Happy Holidays from Matheism

There’s no greater time to show your token devotion to a higher power than Christmas. Whether it be via attending some kind of religious service during the month of December or angrily calling upon God to damn people who take your parking spot, the Lord and his or her mysterious powers of spontaneous baby-making are often invoked as the calendar creeps closer and closer to the dreaded number 25. The Methodists did NOT disappoint in providing appropriate hoopla for our viewing pleasure during the Christmas season.

Increased numbers in the fold: Not only did Voltron and I notice an uptick in warm bodies sitting in the stiff wooden pews (an extra 10 human Christians a week, I’d say, each bedecked in garish reds and reindeer patterned vests etc), but we were blessed with the brief return of a former lapsed choir member. While Uncle Fester only showed up for one day—a Sunday, I might add, which means that she inexpertly took part in the performance of an anthem that she’d never set eyes on before, no big—her ephemeral vocal presence was a thoughtful, helpful, and responsible addition to our Yuletide warbles.

Big Geezy’s Attire: Homegirl ROCKED a shiny plastic golden jacket throughout the majority of December. We were rehearsing in the sanctuary one night in preparation for our X-mas spectaculaire, and due to some really graphic plumbing issues of J. Arbuckle’s that we heard in detail but that I will not repeat here, he and Geezy were running super late. (J. Arbuckle picks her up for Wednesday night rehearsal to avoid Geezy let loose on the roads of Burlington in the pitch black.) The Oracle insisted that Voltron start us up sans Arbuckle, so we were slogging our way through some piece when Geezy made her grand entrance into the sanctuary, the bright lights bouncing off her Elvis Pressley-like overcoat, creating a blinding beacon out of her entire body. Apparently moved by our strained crooning, she parked herself in front of the group and majestically simulated the arm swings of a choir director, and for a moment, we miraculously allowed ourselves to be directed by a squat, glowing Elvis impersonator. Christmas magic.

Explaining Dirty Santa to people who are a million years old: In preparation for our Christmas choir gathering, J. Arbuckle proposed that, in addition to bringing cheddar cheese, bacon bits, and sour cream for our ultra-nutritious baked potato feast, we also bring a gift for “Dirty Santa.” Upon speaking these words, there were gasps of shock and looks of fear and scandal on the faces of our humble choir. “DIRTY?” Eddie Munster lamented. “I do not laik thayut.” J. Arbuckle backpeddled, “No! No, it doesn’t have to be inappropriate gifts. They can be legitimate presents.” The frowns and furrowed brows remained. “Well, whai do we need to give giyufts at awl?” These types of concerns were vocalized with J. Arbuckle assuring that it was just an idea and that we could simply choose not to do it. But some sense of Southern, Christian propriety meant that we had to passive-aggressively participate in whatever one person wanted to with all manner of sighs, rude looks, and undermining questions.  “Well, how expensive are these giyufts?” J. Arubuckle paused, clearly searching his brain for the answer that would offend the least. Tentatively, he offered, “Errrrr….teeeeennnnnnnnnn dollars?” Again with the gasps. “TEN?!” We negotiated down to 5 before the new line of questioning began. “Ayund do girls bring giyufts for girls and boys for boys?” J. Arbuckle was totally thrown by this bizarre question. “What?” Much confused talk finally cleared up the bruhaha and made sure that everyone understood that the gifts should not be gender specific and should be 5 dollars and under. We finally moved the conversation toward the evening’s musical selections when Jabba interrupted, “Wait a minit,” he bellowed. “So do I bring a MALE gift?” J. Arbuckle then reenacted the scene below:

before reexplaining everything.

“AH, so I get a NEUTER gift. Got it.”

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/post/71019311712/merry-christmas-from-garfield-minus-garfield

 

Bizarro Children’s Moment presentations

Children’s moment is a time during the Sunday service during which all of the people under the age of 18 parade down to the front of the church, sit on the carpeted steps, and get talked down to about how to be a good person. A different church member takes on the responsibility of making a boring pedantic babyish speech every week. The week before Christmas, the church’s 5 youths had the pleasure of being lectured by Nose Hair, the ancient husband of Frau Blucher.

