Adventures in Idiocy I was in the same room with Eddie Izzard. I was. I’ve been waiting for someone to go “did you lose weight? No, a haircut? New contacts?” So I can reply “What you are seeing, my friend, is simply the glow of a person who has seen the sexiest transvestite comedian on earth in person! But so far, no one’s asked.
So, yeah. Meg and I made the drive up to Philadelphia on Tuesday and back yesterday, for the express purpose of seeing Eddie in the last American city on his sold out “Sexie” world tour. It was like a little adventure.
I mean, the Philadelphia part and the driving part and the Eddie Izzard part and the meeting up with Aaron-the-actor-from-the-show because it’s his home town and he happened to have tickets for the same performance, coincidentally, part, and the having to call in sick Wednesday because I don’t get any vacation days but got election day off part would all have been adventurous on their own. But these kinds of adventure, really, were all trumped by a different, more…shall we say…scary kind of adventure called “Ginny’s Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy.”
This part of the adventure is so adventurous, you see, that it even starts back last week, before we even left, when I managed to rear-end a car in front of me going approximately two miles per hour, and nonetheless cause $3000 dollars worth of damage to my car, rendering it un-road-trippable.
This accident was entirely my fault. The line of traffic stopped, and I kept creeping forwards. Thus, $3000 worth of damage. You can’t tell it by looking at my car, but I somehow broke a fan inside of it and misaligned the headlights completely.
So. Upshot was that Meg and I took off in my mother’s van, instead of my somehow-smashed-up car. Now, in the classic sense, you would not consider a van a more adventurous vehicle than a Dodge Stratus, but in the Idiocy Adventure sense, it definitely is. It is not only a symbol of the Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy Fire you are playing with, it is also not my primary car, so my driving skills may even be worse in it than they already are. And if you’ve ever driven with me, you’re scared now. Cue the soft and ominous Strings of Approaching Dumbness.
So off in the van we go. We had decided that Meg would drive the first half of the trip, and I would drive the second, so that put me in the navigator’s seat immediately. This is where you should start hearing the Bassoons of Staggering Idiocy.
To my credit, I think we managed to get about two hours down the road before the Idiocy Adventure truly began, but after that – oh man, Idiocy Central. Because that’s the point at which I directed Meg to take the wrong interstate.
For two hours.
I’ll give you a moment to let the full-fledged Symphony of Stupidity play melodiously in your heads, complete with crashing Symbols of Lunacy and bleating Trumpets of Madness.
Yes, my friends, due to my Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy, Meg and I drove in completely the wrong direction for TWO WHOLE HOURS.
Most people would not have made this mistake. There is no reason for me even to have made it. The interstates are not confusing. The directions are not misleading. The only explanation is sheer and unmitigated stupidity. But even if someone else in this situation had had a lightning-strike of me-like stupidity and taken the wrong interstate turnoff, he or she would never have been able to draw from so deep and vast a reserve of sheer idiocy as to continue on that wrong interstate turnoff for two fucking hours.
Only I, my friends, am capable of perpetuating that kind of adventure. It’s my own special gift. We truly went two hours down the road in the wrong direction before, with a sudden and screeching crescendo of realization (Piccolos of Horror), my mistake became apparent to me. I might not even have realized it if Meg hadn’t been in the car – later, I told her the trip might have gone something like “Oh, gee, I wonder what that wide, watery-looking road in front of me is? Chesapeake Bay? Gee, I guess it must be right! I’ll just drive ahe…..SPLASH!”
Anyway, I finally did realize it, and in a frenzy of horror and shame, turned the car around immediately and did the best I could to try to make up for lost time, taking a new, patchwork route as best I could, but of course we were now two hours behind schedule.
The plan had been to arrive in Philadelphia by 6, in time for dinner – now chances of making it there by 8, when the show started, seemed dreadfully slim. I mean, I wasn’t even sure we’d make it there at all. The black hole caused by my lack of brain might actually become strong enough to implode the car and take both of us with it.
