Brian C. Petti's Blog, page 3

The Love Song of Sidney J. Stein, Opening Friday in NY

My play “The Love Song of Sidney J. Stein” will have its premier showing this Friday in NY and play through the weekend.  If you’re in the area, please come check it out!

The Fresh Fruit Festival presents Brian C. Petti’s  The Love Song of Sidney J. Stein , a gay relationship play for the new millennium, at the The Wild Project, 195 East 3rd Street on the Lower East Side (bet. Aves. A & B, F train to Second Ave.) A former male prostitute tries to guide a troubled young streetwalker in this comedy/drama about trust, honesty, and second chances. Show times are: Friday, July 12th at 9pm, Saturday, July 13th at 4:30pm, Sunday, July 14th at 7pm. Tickets may be purchased for $18.00 online at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/527. Runtime approx. 80 minutes. 
 
Further information available at http://pettiplays.wikispaces.com/The+Love+Song+of+Sidney+J.+Stein.

Desperation is NOT Pretty

Last night (and I mean ALL night) I emailed every LGBT organization within a 50 mile radius of my upcoming NYC play, The Love Song of Sidney J. Stein. There are a LOT. Besides the usual community centers, there’s a gay cycling club, a gay wrestling group, a few gay synagogues, a gay chorus, gay country-western line dancing… Out there living the glorious, childless life I could have had if God in his wisdom hadn’t made me so damn straight! There is even a group for bear lovers where you have to press a big hairy belly-button to get into the website. Who knew gays loved wildlife so much?

My show opens a week from this Friday and I am slowly reaching a level of panic usually induced by looking in my rear view mirror and realizing those shiny red and blue lights aren’t a UFO. You know, that moment of sheer terror when you make a quick mental checklist of whether you actually have the car registered, inspected and insured all at the same time and search frantically for your license so you don’t have to spend the rest of the night trying to arrange a ride back home from the police station? No? Maybe this example only applies to my wife and me.

Needless to say, I am freaking. Except for the livingroom where we rehearse, my house is a disaster area. There’s a new tire next to my piece of crap car waiting for it to stop raining so it can be restored to its rightful place. My fantasy baseball team is crumbling into disrepair. The kids have resorted to (gulp) getting food and drink for themselves! Because of my strange, three-hours-at-a-time sleep schedule, the cats pounce on me 12 to 15 times a day to be fed, probably thinking each time that it’s morning again. I’m a downward spiral, wrapped inside a hurricane, surrounded by an inferno of lava. And that’s just my stomach.

Every week the good people from All Out Arts who run the theater festival send me an email with our ticket sales to date. For the last three weeks it’s been the same—four total tickets sold for three shows. Four! Now of course more than four people will see the show. Rationally I know that festival audiences are usually spur-of-the-moment and rarely lock themselves into tickets beforehand. But irrational, sleep-deprived, obsessive Brian reacts like Oskar Schindler at the end of Schindler’s List: if I sold these cufflinks, I could have had three more audience members…this ring, I could have melted it down and gotten four more tickets sold…this car…why did I need the car?…it could have been 20 tickets…

See, if I was thinking rationally I would know that our car would be lucky to fetch the price of one ticket, and only if you sold it for parts.

My problem is I’m a playwright, not a producer. Oh, I’ve learned how to do the things I need to do to promote my show, and I write a helluva press release. But there’s that…glaze-eyed, single-minded, slightly manic INTENSITY good producers have and I lack. I’m not willing to call and call and call until I get what I want. Although some of my Facebook friends might disagree, I am not comfortable with the all-out, Super Bowl marketing blitzkrieg necessary to sell tickets. I’m not above asking friends to come support my work, but I’m no good with the follow up phone call where I ask, “So what day are you coming? Are you bringing friends? How many? Get more, I’ll arrange a bus.” Naked ambition and the ability to use people I like without a conscience aren’t in my DNA. Which is why I will never succeed as a producer.