One never knows what to expect from these children’s moments as they usually have some kind of boring gimmick. This time, the opening gimmicky question to the handful of children was “Do you ever get bored?” delivered by Nose Hair as he paced back and forth holding a mid-sized brown paper bag. There was a pause during which these poor souls looked at one another as if to silently ask, “Is this the? What? I mean, do we just say yes?” Eventually, one brave acolyte answered, “Yes?”

“Whadda you do when you’re bored?”

Almost simultaneously they responded, “Watch T.V.”

“Well, when I get bored around the holidays, I play with…. FROSTY.”  He opened his paper bag and pulled out a stuffed snowman, and upon squeezing its middle, a tinny electronic holiday melody eeked sadly out of the yellowed toy. At first we all laughed, but our laughter quickly fell silent as Nose Hair held up his hand mike to Frosty’s throat in attempt to amplify these songs then stared, un-moving, at these children. We were all silently wishing for a swift end to the tune, and exhaled relieved at its conclusion. “Idn’t that nice? But wait! There’s more!” He gave Frosty an additional squeeze and resumed his frightening, wide-eyed, staring position, holding the children and the church captive to this musical terror. Somehow he managed to tie this concept of relieving childhood boredom via stuffed knickknacks to relieving the ancient shepherds’ job-related boredom by being alerted to the Messiah’s birth and having to find him in a stable. I’m still a little confused by the take-home message.

Sundee Marnin' Service

Some has been said about the choir rehearsal, but nothing has been noted about Sundee marnin service. Here’s a run down of the day.

10:30 The choir gathers in our frigid underground lair to don the flowing white robes and shiny stoles that serve as our costumes for the production.

10:33 High five Big Geezy, receive my weekly cheek kiss (always so wet), and compliment her on the latest fashion creation she’s sporting. Last week, it was a bedazzled off-white sweater trimmed in thin, gold rope which apparently belonged to her (long since dead) mother in law. Flashy ladies they be. 

10:35 We almost always hear an anecdote about J. Arbuckle’s new dog, Lonelynomore, the only creature he has in his life to comfort him during his battle with gout. Yes, J. Arbuckle has gout in his knee. No, J. Arbuckle is not a 17^th century pirate; he is a 30 year old music graduate student. According to Mayo Clinic’s online compendium for hypochondriacs and self-proclaimed physicians, gout can be caused by an over consumption of “organ meats, anchovies, herring, asparagus and mushrooms,” so I’m assuming we can check those things off of our what-to-get-J-Arbuckle-for-Christmas list.

10:40 Without so much as singing a do, re, or mi in attempt to warm up our voices, we jump right in and rehearse the day’s anthem. No one remembers it from the thousand other times we rehearsed it before this moment, and it sounds like a bunch of people, disoriented from just having woken up from a nap in the middle of the day, moaning in time to a coherently performed piano accompaniment. But that’s okay, because Voltron plays our parts again, J. Arbuckle gives us a few little tips, and before we know it, it’s show time.

10:55 I ride with Big Geezy in the elevator—instead of walking the one flight of stairs—and we book it to line up with the rest of the choir who has long since queued up outside the sanctuary, lookin’ fierce in our official God gear, ready to make our grand entrance. Every week there is bickering about the various arrival times of each member—who waited for who to close the elevator door, who should have taken the stairs, etc.

10:57 We file into the sanctuary to the glorious and powerful strains of…Frau Blucher sightreading a hymn on the piano (with the occasional timidly improvised flourish). The day is good when everyone successfully mounts the THREE carpeted stairs that stand between us and the choir loft. We have had good days and bad, the most notable bad day being when Big Geezy face-planted IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE CHURCH on stair number 2 of 3. One moment we saw Geezy upright, and the next, she was down, limbs-a-flailin’. There was a gasp from the congregation and the classic momentary flub in the live piano music as a host of robed figures crowded her to offer assistance. Moments later she was on her feet, clearly embarrassed, but miraculously unbroken. 

11-12 Church happens. Prayers are prayed. Songs are sung (EVERY LAST VERSE OF EVERY HYMN). Laughtrack laughs. Sermons are preached. My favorite sermon is detailed below.

