Meeting the Monster

I’ve been meaning to post this picture for several weeks now, but due to a glitch, it’s been stuck on my phone.

That’s me and Doug Jones, the actor behind the makeup of such film creatures as The Faun and The Pale Man from Pan’s Labryinth, the Silver Surfer from the second Fantastic Four, and Abe Sapien from the Hellboy movies. I met him at Cornerstone Music Festival this summer in a complete fluke. I’d cashed in my vacation hours and headed out of town for a week. I spent the first half of my vacation in Joplin with a group from my church doing tornado relief, and then I headed the opposite direction to Bushnell, Illinios for Cornerstone.

I’d heard about the festival for years from friends who went every summer during my college years, but I’d never been. Now it seemed like the perfect place to get away from it all. I went all by myself, with very little knowledge of any of the bands or events happening that week.

When I arrived, I parked my car on the grass beside everyone else’s and went walking. There were lines and lines of tents, holding musical acts as diverse as old people playing folk music to angry kids playing thrash metal. There were busy crowds of Christian hippies, punks, goths, and God-knows what else camping and signing and milling about. There were fire dancers in the road and golf carts packed to the tipping point with youth group teenagers driving by and slapping high-fives with anyone who met them.

And I felt completely lost.

 

A Picture and a Thousand (Gibberish) Words

ANDREW JANSEN / JOURNAL David Strugar, Affton, and Heather Cooper, Dogtown, of The Improv Trick, perform a skit during the Cheers to the Troops event to benefit the USO at the South Broadway Athletic Club, Saturday, July 30, 2011.

It’s funny the moments that get remembered.

In the dashing photograph above, Heather and I are playing a game called “Foreign Film,” which I hate and suck at. It’s a gibberish game where two players speak to each other in gibberish, while two others “translate.” The gibberish is supposed to represent a language that we get as a suggestion from the audience—that night it was Bosnian. Since I’m half Serb, I threw in the three or four Serbo-Croat phrases I know to get things going. After that, it was all…well, gibberish.

Gibberish games require a certain freedom of mind, to just open your mouth and let whatever syllables are inside come spilling out. Unfortunately, when I play, my brain keeps rebelling and wanting to make some sense. Either that, or I just spit out the same couple of syllables over and over: “mooma da gooma” somewhat approximates it, I think.

Obviously, the joke is that nothing you say makes any sense anyway, and it can be even funnier when your gibberish sounds nothing like the language you’re supposed to be imitating. I have, however, heard improvisers who make gibberish sound like poetry. Sometimes they even find a certain mash-up of syllables that sounds like a real word, and it becomes part of their temporary, made-up language. Great stuff.

As luck would have it that night, we didn’t have enough microphones to cover everyone. Heather and I performed without so that our translators could use them and be heard. So in the end, we could have been speaking perfect English, insulting each other’s mothers, for all anyone knew.

And we got our picture in the paper for it! And they didn’t use the moment where I was admiring Heather’s armpit hair. Not a bad night.

(Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/photos/image_190a08e9-9dff-537d-a973-1f3995284603.html#ixzz1UBoFuHYc)

 

Praise the Lord, and Pass the Lemonade

I lost my keys on vacation a few weeks ago, in the Middle of Nowhere, Illinois, at Cornerstone Music Festival. Although I could get into my car (I’d left it unlocked), I wouldn’t be able to drive home at the end of the weekend. After searching the grounds and leaving a message at the festival office, I quickly texted several friends to ask them to pray that my keys would turn up. Then I called my old roommate to see if he had my spare.

He did, and he and his wife drove three-and-a-half hours to deliver the spare (I provided a fist full of gas money). Unfortunately, the spare only started the ignition, and didn’t unlock the doors, so I was going to have to spend a bunch of money when I got home getting a new car key made, not to mention replacing the rest of the lot.

Finally, on the last day of the festival, someone found my keys. I texted everyone with the good news. One of my friends texted back: “PTL!”

 

The Epicenter of Crazy, Part 3

© KireevArt – Fotolia.com (used with permission)

My dirty little secret as a barista is that I don’t drink coffee. It’s a long story, but basically, I developed a very bad reaction to caffeine as a kid, and so I quit drinking soda. I eventually outgrew whatever it was that made me react so badly, but by then I’d never picked up the coffee habit.

In the years since, I’ve acquired enough of a taste that I can sample coffees and tell people what they’re like, but I rarely drink a cup for its own sake. When I need a kick in the morning, I go for a chai. Specifically, an iced soy chai. The size varies depending on my needs.

This particular Saturday morning, I needed it bad.

The Drip had started.

 

The Epicenter of Crazy, Part 2

© KireevArt – Fotolia.com (used with permission)

“For my coffee, I will need the real cream, not the half-milk fake stuff, and I will need my paper ticket report to see the magnetic balance on my electronic golden card.”

I hadn’t seen Paper Ticket Man for a long time, but his litany was pretty much word-for-word as I remembered it. He’d been one of our former manager Heather’s favorite “characters.” When he lumbered into the cafe recently, after we’d already had a particularly rough morning, Jill-1 whispered to me, “I think the planets are out of alignment today.”

“I don’t think he ever was in alignment,” I said.

The redeeming thing about Paper Ticket Man is that he speaks his piece and goes back about his business. Other characters don’t always know when to give up. One of my unofficial duties on the morning shift is to rescue Jill-1 from conversations that have become suddenly too one-sided for comfort.

(Side note: We used to have three Jills, and now we’re down to two. But Jill-1 was always the first. Since she’s into pirates, “Cap’n Jill” is also acceptable.)