I’m more of a soft sell guy. The kind who would write a passive-aggressive blog about how freaked out he is over ticket sales with the hope that everyone who reads it and can travel to New York “gets it” and instantly goes to the website at web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/527 and buys tickets to make my stomach stop hurting. See why I suck at this?

 

You want to know how I view the art of selling tickets? You ever see Miller’s Crossing? If you haven’t, go out and buy it RIGHT NOW. We’ll wait. OK, you remember the scene where John Turturro is being taken out into the woods to be shot by Gabriel Byrne and he’s begging, begging, begging for his life to be spared? “I can’t die… out here in the woods, like a dumb animal! In the woods, LIKE A DUMB ANIMAL!” Sniveling, pride-less John Turturro, pissing himself and crying, on his knees in the woods. “I’m praying to you! Look in your heart! I’m praying to you! Look in your heart! I’m praying to you! Look in your heart! I’m praying to you! Look in your heart… ” Producing, ladies and gentlemen!

 

I want the world to see my new show. It’s my latest child, and he’s just learning to walk. I want to show you the video and the endless pictures of his first step. But…I know there’s a limit to how much you’re going to listen to me go on about my miraculous kid. At some point you’re going to smile, nod your head knowingly, say something like “aren’t children great” and try to get away from me as quickly as possible without being rude. Oh, how I wish I could be one of those blissfully unaware people who think whatever is important to them is equally, if not more, important to the rest of the world! If only I lacked all empathetic ability, and cared not a whit about what the other guy was thinking as I’m saying, “So, you gonna come to my show? It’s going to be fabulous. Ten tickets or an even dozen?”

 

I need to send more emails and lie down for no more than three hours, if my stomach stops churning. Feel sorry for me? Good, here’s the flyer: 

 

Let Us Give (Ahem) Thanks

Thank you that when my wife Mary Ellen said to my son Conor, “Do you want me to snap and kill all of you?” it probably didn’t include me. Most likely. Hopefully.

Thank you for the 652 people who had the good taste and common sense to download my ebook when it was free last week. They got a few free laughs and I got to look at the pretty round numbers.

Thank you for letting me be born in a blue state. Although I hear people in red states are very friendly, the idea that after they’re so friendly they go home and try to research Barack Obama’s Islamic heritage just ruins it for me.

Thank you for making my children bright. Thanks a lot, really. Every time they argue with me about, oh, EVERYTHING from what they’re going to eat, to what they’re going to wear, to whether or not the damn moon revolves the damn Earth…I count this particular blessing. Sometimes while simultaneously counting to ten.

Thank you for NOT blessing my cat Shea with said brightness. Watching him equivocate over whether or not to leave the house on a rainy day while I breathlessly wait, holding the door, for his final answer like Regis Philbin in that game show fills me with unfathomable joy. And I’m pretty sure he eats his own feces.

Thank you for the ability to eat. I will never, ever take it for granted. If it is taken from me at some future date, at least we had Paris. And bacon.

Thank you for the following exchange between me and Mary El:

Mary El: I don’t know why they let fathers in to see the birth. Wouldn’t you rather be in the waiting room?

Me: I thought I was as calm as I could possibly be. I was there for you.

Mary El: Yeah, but…

Me: Look, wherever you are suffering, I’m gonna be there.

(brief pause)

Mary El: (deadpan) That is so true…

Thank you for my new play, The Love Song of Sidney J. Stein, running this July at the Fresh Fruit Festival in NYC July 12, 13 and 14. And thank you for allowing me to live with the shame of relentlessly promoting myself at every possible opportunity. Tickets available at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/924651!

Thank you for my fantasy baseball team. Although You, in your wisdom, saw fit to take my best player Troy Tulowitzki away from me for six weeks due to injury, I know You did this in order to test my coping abilities. You would think the seven surgeries and constant poverty would have covered it, but no! You had to go and smite a perfectly good power-hitting shortstop having the best year of his life. Blah, blah, blah, mysterious ways, blah, blah, blah, ours is not to reason why, blah, blah, blah…I was in first place, Youdammit!