Special UMW (United Methodist Women) Service: A few Sundays ago, the laydees of the church took control and led our hour or worship, sprucing up our mundane moments (such as boring ole pastoral prayer time, where the name of every ailing, bruised, scraped, slightly headachy, and terminally ill church member is called out and wished a speedy recovery) and turning them into wildly out of control hootenannies. Behold, the UMW “Women Through the Years Slideshow Remembrance,” during which 1,000 pictures from the late 80s to mid 90s were displayed, flipping at a snail-like pace from one to the other, all with captions reading “Women Fixin’ Refreshments, Dottie Hawkins and Suella Mae Clark, 1991,” “Eating refreshments with Mildred Chancel and Frankie Simmons, 1987!” or perhaps, “Women love to eat! Cakes and pies with Susan Doyle and Dottie Mae Duncan, 1994.” The name Dottie appeared countless times.

The most amazing part of this particular service was the sermon, delivered by Roz, as in the slug-like secretary from Monsters Inc. famous for constantly chiding Mike Wazowski and droning, “Don’t forget to file your paperwork.” UMW Roz resembled the movie version insofar as they share the same stretched facial features—a wide mouth with giant, sleepy eyelids—and they both inch along laboriously, barely moving the upper body. The rest was a bit different.

Imagine, if you will, Grandpa Simpson being given the platform of the pulpit and allowed to speak for an indeterminate length of time.

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.

Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones... (Grandpa Simpson, Last Exit To Springfield, Season 4)

Now imagine William Faulkner narrating Grandpa Simpson’s inner monologue/stream of consciousness narration of this sermon. This barely comes close to expressing how entirely obfuscating, psychedelic, and impossible to follow Roz’s rambling words were.  Essentially, she strung together patchy remembrances of her time in UMW, never giving us the context for these experiences nor wrapping them up in any kind of definitive way, rather transitioning hazily into the next. Here is a partial reconstruction of one of these moments:

And then I went to the prisons. I didn’t want to go to the prisons, but I felt I needed to,    and I had a meetin’ the next town over in that prison, and in my house were SEVEN GIGANTIC boxes. SEVEN! Can you imagine? And they were open, all of ‘em. Opened up in my house when LOW AND BEHOLD, the children’s home done called. And I with SEVEN boxes in my house, well, I just about had a fit, but that’s just the way it is. And another thing I did was…

And so on. 30 minutes later, without warning or signal that things were wrapping up, she said, “Well thank you for listenin’ to my stories, and sorry for muh raspy voice,” and began her eternal descent of the 3 stairs.

On the next episode, tune in to find out who won the Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress in a Religious Mole Project. It may not be who you think!

Week 3 of Bein’ Undercover Brothers (and sisters) In Christ

Typical Wednesday Night Choir Rehearsal:

6:45 Turn into the pitch black, empty neighborhood street on which the boxy house of God stands and add our car to the handful already parked next to it.

6:50 Eavesdrop on Winzdee naight pruhyr meetin (trans: Wednesday night prayer meeting) as we enter and head for the stairs. The following was overheard the first Wednesday night, word-for-word:

The Wolf: I have the acid reflux, you ever have it? Oh, I have it so bad.

Nose Hair: Yayus, so does Lois. You know, she slipped off of her pillow and her acids started comin’ back up.

Why would pillow slippage cause the return of the acids?

6:51 Descend the stairway into the musty, damp bowels of the church and begin picking our way through the bizarre maze of corridors in attempt to reach the choir room. Make one wrong turn and you’re in the bathroom, a dreadful little hole in the wall with linoleum flooring and cracked, mauve, laminate countertops. Head for the sink and you behold a small dingy vase holding a bouquet of fake daisies (that have managed to wither and yellow like a fresh bouquet) and a basket containing two bottles of lotion, both of which are just about ¼ full and covered in that congealed and hardened lotion mass  that gathers on rarely-used containers. Somehow this whole scene is upsetting, reminiscent of an old nursing home or dentist office bathroom, and you run away as quickly as possible.

