We do improv all the time! This conversation, right now? ALL IMPROV.

Last night Heather and I went to see Uptown the Musical, produced by our lovely friends at Box Wine Theatre. We got sushi before the show in Calhoun Square then walked to Intermedia Arts. We were still a little early and not feeling quite hipster-ish enough (we talked about riding bikes, but we didn't, total missed opportunity), so we stopped in a nearby thrift shop.

Now, I'm not big on used clothing, since it seems people in the 70s were not proportioned the way I am. Which is weird, because I came from two people who were my age in the 70s. What did they wear? I assume my mom wore hippie clothes she sewed herself, and my dad wore Black Panther-style leather jackets and berets, and neither look is really my style. Also, that is probably untrue, since my parents were suburban, middle-class Republicans with day jobs and night classes. All of this is to say, I buy clothes online from the Gap, because they sell pants with freakishly long inseams that are shipped to me sealed in plastic, and I never have to speak to another human being. Total opposite of the thrift store experience.

So on the rare occasion I find myself in a thrift store, I don't even bother trying to shop and instead gravitate towards the most ridiculous-looking thing I can find. It's almost always the rack of formal dresses, and last night was no exception. The first dress I picked up was a yellow and silver sequined strapless dress with the 80s flare-out thing that hit around the knees. So sparkly. So poofy. I loved it.

Anyway, the dress prompted the following conversation, which I think sums up the relationship Heather and I have pretty well.

Naomi: [Picks up dress] "Oooh!"

Heather: "Oooh! Sparkly!"

"Yeah." [Puts dress back.] "I need your opinion on something. I'm thinking of making a hoop* with sparkle tape and lace. Does that sound good, or would it be too much?"

"No, that sounds awesome!"

"Okay. It's just..."

"What?"

"Well, I have a whole closet full of sequined clothes, and I'm going to make a dress for the Iveys this year that has a feather skirt..."

"Oh yeah, I saw the link you posted about that!"

"Right, it'll be awesome. But with the feathers, and the sequins, and the lace...it's just that sometimes I worry that I'll wake up one morning and discover that I've transformed into a gay pride parade float."

"Oh. Well, if that happens, I'll throw candy at you!"

"Thanks, and I'll throw condoms at you!"


And probably the best photo to illustrate this story: Heather and I on New Year's Eve 2010, very sparkly and maybe just a tiny bit intoxicated. Not to be confused with New Year's Eve 2009, when I woke up the next morning on Heather's couch wearing a t-shirt that said "I'd Rather Be Riding Ginger!" That does not sum up our relationship at all.

Those are the faces of people who do not normally stay up past midnight
or wear heels for more than two hours. Friggin' CHAMPIONS.

(The show was a ton of fun, by the way. Check it out at the Fringe Festival. And check out Heather's show, which I am now morally obligated to promote since she'd let me throw condoms at her if I were a gay pride parade float. This is the new standard by which all future relationships will be measured.)


*More on this later. Okay, maybe just a little bit right now!

Evolution of an absurd inside joke

My birthday was last Wednesday, and on Friday night I went out to dinner with some friends to celebrate. This is actually the end of the story; there's a year or so of backstory to get through until we're at last Friday. I just wanted to start here so I'd remember to say I had a lovely birthday, and if you are reading this and you helped make it lovely, then thank you. So far 27 is a great age to be. It's the cube of an integer whole number! I won't be that again until I'm 27i 64!*

Heather has a cat named Cooper. She got him about a year ago as a diversion from editing the nascent cult classic Zombie Sweater, which, shameless plug, I'm in. Go on and watch it. It's the only film I've been in where I was cast solely based on having hot legs, which is weird because it's not a sexy film or role at all, and weirder still because the only other film I've been in had nothing to do with having hot legs and yet still somehow felt like a porno while we were filming it. I don't know, acting is tricky I guess.

Anyway, Heather got Cooper last April and the two were a match made in heaven. Here's the blog she wrote about him when she first got him. And I know what you're thinking. "Awww, she was so excited that she talked about him like he was people! I can haz poetic license plz?" But you're wrong (and LOLspeak is way passe), that's how they actually are in real life. Heather is a crazy cat lady, but young and hip enough that she makes it awesome somehow. Sometimes I'm jealous of Heather and Cooper. I wish I was a cool cat lady. But then I remember that my cat is awful and fat and tries to trick you into petting her even though you were totally gonna do it anyway.

Fast forward to December, when Heather went back home for Christmas and I was glad she'd be gone for a while, because I still had no idea what to get her. I was also glad to cat-sit for her, because Cooper is super friendly, and sometimes with all of the stresses of the holiday season it's nice to be able to crash on someone else's couch and cuddle with their cat for a while, you know? It was during one such cuddle session that inspiration struck.

Cooper

Plus t-shirt

Plus Photoshop and iron-on paper

Equals the best damn present ever.

Also, I think at this point I may have become Cooper's aunt. I'm not quite sure how that works.

Fast forward again to this April, when Heather threw a party in honor of the first anniversary of Cooper's adoption. I was out with some mutual friends a couple weeks before the event and we were discussing gift ideas. How do you top something like a t-shirt with a picture of a cat on it?

"You could get Cooper a t-shirt with a picture of Heather on it," one friend suggested.

"I could," I said. "Or..." 

And then it hit me. A flash of inspiration; that beautiful moment when genius and insanity and "maybe I drank too much beer waiting for the late night happy hour app specials to start" collide. I knew exactly what to make.

"Or...I could get Cooper a t-shirt with a picture of Heather wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Cooper on it, on it."

And that is exactly what I did.

At the party we all joked about how far it had gone. What was next, another t-shirt? Something larger, maybe a tote bag? Unfortunately cats hate wearing clothes, so I didn't get any good pictures of Cooper wearing the shirt. I figured this was the end.

And now we're up to last Friday. When we got to the restaurant Heather gave me my birthday present, a small, soft package wrapped in pink tissue paper. I could tell it was something fabric, and for a brief moment I thought about joking that it was a cat t-shirt. But I didn't say anything, because it couldn't be, right? There's no way.

Except that it totally was. Nicely played, Heather.

And so....here's a picture of me wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Heather wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Cooper on it and Cooper wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Heather wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Cooper on it, on it. I think.

The important part is, Heather's birthday is at the end of October, so I have five months to parse that sentence and find an iron-on transfer large enough to accommodate all of the recursive madness. This isn't the end. This is only just beginning, and it won't stop until someone's head explodes.


*Okay, I looked it up and it turns out you don't get i as an answer unless you were cubing i to begin with, and it's not an integer anyway, so none of that up there makes any sense. That's what I get for trying to shoehorn in a math joke. Tune in next week when I talk about how I was so excited to find out that my mutual fund was compounding interest again that I yelled "eeeeeee!" DAMMIT THAT'S EVEN WORSE.