That is, if my lunatic driving didn’t kill us first. It’s truly miraculous I didn’t get us killed, I think. I was furious with myself, and trying very hard to get from Virginia to Pennsylvania in five hours, and the result was very nearly Disaster at every turn. We might almost have made it by eight, actually, if we hadn’t hit D.C. at precisely 5:30 p.m., which even on a federal holiday is a damn stupid time to hit D.C.
As it was, though, we somehow did not die. And though we did not make it to Philadelphia by 8, we did manage to make it by 8:20, change furiously in the car, and run across the street to the theatre, where they let us in. So apparently the Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy was not quite deep enough to drown us, but it nearly was.
(In case you would like yet another example of how inexhaustible the Vast and Staggering Reserve is, when we did finally get to Philadelphia and were driving down the Avenue of the Arts, almost there, we were directly facing a lovely yellow disk in front of us in the fog. We’d just been talking about me potentially driving right into the Chesapeake Bay.
“Oh,” Meg said, after a brief pause. “Look at the lovely….”
“Moon!” I shouted
“…clock” she said.
“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “SPLASH!”)
So we saw nine-tenths of the show, anyway. And it was wonderful. As I would have expect. Eddie Izzard is so funny.
And so hot. When we walked in, he was wearing…get this…a black miniskirt, a red silk top, his new breasts, knee-high spike-heeled boots, fishnetty stockings and…..an eighteenth-century-style frock coat! It’s as if he had known I was coming! And that I have a consuming passion for eighteenth-century men’s clothing! For the second act, he changed to a black glittery slit-skirt/tank top combination with a white sequined jacket with black trim that I didn’t like nearly as well (save for the slit), but that first outfit alone was probably worth coming to Philadelphia for. Even if he hadn’t said a thing.
But he did say things, lots of funny ones, which I loved, and which I won’t try to recap because I’ll just screw them up. I will say that he seems to be playing much more with sound effects than with gestures these days, and it’s interesting. Fans will of course know his genius with gesture: a man who can infallibly impersonate an evil giraffe or a “sudden interest in botany” ray gun can be called little else than a genius. But during this show he was doing a lot less of that, and a lot more playing with abstract sounds to represent various things, like Mars, or confusion. I missed the gesture a little, actually, though the Mars sound, particularly, was really funny.
I’ll admit that my sheer joy at actually seeing Eddie Izzard may even have made insignificant the actual amusement I got from the comedy, and a teeny tiny voice in the back of my head may suggest that I still prefer “Dressed to Kill” and bits of “Unrepeatable” and “Definite Article,” but this should in no way suggest that it was not the funniest stand-up performance I have ever seen live. Because it so was. By miles. Eddie Izzard may be the funniest man now living.
And he is most certainly the only transvestite stand-up comedian I will ever drive two hours in the wrong direction to see.
After the show, Meg and I met Aaron and his brother and went and got some gelato, which was nice, and gave us just a little view of Philadelphia. Which struck me as foggy, primarily, and nice, and sort of weighty in a not too threatening way. I liked it, though I think it would not be a city I would ever fall in love with. (I proclaim pretentiously, after having been in it for just a little over twelve hours of my life.) Then we went back to our hotel, where they gave us cookies just for checking in, and went to sleep.
And the next morning, we packed up and drove back to Virginia, this time using the correct route, which was much quicker and, in fact, prettier. The Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy didn’t make any notable reappearances on the drive home, and we got there in time for me to crash and go to bed: you may have noticed that I do not seem to have followed through on my plans to use any means necessary to sleep with Eddie Izzard, groupie style. This is because on Monday I came down with a yucky fever-thing that may very well be allergies, but nonetheless made me feel pretty crap all the way up until this afternoon. So I figured that attempting to infect Eddie Izzard with yucky fever-illness would not be a good way to show him how much I love him. Besides, with the Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy at the levels it obviously was, I probably would have managed to, oh, I don’t know, break his legs by accident too. And that’s just too much of a risk to take.