6:57 Locate the little choir room just in the nick of time and enter to be greeted by radiant, elderly faces and exclamations of “Voltron!” and “Nelson!” and “We are SOOOO happy to have you!” This inordinate praise began from the first moment we entered this space. Before they even had a moment to discern our relative worth or godliness, this group of nearly-dead were heaping upon us all manner of praise. After the very first rehearsal during which Nelson merely sightread some alto jams and Voltron hammered out some accompaniments, back row bass singer Jabba (yes, as in the Hutt) stirred from his idle position, opened his watery eyes wide and bellowed, his giant belly expanding and contracting exaggeratedly as he spoke, “You have breathed new life into this kwahr (trans: choir). We thank yuh.”

7:00 Take my seat next to the only other alto, Laughtrack, and exchange our regular greeting, “Altos are the best.” This apparently is a joke that we share. After the first rehearsal, when she was laughing and gushing about my existence then laughing some more—“Oh it’s so good to have another ayul-toh (trans: alto) in this kwahr—I responded, “Yeah, altos are the best!” and I put my hand up for her to give me a high-five. At the time, her giddy laughter did not indicate to me that she found this comment any more amusing than she did the myriad other things to which she reacted in the exact same manner. Laughtrack, a lady in her mid-sixties and always dressed in scrubs, received her blog-moniker in the most predictable way possible: by guffawing, giggling, chortling, and chuckling CONSTANTLY at everything that is uttered. However, apparently my comment about altos struck her as particularly hilarious, because the following Sunday after church, an avuncular energetic, balding man approached me and introduced himself as Laughtrack’s husband, saying, “Laughtrack told me ALL about that ayultoh joke you told! Heh! Ayultohs are the best! Whew! That’s a good one!”

7:05-8:00 John Arbuckle, our choir director, instructs Voltron to bang out the SATB parts and drags us through spotty reading of the 10 pieces we are working on for the Christmas program. (J. Arbuckle—openly gay to the secular world but has yet to come out of the sacred closet—shall be profiled at length soon.)

Laughtrack and I sit to the far left on the middle row, right in front of Jabba and his bass posse, perfectly positioned to hear him come in whole measures too early or howl out notes that have long since ended according to the music we have in front of our faces. Close to Jabba is a cohort of lady tenors, among whom is the Oracle, the wise-est and most venerated of the entire group, who I have yet to hear utter a contraction in conversation. She recently brought Voltron and Nelson an entire pecan pie inside a ceramic dish. When I assured her that we’d return the vessel in which it had been delivered to me, she insisted, “No! I shall not be wanting that to be returned! I will not be accepting it! It is yours to keep!” The rest of the crew is sopranos, including Big Geezy. Between the 13 or so of us, I’d wager that about 9 know how to read music, and of those 9, 5 may be able to do it with any kind of accuracy at any given moment.

8-8:15 J. Arbuckle opens the floor for prayer requests, and all manner of illness, injuries, and impending deaths amongst the group’s acquaintances are discussed. Bottom line: everyone is dying in the church, like, tomorrow.

8:15 Prayer and wrap-up. Usually Oracle leads the prayer, wowing all of us with her grandiose Georgia-southern drawl and her complicated and esoteric but powerful grammatical constructions. However, on rehearsal night #1 of our Methodism, J. Arbuckle insisted that we create a circle with our bodies, hold hands, and enact a kind of open-mic prayer, to be concluded with the joint singing of a verse of Amazing Grace.

I. Am. Not. Kidding.  

It was at this point that Voltron and I were both living on the verge of bursting into explosive laughter and ruining our characters entirely. As we gripped one another’s hands tightly, squeezing at every moment of hilarity, one of the bass posse members prayed, “And Lord, watch over my granddaughter, who was hit in the head with a twirlin’ flag as her marchin’ band was presenting a musical piece to the football crowds.” My body ached with the need to expel the humor from my breast as this solemn pronouncement was followed up by the warbly strains of “I-I wuuuuuuuuunce wuuuz laaaaaawst! But nooooooooooww, Ahhhhhhh’m found.”

 8:15-8:20 Return our music to our little designated cubby holes and listen to the ever-resounding pronouncements of “We love you, Nelson and Voltron!” or, as they like to call me, “Voltron’s better half,” as if I were the half of him that contained the vital organs such as the lungs, heart, and liver while he carries useless things such as the appendix, cuticles, the belly button, and an extraneous toe. We grope about in the hallway-maze, find the stairs, hop in our car, let out a good chuckle and a well-placed expletive as if to cleanse the palette then head home only to return on Sunday.

