My Anti-Bacterial Soap Box
There's a pandemic happening
In 7th grade I told my crush that I liked him over G-chat. When he didn’t reciprocate the feelings, I asked him to not “make it weird” at Hebrew school. This is ironic, because Hebrew school is the weirdest place on earth. One time we had an Israeli martial arts instructor come in to teach (only the girls) self defense. He told us about how boys could be dangerous but my idea of a man at that time was a 13 year old who played laser tag and used sink water to spike up the front of his hair. It was a 2 hour session and you’d think we’d just cover the basics, but around the 1.5 hour mark he pulled out a plastic gun and proceeded to show us how to disarm an assailant.
I’ve been sent to the principal’s office twice in my life. Once was when I was an eye-witness to a boy throwing a full pudding cup at a girl’s head and was brought in to mediate, and the second time when, in Hebrew school, I was distracting my classmates. I think writers are just professional distractors, so I hope to continue on this path.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to have a platform. Sometimes it’s literally a platform, like the mayor of Munchkin City making an announcement in the town square. I have no idea how my brain just jumped that fast to the Wizard of Oz but I guess I’ve been taking lots of really long walks lately. Before covid, I used to do stand up comedy. I would go to open mics with my friends and we’d usually get a room temp Tecate to calm some of the nerves. The weirdest thing about live comedy is you’re in charge. Whatever you decide to say when you’re up there, people are going to hear it. And they can only attribute it to your brain and nobody else’s because it’s just you up there, alone.
The first time I ever performed live comedy was in front of 1,200 people. I was on my high school’s sketch comedy team and it was the opening night of our annual talent show. My role was to do an impression of a famous substitute teacher colloquially known as the “riddle lady.” Half of what made my impression believable was my outfit. The riddle lady was a 5 foot tall adorably petite French woman with a unique style and a thick accent. Every day she wore new balance sneakers, black leggings, a men’s XXXL tee shirt of some sort, a bandana on her head, and bronzer on her face that was 8 shades too dark. She was known as the riddle lady because no matter what class she was subbing for, she spent the period telling riddles from her own book. If you were expecting a calc lesson in 7th period, but she was there, you instead got to spend 45 minutes figuring out how many apples Johnny ate if he came home after midnight.
I miss live performance. I miss the adrenaline of uncertainty. One time on my way to work a man pushed another man onto the subway track and he broke his arm on impact. That could’ve been me! What a story to tell! Mostly I just miss the vulnerability of a live audience. I know as I write this that I have an audience, but in person I don’t have time to edit my words. I miss bombing at a karaoke bar in Greenpoint. The bar doesn’t even exist anymore which sucks for me because I wanted to take my kids there one day and tell them, “Look, this is where mommy made a joke about how being a moderate is the equivalent of a person who says they don’t have a preference for lunch and are down for whatever and mommy explained that that kind of person actually makes things harder for everyone and delays the decision making process and nobody really got it.”
I don’t know what the next few months look like on a global scale. I’m sad for the millions of people who have lost loved ones during this pandemic and I’m scared for the many who will continue to. But I know it’s important to remember the very real ways we lived before this, and to not let digital placeholders replace them. Twitter is not a comedy club and Instagram is not an art gallery. We need to remember that the real thing is real for a reason. I miss my friends and my family and I miss loitering in grocery stores. There exists no app that can replicate the euphoria of wasting time in a grocery store. Thanks for tuning in to my first blog of the Biden Presidency, and may god bless America.