I handed a cup of coffee to a soft-spoken man who paid in change, and he remarked that, “You serve a fine product. A fine, fine product.” I agreed, and he left the bar. But instead of heading toward the cafe to find a seat, he went the other direction, toward the bathroom.

Toward the Fuzzy Zone.

 

The Epicenter of Crazy, Part 1

© KireevArt – Fotolia.com (used with permission)

Two years ago, on my second day of work at the cafe, I met Edna Rae. She stomped in wearing old pajamas, and thrust her hand out over the bar.

“Sir?” she drawled. “Sir? How much coffee can I get with this?”

I looked at the dime in her hand. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we don’t have any coffee for a dime.”

“But it’s a really OLD dime,” she said. “It’s all tarnished an’ stuff.”

Edna Rae was what Jill-1 calls “a character,” and I soon learned that our store has a collection of them.

To be fair, most of the chronically homeless people you might pass wandering the street are in that condition because of mental illness—rather than say, injury, sickness, loss of job, or other bad luck—and that’s not funny. Still, you have to find a way to roll with it when you encounter it every day, and to treat them with respect while being firm about not being able to give away free stuff all the time.

Edna Rae usually managed to find a couple dollars and come back for her coffee, but just as often she tried to pay with a casino token that she would then ask to have back so she could use it next time.

As my grandpa used to say, “I had to laugh.”

Then there are the people that just plain freak me out.

 

Lead Me Not into Heavy Traffic

St. Louis drivers suck. I know this after an extensive, non-scientific poll of my friends who’ve moved here from other cities. To a person, they’re appalled at the poor driving habits of our citizens.

It’s not that St. Louisans drive like maniacs. Big cities are known for their aggressive, hostile drivers. You expect people to be fast and crazy when they’re busy and have someplace to be.

Sadly, it’s exactly the opposite problem here. St. Louisans tend to be timid, unaware, and for lack of a better word, dumb. They have no concept of the turn signal for any occasion, right-of-way at any variety of intersection, or of making a turn without first coming to a complete stop.

I don’t know what it is about the South City area, but since I moved to Affton and have had to drive Gravois to Kingshighway to work every morning, I seem to encounter more terrible drivers every day than I could have possibly imagined. Just today I logged four people in one commute who changed lanes without signaling in front of me.

Meanwhile, I take my life in my hands every time I drive through the intersection of Maryland and Euclid in front of my cafe. More than once I’ve honked at drivers who breezed through the stop sign in front of me, only to get a finger in return.

I say this as someone who’s been honked at more than once because I spaced out at a light that had just turned green.

But at least I didn’t pull up to a green light and come to a complete stop. When the driver in front of me did this not long ago, I very nearly gnashed my teeth down to the gums. Traffic in the next lane was still moving, so I couldn’t pull around the guy to get out. I just had to keep honking in vain while the light burned green, then yellow, then red.

Maybe I’ve just gotten old and grumpy, but I really hate driving in my hometown lately.

Then the other day, while reading a humor article on Cracked.com about “6 Things That Annoy You Every Day (Explained By Science),” I saw this video, and I believe my life was changed.

 

Wicked Awesome

First, before I get into it, watch this:

Defying Gravity Storyboards from Heidi Jo Gilbert on Vimeo.

I don’t even like Wicked: the Musical, and I think video this is awesome.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an animator. I had a book titled “Disney’s Art of Animation” that I read over and over until it fell to pieces. I kept a chronological list on my desk of every Disney animated feature since Snow White, and at one point had them memorized. I even wrote a fan letter to Glen Keane (if you’re an animation geek, you know who that is).

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the discipline to learn how to draw.

 

Make David Run

UPDATE: I did it! 40 flights of stairs in 9m:55s! I’m waiting to post more when I get pictures. Thanks to everyone for your support!

_____

Nothing helps you appreciate having healthy lungs like climbing 42 flights of stairs.

When our manager Jeremy flew the idea of us honoring the mother of another store manager who’s fighting lung cancer, we all jumped on the idea. So on March 19th, 2011, our baristas will climb St. Louis’ tallest building, One Metropolitan Square, in the American Lung Association’s Fight For Air Climb, aka: “Master the Met.”

But we need your help to get there.

 

The Revenge of Plinkett

I am such a happy geek today. “Mr. Plinkett” finally released the last of his Star Wars Prequels reviews at Red Letter Media. I’m not the only one who’s been waiting for this for a long time—I don’t know how I missed it being posted almost a month ago.

The Plinkett reviews don’t just trash the films. Lots of people can and have done that, with wildly varying degrees of intelligence. Plinkett picks apart at the underlying story structure of the films, giving viewers a pretty good lesson in storytelling basics along the way. It’s one of those things where when you watch it you think, “THAT’S what bugged me about it, but I could never quite say it!”

The reviews are also hilarious bits of entertainment themselves. Rather than just type out a poorly-spelled rant, the filmmaker behind Red Letter Media creates a character to speak through, with a backstory all his own that keeps getting in the way of the review itself. The Plinkett character even has his own movie now.

Now, I have to speak up and say that some of this humor gets disturbing for me, since the character is a creep and a pervert and a serial killer. It’s all pretend, of course, but when he diverts too long down that path, it ruins the experience for me. Be forewarned if you get into these reviews that this stuff will be in there.

It’s a little meta for me to be offering a review of a review, though. I simply don’t want anyone going to watch these videos on my recommendation and getting offended. Just enjoy the insightful and cathartic rant on a series of movies that really needed someone to stand up and give them the business.