Day 1 of undercover atheism

Before entering the hallowed halls of Jehovah for the first time, Voltron and Nelson had to not only practice our reverent facial expressions (which we did much in the way that a movie protagonist amps him or herself up in the mirror before asking someone out on a date, trying out potential introductory phrases or coy smiles, except for in our case, we were workshopping the patented praise-song hand-raise accompanied by the serious head-nod and upward gaze) but also had to nail the wardrobe. Voltron opted for a Ned Flanders, khakis-and-green sweater look while I went more in a teacherly direction: ever-so-slightly high-waisted (in other words, not high enough to be high-waisted on purpose thus falling somewhere in the mom-jeans fit area) black pants that billow out awkwardly in the hip/mid-thigh region and an innocuous, cream-colored sweater. Perfect attire for not only avoiding a display of sexuality but for also actively repulsing others around me with my body.

It was in these getups that we first infiltrated the new scene of our undercover atheism, ready to get to the bottom of this institution. Unfortunately, I did not immediately get a chance to test out my character as, upon arrival, Voltron was whisked away by a stalwart, no-nonsense woman who we shall refer to as Frau Blucher, and I was left in the parlor to wait as Frau and other members of the committee interrogated him to ascertain his godliness and piano abilities. From the parlor, however, I was able to come to several immediate conclusions about the nature of this establishment. For example, two tiny, tacky chandeliers on an enormous ceiling bespoke the failed attempt at cultivating an atmosphere of grandiosity and luxury for the lord; the card table on which the Operation Christmas Child pamphlets were fanned out foretold a neediness-only-exists-far-away-and-neediness-consists-of-lacking-toiletries philosophy of service; and the claw-foot, rigidly upholstered, rock-hard divan on which I sat prophesied that the mean age of these particular churchgoers was probably something around 70.

The latter hypothesis was bolstered by the subsequent arrival of Big Geezy. Coming in at a solid 4 foot 10, this ancient woman ambled into the parlor as her ride to and from church that night, John Arbuckle (the choir director, yet to be introduced…will come later), sped quickly through the sitting area, waved a hello, and darted away to attend to official, secret church business. She introduced herself and plopped down next to me on the divan, and within 5 minutes I had learned the bulk of her life story. Here’s the upshot: everyone she’s ever known or loved (two husbands, 9 brothers and sisters, other relatives) is dead. She lives in a 5 bedroom, 3-car garage home of loneliness. She can barely see 5 feet in front of her, yet somehow succeeded into getting her driver’s license renewed. As she told the story of that most recent trip to the DMV, her weak, bony legs dangled off the couch not reaching the floor, and her shiny gold slippers fell off one by one onto the carpeted floor revealing gnarly toes withered and bent to one side as if a great wind had blown them permanently in the same direction. Fearful of seeming rude by staring, trance-like at her feet, I concentrated now on her face, but was seized with the desire to run my finger over the deeply corrugated skin of her upper lip. HOW CAN SKIN BE SO LOOSE?

We spent an hour together waiting for the great pianist-finding-committee tribunal to end and choir rehearsal to begin, in which time I developed a warm feeling for Big Geezy. Between her lamenting having prettied-herself up for her driver’s license renewal appointment, insisting that “the man in the DMV would have treated me better had I spent all night drunk in a car and walked in that morning stinking of alcohol” and her singing an ode to the beauty and excellence of rocking chairs (“I could rock and rock and rock all day.”), I decided that she needs to be our church friend. Think of the amazing parties we could throw in that giant house and how grateful she would be for the company of whomever in the world decided to show up. We could paper the whole town with invites, open the doors, and watch magic unfold. The objectives for our undercover operations are shaping up, but number 1 on the list is to befriend Big Geezy in a serious way.

In the coming installments: recap of the sermon entirely based on the movie Gravity, get-to-know-the-choir, and hunting out the insidious shadow people.

From one snake-charming institution to another...

