A Blue Christmas Without You.

Halfway through the movie, I brought some popcorn downstairs for the niece and nephew and realized I brought over the wrong Adventures in Babysitting DVD. 

That was a few years back, and luckily DVDs are now mostly a thing of the past. The only ones I watch these days are SAG Award screeners. Well, these days have been delayed. But because of this upside-down year, the awards have been moved from January to March, and even then they’ll be severely lacking entries. 

But at least we’re shut in with nothing but time. Happy holidays.

Parental Guidance.

Warning to my nephew: the life you are about to lead as a teenager contains strong language, adult situations and nudity. 

It was his idea when he recently visited to watch the HBO movie Seven Days in Hell, starring Andy Samberg. 

Let’s just say there’s a skosh of full-front male nudity, which made my nephew take full advantage of his hoodie. If there’s a better film endorsement, I’d like to see it.

Here’s What I Think Happened.

If I found out I had six months to live, I would get fat enough to shut down a water slide. 

I was driving in Dallas and saw a giant funnel-shaped structure outside something called Great Wolf Lodge. I guessed it was a satellite dish attached to a hunting lodge and had to investigate. 

I was way off. It’s an amazing indoor water park. The structure outside is part of a slide that runs outside the building. Kids ran amok, having the time of their young lives. Ultra cool.

On my way home, colorful stitches of clothing were scattered on the road, and here’s what I think happened: a parent who brought his/her kids and several of their friends to Great Wolf Lodge finally wrangled them after a long, overwhelming afternoon, and in his/her haste, got the hell out of Dodge but left a bag of wet bathing suits on top of the car. A bonehead move but understandable. Any one of us would have run toward daylight.

Pretty, Pretty Good.

When we were really young, my mom used to tell people my brothers and I taught frat boys how to trash houses. 

It was our destiny. I joined the TEΦ house at the University of Maryland,  the same fraternity of which Larry David was president in the late 60s. Most frats loose their actual houses early and often thanks to misbehavior, but Maryland TEΦ miraculously managed to get kicked out and win it back in the 90s. 

Today, the frat is going strong in the same place Larry David and I were brothers. Hanging on the wall is some wise advice from Larry: 

To my TEΦ brothers –

Enjoy what will undoubtedly be the best years of your lives. 

-Larry David 

Tau Beta 857 (I think!) 

Tau Beta is our chapter number. Larry was the 857th (or so) member. I was 1467th.

Texas Leftovers.

I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one. 

Thanks to its low taxes and central location, many companies are headquartered in Dallas. Which means lots of meetings and conferences take place there, and thus business hotels have the shit beat of them. Case in point, the Hyatt Place in which I stayed needed a makeover, badly, starting with the missing H out front. My friend Ariel kept asking me how the “Yatt” Hotel was. My response was a tribute to Defending Your Life, in which Albert Brooks, staying in a modest place in Judgement City, is jealous of Meryl Streep’s five-star hotel. When she asks where he’s staying, he replies, “I’m at the Continental. Come over one day; we’ll paint it.” 

Grapevine, TX, just north of Dallas, was a real wild-west town back in the day (Bonnie and Clyde killed a cop there), so the city commissioned its first town jail be built in 1910. They called it “The Calaboose,” and many bad, drunken dudes spent frigid evenings in it all the way into the 1950s. These days, it’s on display on Main Street. The same-sized space would fetch 5k a month in Manhattan. 

AT&T Stadium, where the Cowboys play, felt like the biggest building I’ve ever been in. The stands are steep and massive. To class up the joint, the wife of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones commissioned 25 artists to create pieces displayed inside and out. Most are not football-themed, but this one, from a 60s hippie artist’s series of “Thesaurus Paintings,” is. You know those medieval paintings in which the artists had never seen an elephant, but they’d read a description of one and were certain they got the gist of it? Anyway…

Happy Belated.

I miss one of Ricky’s birthdays, and he’s acting like I’ve missed the last seven. 

He turned nine last Wednesday while I was in Dallas and he was in the fancy kennel, and I’m making up for it now. 

Nine is not young for a big dog. I imagine when I get to be the equivalent of his age, I’ll no longer need erectile softeners. 

Happy birthday, sir.

Table-ish Read.

Whenever my dog interrupts a Zoom meeting, I say “Oh, that’s just the intern.” 

He luckily refrained from howling at firetrucks yesterday afternoon as I participated in an online table read for my friend Ed Gine’s superbly-written sci-fi thriller script. I got to play Commander Vincent Cain, a man as badass as his name. I got into it and then some. Ed texted me afterward: “ Dude, you really brought it today. Awesome job.” 

Thanks, Ed. Love your movie. Cain would greenlight the shit out of it.