Always a blogsmaid: 2,000 words on why you should just go ahead and read something else

Pay no attention to the title. Drew, our newest and self-deprecating-est VF contributor, shocks and awes with his searing and syphilitic pirate-mentioning portrayal of life in East Nowhere, Mass. Flattery, our Star Wars-loving friend has discovered, will get you everywhere. Or at least into our annals, with heavy underscoring of the second ‘n.’

I feel a certain obligation, dear reader, to inform you here at the outset that what follows contains nothing of what you’ve come rightfully to expect from a posting under the Vanity Fare banner: nothing voguish or metropolitan or exotic or epicurean or bon vivanty or readable. There will be no reportage from the great cities of Asia, the Mideast, or Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe; indeed, this is correspondence from an entirely different and altogether un-golden part of the horse. For you see, dear, charitably persistent reader, the grim truth of the matter is that I live, with my parents, in East Nowhere, Massachusetts, in a town best known for Oprah almost but eventually not buying a house here one time, and am perpetually too stone-broke to afford return trips to any of the Bay State’s more blogworthy localities. But in spite of this being the place where I park my laptop, you can also add life in No-Oprah, USA to the growing litany of things this post is turning out not to be about—although I caution that you might not know it at first. No doubt by this point, dear, unrelenting reader now showing troubling signs of masochism, you find yourself cerebrating on at least one of the following excogitations: what, then, is the stupid entry about already, and why would someone so obviously unqualified be contributing to Vanity Fare in the first place? Believe it or not, the long answer to both of these questions is exactly the same.

The short answers, respectively, are Saturday night of January 27th, and because I don’t screen my calls.

Now, I use “Saturday night” in the loosest possible sense of the term (certainly not in a way that implies it to be Live, Fever-inducing, or Alright for Fighting). Understand that the place I live doesn’t even qualify as a one-horse town because the one horse we had actually died of boredom. Normally I would have spent this particular evening at home watching The Matrix Revolutions on HBO again and laughing to myself about how terrible it is—a process I refer to as “working on my screenplay”—but fate, and my parents, had other plans. Other dinner plans, to be specific, in the form of a very VF-appropriate dinner party they were hosting (there would be spicy shrimp gumbo and crèmes brûlées!), around for which I was told, in no uncertain terms, not to stick. And with my lately-acquired obligations to this blog sitting heavily on my shoulders like a fat parrot on a syphilitic pirate, I walked out into the night, flipped the middle finger at my cruel and uncaring parents inside the house where they let me stay for free, got into the car that they let me use, and just started driving. Surely there had to be somewhere here in Podunk with a brow and a health inspection grade high enough for me to enjoy a bloggable repast! Somewhere …

Somewhere …

Somewhere …

I eventually settled on much-reputed strip mall hash house T.C. Lando’s, well known in these parts for diner fare that’s equal parts last meal and lethal injection, as well as for its convenient Dunkin’ Donuts-adjacent location. (Rumours of the restaurant’s affiliation with heterosexual Star Wars character Lando Calrissian remain unconfirmed but highly true-sounding.)

Packed to the walls with dinner rushers taking-out their greasy spoonfuls, there were not only no places to sit, but when it came time to order, my performance definitely suffered under pressure to keep the line moving. The chicken parmesan sub I ended up with is, I think, an unfair indictment of the menu as a whole: nicely spiced chicken, but a tepid tomato sauce, gluey cheese, and bread that tasted essentially as if someone were describing the concept of bread to you in a language that neither of you spoke very well. Plus I had to eat it in my car. But enough people passed by while I waited near the counter with food that looked and smelled like the real deal that I wouldn’t hesitate to come back and try something a bit less shoot-from-the-hip. Maybe on a Wednesday around ten in the morning.

Now, as any seasoned VF reader would be quick to tell you, on a full actual stomach is the perfect time to go about cramming one’s cultural piehole by taking in, say, an art show, a gallery viewing, or a game of Jenga. Unfortunately, both the children’s museum and the skateboard park were already closed by then, so in order to get my recommended dosage of the fine arts for the evening, I would have to press on to a neighbouring town. Conveniently, the art world there seems to have taken a lesson from the “Girls! Girls! Girls!” school of advertising:

Yes, the arts don’t come much finer than in this county firetrap, one of the main ports of call for moviegoers in my town ever since our own movie theatre was shut down and turned into a liquor store, which I think pretty well sums up just how seriously folks have to take their escapism in order to go on living here. Though its billings tend to take bronze a bit both critically and commercially, there was, this Saturday night, unalloyed gratification awaiting patrons of the Arts in the form of indie-tastic Oscar comedy beard Juno, showing on Screen 2. Over on Screen 1, however, those of us who’d already gone to see Juno back before it was cool were, along with 200 decibels worth of teenage girls, treated to a little oversight in the Geneva Convention entitled 27 Dresses.