Thank you for taking the scourge of my Hickman catheter (a permanent IV for nutrition) away from me. It had been about three years since I was able to take off a shirt without unclipping it from my collar. My chest is still sore, but it is indeed a small price to pay.

Thank you for summer vacation. Getting up and getting the kids ready for school is literally killing me. Plus they’re are SUCH pleasures in the morning! Just moaning, bitching, complaining bundles of unadulterated joy. I’m sure I will not be thanking anybody when they start bemoaning how bored they are, but at least I will be more rested.

Thank you for giving the Mets Matt Harvey, though they desperately don’t deserve him the way they hit when he pitches.

Thank you for allowing me to be well enough to help coach Mychal’s little league team this season. I missed it.

Thank you for Miguel, the kid who works at Wal-Mart and fixes cars on the side, who will provide the brakes that will keep our car from catapulting off the side of the mountain when we drive into town to pick up milk. And thank you for answering our hurriedly mumbled prayers that have somehow kept said catapulsion from occurring during the previous month’s forays down the mountain of imminent death.

On behalf of my family, thank you for the ability to not take ourselves too seriously, and to find humor in the most unlikely places. Laughter is our offense against ignorance and our defense against despair.

And if you’re taking requests, some good crowds for my show would be swell. And help Tulo’s ribs heal up, I need him in the lineup. And, you know, health for us all. Thanks.

Sister Mercedes and the Temple of Doom–FREE 6/10-14

My ebook Sister Mercedes and the Temple of Doom will be offered for FREE on Amazon from 6/10 to 6/14!  Here is the description:

“Sister Mercedes and the Temple of Doom” is a collection of blog posts from playwright and author Brian C. Petti. From the depiction of the author’s upbringing as a fat, shy Catholic school boy to the vagaries of family life to trying to live hand-to-mouth while on disability, “Sister Mercedes” is a sometimes hysterically funny, sometimes tragic and always human glimpse behind the veil of parenthood, marriage, pop culture and the world in general.

“”Edward Hayes  |  6 reviewers made a similar statement

“”JBeaty  |  5 reviewers made a similar statement

“”J Flowers  |  2 reviewers made a similar statement

http://www.amazon.com/Sister-Mercedes-Temple-Doom-ebook/dp/B00C479TN6/ref=zg_bs_156284011_f_3

Want My Advice? Of Course You Don’t!

I was recently given some unsolicited advice about grammar by a well-meaning person who only had my best interests at heart. Don’t you love well-meaning people who only have your best interests at heart? They make this great big blue world go round.

In case you can’t see the bile leaking off your computer screen, I’m being sarcastic.

Now I’m all for opinions. You can’t read three paragraphs of this blog without tripping over a veritable landmine of opinion. If I’m writing about it I have something to say, and if you’re reading it…well, I’ve managed not to piss you off yet.

Advice? Bit of a different story. As I’ve said here before, there are about four people in the world I trust enough to take their advice. Maybe three. All right two. And when I want said advice, I like to think I am humble enough to ask for it. Having advice volunteered to me is akin, in my mind, to someone showing up at my doorstep unannounced, inviting themselves in, commenting on what a mess the place is and asking, “What’s for dinner?” I’ll feed you because I’m polite that way, but I ain’t gonna be “overjoyed by your presence”.

If you’re a particularly perspicacious reader, you might notice that I used two instances of quotation marks in the previous paragraph, but left the punctuation mark INSIDE one and OUTSIDE of the other. The lovely, generous, well-meaning pain in the ass—I mean “advice giver”–helpfully (annoyingly) suggested (told me in no uncertain terms) that the punctuation mark is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS included INSIDE the quotation marks, so it is written, so shall it be, Amen.

I’m a bit of a grammar Nazi myself, but I think I would rather chew razor blades than correct someone unsolicited (unless they’re being a real jerk.) That aside, I know the damn rule and I think it’s stupid. Here’s a self-deprecating and hopefully disarming way to illustrate what I mean:

Joel said, “Brian, when you sing you have wandering pitch.”