It’s been over two years since Nelson blew his cover at Podiatry. Two years since I’ve had a front row seat to the circus of consumerism. Two years since I played usher to the clambering crowds coming to worship at the altar of material goods. Two years since I submitted my body as a pawn to the gods of capitalism, becoming the fitting room snake charmer and luring others to bend to the gods’ wills and purchase, purchase, purchase! And oh what delights, wonders, and horrors did I discover. It is only right, then, that Nelson’s next persona be in an equal position of wooing others, of appealing to emotions, of using rhetoric to persuade the masses to join in a great and influential machine that is over and above them with a force seemingly too great to counter. Thus Nelson, no longer a Podiatrist, stripped himself of the chunky jewelry, grew out the edgy haircut, and hung up the color-blocked tees only to don the billowy, ankle-length, skin-covering sack-like garb of the righteous. Nelson Mandela is a Methodist.  

Just as Podiatry was at the same time a social experiment and a means of cash-getting, Methodism currently serves as a source of income for my household. My spouse, who will henceforth be known as Voltron, has recently wrested a Methodist church pianist position from the cold, bureaucratic, nearly-dead fingers of the pianist-finding committee. In an act of solidarity, I have agreed to not only attend this institution but lend my snake charming voice to the alto section of the church’s choir. Just as he did at Podiatry, at church, Nelson will play a part; this time, Nelson shall play the part of the devout, crafting a character with the right dress, turns of phrase, and, of course, the perfect prayerfully communing with Jesus face. 

Stay tuned to the next post for the introduction of a few of the cast members: Big Geezy and Nose Hair.

Blunder # 3: Nelson’s mask comes off

Podiatry boasts a “generous” discount for its employees.  If we desire a full-priced item of clothing, we pay a mere 60% of the full price.  If we desire a home item, we pay 75% of the price.  Anything on sale, however, is available to us at the price listed on the tag.  But every once in awhile, when employees are least expecting it, the company announces, via email, surprise periods of time during which ALL goods are 40% off to its employees.  These periods are called (for the purposes of this blog) THE AGE OF PODIATRY.  

Being excellent times to actually purchase some quality things for somewhat reasonable prices, all employees look forward to THE AGE OF PODIATRY.  We whisper excitedly and semi-constantly about when the next AGE may be.  “Haven’t had an AGE in awhile, you think it’s coming?”  “I heard we’d have an AGE after this next markdown.  I sure hope so.”  “I’m waiting for an AGE until I buy that vase.”

A few weeks ago, we got the messiah of all emails: “Announcing THE AGE OF PODIATRY now through Sunday!”  It had, indeed, come immediately after a payday; they get you right when you’ve got cash in the coffers.  Having only purchased a few candles throughout my time as an employee and anticipating the overwhelming number of August birthdays I have marked on my calendar (3 family members, 4 good friends), I suddenly decided that it was time to break down and truly give in to THE AGE OF PODIATRY.

I meant to do my shopping immediately after a shift when I was still in costume and makeup, but once my time to clock out came round, all I could think of was getting out of there.  The days left in the AGE were dwindling, and I had yet to do my massive bout of shopping.  As I scrubbed the bathtub while a pot of mustard greens were steaming on the stove (I was cleaning the house and making dinner for a pair of friends coming to stay the night), I realized with horror that if I did not stop what I was doing and dash immediately to Podiatry, I’d miss my window of savings.

But what about Nelson?  If I went then and there, it’d be ME going into Podiatry, NOT Nelson.  I needed an hour at least to get into character, and what with the dinner to prepare and the catbox left to clean, I didn’t have that kind of time to spend on my facade.  The choice was clear: get in and get out as quickly as possible.

As I drove over to Podiatry, I began to realize fully just what a grand mistake this was.  I’d chosen the entirely WRONG moment to be caught without a disguise.  The miserly side of me refuses to let our thermostat go below 78 even on the hottest of days; thus I was particularly sweaty and red-faced from a day of cleaning at that moment.  My outfit of choice: oversized, burlap-resembling shorts and a faded racerback tee that I claimed after finding in a dryer somewhere.  Oh, and a sports bra.  I smelled like bleach-cleaner and sweat.  My legs were unshaven.  My hair looked like a mushroom cloud around my head.  

