Appetizer: Do you button shirts top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top?
Top to bottom. Doesn’t everybody? You know how women’s buttons are on the left, and men’s buttons are on the right? Maybe it’s the other way around. I’m a little confused because I wore my yellow kimono today. I’ll get back to you/beaten up on my walk home through Downtown Crossing.
Soup: What is your favorite sandwich?
Those deep-fried Monte Cristos you get at Bennigans. Take a grilled cheese sandwich, and use mayonnaise to grill it instead of butter. Then dip it in batter and deep fry it. Then remove your heart from your chest, roll it in rough sawdust and place it back into your cavity like some sort of indecisive Mola Ram.
Salad: What was a family project you helped work on as a child?
My father built a sweet treehouse for me when I was a yute, and I suppose I must have helped a little bit. He took two computer crates, back when computers were the size of refrigerators, and stacked them on top of each other next to a 15 foot dead tree. He cut a door in the front, and then a ladder went up through both crates – so it was like a two-story apartment. Then he covered the crates in split logs so it looked like a cabin. The ladder continued up through the top of the upper crate and onto a big rickety deck he built on top of the stump. It was amazing and I will see if I can find and scan an old photo (update: found and scanned). There has never been a better treehouse in which to play doctor. Thanks, Kathy, wherever you are. Although I remember killing a lot of frogs in there, too. Jesus, that’s hot.
A note on the photo – that’s my Grandmother, Claire, in the aviators holding the Yorkie (Buffy) and her friend Pat standing behind me – we’re a good 3 stories off the ground. Pat was a nice lady, but looked an awful lot like Roger Ebert. The photo was taken in Manotick, Ontario circa 1981. The beginning of my obsession with Raiders of the Lost Ark was only weeks away.
Main Course: When have you acted phony?
I was privvy to a nasty secret once, between a group of very close friends, that I pretended to be completely ignorant of for several days. I eventually, and for very good reason that I can’t go into, spilled the beans and subsequently created a string of incidents that got very ugly indeed. I’m sure you’ve all been there. And probably with the same horrible, cum-dumpster of a girl. How is she, by the way? What’s the matter? She can’t call nobody?
Dessert: Do you write letters or postcards? If so, to whom?
Your Mom. I send checks to people who send me bills. So there’s a bit of give and take there. It’s sorta like a relationship with a pen pal, you could say. A dirty penpal, who always wants something from you. I am in an unhealthy, abusive pen pal relationship with NStar.
Roger Ebert. Hilarious.
Lovely woman. But on the inside.