Joel told me I have what is called in the music business “wandering pitch”.

To me, the period belongs in the first set of quotation marks but doesn’t in the second. That’s just the way I see it, right or wrong. I like the subtle discernment between the two thoughts and I like how “wandering pitch” looks separated from the punctuation mark. Like a red light on a deserted road at 2am, I choose to slow down and carefully breeze through without stopping. Unless you’re a cop, what does anyone care?

Ah, but there are people out there who are the WORLD’S policemen. They have their lives so incredibly together that they have a whole steaming pile of life expertise to share, and dammit they’re a-gonna spread it! They will make you less fat, more successful, less of a doormat, more self-aware, less married, more industrious, more, less, less, more, more or less, if only you heed their warnings, listen intently to every word they say and let them move you around their personal chessboard like a freakin’ pawn!

All right, the poor woman was just trying to help me, she wasn’t trying to become Vladamir Lenin to my Soviet Union. But you know what? I still can’t help but resent it, because I didn’t ask for it. I recently published an ebook and I sent it out to a bunch of people for free in exchange for an honest review. In that case, all bets are off. I solicited these opinions and now, good or bad, I have to be ready to listen. If someone hates the book and says so in the review I am completely cool with that. I’m willing to accept their opinion.

But I invited them to dinner, they didn’t just pop in. If I ask you over and neglect to clean the place before you come, you have every reason to comment on the housekeeping. If I promise you a good meal and serve Pop Tarts with applesauce on the side, feel free to call everyone you know and tell them what an awful host I am. If I asked your opinion, the result is on me. If I didn’t, volunteering your advice will not be, as they say in the life business, “looked upon kindly” PERIOD

(Full disclosure: I SO want to put another period after PERIOD. It’s literally hurting me not to. And yes, I know I ended that last sentence with a damn preposition!)

Sister Mercedes and the Temple of Doom Radio Interview

If you’re near a computer or radio (Catskill Hudson area), tune in to WGXC 90.7 or http://wgxc.org/ at 2pm today (5/16) to hear my interview with Ann Forbes Cooper.  You can hear me read selections from “Sister Mercedes and the Temple of Doom”, my new ebook on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C479TN6/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb.

If you miss it on the radio, the interview will be added to their website for download as well!

Brian

How to Produce an Off-Broadway Show for $1.50

Click on the flyer for more info on the show.

I ain’t got NO money, honey. I mean zip. At this very moment, I have a car with no brakes and a suspended license I can’t afford to pay off. As many of you know I am on permanent disability, which, if you read Facebook, means that I’m luxuriating in mountains of free cash while smoking crack and talking on my brand new I-Phone. Yeah, not so much.

What the HELL am I doing producing an Off-Broadway show?

The short answer: as much as I can without spending a dime.

Way back when when I first started playwrighting, I wrote a play called Everything’s Coming Up Roses that took place on an AIDS ward. I had written a couple of monologues for an Art for AIDS benefit and one of the members asked me to find a play to produce to fill a two-hour slot. I looked at a bunch of AIDS plays, but couldn’t find one I liked. So, being young and stupid, I decided I’d write one.

Against all odds it ended up being pretty good. It was a long one act with strong characters and believe it or not it was funny. I remember being up in the balcony running lights in the Poughkeepsie theater where we debuted the show. I held my breath at the first laugh line. I was both shocked and thrilled when the audience responded. It was a heady experience.

Not that comedy was the point—the play took place in an AIDS ward, after all. But at the center of the ensemble play was a flamboyant character named Sidney J. Stein, who provided many of the one-liners, sang inappropriate showtunes and filled the stage with life. Or it was the actor, Jimmy Pillmeier, imbuing the character with his boundless energy. Script, actor, actor, script. When it works you don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

There have been five incarnations of Roses, and Jimmy played Sidney in each one, from Poughkeepsie to the Village to Brooklyn. My first full-length play was a prequel to Roses called Before the Parade Passes By, which focused on Sidney’s troubled family at his abusive father’s funeral. Jimmy was in the show we debuted at Bard, and then again when it had a limited run in New York. In short, Jimmy has been Sidney on stage whenever there’s been a Sidney to be seen.

