Me and Danny Zuko don’t like tea!

And now I don’t know what to do with this box of foul. It seems wasteful to throw it away. It seems racist to ask the housekeeper if she likes that tea. It seems mean to give it to any of my friends. There’s no Goodwill for shitty tea, and I’m afraid to try to use the leaves for anything else because they stink like feet-waves.

Then I read up on it a little more and it says if you drink too much of it at once, you can die. Should they be selling that shit at Albertsons? I mean, that was nowhere on the box. What if I had made up my own liver cleanse and killed myself with some foot tea?

So, consider this my public service announcement. I almost died of Boldo tea so now you don’t have to. And once again, green tea: go fuck yourself.

But I’m not a hater, and I don’t think it’s stupid or childish, and I like other grown-ass people having fun on Halloween. All the sexy turtles and literal interpretations of catchphrases. It’s like watching Facebook memes come to life. It’s delightful.

But that’s once a year, and that’s how it should be. (I am not a crack pot.) This is why I’m not excited when you Evite me to your Themed Birthday Party.

I don’t want to dress like we’re flappers or ninjas. I don’t want to “Come as [my] favorite book.” Your black-and-white parties make me feel like we’re having a fake wedding. When your party requires me to make a costume change to prepare for the “game portion,” again I must ask, “What time does the balloon animal guy show up? Oh, he’s right there? Okay. Nevermind. PS: you’re a grown-up. Just reminding you. And tell him to make me a bunny rabbit.”

I come to your party to celebrate you. I don’t need you to hide behind all the bells and whistles.

All of this is to say: sometime last year I had to go to a themed birthday party that was filled with musical theatre people. The theme doesn’t really matter for this story. The point is: this is where I learned nobody gets into a themed birthday party like musical theatre people.

There was joy and song and puns and jazz hands. And they were all young and happily stacked in an apartment as only the young theatre set can. I sat in the corner with my fellow old-grumps who were all on the other side of ten-plus years of Hollywood rejection, watching these young, hopeful faces sip from their red plastic cups and chat about getting new headshots. We remembered those times when we’d head from our improv show to someone’s theatre party, loudly rehashing our favorite moments from that night’s game of “Party Quirks.” ["Your human dildo was the funniest human dildo I've seen in a long time, Cody."]

Let me tell you that for years, years, I was happily planted in the center of that part of the party. I loved standing in the loud group, drinking my yelling-juice, arguing about actors on Saturday Night Live. I was the person who you probably had to shove aside to get to the Doritos. I was definitely the girl breaking out into a Bonnie Tyler song for no real reason other than people laughed when I fell to my knees in passion.

It turns out after being that girl for more than a decade… you get tired. Instead of entering a party searching for the group with the kind of action you normally find at a craps table, you look for an empty chair, preferably a comfy one. You walk into the room and think, “I only have to do this for one hour and five minutes.”

The small group of similar elders I sat with chatted about the things old actors chat about, like how our knees hurt, and if they want to go through the bullshit of this year’s pilot season ["I mean, have you read what's out there?"], and why is this wine I’m drinking from a box. We sat on folded chairs and watched the happy musical theatre people pack themselves around the table of (themed) party foods.

It got quiet for a little while in my small group, which is when I noticed there was an odd smell. Like one of our old people had eaten something that disagreed with him or her. Perhaps that’s why we all fell silent, each one wondering which one of us had sprung a leak.

Then someone started a new line of conversation. “Oh, I smelled the worst thing the other day…”

Everyone joined in and commiserated with recent bad smells. This got us to the segue we needed. The next time someone passed us by, we were all like, “Yo, that person keeps coming by and farting on us, right?”

Happy to have a scapegoat, we engaged in stranger-judging, an important part of being in the corner of the party. We were entering a third round of teasing when I realized it wasn’t any of us being stinky, it wasn’t that poor girl we’d named Fartin’ Fanny.

It was the deviled eggs.

They were in the middle of the food table, about thirty of them, right where any passersby could whip up their scent and send it soaring through the tightly packed room. As soon as I identified it, we all knew it was true. The heavy sulfur tang in the room wasn’t from someone’s butt. It was from the eggs. All the musical theatre people had their very best acting faces on, eyes widened and teary, trying to pretend they weren’t ignoring whichever one of their friends had a case of the toots.

“I’m going to put them in the kitchen,” I said, happy to play the hero.

“But we aren’t supposed to go in the kitchen,” one of my friends reminded me.

“This is an emergency.”

We weren’t supposed to go in the kitchen because this themed birthday party had a lot of themed birthday party foods and drinks and frivolity going on, and all of it came out of the kitchen, where one busy woman in a retro fifties dress was doing her very best to serve a very large party. I’m going to have to go ahead and call her the Egg Lady, because that’s what I call her in my head, even though I know her real name. This night was that traumatic.

I entered the kitchen holding the serving tray of eggs.

“Is something wrong with the eggs?” she asked, eyes wide, terrified.

I immediately knew I had done the wrong thing. “No, not. Not no, not really,” I stammered. “There’s… you know, it’s smelling like eggs out there in the room because it’s kind of packed and hot with the heater on over the eggs and all so I just thought I’d rescue them and put them right here so the room can air out.”

I believe I said all of that while putting the eggs on the counter and backing out of the kitchen.

The Egg Lady took the tray and stared at it. “I guess I’ll put them in the refrigerator,” she said, sounding absolutely heartbroken. “If these eggs do offend.”

