Grosse Pointe Bill

I guess I have trouble taking the whole reunion thing seriously. A few years ago, when Council Rock High School began collecting alumni information on the class of '88, I listed my career as "CIA Dentist." It's still in the book. While that might have pleased me -- and it did -- it also virtually guaranteed that I remained hidden from anyone who might have been trying to locate me using that method.



It wasn't a dismissal of those people, mind you, so much as it was a rejection of the whole idea of memorializing a time period in my life that I'd pretty much like to flush down the memory hole forever.

Let me explain. Since I was 17, I've kept a fairly regular diary. I am fascinated by dreams, and tend to record them when I have time. After I graduated from college in 1995, I recorded more than 300 versions of the same dream. The details are slightly different each time, but the plot is basically the same: I am my current age, and though I've graduated from college, some academic police force has discovered that I didn't properly graduate from high school, and I have to go back (at my current age) to complete either German or trigonometry.

I'll leave thorough analysis of that dream cycle to the team of psychoanalysts who treat me on a regular basis, but suffice to say it's a dream about anxiety, and anxiety and high school were the yin and yang of my teenage existence.

Not all of it was bad, of course. I didn't mean to lose touch with everyone. But prior to the advent of facebook, that's exactly what happened. As of 2007, I had fallen out of contact with everyone I knew in high school, baby and bathwater.




That brings me to the present. The Friday after Thanksgiving was the eminently miss-able 20-year reunion of the 1988 senior class of Council Rock High School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Apparently, some kind of fight broke out, but this is what happens when your graduating class (908 people) is larger than some towns in Iowa. Saturday was the much more important reunion of the Bill Behun Comedy Team, a group of my friends that formed senior year to perform comedy and skewer the pretensions of one Bill Behun. Even by the usual standards of teenage pretension, Bill Behun was a colossus: He wore suit jackets and jeans, sported John Lennon-glasses and had his hair in a ponytail, and despite a clear lack of evidence that he was born in England, would regularly utter British-isms like "'lo love" and pronounce "schedule" like shed-yool. Nonetheless, Bill was something exotic in our suburban world, and he had a knack for wooing the kind of brainy girls I swooned over in high school. I can't speak for the rest of the group, but even while throwing darts at him, there was a part of me that envied his ability to carve out such a rich identity (even if some of it was made up) in that unforgiving environment. It was probably more than a bit cruel, but when we performed, we adopted his uniform, and while it was not our chief reason for being, Bill provided an umbrella for our self-referential and absurdist brand of comedy.

I admit to feeling some harbingers of anxiety Saturday night as I approached the home of Brian Klaus, the leader of our group and the one responsible for getting the reunion together. I feared there was one of three ways this was gonna go down:

a)An orgy of lame nostalgia-tripping "Remember when we went to Olga's Kitchen, and everyone ordered stuff that began with Olga's name, like Olga Burger, Olga fries, Olga Cola and, for dessert, Olgurt? Yeah, that was pretty funny, wasn't it? Good times."

b)Awkward attempts to bridge lost time "So, you're an actor, huh? That must be fun. Here are pictures of my cherubic children."

c)A dysfunctional meltdown. The group included three former couples who used to date, a bunch of strong-willed guys who experienced creative tension even over the question of which fast-food joint to eat at, and Bill, always something of a wild card.



Like everyone else, I am happy to report that none of that happened. I had a big goofy grin on my face the entire time, and it came from actively enjoying these people in the present, not from rehashing the past. Although that was fun, too. We watched the film we made during the cusp between high school and college, titled
"The Last Temptation of Bill." The movie is really quite horrible, but fun to revisit in a "Rocky Horror" kind of way (I am looking at the camera in every single fracking scene I'm in! I have to believe my acting has improved since then.) In addition to five of the six members of the BBC (sans the elusive Gary Schwartz, Orlando's "champion of the underdog."), real Bill and movie Bill (the wonderful Jeff Cothren), there were several people who played roles in the movie and a couple of newcomers.

