“But I don’t have any pants on.”
The Tryping My Best Moment of the Week #28
I am continuing on with the subscription donation project. The organization for October is Heart of Dinner. If you are new here (welcome!) or need a refresher about the project, you can always find more details of the project on my About page.
This newsletter means a lot to me. If you are connecting with the work at all, please consider clicking the heart button, leaving a comment, and/or sharing it. The world should probably know about it.
Hello Spooky friends. The time is upon us! It’s a very special Halloween edition of the Tryping My Best Moment of the Week. And because it is a special edition, I’ve decided to go ahead and send it out to all you lovely subscribers, paid and non-paid alike. As far as trick-or-treating goes, you are in for a treat.
“But I don’t have any pants on.”
I am late to everything. Well, that’s not true. I am a theatre person. I was taught when I was very young that if you aren’t ten minutes early you are late. And while NYC has trained some of that out of me (being the first at a bar?? in this economy??) I am usually a physically on time person.
Pop culturally, however, I am not. It took me a good twenty years to watch Jurassic Park. (Shout out to the grad school [*drink] classmates for taking the initiative to fix that one.) So, it’s no surprise that it took me at least a decade to watch the movie Fargo. But once I did, I was all in. After I watched it, I started planning my Marge Gunderson costume for Halloween AT ONCE. Well, I didn’t call her by her character name. I just called her The Pregnant Cop.
It’s a relatively easy costume to put together: khaki on khaki, a fuzzy hat and a blonde wig, a big ol’ belly, and rain/snow type boots. After a trip to the thrift store, the only thing I was missing was the boots. My best friend Cassi swooped in with the assist with her rain boots and the costume was complete.
As with most weekends when you are an undergrad theatre major in a college town, the party option was a theatre house party. Usually the parties had some sort of theme so technically, they were all costume parties but, of course, the theme for this one was simply Halloween.
The actual party is not the important part of this story so I’ll give a brief rundown: The house was packed from end to end with people. My blonde wig was incredibly cheap and therefore very itchy. As far as I remember, everyone loved my costume. I was nursing a severe crush on someone who would eventually sleep with someone else in the bushes outside of the house that night. I drank very many alcohols. Arguably too many. What is too many alcohols in your 20s? Let’s not think about that too hard. Got the picture? Good.
Now for the interesting part. Somehow, I made it home. I do not remember who brought me home. Whoever you were, thank you for seeing the pregnant cop to the door. At the time I lived in a townhouse with Cassi and another one of my very good friends, Christina. It was a god-awful hour but I managed to beat both of them home. Clumsily, I unlocked the door and stumbled over the threshold and clumsily shut the door. Then, I stood in the center of the dark living room for a while. Stood is generous. I swayed around the dark living room for a while.
All of a sudden, I needed to be out of my costume immediately and I thought the best way to do that was to take off my pants first. So that’s what I did. I tried to take off my pants. Over the rainboots Cassi loaned me. That were actually about a half size too small. It did not occur to me to take the boots off first. Instead, I struggled with trying to get my pants over these boots until I was fully squirming about on the floor. Eventually I just passed out, pants halfway down my legs.
An amount of time later (who knows how long), I vaguely heard the door open. Then I heard the following sentence, “Can you guys hold on for a sec?”
Cassi had returned home from her night of spooky revelry with a few friends and when she opened the door she saw me, in all my glory, face down on the floor. She shut the door with her friends outside and came over to gingerly check on me. I sat straight up, figured out that I needed to take the boots off first and, with Cassi’s help, finally got my pants off. I made my way to the stairs and Cassi went to the door to let her friends in out of the cold.
“Sam!” I turned around from my pantsless struggle up the stairs to see a friend of mine coming in with the group. There were no words as I tried my best to get up the stairs as quickly as possible. This friend, however, followed me right up the stairs and into my room.
She talked so fast and to be honest, I don’t remember a word of what she said. In my futile attempt to get her out of my room so I could pass out face down on my bed this time, whenever there was a lull in the conversation, I would say, “But, I don’t have pants on.”
“Sam!” Something something something something.
“...but I don’t have pants on.”
“Oh that’s so funny.” Lots more words very quickly.
“...pants.”
Eventually, she rejoined the group downstairs and I turned off my bedroom light and passed out. Or maybe it happened the other way around. Either way, I finally drunkenly and pantlessly fell asleep.
The worst part of the story was actually the next morning when I had to be up early to drive to Seattle with a couple of friends to see a screening of Iron Jawed Angels. One of those friends was the aforementioned other person from the bushes at the party. So, I was distressingly hungover, deeply sad, and trying to hold both my barf and my feelings in.
Anyway, Happy Halloweekend my friends. And, until next week, get you a best friend who will loan you her boots and also give you time to get your pantless ass upstairs before letting her friends in and keep on tryping your best.
P.S. This note is for Cassi: if this story ever gets inserted into a play or a movie or a real article, I owe you some dollars. Well, on the whole, I owe you my life but that’s a lot harder to monetize. I’ve already sold my soul to the devil.