Category: UPSETTING DAY
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Quick, what’s your favorite children’s musical Broadway show that ends with the main character eating the heart of her best friend? Miss Piggy’s Foot Fetish Funtime Hour? Hmm, I’ve never seen that one. My favorite is Raggedy Ann The Musical. The only Broadway musical for kids with a menacing haunted carnival theme.
The Raggedy Ann musical has a cult following among weird musical theater nerds because its songs are kind of catchy but everything else, from its costuming to the set design to every element of the story, seems like it’s explicitly designed to make a child cry. You can’t convince me that anyone involved in this production liked children. I’m an adult, and I had a nightmare about being chased by clowns after watching a bootleg VHS recording of this show some hateful maniac uploaded to Youtube.
Broadway musicals always have an “I Want song” in the first act that establishes what’s driving the main character. Raggedy Ann’s main character is a little girl named Marcella, and what she wants is to not die. She’s very ill, which we know because three doctors in clown wigs stand on her bed and sing to her about it.
The actual lyrics for the, again, weirdly catchy song are:
♪“Because you’re sick, sick, sick
and you’re not getting better quick, quick, quick
You’re sick, sick, sick
and we think you’re gonna die!”♪
Grapevine, grapevine, two, three four. The clown straddles Marcella so he can jump up and down on her bed as he tells her she’s dying.
♪“You’re sick, sick, sick
Your future isn’t worth a lick, lick, lick
Yeah, you’re sick, sick, sick,
and we know you’re gonna diiiiiie! Hmmmm”♪
Marcella has the saddest life ever. She says her Mother abandoned her, but her Dad’s like, “No, she didn’t abandon you. Remember she was kidnapped.” Which, I guess, he thinks is the healthier thing for Marcella to believe. It seems like there’s something more light-hearted than kidnapping this musical about a clown doll could have gone with as a lie about her mother’s absence, but its writers have never heard of a sad thing that they didn’t want to add into this jaunty musical.
Immediately after discovering that Marcella’s mother abandoned her, we also learn her dog, Red Fang, ate her pet bird, Tweety, and choked to death on its feathers. This is kind of played as a joke, but it’s extremely important to the plot later.
At the risk of writing the most disturbing sentence of all time, Marcella’s dad, being scolded for his alcoholism by clown doctors as they high kick offstage in front of his dying daughter, tells her that her toys come to life when she sleeps. He sews a candy heart into the Raggedy Ann doll he makes for her and puts it into her toy box. When she falls asleep, one by one, the toys start climbing out of the toy box, and each one is more menacing than the last.
There’s Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, of course, but there’s also a baby doll that uses baby talk and kind of flops around like a real baby. And also a panda with a human face and an extremely racist accent. Since this was made in 1984, I’d, of course, expect nothing less.
It seems like William Gibson, who wrote the book for this musical, was trying to do an experimental Freudian thing, where this kid with the shittiest life travels through her own psyche and solves all of her problems. The moral of the story is something like, “Have you tried not being sad?” The characters are constantly like, “Maybe you wouldn’t be dying if you didn’t have such a bad attitude, Marcella.” How about instead of bitching about your imminent death, you get up and DANCE FOR ME.”
The show’s villain is called general D when he first appears, but he reveals that the D stands for Doom after about five minutes. He’s recruiting for his army of the dead, and he says he’s going to take Marcella with him by sunrise and maybe also marry her? He has two sidekicks with him: a sexy ’80s bat who pole dances at one point…
… and a dog man he keeps on a leash who continuously harasses the bat by biting her and licking her neck. This whole musical is like a Bingo card of the worst things I can possibly think of.
A fun fact about the villains is that the actor who played General D was dying of terminal cancer and passed away a year after the first round of performances. Anyway, enough real-life tragedy! Let’s get back to the whimsical, pretend tragedy!
Marcella, Raggedy Ann, and company are somehow transported via the General, or possibly just dream logic to, “The Miami shipyard where all dolls go to die.” There they meet a sad camel who sings a song about how life isn’t worth living because no one loves him. God, I know this sounds like a creepypasta and looks like security camera footage of an Insane Clown Posse brawl, but I swear it’s real.