I had forgotten how funny we all were -- funny in very different ways -- and how enjoyable it was to riff of each other. It was interesting to see all the ways we've changed and haven't. But mostly it was just fun. Despite it all, I'm still a pretty shy guy. At most parties, I'm eyeballing the door after the first hour. This one, I didn't want to end.



Hopefully, we can make this happen again before we're 58, although the 40th reunion of the BBC in the year 2028 sounds kind of funny too.

This post is brought to you in amazing triple-blog format. See Brian's posts here and here, and Jeff's here.

Bride of Facebook

Via my friend Leta, here's a uniquely British take on Facebook, which I think nails what is so peculiar about the phenomenon. See my own take on the same subject here.



PS: Since my last posting, I have been friended by another former high school girlfriend and the sister of my first love, whose parents hated me and forbade me to see her, who got married and befriended me again later in life, and who died suddenly and tragically at the age of 30. Jessica, wherever you are, I'm sure you'd find this all a little funny.

Cookiepuss Revisited

If you're like me, and happened to spend a good portion of your childhood in Philadelphia, you're likely to remember a certain voice, a voice that sounded to me like an emphysemic mobster and that comedian Patton Oswalt once likened to "Tom Waits gurgling hot asphalt." The voice would say things that didn't make much sense like, "Tuesday is Sunday at Carvel," always accompanying grainy, home-grown commercials for ice-cream cakes with absurd-sounding names like "Fudgie the Whale" and "Cookiepuss."

Yes, Cookiepuss. There are certain words that are able to conjure an entire sensory encyclopedia from my childhood, like a Northeast suburban version of "Remembrance of Things Past," and Cookiepuss is one them.

Cookiepuss was one of a handful of pre-fab ice-cream cakes that were a staple of birthdays for my friends and I until I was about 8, and we moved away. I had forgotten -- perhaps repressed -- Cookiepuss until several years ago, when Doug Bowles, a castmate in "Assassins", recalled Fudgie the Whale. It wasn't long before my friend Stephen Gregory Smith, who also grew up in PA, and I began reciting the absurd commercials. Tom Carvel was no doubt a kind and gentle old man, but in my mind, I always pictured him as the black sheep of a Mafia family, like Fredo from "The Godfather," with the voice of Krusty the Clown: "Come to Carvel...Tuesday is Sunday....We've got Fudgie the Whale...We've got Cookiepuss..."

Recently, during the production of "Kiss of the Spider Woman," Stephen and I were backstage, and he asked me, "Whatever happened to Cookiepuss?" This evoked the phenomenon once again, and I discovered, not for the first time, that, with or without the voice of Krusty, "Cookiepuss" is just funny. Maybe it's because I have the sense of humor of an 8-year-old, but when castmate Danny Binstock opened a conversation by saying, "I googled Cookiepuss the other day...," I started giggling like a girl. I could be wrong, but I think we may have accidentally stumbled upon one of those rare comedy rules, like the Rule of 3 or the Rule of 7: If you start a sentence with, "I googled Cookiepuss...," it's going to be hilarious -- no matter what follows.

Stephen actually googled Cookiepuss and discovered that the cake, like seemingly everything else in the universe, has it's own Wikipedia entry. Here's what we learned: Cookiepuss is actually a space alien. His original name was "Celestial Person," "C.P." for short, which later came to stand for Cookiepuss. Cookiepuss was born on the planet Birthday. He can fly, but requires a flying saucer for interplanetary travel. This is never explained. I also learned that there were special versions of the cake for St. Patrick's Day ("Cookie O'Puss) and Valentine's Day ("Cupie Puss").

Once again, google is my way of finding out that I'm not alone in my obsessions. Cookiepuss, as it turns out, has been mentioned in episodes of The Family Guy and The Critic. It's also lent its name to a somewhat raunchy, prank-call centered rap by the Beastie Boys, and to a clothing and cosmetic line.

That is what I learned from googling cookiepuss. And I'm still giggling.