Needless to say, after my first two plays dealt very specifically with AIDS and gay characters, I gained a bit of a local reputation as “Orange County’s Foremost Gay Playwright” (that’s Orange County, NY—in California I wouldn’t have been in the top 20). The fact that I was actually straight seemed not to matter much, which I chose to take as a compliment. If the plays had sucked, the gays would have dropped me like last Spring’s fashions!

Since that time I have written a range of characters, from my own Irish uncle to a German boxer to a Polish Holocaust survivor to my wife’s grandmother. It is a particular freedom playwrighters enjoy, to be able to create characters who are often very different from themselves. As long as the characters are true, not false. False will be ferreted out before the end of the first scene, if it takes that long.

Which is all an effort to explain how I came back to the beginning by writing a new play called The Love Song of Sidney J. Stein. I will soon be embarking on a one-man PR blitzkrieg in an attempt to make everyone in the metro New York area (and everyone else I know) aware that this play will be going on in New York this July. Which is not the point of this blog, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. They say you have to put a message in front of potential “customers” 20 times before it has the desired effect of having them notice it. One down, 19 to go!

The idea of seeing where Sidney might be at this stage of his life was immensely appealing to me. He never really went away as far as I was concerned, but it had been quite a while since anyone else had heard from him. He has changed in some ways, like we all do as we mature and age. He works at a halfway house now, trying to help the new generation of runaways and hustlers who always seem to repopulate themselves. He is still himself—still snide, still funny—but more than himself at the same time. And somehow he’s alive, as many folks who are HIV positive have recently found themselves.

And as luck would have it, Jimmy returned from his theater job in Maine around the same time! Kismet!

So when I saw that there was going to be a “Fresh Fruit Festival” in New York featuring LGBT-centric plays, I knew Sidney, Jimmy and me had a date with destiny. I entered the play for consideration, letting Jim know of the possibility, and waited. I can’t say I had no plan about what I would do if the play was accepted—I have done the self-producing merry-go-round before—but I can safely say it wasn’t completely thought out. Of course we got in, and I beat the bushes looking for a producer. No dice. So…I borrowed the refundable deposit from my Dad and we’re embarking on the $1.50 version of Sidney.

What does this mean? OK, first of all I can’t hire a publicist, which means I have to make up my own press release and send it out to the oh, two thousand media outlets in and around Manhattan. Request reviews, follow up with pictures, pursue contacts. I started that this week, and I will probably keep doing it until we open. Good thing I don’t have a job, although the Cadillac shopping does slow me down some.

It also means niceties like costumes and set pieces are probably going to be necessarily expendable. Neither will a stage manager nor a light/sound tech be affordable. It’ll be me, me and me, and my two cast members, and however many of our friends or strangers we can convince to come.

And you know what? So what. There’s no helicopter landing, or chandelier falling from the roof in act two. There’s no multi-media, no light show, no puppets. It’s a two-person character-driven play that we would do with flashlights if we had to. Because it is important to us and we need to show it. I’d like it to become a huge, runaway success that warrants a twenty-thousand dollar budget, or a two-hundred thousand dollar budget, with a lighting director and a costume mistress and a paid producer. Hell I’d take 200 bucks to defray travel costs. But no multiple of twenty is going to make the show itself any better. The right actors, with the right script. You should be able to stage it at the bottom of a well.

So this is how you produce an Off-Broadway play for $1.50, if you’re ever in the mood. Write a script you have the passion to get out no matter what. Cast talented people, preferable ones you’ve worked with before so you know what they are capable of. Rehearse the hell out of it. In your living-room. Send a LOT of persistent emails. Bother everyone you know to come see it. Carpool down to New York. Find out where the “lights up” switch is on the board and tell the actors to project. Try to enjoy every second, because the opportunity does not come around as often as you’d like it to.