The song is called blue, and here’s a little taste of the lyrics:
♪“When you’re wrinkled and cold
and your fortune has all been told
and you’re nobody’s ‘I love you’
How can you be happy?
How can you be smiling?
How can you be anything but low-down, saggy, and blue?
Sad but true.”♪
It’s yet another moment in a play for children about processing their emotions where someone says, “I’m sad,” and the overwhelming response from the rest of the cast is, “How about you shut the fuck up about it, and we all move on?” The camel’s costume is also a great example of how each costume in the play is somehow scarier than the last. His head was a puppet, and while he was singing, someone was making it blink and making the ears move, but the eyelids weren’t on quite right, so if he fully shut his eyes, the top of his eyelid would pop off. This meant he had this half-lidded stoned look for most of the musical.
Anyway, Raggedy Ann decides that since Marcella has tried every other doctor and they all say she’s dying, maybe he should ask the doll doctor to fix her. The toys and the camel turn Marcella’s bed, which was transported with them to the Miami shipyard where all dolls go to die, into a boat, and start to travel to see the doll doctor. A sea monster attacks them, so they turn the boat into an airplane and go up into the sky where the clouds, sun, moon, and stars all sing a bullshit song about being happy which doesn’t belong in this musical at all.
It’s like someone had a seizure and decided to do a children’s song for three minutes, but when you put it next to everything else going on in this musical, it just becomes haunting. I’ve never seen tap-dancing look so menacing.
Don’t worry. Things go back to their comfortable place of extreme darkness reasonably quickly when the bat attacks the sky boat, and all the characters end up on the roof of an Oklahoma meat processing plant. And also don’t worry, they make sure to tell the kids in the audience it smells like “burning bones.”
Here it’s revealed that the bat and the dog are actually Marcella’s dead bird and dog but like, as zombies, I guess? Anyway, it doesn’t matter because pretty soon, General D gets mad at the bat and, no shit, strangles her to death on stage and then shoves her through a glowing red trap door to Hell. You know, just in a case there was a single child in the audience still untraumatized at this point.
If you thought that was going to be the only death in this musical, strap the fuck in, boys, because next, we cut to the Gastly Woods, a set I think is supposed to symbolize, no shit, a suicide forest. My supporting evidence for this is that there are skeletons painted in amongst the trees in kind of an arty way, and the character we meet there is a woman who is trying to kill herself by hanging, but she can’t tie the knot right.
This woman turns out to be Marcella’s Mother, who sings a weirdly perfect and haunting ballad called “What Did I Lose?” about her regret at leaving Marcella behind because she felt like she was losing herself in motherhood. Genuinely, if this power ballad had gone in any other musical in the ’80s we might have been singing it instead of “Memory” at our high school musical auditions. What is it doing surrounded by psychotic clowns and suicidal camels?
Marcella forgives her mother for leaving her, and just as their tearful reunion begins, the dog attacks everyone, causing them to scatter. They wake up in a hospital run by the clown doctors from the beginning. There’s another run-in with General D., and when they escape him, they find the doll doctor in a dungeon-type deal below the regular hospital.
Another example of this show going way too hardcore is how the stairway in the doll doctor’s cell is stuffed with tons of nude broken doll limbs. It’s the little touches that make a show like this pop, you know?
I spoiled the ending in the intro, so you know the doll doctor tells Marcella that she has to eat Raggedy Ann’s heart, and for two seconds, Raggedy Ann, who’s been all about saving Marcella up until this point, is like, “But I only have one heart!” So the children in the audience who are slow can do the math and realize, yep, Raggedy Ann is definitely going to die. She’ll join the bat in Hell, I guess!
Marcella is understandably conflicted about devouring her friend’s mortal flesh, but everyone else is chanting, “do it, do it!” Eventually, she gives in to peer pressure and eats the whole heart Daenerys Targaryen style while looking directly out across the audience. It’s chewy, and it takes a long time.
General D. takes the heartless corpse of Raggedy Ann in Marcella’s place, and Marcella wakes up from her dream feeling miraculously better. This implies that either the dream was real and she actually ate her friend’s heart, or she was never sick in the first place, and the dream was about processing her trauma and forgiving her absent mother, which allowed her to stop faking being sick for attention. Her dad offers to give Raggedy Ann a new candy heart, so hopefully that does something even though General D already took her to Hell?