It was in this state that I rushed madly into the store, carrying my own bag and shoveling things in it left and right.  I ran into Tiny Tim first.  He gave me not just a once over, but a twice and three-times-over, his head literally moving from the top of my body to my shoes three times in order to fully take in the horror he was witnessing.  “Yeah, heh, I know, I’m uh...still cleaning my house! Haha!  But I ran over here in the middle of chores because I just, you know need some...” I looked at what I was clutching in my hands--dish towels for my mother-in-law-- “dishtowels with birds on them!  Haha!”  He smiled an odd smile and pranced away on his chopstick legs.  

I dashed from fixture to fixture, hiding behind towers of candles or racks of long dresses to conceal myself yet could not seem to escape coming across other coworkers as the floor was crawling with them on what seemed to be a busy sales day:  Zebulon, Mama Skaggs, and of course Moonblood who I’ve come to dread as of late.  (Moonblood’s one of those who literally ends every shift with a clothing purchase, wearing only the latest fashions displayed in the store...never seen her repeat an outfit...and how can she afford all of these luxuries?...living at home and spending all of her Podiatry earnings on body-coverings, not on rent or food.)  Moonblood had just returned from a 2 week family vacay to various European countries.  “Oh wow, I guess I haven’t seen you in about 3 weeks then,” she said in reaction to me as she rung up my pile of purchases, giving me the thrice-over as did Tiny Tim.  When not regarding with curiosity the things I was buying, her slit-like eyes were burning into my body, deconstructing the mess she observed before her and trying to connect me with Nelson.  

My things unnecessarily wrapped up in the signature Podiatry tissue paper and thin packing tape, I headed for the door, weaving in and out of the various fixtures obstructing my quick exit, turning a last time to see my colleagues puzzled faces turned in my direction.  

The ruse was up.  

Nelson's final bow

Here I sit on the couch, out of breath after a frantic on-foot trip to Walgreens where I went--slightly tipsy--in order to attend to an emergency: the cats were hungry and we’d already served them the last scoop of dried pellets to be found in the bag.  I had just consumed a single Paulaner hefeweizen and one third of a glass of 2 week old cabernet sauvignon (to be fair, I thought it was fresh).  As I jetted out of the house in the direction of the little store, I realized in the light of the evening sun that my dark brown cotton dress was covered in short, white animal hairs.  "Great,” I muttered to myself, “this’ll just add to my prowess...bloodshot eyes, ashy, chlorine-coated skin, stiff, unkempt hair; I’m gonna turn some heads in there.”  After an afternoon at the mini water-park with a four year old, I was left suffering from a stubbed toe, a mild case of housewife’s knee, and the beginnings of pinkeye.  Limping a bit from my pool injuries and swaying slightly to and fro from the influence of one unit alcohol taken on a relatively empty stomach, I was pleased to find few people in Walgreens and hastily conducted the transaction.    

But I’m home now.  My weekend babysitting gig is through, the cats are satiated, and I’ve just discovered a fresh bottle of merlot.    

This is my life: living in a sports bra and cotton tees from one errand to the next, having fun cooking with my man friend, then worrying about how long I can leave the dishes in the sink before they start attracting fruit flies.  When I’m me and not Nelson, I don’t worry about ruching or empire waists or “back interest” and nerdy chicness.  And now I can be me all the time.  Let the celebrating begin!  

My run as Nelson came to an end at noon yesterday.  As the curtain fell for the last time, I slipped out backstage, opting not to take an elaborate series of final bows preferring to make a quiet exit.  An arduous child-wrangling afternoon ahead of me, I needed to avoid a long chorus of cutesy goodbyes from my coworkers.  So I drove away from Podiatry for the last time like it was any other day.

I’ll reflect on the experience in this space as opposed to trying to process it while still in the store, surrounded by things that I felt a serious urge to buy and by people who, while nice, I never felt at home with.  In the end, my time at Podiatry was a lot different than I expected, and I learned a lot.  After explaining blunder number 3, the blunder that heralded the end of Nelson’s career, I will begin to pick apart the Podiatry world, examining its constituent parts, and making conclusions about this wacky world in which we live.