I’m sorry, that last comment should maybe be taken with a grain of estrogen. Indeed, for the sake of my bloggerlistic integrity, I will go so far as to credit the film as a perfectly serviceable specimen of the romantic comedy, one that even held out a few tantalizing modica of hope that it might be cribbing from something savvier than The Big Book of Tired Chick Flick Bullshit. But alas. And what was with James Marsden not needing special ruby quartz lenses to restrain his uncontrollable mutant optic blasts? Talk about your continuity errors!

But I’ll tell you what really stuck in my craw about this cloying but basically digestible confection. The film’s hook is that Katherine Heigl’s protagonista Jane has acquired a montage-sized collection of each-worse-than-the-last-one dresses by having served as a bridesmaid (though really more a de facto backstage Maid of Honour, considering all the work she evidently puts in each time) in the weddings of twenty-seven of her girlfriends. By all accounts, this isn’t just sublimated bouquet envy on her part, though: at worst, Jane can be perceived as kind of a doormat and an unrepentant romance junkie; but in a good light, she’s more of a patron saint of weddings, repeatedly martyring herself in order to enable what she believes to be the most important day in each of her friends’ respective life. And decry as we might her basic premise, or the extremeness of her measures, her attitude at least strikes me as above reproof. Here was a refreshingly positive angle on the usually heartsick sentiment behind the movie’s inevitable tagline, “Always a bridesmaid”—rather than a mark of Cain, it’s a badge of honour, and of real friendship. How disappointing, then, when it became clear that Jane’s emotional journey in the film would be on a path of increasing selfishness, pettiness, and vanity (of the most assuredly unFare variety), such that her own wedding at the end of the picture, with all her friends lined up in the same ridiculous dresses she was once made to wear, plays more as an act of revenge and humiliation, rather than the estimable triumph of good karma it should have been. Seriously, it ended up feeling like a rom-com screenplay written by Ayn Rand, give or take 1500 pages.

But before 27 Dresses came apart at the seams, it did manage to germinate in me a single significant notion. I want at this point to impress, dear, but one can only assume Guantanamo Bay-detained reader, that I am all too well aware of the manifest pointlessness of this entire blog entry: way back more than a thousand words and three Dunkin’ Donutses ago, you’ll remember, I even warned you that what followed would be stodgy and unbohemian and utterly devoid of that characteristic Vanity flare. This is effectively because my life is incredibly boring, as demonstrated not only by the manner in which I spent my most exciting Saturday night in months (slop and a flop), but how I spent the week that followed (writing about it for three-and-a-half drafts). I think you’ll agree it’s a life, like so many, that should never see the light of the internet—but I’m afraid that ended up being all the more reason to inflict it upon you. Know, however, that this sadism wasn’t voluntary on my part: you see, it was a mutual friend of ours who asked me, innocently but insistently, to write something for her foody-artsy-travelly blog, with total disregard for my unhyphenated lifestyle. But then, many desperate and ponderous hours after my sub-par chicken parm sub and the Heiglian diarrhetic,* it dawned on me what an account of those paltry events could, in fact, be made to amount to; and with sudden nobility of purpose, I set out to write that account with all possible speed, which ended up meaning I took four days longer to finish than was supposed to. And with the so-called happenings of Saturday night, January 27th now recorded for you in all their considerable monotony, I only hope the effect is complete.

* For why this is the cleverest thing you’ve ever read, click here.

Because this post is like a bridesmaid dress. It’s ugly and unstylish and made out of cheap material. It’s probably too long and definitely too frilly. It’s an embarrassment to have to display in public. And yet, in spite of that, that, that, that, that, and that, I elect to wear this dress, and wear it with pride. Because above all, this post should clearly be seen for the glaring anomaly it is, setting into stark relief all the things about Vanity Fare that get you to read it and keep you coming back to it. For me personally, aside from learning things like how to spell “Mountain Dew” in Arabic, that’s the chance to see friends of mine leading lives of culture and risk and discovery and sodality and that they’re eating well—all of which makes me feel much better about not really being a part of those lives most of the time. So on the once in a lifetime occasion (as I’m sure we all hope it proves to be) when one of them calls up and invites me to come up to the front of the blog—well, yes, I accept; and then I try to make my presence implicitly all about the wonderful thing she’s created and set up and accomplished—by cobbling together the meagre scraps of my own life’s fabric and piecing them into the ugliest dress that will still keep me in the wedding party. And see: doesn’t pristine, elegant, exciting VF look simply radiant by comparison?

That’s the thing about friendship, dear reader—sometimes it’s a tall, bearded man wearing a dress.

- Drew