Or you can find a producer, but what fun would that be?

Five Reasons Why “The Following” is Balls

I like Kevin Bacon. I really do. I gave this show a shot mostly because of him. I gave it a second shot because he was in it. I watched the rest of the season…well, not because of him anymore, but out of a masochistic desire to finish the damn thing already. It stinks, he stinks, the writing stinks. It’s balls.

I don’t like making unsupported claims. Let me tell you exactly why it’s balls.

The protagonist: Ryan Hardy. Ryan is a tortured, self-destructive detective with a drinking problem and a deep-seeded fear that everyone he ever loves is doomed to death. He’s right, starting with this stillbirth of a character. Every…and I mean EVERY…cop cliché is thrown together in a jumble of badness. Ryan plays by his own rules. If he has a hunch he follows it, FBI be damned. And he’s always right, because the writers prefer it that way. Ryan is too damaged to love. He pines tragically for the killer’s wife, with whom he had an affair but nobly dumped because she needed to move on. He’s tough and just and weathered and blah, blah blah blah, de blah. Didn’t Kiefer Sutherland do this same damn thing like, five years ago? Haven’t the Law & Orders, et al been flogging this dray horse for the better part of three decades? I get it, we love cops, and the more unhappy the better. But c’mon already, it’s been done and done and done. Kevin knows a good script. He was in JFK! Tell me he didn’t see the obvious cracks in this character by page two. Maybe he tried to throw the script in the garbage but it was so one-dimensional it just bounced off the can like it was a painting. He should have burned it.
The antagonist: Joe Carroll. Joe is a Literature professor with an English accent who, after killing a bunch of young women in some convoluted homage to Edgar Allan Poe, masterminded this big old plan to escape from jail, kidnap his wife and child and relentlessly tweak his arch-enemy Ryan Hardy with the help of countless insane “followers” who live and breathe by his every word. Not since Snidely Whiplash has there been such a trite, obvious and all around ham-handedly evil character as Joe. He might as well be twirling his mustache over a damsel in distress tied to a railroad track. He’s supposed to be creepy and intelligent with some overarching plan that will blow the lid off the crime-thriller genre. So far, all he does is ruminate over his badly written book while consistently having his plans blow up in his face. Mastermind? Who puts a bunch of psychotics together in a commune-like house and expects everything to run swimmingly? By benefit of what, his English accent? His magnetism? He’s not magnetic so much as earnestly silly and unrelentingly over-the-top.
The damsel: Claire. Joe’s ex-wife who was apparently so oblivious to her own husband that she was unaware he was secretly ducking out at night to buy a bottle of scotch and kill some co-eds. THEN she hops into bed with the detective who put her husband in jail because that always happens. And she has a darling boy with her killer ex, to whom she is about as maternal as one of those bare wire mother surrogates in that rhesus monkey experiment. Not since Laurie in The Walking Dead has there been a character who so inspires you to root for her immediate death. Lovely Claire, who although her son is missing and her ex-husband is trying to get his hands on her for a reconciliation/retaliation-fest, ALWAYS has her hair just so and never lacks time to apply eyeliner. Lots and lots of eyeliner. Unlimited eyeliner must have been written into her contract. She’s attractive enough if you think you should cast a vulnerable suburban mom off the Maxim’s Top 100 Hot List. Go back to soap operas, Claire, or just die already.
The whole “Poe” thing. Whoever is writing this series obviously has a Cliff’s Notes version of Selected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe and they’re not afraid to use it. From “The Raven” to “The Fall of the House of Usher” to “Masque of the Red Death”, the quotes just keep on comin’. Stand-alone quotes with a wisp of hackneyed explication by the hero, adding ultimately to squat. Apparently the big, revelatory reading of Poe leads to the concept that “killing is natural”. That’s it. That’s the best they could do with one of the most original horror writers in the English language. A Poe Literature professor and all of his breathless students came up with the genius idea that killing is OK. Oh, THAT’S why people still read Poe nearly 200 years later! It’s all so simple! Man I should have taken American Lit with Crazy Joe, I would have aced that shizz! Come to think of it the writers should have taken that class too, and maybe a few screenwriting courses as well.
The Followers. These are supposed to be a group of hard-core killers who manage to lead normal lives, known in their full depravity only to Joe. The problem is they walk around acting like complete loons. And dramatic loons. It’s like Psycho Beach Party meets Dawson’s Creek in that house. Everyone’s sleeping around, killing people randomly, crying about their feelings, killing people randomly, questioning why they dropped everything else in their lives to follow Snidely McBadactor, killing people randomly… They’re supposed to be psychotically dangerous, but come off as the kind of whiny navel-gazers Winona Ryder made a career out of playing circa Girl, Interrupted. And if someone at line at the store was acting as obviously insane as these people frequently do, six people behind them would have called 911 from their cell-phone before they paid for their hatchet and switchblade. Hiding in plain sight? These people (actors, writers, producers included) have the subtlety of a crazy, homicidal pie in the face.