Yeah, there’s clearly a reason this show only lasted five (5) performances on Broadway before closing. One reviewer said it “made Macbeth look like Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm.” When it was still in previews, a woman hated it so much that she reported it to the local news who did a segment I imagine was titled, “The Suicide By Hanging Scene That Might Be Hiding In Your Kids Musical About A Heart Devouring Doll.”
However, there was one group of people who absolutely lost their shit for this show– Russians. Somehow this monstrous thing was part of a cultural exchange with Russia, and instead of starting a war, it became a huge hit. They advertised it as, “The show that took Moscow by storm,” which was yet another mark against it during the Regan era. So, that’s why you might never have heard of the best musical ever written (that included a scene where the main character ate her friend’s heart.)
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Josh Fabian, who also has a candy organ you can eat.
When I was a kid, my grandmother recorded a documentary for me on VHS about dogs. Grandma didn’t know that what she actually recorded wasn’t so much a documentary as a bizarre milieu of reenactments, staged scenes and ridiculous personal dog stories – almost exclusively from a town in Australia called Mossman. This documentary is bonker butts. I can’t stress that enough. For years I would describe what I only knew from childhood as “the doggy tape” to people and no one believed it actually existed. I’d say “there’s a reenactment scene of a pelican kidnapping a chihuahua and the chihuahua plays itself!” While this description was too much for people to believe, the actual scene is much weirder and more beautiful than I could ever convey.
After years of searching, I found it. tHe WOnDerfUl WOrLd oF DOGS.
It’s a documentary by Mark Lewis. He’s some sort of deranged animal-based libertarian documentarian judging by his only other documentary, Cane Toads (which is almost as batshit as tWWOD.) Let me tell you, nothing I can say will do this film justice. But seeing as it’s only streaming on one obscure site and costs money, I’ll try my best. (Also, many humans in the film are not introduced by name so I’ll refer to them by their relationship to dogs.)
The most prevalent storytelling methods in The Wonderful World Of Dogs seem to fall into three categories: Interviews with reenactments, staged scenes, and vendettas.
For a non-crime-based documentary, this film sure has a LOT of reenactments. And boy, do they deliver on drama. The best reenactment is the saga of Pebbles, the chihuahua who may or may not have been kidnapped by a pelican. When we first see lil’ Pebbles, she’s expertly extracting and chomping down on the patty from a big mac. Pebbles is a chunky lil’ doggie for her exceptionally tiny size. Her eyes are big and round and blank as hell. So cute. Pebbles’ owner looks and sounds like what we Americans think a British nanny looks and sounds like. Said owner lists various human foods Pebbles likes, explaining that her chihuahua probably loves spicy food because she’s Mexican.
This is when our harrowing story starts. Pebbles’ owner says they were on holiday at a beach when people started warning her not to let the dog down near “the pelicans.” Her fear is palpable. She claims pelicans have kidnapped and flown away with chihuahuas in the past and we get a glorious close up on Pebbles dubbed with a fearful gulp sound effect. Pebbles’ helicopter mom says of the pelicans, “They would’ve taken her, she’s so little, they would’ve taken her!” And we fade into a beautiful reenactment. I can’t stress enough how well shot this is. Pebbles’ mom and Pebbles play themselves. There’s twilight zone-esque royalty free music, a nefarious gang of real pelicans, a pelican puppet CARRYING PEBBLES OVER A BACKDROP OF THE SKY and dropping her on the beach as her owner sobs– basically everything you could possibly want in a pelican-kidnap-based reenactment. It’s shot like the most harrowing crime recreation you’d find on Investigation Discovery. You just have to see it. You have to fucking see it. (By the way, it’s not even clear whether or not Pebbles’ mom believes this DID happen or just that it could have happened.)
Other reenactments include (but are not limited to): a British woman who picked wild mushrooms and served them at a dinner party while her dog barked like mad. The dog finally eats the mushrooms and dies to demonstrate the dangers of their food (since the dog is dead it is played by an actor.) The Brits get their stomachs pumped.