So I’m back to normal life, and I don’t like it much. At least normal life should allow me less room for Vast and Staggering Idiocy. But with my kind of talent, you know, I’ll find a way. Oh, I’ll find a way.
So, yeah. Meg and I made the drive up to Philadelphia on Tuesday and back yesterday, for the express purpose of seeing Eddie in the last American city on his sold out “Sexie” world tour. It was like a little adventure.
I mean, the Philadelphia part and the driving part and the Eddie Izzard part and the meeting up with Aaron-the-actor-from-the-show because it’s his home town and he happened to have tickets for the same performance, coincidentally, part, and the having to call in sick Wednesday because I don’t get any vacation days but got election day off part would all have been adventurous on their own. But these kinds of adventure, really, were all trumped by a different, more…shall we say…scary kind of adventure called “Ginny’s Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy.”
This part of the adventure is so adventurous, you see, that it even starts back last week, before we even left, when I managed to rear-end a car in front of me going approximately two miles per hour, and nonetheless cause $3000 dollars worth of damage to my car, rendering it un-road-trippable.
This accident was entirely my fault. The line of traffic stopped, and I kept creeping forwards. Thus, $3000 worth of damage. You can’t tell it by looking at my car, but I somehow broke a fan inside of it and misaligned the headlights completely.
So. Upshot was that Meg and I took off in my mother’s van, instead of my somehow-smashed-up car. Now, in the classic sense, you would not consider a van a more adventurous vehicle than a Dodge Stratus, but in the Idiocy Adventure sense, it definitely is. It is not only a symbol of the Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy Fire you are playing with, it is also not my primary car, so my driving skills may even be worse in it than they already are. And if you’ve ever driven with me, you’re scared now. Cue the soft and ominous Strings of Approaching Dumbness.
So off in the van we go. We had decided that Meg would drive the first half of the trip, and I would drive the second, so that put me in the navigator’s seat immediately. This is where you should start hearing the Bassoons of Staggering Idiocy.
To my credit, I think we managed to get about two hours down the road before the Idiocy Adventure truly began, but after that – oh man, Idiocy Central. Because that’s the point at which I directed Meg to take the wrong interstate.
For two hours.
I’ll give you a moment to let the full-fledged Symphony of Stupidity play melodiously in your heads, complete with crashing Symbols of Lunacy and bleating Trumpets of Madness.
Yes, my friends, due to my Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy, Meg and I drove in completely the wrong direction for TWO WHOLE HOURS.
Most people would not have made this mistake. There is no reason for me even to have made it. The interstates are not confusing. The directions are not misleading. The only explanation is sheer and unmitigated stupidity. But even if someone else in this situation had had a lightning-strike of me-like stupidity and taken the wrong interstate turnoff, he or she would never have been able to draw from so deep and vast a reserve of sheer idiocy as to continue on that wrong interstate turnoff for two fucking hours.
Only I, my friends, am capable of perpetuating that kind of adventure. It’s my own special gift. We truly went two hours down the road in the wrong direction before, with a sudden and screeching crescendo of realization (Piccolos of Horror), my mistake became apparent to me. I might not even have realized it if Meg hadn’t been in the car – later, I told her the trip might have gone something like “Oh, gee, I wonder what that wide, watery-looking road in front of me is? Chesapeake Bay? Gee, I guess it must be right! I’ll just drive ahe…..SPLASH!”
Anyway, I finally did realize it, and in a frenzy of horror and shame, turned the car around immediately and did the best I could to try to make up for lost time, taking a new, patchwork route as best I could, but of course we were now two hours behind schedule.
The plan had been to arrive in Philadelphia by 6, in time for dinner – now chances of making it there by 8, when the show started, seemed dreadfully slim. I mean, I wasn’t even sure we’d make it there at all. The black hole caused by my lack of brain might actually become strong enough to implode the car and take both of us with it.
That is, if my lunatic driving didn’t kill us first. It’s truly miraculous I didn’t get us killed, I think. I was furious with myself, and trying very hard to get from Virginia to Pennsylvania in five hours, and the result was very nearly Disaster at every turn. We might almost have made it by eight, actually, if we hadn’t hit D.C. at precisely 5:30 p.m., which even on a federal holiday is a damn stupid time to hit D.C.