Oh, the Humanity: Reflections on Reaching the 100 Friend Mark on Facebook

"Half the people you see these days are talking on cell phones
Driving off the road and bumping in to doors.
People use to spend quite a bit of time alone
I guess nobody's lonely anymore."
--Greg Brown, "Cept' You and Me, Babe."

"Where have all my friends gone?
They've all disappeared."
--The Jayhawks, "Blue."


I recently passed a curious milestone: I reached the 100th friend marker on Facebook, the internet social networking utility I joined somewhat reluctantly several months ago. The response of said friend, Keith Bridges, artistic director of Charter Theatre, perhaps said it all: "Dude, that's just sad."

There are, in fact, people out there with over 300,400 friends, but why quibble over the math? At what point, exactly, do you become a Facebook whore? But then something happened that got me thinking about this phenomenon, even more than the endless invitations from the site to become a werewolf, a vampire or a zombie, or the quizzes to determine what city, James Bond movie or brand of underwear is most like me -- with answers available only if you have the audacity (or shamelessness) to pass it on to 20 more "friends."

I got a friend request (number 107) from the girl I took to my 9th grade homecoming dance in Milwaukee. Actually, to say I "took" her is a bit misleading, as it suggests that a)I did the asking and b)that I had a vehicle to take her in. Neither was true. I was still at that awkward age where I was much too shy to ask anyone on my own, and even in a recent e-mail, she acknowledged what a good "sport" I was to go along. Adding to the angst was that my sister chaperoned us to the dance and the restaurant beforehand, as I had no car. Photographic evidence of the night (Polaroids show me with a suit my mom dressed me in and an expression similar to those in hostage videos from the Middle East--I had a major stick up my butt) was the source of endless ribbing for years afterward.

The picture that accompanied the request showed her with her baby girl. She located me because we had a "friend" in common, the person who is organizing the 20th reunion at the high school I went to briefly in Milwaukee (which I left after the 9th grade when we moved to Philadelphia, for reasons that had nothing to do with the homecoming dance). I put friend in quotes because my chief memory of this person was a fight we had in the 7th grade during gym. The scene: Outside, playing softball. I was catching, he was pitching. I may have said something like, "Can't you get one over the plate?" He then beamed me in the head with the ball. I rushed toward the mound. Mayhem ensued. Though I think I was operating largely in self-defense, we both got detentions. My "friend" had a reputation for being what we would have then uncharitably called a "spaz," and I will never forget the subtle smile that appeared on the face of my otherwise mild-mannered English teacher when he accosted me in the hall, and asked, "Is it true that you beat up...."

And there was my friend's photo on my computer screen, 20 years older (with tattoos, holding baby boy.)

There are further odd connections in my burgeoning pile of Facebook friends:

*The best friend of a girl I dated in high school in Philadelphia, who unbeknownst to both of us, had been doing props in DC at the same time I was getting back into theater.

*The person who played the loyal lieutenant to my corrupt colonel in an amateur production of "A Few Good Men" in college. He also lives in the area and currently works for the state department.

*Two close high school friends that were part of a comedy troupe I performed in during high school. One is a vice-president of a medicinal rubber company (it's not what you think) and the other is a film director in New York.

*The assignment editor of the newspaper I worked at in Albany, now flak-ing for a local college, whose favorite question was, "Hey Brownstein, where's my page one story?"

I think there needs to be a new word for the weird cognitive dissonance, the sense of compressed time bridged instantaneously, that comes from reconnecting with old memories after getting "friended" on cyberspace. Maybe "webui" or "netstalgia."

Don't get me wrong. For the most part, it's incredibly exciting to have people I was once close to back in my life. In some of these cases, we had previously tried to find each other through more conventional means, and discovered one another purely by accident (or a degree of separation) on Facebook. But it sure makes repression rather difficult. The phrase "The past is not dead; it's not even the past" takes on a whole new meaning when the past sends you e-mail with photo attachments.

A final note: There also needs to be a new word for people on the opposite end of the spectrum. I am not proud of this, but as of this writing, I have 7 Facebook friends whom I've never met, and 15 who I've spoken to only briefly.

What does that say about me?

Perhaps I should put a poll on my blog.