There’s a reenactment of the time George Bush Sr’s staff had two dogs shot on a runway so his plane could land, because of course they did. I know they didn’t shoot the dogs in this reenactment. Right? One of them is just playing dead? I only ask because the makers of The Wonderful World of Dogs seem willing to do anything for their art.
Another interview/reenactment features a mailman whose dog-related trauma seems very real. You can feel his fear as he describes these big yard dogs dog-calling him like he’s a piece of meat. Obviously the filmmakers have this poor beleaguered mailman reenact being attacked by a dog. This ends with a close up shot of his glasses falling onto the pavement, a trope most movies save for, like, death. I don’t know if the mailman received therapy after this.
Some of the staged scenes in The Wonderful World Of Dogs could also be considered reenactments and/or are part of the two prominent vendettas in the film. So I’ll discuss some of the staged scenes that seem more like filler? Color? I don’t know but they’re glorious. “Street dogs” are shooed away by citizens who just happen to be standing there at the right time, yelling PERSONAL INSULTS at the dogs. These “street dogs” are wearing collars. One steals from a butcher shop. I’ve thought about these scenes a lot, because if someone said “I’m going to make a documentary about dogs” you’d think they were just going to film dogs’ natural behavior. Getting multiple dogs to conform to a storyboard seems like a lot. But Mark Lewis had a vision. He had the dogs. And he had some random Australians stand in the street to yell insults at the dogs.
A bulldog lover whose house is littered with porcelain bulldogs even the kitchiest grandma would find tacky is interviewed with his current bulldog. She’s jowly and jittery, the best combination. The dog is constantly trying to jump off his lap and, I think, eat the camera? Her owner explains that his droopy lil’ bullsnort loves to attack a particular TV news host and turns it on to demonstrate. The bulldog attacks the TV with lust and vigor the likes of which you’ve never seen.
A gentle looking brunette woman explains that her poodle, Kisses, showers with her. She showers with Kisses to demonstrate. She has no qualms about being nude on camera (props to her) but I guess none of the dogs do either.
Also, because it’s the late 80s/early 90s, she has the same hair as her poodle. They use the same shampoo.
They own matching outfits. Nobody let this lady have a daughter! After the shower we are treated to a poodle fashion show.
The bulldog and poodle scenes are more like demonstrations of dog behavior under proper conditions, whereas other staged scenes are definitely just, uh, scenes. Like, scripted scenes, but in a documentary and starring dogs.
For example, a very scripted scene shows a lovely young couple saying “Goodbye! Be good!” to their stubby (Australian cattle dog mix?) doggie before they go out, after which the dog promptly destroys everything and sets fire to the house with Christmas lights.
My favorite staged scene is something else entirely. It involves two large, lean brown dogs fucking over porn music. It’s dubbed by HUMANS panting and grunting. There are doggie style POV shots just like in real porn. Are we supposed to view this like real porn? How many people were involved in making this? Is it some sort of crime? What did the filmmakers do to get the dogs fucking on camera? Asking questions of a Mark Lewis documentary is pointless, but I do it anyway because I feel dirty. The proper way to watch this film is just to bask in the bizarre. Let it wash over you. Let yourself feel every moment of this filthy fuckfest:
The Wonderful World of Dogs features two prominent vendettas. One is between Mossman City Councilman Screwby and a German Shorthaired Pointer named Fugly. The other is between a woman in Mossman and dog poop. These vendettas are long, drawn out, and filled with way more rage than any of us could expect. In fact, the Saga Of Fugly takes up most of the film. I’ll touch on the finer points of these longstanding grudges, starting with dog poo lady.
A middle aged woman in her very ’80s kitchen sits at a typewriter that’s presumably only been used to write angry letters. Her blue eyeliner matches her blue typewriter which matches her blue shirt and blue porcelain babies. If she believes blue is calming, it’s not working. She smokes a cigarette mournfully and tells a chilling tale about dogs pooping on the city-owned patch of grass in front of her house. That’s right, the dogs aren’t even pooping on her property. From the lengths she’s gone to in order to stop them, you’d think the dogs of Mossman spread their floppy doggie buttcheeks and laid a fat poo directly in her mouth.