As it was, though, we somehow did not die. And though we did not make it to Philadelphia by 8, we did manage to make it by 8:20, change furiously in the car, and run across the street to the theatre, where they let us in. So apparently the Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy was not quite deep enough to drown us, but it nearly was.
(In case you would like yet another example of how inexhaustible the Vast and Staggering Reserve is, when we did finally get to Philadelphia and were driving down the Avenue of the Arts, almost there, we were directly facing a lovely yellow disk in front of us in the fog. We’d just been talking about me potentially driving right into the Chesapeake Bay.
“Oh,” Meg said, after a brief pause. “Look at the lovely….”
“Moon!” I shouted
“…clock” she said.
“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “SPLASH!”)
So we saw nine-tenths of the show, anyway. And it was wonderful. As I would have expect. Eddie Izzard is so funny.
And so hot. When we walked in, he was wearing…get this…a black miniskirt, a red silk top, his new breasts, knee-high spike-heeled boots, fishnetty stockings and…..an eighteenth-century-style frock coat! It’s as if he had known I was coming! And that I have a consuming passion for eighteenth-century men’s clothing! For the second act, he changed to a black glittery slit-skirt/tank top combination with a white sequined jacket with black trim that I didn’t like nearly as well (save for the slit), but that first outfit alone was probably worth coming to Philadelphia for. Even if he hadn’t said a thing.
But he did say things, lots of funny ones, which I loved, and which I won’t try to recap because I’ll just screw them up. I will say that he seems to be playing much more with sound effects than with gestures these days, and it’s interesting. Fans will of course know his genius with gesture: a man who can infallibly impersonate an evil giraffe or a “sudden interest in botany” ray gun can be called little else than a genius. But during this show he was doing a lot less of that, and a lot more playing with abstract sounds to represent various things, like Mars, or confusion. I missed the gesture a little, actually, though the Mars sound, particularly, was really funny.
I’ll admit that my sheer joy at actually seeing Eddie Izzard may even have made insignificant the actual amusement I got from the comedy, and a teeny tiny voice in the back of my head may suggest that I still prefer “Dressed to Kill” and bits of “Unrepeatable” and “Definite Article,” but this should in no way suggest that it was not the funniest stand-up performance I have ever seen live. Because it so was. By miles. Eddie Izzard may be the funniest man now living.
And he is most certainly the only transvestite stand-up comedian I will ever drive two hours in the wrong direction to see.
After the show, Meg and I met Aaron and his brother and went and got some gelato, which was nice, and gave us just a little view of Philadelphia. Which struck me as foggy, primarily, and nice, and sort of weighty in a not too threatening way. I liked it, though I think it would not be a city I would ever fall in love with. (I proclaim pretentiously, after having been in it for just a little over twelve hours of my life.) Then we went back to our hotel, where they gave us cookies just for checking in, and went to sleep.
And the next morning, we packed up and drove back to Virginia, this time using the correct route, which was much quicker and, in fact, prettier. The Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy didn’t make any notable reappearances on the drive home, and we got there in time for me to crash and go to bed: you may have noticed that I do not seem to have followed through on my plans to use any means necessary to sleep with Eddie Izzard, groupie style. This is because on Monday I came down with a yucky fever-thing that may very well be allergies, but nonetheless made me feel pretty crap all the way up until this afternoon. So I figured that attempting to infect Eddie Izzard with yucky fever-illness would not be a good way to show him how much I love him. Besides, with the Vast and Staggering Reserve of Sheer Idiocy at the levels it obviously was, I probably would have managed to, oh, I don’t know, break his legs by accident too. And that’s just too much of a risk to take.
So I’m back to normal life, and I don’t like it much. At least normal life should allow me less room for Vast and Staggering Idiocy. But with my kind of talent, you know, I’ll find a way. Oh, I’ll find a way.
Labels: being dumb, trips
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