I turned around and walked the seven steps back to my group of cranky actor friends. “I think I have to leave now,” I admitted. “I’m pretty sure I fucked up.”

“Why? It already smells so much better now.”

“I think I offended her.”

“She’s not made of eggs.”

“She’s… not happy.”

This is when I saw the birthday girl emerge from the kitchen holding the tray of eggs. She marched over to the table and set them right back in their place of honor. Not the Egg Lady, you guys. The Birthday Girl.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I really should go.”

“Because of what you did with the eggs?” asked a friend who was nowhere near me during any of the previous story.

“Yes! How did you know that?”

“It’s kind of a thing now.”

I found the birthday girl to apologize for anything that I might have done. “Is she like, mad?”

“She’s… she’s upset. I put them back out there so she would calm down. I don’t know why you had to touch anything. You don’t live here. It’s not your job. She’s made a lot of eggs and you can’t just go putting them in refrigerators or on counters like you know best.”

“Should I go… apologize?”

“It’s probably best if you stay away from her.”

For the next hour I sat in my shame seat as all my old-actor friends stretched and yawned and headed off to their early bedtimes. All I could do was worry. During the “Happy Birthday” song, the Egg Lady sang her words staring right at me with such frozen sorrow, the word “happy” sounding ironic and bitter every time it came out of her mouth.

“This is ridiculous,” I said to nobody, because I was alone with the rest of the box wine. “I was helping. I was helping the party be less farty!”

When I did find a friend, she wasn’t very helpful. “Do deviled eggs smell?” she asked. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yes! That’s why we go through this every Easter.”

“Maybe that’s it,” she said. “She’s Jewish. She probably doesn’t know eggs smell like sulfur.”

“I really don’t think I should tell her that this might all be happening because she’s Jewish.”

The party had crested and was well past one in the morning when I decided to brave the kitchen once again. I found the Egg Lady pulling another set of pigs in blankets out of the oven. I handed her an oven mitt and a serving plate.

“Thank you,” she said. Curtly.

“Hey, uh,” I started. “I just wanted to say sorry about the eggs earlier. I didn’t mean to offend you. I know you worked really hard on this party and all the food and everybody was talking about how great everything is. It wasn’t against you or the food. I mean, if anything it’s the egg’s fault for having that smell, you know?” I knew I was very close to mentioning her religion as a possible culprit, so I made myself shut up.

She tilted her head. Closed her eyes. Exhaled.

Here was the part where she’d melt, relax, and give a small chuckle. Where she’d shake her head and apologize right back for being so stressed out and for taking it out on me. Where we’d talk about how hard parties are to throw and how ungrateful everybody always is and aren’t deviled eggs just stupid, anyway? They are horrible for you and you always end up eating five or six, which you’d never do at breakfast.

But she didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she turned to me, gave this wide, weird smile and said, “I accept your apology.”

Bam.

Then she added, “I was really offended at what you did, so I think it’s good that you apologized.”

I zombie-stammered out of that kitchen with my mind blown. You guys, you can apologize to someone and they can just take it, like your dead-beat ass just paid off an old loan with interest. Like I’d been pardoned. Excused!

This bothered me for a long time. Not just days. Weeks. I’d think about it and get all tied up again in knots of frustration. I didn’t mean to offend! I was trying to help! I was trying to help and ended up apologizing, and then got chastised! I’d tripped into offending the hostess when at no point was I doing something offensive. The eggs were offensive!

My outrage, however, made me a raging dick about this. I was offended that I had to apologize for accidentally offending someone who — if she had been stuck in the room filled with poot clouds — would have been thankful that someone literally cleared the air.

It was an important lesson in my life. More important than “Don’t serve deviled eggs in a crowded room of animated people.” One I will take with me forever.

Never apologize just because you’re looking for one back.

I don’t blame the Egg Lady for this uncomfortable moment in my life that will haunt me forever. Not anymore. I now blame the themed birthday party. Because it’s a bunch of stressed-out bullshit. If you are over the age of… I’m just going to go ahead and say twelve, because these themed Sweet Sixteens appear to be the cause of everything wrong with girls, then you can have a party where people bring presents and we eat cake, but you don’t get to dictate what people wear. You are not a princess. You are the birthday girl. There’s an enormous difference. If I’m buying you a present, please don’t make me also have to buy a costume. Why am I your servant of fun?

And that’s what was happening to the Egg Lady. She was trapped in the kitchen, a servant of fun, handing out tray after plate of “Quiche-a Knight-Pulliams” and “Chocolate Chip Punky BrewSTARS.” I’d have gone bonkers after twelve straight hours of that, too. I might have cut a bitch for giving me shit about some motherfucking eggs. So I don’t blame her, nor her theme-appropriate Donna Reed outfit, nor the way she went all Stepford Wife on me. Even though I’m still involuntarily holding my breath, waiting for the reciprocal apology. This is how people make up! With two people apologizing, one after the other! When will it happen? WHY WON’T IT EVER HAPPEN?! I CAN’T BREATHE!!

Before you have a themed birthday party, please think about the collateral damage you’re going to cause. You will destroy first dates. You will stress already tense friendships. You will make that one person who’s barely hanging onto a social life decide to just stay home forever. It’s enough that we’re willing to celebrate you at all. Please, please. Think of the Egg Lady, and how she totally shot me down like I was some kind of asshole and how I will never really be okay with that.