Some of the methods she says she’s used to stop dogs pooping on the grass are:
- Calling the city council
- Calling the sanitation department
- Calling the parks department
- Calling the sanitation department again
- Cayenne pepper (she pronounces it canine pepper in some sort of Freudian slip, the dogs have taken her mind, nothing lives there but the dogs.)
- Moth balls
- Turpentine
- Ammonia (how is the grass still alive?)
- Teriyaki sticks in the ground
- Fennel
- Calling the city council again
- Chemical laden water bottles (They work for a bit, but humans destroyed them- I’m guessing local dogs got sick or something.)
- Asking the city council to let her replace the grass with concrete (they say no.)
This woman also voices over the end credits to complain, once more, about the dog poop.
By far the most prominent story in this film is the saga of Councilman Screwby and Fugly (as far as I could hear, and believe me I kept rewinding to make sure, this IS the dog’s name.)
Fugly is a dog who escapes from his home to roam the town and make friends. He’s a very friendly brown and white dog whose jowls bounce and collar jingles when he walks. Other than knocking over the occasional trash can, the charges against Fugly seem to just be ‘roaming without a leash’ which, granted, is dangerous for Fugly himself (despite the mayor of Mossman claiming he saw Fugly press the button to use a crosswalk. There’s a staged scene of this because of course there is.)
We see interviews with owners of various shops where Fugly spends his days including a tire shop that hides him when the dog catcher is called (the dog catcher also loves Fugly and regrets caging him on so many occasions).
City councilman Screwby, however, is not pleased. Sitting calmly in his very beige office, it seems like he’s trying to cultivate the image of a reasonable man who does NOT call the dog catcher on a single dog every day. A man who does not troll the streets day and night, looking for his one doggie nemesis. Perhaps he is a reasonable man. Maybe this documentary is biased in Fugly’s favor. Screwby’s interviews are so perfectly poised, yet so perfectly insane. Screwby talks about Fugly like he would an actual criminal. Seriously, you have to watch him talk about this dog.
Most glaringly, The Wonderful World of Dogs teaches you ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT DOGS. Not from a biological standpoint, breeding, training, behavior, rescue, or um, anything. But if nothing else, this film lives up to its name. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to watch this perfectly demented piece of cinema. I tried to tell you. I wrote a whole thing. You just read it. But I can’t fully describe it all. You have to watch this shit.
There are so many things that make people smile. I bet you could think of a thousand and three of them if you really had to! Well, meet Lisa Birnbach, Ann Hodgman, Patricia Marx, three “authors” who took that bet as a team and lost.
Lisa, Ann, and Patricia published 1,003 Great Things to Smile About in 2004, seven years after they wrote 1,003 Great Things About Getting Older and two years after 1,003 Great Things About Moms. Which is crazy because it means that after publishing 3,009 ideas, anyone looking at their life’s work would say, “Those old ladies only had one idea.”
Much like the disorganized thoughts of the authors, I’m going to go through 1,003 Great Things to Smile About randomly. Not that anyone would know since Lisa, Ann, and Patricia don’t number the entries in any of their 1,003 Wet Mental Coughs books. But I promise I did not make up a single one of these. Let’s start smiling.
This is the perfect one to start with because at first glance this seems cute, right? A book of 1,002 more of these would be adorable right up until the existential pointlessness was too great to ignore. It’d be a perfect work of art demonstrating how fleeting moments of pleasure with no purpose makes you nothing. You’re a houseplant mindlessly turning toward sunlight.
But let’s step back from the cosmic despair of this book. Imagine you saw a cookie shaped and decorated like a little shoe. Aww. You love it. Now some fucking asshole walks up and goes, “There are some great cookie-cutter shapes out there!” as if the source of your joy was recent innovations in the cookie cutter consumer market. As if your smile came not from the tiny, crispy shoe you can eat but from how making them is easier than ever thanks to all those shapes out there! Not only does this entry from 1,003 Great Things to Smile About fail to inspire happiness, but any hypothetical stranger saying these exact words they chose would destroy any cookie joy you were already feeling.
So let’s be clear, before we go any further: This book is so bad at its easy, easy job that if you ever smiled at the specific things it mentions, you won’t anymore. And more bad news for smiles: the next entry is just “Bleach.”
