“Well, Buster, it’s been quite a week, ain’t it?” Melvin spat around the rotten anchovy lodged under his tongue. He had traversed the land for a solid eight minutes in search of vittles. When all the trashcans and dumpsters turned up fruitless, he resorted to his hobo handbook and quickly read Chapter Eleventeen: Rannygazoo and How It Can Help YOU.

Melvin jotted down some notes and limped to a nearby trailer park, where he tried his hand at tick-tacking in hopes of luring people far enough out of their doublewides to allow him a chance at slipping inside to raid their ice boxes.

Maybe find some leftover Spam or tuna casserole.

“I could really go for a fat slab of day old Spam on a wheat cracker,” Melvin thought deliriously to himself. But everyone came to their door with a shotgun hitched across their shoulder on account of the rampant infestation of colored folk who arrived from a scary state called Arkansas.

To get back to his camp, Melvin had to pass a sewage plant.

The thought of sucking on bloated turds crossed his mind, but he had food allergies and didn’t want to press his luck, since no doctor in  town accepted his snotted hankies as insurance.

Over the crackling fire, Melvin relayed the day’s food quest to his faithful companion, Buster.

“But now we gots some wieners, don’t we Buster?” He gave them a twirl over the fire, letting the flames lick them into a sizzle.

Buster whined a little, then passed out, on account of all the blood he lost from his groin trauma.

Melvin never did say where he got the other wiener, but other hobos in the camp noticed that his urinating was done in private after that night, and generally accompanied with blood-curling howls.

(Picture provided by fabulous sponsor Alyson!)

I watch So You Think You Can Dance and I’m not afraid to admit it.

Actually, I sort of am. I’ve always been so anti-American Idol that it’s almost like, “Well, what’s the difference?” I mean, aside from the obvious. You know. The one’s got singing. And the other’s got…dancing.

I’ve never really given a shit about dance before. Yes, I took Jazz in like third grade and was INCREDIBLE at step-ball-change (ask Henry! Sometimes I do it just to do it and he’s like, “Goddamn I am so lucky to have hooked myself such a skilled footed woman.” Or maybe it was “footed such a skilled fucking hooker.”). But aside from that small dalliance into the world of staged dancing, I never really noticed anything that was going on.

We started watching SYTYCD at the start of the second season auditions. Totally by accident. Chooch was a newborn. I didn’t have much else to do but stew on the couch while he sucked on my nipples. So it became something I looked forward to every week.

At first, my pedestrian eye would mock the dancers during the tryouts. I remember seeing Travis Wall for the first time and literally laughing so hard and yelling, “OMG THEY’RE GONNA MAKE FUN OF HIM SO HARD.” But then it was all, “Come get your ticket to Vegas!” I had never seen any of that lyrical/contemporary shit before. I didn’t know it was the good stuff.

But once the choreographers got their claws into the dancers, I started to understand. Wade Robson? Totally putting dance moves to the shit inside my head. Mia Michaels? I vow to have sex with her one day.

I never thought watching someone dance could make me cry. It was like the way music moved me, only now I was sobbing while watching a couple act out a scene atop a Mirah song.

I cry more during this show than any drama on TV.

My current favorite is this hot ass Mia Michaels piece from last week:

Embedding was disabled, so you have to actually click!

Two reasons I’m posting these photos:

1. I need to have curlers like those in my life again
2. That’s PURPLE in my lap in the second photo!

And also because I miss my old bedroom so much. That’s the last time I had a bedroom with actual interior design. It’s been white walls and bland furniture ever since. Then Henry moved in with me and added casually strewn socks and underwear to the floor.

Lisa was over my house one time and videotaped me dancing to Queen’s Radio Gaga with those curlers in my hair. It was not one of my finer moments. Speaking of finer moments, I need to wake Henry up so he can fulfill some obligations up in here.

I have no idea who took these pictures, which is alarming to me, since I always know everything.

I don’t know what started it. Maybe it was my fault, mentioning that some dude at The Law Firm just returned to work after serving his third tour of Duty in Iraq. But it made Alisha start talking about war. All the wars. Even wars that may or may not be happening  on Uranus right now.

She was asking questions out loud, to no one really in particular, while “Bewitched” droned on in the background. Then she started answering her own questions.

And then she second-guessed her answers. At one point, this brought her to the question of “How old is America? Didn’t we just have a bicentennial?

Wait…how many years is in a bicentennial?”

I was sitting on the chaise.

“Are you looking this up?” she asked me.

“Huh, me? No. I’m texting.”

She sank back down on the couch, defeated.

And then, “I love Shirley MacLane. She’s such a great actress.”

I agreed and followed with, “Every time I think of her, I think of her biography that my grandma kept on the coffee table for like, ten years.”

Alisha glared at me. My participation in the conversation wasn’t as film-snobby as she’d have liked. But then she distracted herself by talking about “Steel Magnolias” and the scene in the graveyard, and then I started remembering that scene too and the next thing I knew, I was crying.

“Laughter through tears is like, the greatest thing,” Alisha said with a far-off, half-deranged glint to her eyes.

I sighed. “It really is.”

*********

It was the only thing that got me through the exhausting, painful visitations at the funeral home after my pappap died. All the hand-shaking with strangers, all the pouting lips of distant relatives as they clasped my hands and tilted their head in that knowing fashion that read, “I know exactly how you feel.” My best friend Christy was there through it all with me, and we sat in two chairs tucked away in a corner, making fun of relatives I didn’t like, and asshole employees of my pappap’s drywall company who were chomping at the bit to take advantage of life at Expert Drywall without John Stonick.

We cringed as my cousin Zita flounced over to point out that she and I had chosen similar shoes to wear that night.

We cracked up as my step-dad’s friend Daryl arrived with his son Clayboy the Playboy, nee Clayton. “It’s the Claymation family,” I whispered, and we lost it some more.

I think that was the only time Christy and I ever really hugged, right there next to  my pappap’s open coffin. I wasn’t a very affectionate person back then. I guess I’m still not. Hugging is one of the many things I turn into an awkward display of misplaced hands and directionless chin-resting. She and I cried so hard standing there, reality sinking in that he was really gone. He was her family, too.

That night, we sat at the kitchen counter at my grandparent’s house, rummaging through the many fruit baskets sent out of sympathy from people we didn’t know.

“This is your boyfriend,” Christy said, turning over a small red disk of  cheese with a Dutch boy emblazoned onto the wax.

I grabbed a can of sardines. “This is your boyfriend,” I laughed, waving the cartoon depiction of a sardine in her face.

We sat there at the counter, laughing in that high-pitched way that sixteen-year-old girls are prone to, falling into each other as giggle fits overcame us.

My grandma finally kicked us out.