It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [18]
“What is that?” I asked cautiously.
“Mama’s Booze Bag,” she said matter-of-factly, and then pulled out a full fifth of Absolut by the neck. She ripped the seal off with her fingernail, using surgical precision, much like a falcon’s talon gutting a lemming.
As people began to arrive, it was relatively clear that most of my husband’s friends had no idea who Jamie and I were dressed as, and I have to say I wasn’t exactly surprised. At a party several years ago, I bought a black shift from Talbots, a Cher-length blond wig, and a plastic baby doll, which I shoved between two pieces of ciabatta bread to make a baby sandwich, and came downstairs as Ann Coulter. I thought it was pure genius and talked loudly over anyone who spoke in my general vicinity, but people spent the evening smiling politely and moving away from me. Not one person cried, “Baby sandwich! Blowhard! Fiend! You’re Ann Coulter!” Somehow, everyone ID’d my husband, Hamid Karzai, immediately, even when he was catching non-halal meatballs in his mouth. The only people his costume was lost on were my friends, who had puzzled looks on their faces when they asked me, “I think I get it.… Is your husband supposed to be Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago?”
I was very disappointed about my Ann Coulter costume and searched diligently over the next eleven months for something wicked, funny, and obvious. One day it came to me, not in a dream but in a TMZ.com video of Sad Clown Anna Nicole wandering around her backyard, snookered on pharmaceuticals, her face painted like John Wayne Gacy at a kid’s party, and mumbling that her belly was upset not because she was pregnant but because she just had to fart. Halfway through the footage, she picked up a plastic baby doll and insisted it was real, and that’s when I knew. I have that same baby doll, I thought. It’s the filling in my Ann Coulter sandwich!!
I bought another blond wig, clown makeup, and a sheet to tie around me to duplicate the toga Anna was wearing. I also collected pill bottles and taped Anna’s name to them, then Velcroed them to the toga.
Seriously, a slam dunk. And then she died. But I was not letting go of my dream and my fantastic costume. In fact, I thought my plaudits to a gassy, wasted Anna Nicole in white, green, and red face were nothing short of a tribute to her greatness.
However, I didn’t yet realize that, year after year, I was involved in a tiring game of Stump the English Grad Student, which was remarkably easy to win, unless you had an arcane trivia question about The Canterbury Tales or Daniel Deronda (that joke is only funny to 0.2 percent of the population, and it’s not you); in that case, all hands would pop up and monkey sounds would be made. But anything concerning pop culture and the outside world, forget it. How can this be, I thought as the next person looked at me, my crazy clown makeup that looked exactly like Anna Nicole’s, and my baby doll, then swiped a carrot through some ranch dip and walked away. I made a mental note to myself that we simply had to start inviting more gay men to our Halloween parties, because they were clearly the only ones with a finger on the pulse of current events.
My husband—that year, Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer—wasn’t making things any better. Sporting his two-day pencil-thin mustache, he was sitting between a fairy and a girl in a platinum wig who was wearing a tiny tiara and a shiny pink dress that showed altogether too much of her corpulent, goose-pimpled flesh. After standing there for several minutes with absolutely no acknowledgment whatsoever, it dawned on me that not only did the guests not know who I was supposed to be but they didn’t know who I was. I was completely anonymous and also quite irrelevant.
“Can I get anyone anything?” I said to the crowd, hoping to somehow fit in among the considerable chatter.
“Chhh!” my husband said without looking at me, occupied by other conversation with