Yes, that’s the whole thing.
You know that relatable feeling when you find your keys? What if I told you I wasn’t going anywhere with that? That my words were leading to no second point or analogy, and the idea of a smile you might get from finding hypothetical keys was the whole thing! Where are you going!? My friends Lisa and Ann and I have over one thousand more!
It d-doesn’t have to be keys! Maybe you found an umbrella!
The closest thing this book has to context is when Lisa, Ann, or Patricia follow a train of thought through their brain. Like maybe an entry is “The Eiffel Tower” and the next one is “baguettes.” You, if you’re being generous, can put the puzzle pieces together and realize, “One of these ungifted writers is trying to tell me they remembered France.” But there were no clues for this one. “We’re number one!” suddenly appeared in the middle of generic life experiences and names of TV shows. What? How? Maybe they included some clues as to why anyone would publish hundreds of their brain’s saddest misfires?
That was fast.
Okay, it looks like these women also get bitten by a lot of diseased wild animals.
I say 1,003 Great Things to Smile About offers no context, but that’s not entirely true. A slightly different version of this entry is on the back cover. “Your son remembers your birthday… and doesn’t reverse the charges!” is the first example they show to potential customers. What does this mean? Well, it means they take for granted you have a son currently away at college and you’re both using phone technology from several years before the book’s publish date, but it also means they were trying. Someone went in and tinkered with this, and maybe other entries. This isn’t an Alzheimer’s patient noticing things as a nurse rolls her to the sunroom. This is three professional writers and their publisher doing their best. Try smiling now.
The lanyard is not imperfect. What more do you need!?
Smile! The flowers can see you!!!
After reading more, I’m not sure all these entries were meant to go in the book. Some of these might have been phone messages for the other authors.
And some of them might be their dying words.
If three old ladies want to rate which woman is prettiest and be happy when their opinion is validated, that’s fine. Not fine, but pathetic beneath any contempt. Here’s what is worth mentioning, though: according to Google, Miss Idaho has never won Miss America or Miss USA. Lisa, Ann, and Patricia are so out of ideas they’re writing down fabricated memories of beauty pageants they didn’t watch. I came here to make fun of lame, saccharin tidbits, but this is like watching a very special chimpanzee get thrown into an incinerator by a lab assistant who doesn’t know how to say, “Me, alive. Me, can think” in sign language.
What? You goddamn idiots are on the record rooting for Miss Idaho! You wrote it down in your fucking book! In a hypothetical situation you made up! Not only do you openly love the Miss America pageant, you create actual false memories of times you enjoyed watching it! Fuck you! I hope the next one is an actual nice one so I can calm down.
God fucking damn it! Just one genuinely happy thing! Please!
FUUUUUCK!
W-what? Look, I don’t know what’s going on. I ran this page through the scanner because I didn’t think you’d believe me if I told you one of the entries in this book about great things to smile about was, and I quote, “That horrible guy at the bar just sent you a drink.”
I guess in a few parts of the book, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia forgot what they were doing and accidentally wrote things that don’t make you smile? Is it only one of them who is confused? Is it Patricia? Because unless Mabel O’Nobody is a better Blanche than Julia Roberts these are objectively bad things, only maybe worse, because I think these are jokes about objectively bad things. It was already the most depressing book on happiness before they started being depressing sarcastically. But this!? These jokes? If you were writing a movie where the twist was the main character not knowing they were in Hell, these lines would all be too obvious as clues.
I don’t understand!!!! Three of the one thousand and three things are this frustrating interaction with a church bazaar customer! Do these women feed off the suffering of everyone who’s ever read their book? Which is to ask, are they feeding on my suffering alone? If so, I hope you’re enjoying the feast, you dusty fucking minotaurs.
If my theory is correct, right now, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia are in some nursing home workshopping early ideas for 1,003 Fun Eats to Do On a Place and they just got a surge of energy from how much I hated this one. “Ahh, yes, a reader got to the one where all we typed was ‘Yea! You got a red gumball.’ Taste of his fury with me, Lisa and Patricia! Delicious.“
Well, sure. If you had to list a thousand all-time great smiles, one of them would be the time you found your husband’s vintage pornography collection…
… and another would be the time you realized a sitcom’s title was more than a name. It was a revelation.
Maybe they’re onto something. Gilligan’s Island. Maybe these women barely experiencing life while the nursing home’s television idles on ancient reruns really have this whole happiness thing figured out.
One endearing quality of Lisa, Ann, and Patricia is how they are never right. Not only about what makes people smile, but also about everything. They managed to live hundreds of years each and gain no wisdom along the way. For instance, they each saw a media trend of hit shows requiring minimal creative staff and no talent budgets and agreed, “No industry would have an incentive to maintain thi– is that gumball red! YEA!”
“Purple M&M’s, maybe?” asked Patricia to no one. The stupid cow shrugged as she hit enter.
A dark force rippled as Patricia pulled “Kiehl’s lip balm now comes in three tints” from her musings notebook and entered the words into her manuscript. The same words would appear clawed on the inside of the chest cavity of a child nine thousand miles away. “THREE TINTS OF BALM,” he would whisper, though up until that moment, Kikongo had been the only tongue he knew. “THREE TINTS OF BALM,” he would die saying, long before anyone with answers would arrive.
I guess this one’s fine. Three moist coins in a bus station is three moist coins in a bus station.
Oh, good, one of them found another umbrella.
I guess we’re at the “what if you actually found jewels” stage of ideas. Look, I know these women aren’t therapists, and they have no obligation or qualification to give real mental health advice, but I’m not sure an imaginary sapphire meets the book’s implied standard of “a thing,” much less a great one to smile about. This is like telling someone starving in a life raft to picture food. It’s very literally barely better than waiting for death.
So they’re taking home lost items they find in cabs, scrounging change from payphones, fantasizing about sudden jewels, and now they’re rummaging through their receipts for rare pennies? It seems like these women really needed this fucking smile book to work out. And I know how this makes me look, but thinking about how unlikely that was is giving me my first smile.
This one surprised me. Judging by her writing, I would have pictured Patricia’s daughter as more of a Second Windmill than a Sancho Panza.
W-what? I was watching my middle school daughter perform in a play and now I’m eight? And Fabulous Sancho’s grandma has decorated the outside of our house? As a reader, it seems like I shouldn’t have to be doing this much work to make the author’s extremely specific (probably false) memories relate to me.
Yes, Ann, we all remember how you introduced this groundbreaking style of nail treatment to America. Who can forget how the local salon’s sign used to say “Regular Manicure: $25.99, Completely Novel Manicure Ann Has to Name Because It Hasn’t Been Invented Yet: $35.99.”
We get it, Ann. Your deep knowledge of industry secrets like staple foods and popular retailers are what made you into Shady Graves Retirement Village’s most dynamic trendsetter.
Oh, Lisa, you bitch!
Ha ha ha she knows, Ann! She’s telling everybody!
Ann, you’re not fooling anyone! You think your friends believe you spent $1400 on a purse? The one filled with gift certificates and filthy change? The one you were holding when you asked the bus driver if there were any “coin stores” on the route “that are looking to buy rare pennies”? Even Patricia knows it’s a fake and she has spent the last seven hours typing the idea “Stickers.”
Oh my god, here goes Ann with this story again. The time she wore a sweater for Esther’s boutique flyer.
“They said my daughter could have modeled, but um, been there, done that, girls. The life of a model is harder than you think. Gosh, I guess it was 1972? If I remember, it was for a boutique flyer photoshoot? Very avant professional. I had to stand in a sweater in front of a roll of paper, they call it a paper-roll, but here’s the thing: it was almost 70 outside. Ha, not exactly sweater weather. The man, ‘photographer’ is what we call him in the industry, had me do some different smiles, sometimes not smiling… Anyway, I just don’t want my daughter to have to go through all that. I was there for almost an hour and I had to get my own snacks.”
Another email mystery solved by the Best Friends Cyber Senior Squad.
This one is a good reminder that these aren’t ordinary old ladies, but actual lunatics.
How did they know the secret way my twin and I ask each other if we’ve ever fucked a fish?
Great news, ladies: big-ass thongs (if you’re into that). It’s weird to me how this is the only qualified entry in the entire book. They take for granted I have a daughter, I’m eight, my son forgets my birthday, I have a secret twin, and I’m a model with too many umbrellas (and counting!), and yet here, when they tell me about giant panties, they’re like, “We don’t want to make any assumptions about your underpants, senator ostrich-owning dentist recovering from rabies.”
Oh yeah, we need to be open to the possibility that when they say “thongs” they might mean the shoes, not the panties. After all, these are women who mark the eras of their life by achievements in panty hose history.
We should also try to keep in mind they are in one of the later stages of dementia.
“Guess how many! No, three! It took me three days to remember the name of Debby’s first husband! And it was Geoff! With two f’s! Can you believe it! He was named after another Geoff. Anyway, a lot of great cookie-cutters out there these days, right? And don’t get me started on all the tints of lip balm. Or better yet, do! Ha ha ha, you know, I’m actually glad Debby and her new husband whatshisname couldn’t make it! What a couple of bores! Oh, did I show you the umbrella I found in a taxi? I know, ‘you bet I wish it was a sapphire,’ right? Again, I want to say how glad I am that the boring couple couldn’t make it so it’s just us fun people.”
This is the Yiddish word for “prostrate” Patricia learned from a dildo instruction manual.
No one knows how her aunt died, but she was found with dozens of tiny hand marks on her neck and all she left behind was her antique china doll.
The debate is settled, sorbet lovers. Sherbet lovers, go buy 1,003 Canoe Gunnels For Fucks Who Are Wrong About Ice Cream to read more.
Maybe one of them has a twin who secretly knows what this means.
Jesus Christ, what? Do I remember watching a fucking cow pee!? Patricia, all you had to do was name a few hundred experiences more interesting than seeing a cow pee on a fourth grade field trip and you fucked it up.
I think this one is a fart joke Lisa couldn’t quite bring herself to tell. Which is weird since she seems okay talking about watching her uncle gator.
“Ann dear, do you remember when we were writing that smile book and I could barely tell the passing gas in church joke? What!? We’re still writing it!? Oh, well then we should put one in about how it’s nice to smile about remembering fart jokes you almost told. And that story Patricia tells about when the cow, you know, just blasted a bunch of kids with a stream of piss.”
I’m sort of worried the next entry is going to be, “The time you remembered remembering the memory of an aborted fart joke.”
I was not expecting this one. What did you do, Lisa?
Lisa, whatever the shit you did, it seems like you really dodged a bullet.
So I think I’ve figured them out. Lisa is a criminal maniac going through the trash for things she can sell. Ann is a basic bitch narcissist who peaked in high school, back when high school was called “communing with the Great Fire.” And Patricia has the mind of a 5-year-old girl in a fabric store.
I didn’t mean it as a compliment, you dingbat.
Sure, why not? Pick one. I love this entry because I honestly don’t think you can do less than this. If you were given the task of listing great things, vaguely referencing the planet’s most famous great things is the smallest amount of effort you could make toward that end. This is like gunneling a canoe and not even gatoring its Afikomen.
Every 72 hours Patricia and Lisa have to watch Ann “find” her old photo albums and “rediscover” how good she looked with bangs.
Right, and then she rediscovers Fresca.
If you want an idea of how long it took these women to put together a book where each of them had to list about 334 objects or concepts of any nature, this one about bangs finally growing out appeared 8 pages after the one where Ann rediscovered bangs. This lets us establish a timeline.
So over the course of an elderly woman getting a haircut and then letting it reclaim her bangs, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia got 32 entries done. Which means this book, this thoughtless piece of shit book, took them… oh no. 13 years and one month to complete.
Thirteen years well spent, I say. They really came up with a lot of fun, relatable human experiences. What’s next, an amniocentesis diagnosis?
Oh my god.
I’m not crazy about how much of this book has turned into a list of the Grim Reaper’s near-misses.
Lisa, what did you do to Walt Disney?
Hold on, let me look up Walt Disney’s height and width.
You know when your son is both not with you and stupid? 🙂
Well, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia, if my baby-sitter knows how to take care of kids and she tries when she writes a book, that’s two things she does better than you.
…
This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Gellaho, the pansy sapphire cow fart of our Idaho. That’s the nicest thing we ever said about anybody.
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