Want to know the true tragedy? I watched the damn thing. I could have been listening to sports radio, or taking care of my lawn or God forbid writing a new play. No, I had to get wrapped up in this mess. Balls to you, Bacon, and your six degrees of horrendous.

Reason 6,873 Why I Should Never Be Allowed to Leave the House

Mary El and I get in the car Saturday to drive down the mountain to our landlord’s bank in order to deposit the rent check. We have to pay by the 15th of each month because our landlord has some direct withdrawal thing. It is exactly the 15th and the bank closes in 15 minutes. We are nothing if not predictable in our ability to wait until the very last millisecond.

Here’s a brief snapshot of the current rusted roller-skate we call a car: the first thing one notices is the tremendous dent on the driver’s side where yours truly went into a ditch—at the end of our own driveway—while trying to back the car in after a snowstorm.

They say most accidents occur within a mile of one’s home. I’ve amended that to about 30 feet.

The second thing one’s eye is drawn to is the fact that there is an awful lot of silver duct-tape across the car’s trunk, which seems to indicate that said trunk is hermetically sealed. However, upon closer inspection, one sees that the tape seal has been broken (during a frantic search for Mychal’s baseball equipment), leaving the trunk door “held down” by a single, too long bungee cord. One cannot see now, but will soon hear, that said contraption results in a sound most resembling “ka-THWUNK, ka-THWUNK” whenever the car rides over anything larger than a pebble.

A third item an astute observer might notice is that it’s recently been raining. One could come to that deduction by benefit of the position of the windshield wipers, which are stuck directly in the middle of the windshield. They were, and I use this term warily, “fixed” two weeks ago to the tune of $240.00 so said car could pass inspection. Obviously there was not much actual inspection in our inspection, since we frequently have five-year-old children in parking lots volunteer, “Is that your car? I wouldn’t ride in that if I were you…”

The fourth item in our “Crude Tools of the Ape-like Moron” safari is hard to gather upon first glance, unless one knows these particular beasts quite well. If one does, one would realize that there is no WAY these two would have laid out another $3-400 they didn’t have to get the brakes repaired while the wipers were being (ahem) “fixed”. If one follows the primitive rolling machine of the Ape-like Moron on its sojourn to the end of the driveway, one would see the slightly obtuse, quizzical look on the bald male Moron’s face when his foot hits the floor, but the rolling machine continues to roll unabated. One is reminded of the seminal cartoon “The Flintstones”, except Fred’s car would beat this one in a race.

Okay, so our car sucks. But it’s never been dangerous before. Well thank God we don’t live at the top of a mountain or anything! And, I mean, it’s not like we HAVE to go someplace important to do something essential to our lives. Oh wait. We DO live at the top of a friggin’ mountain and if we don’t pay our rent our landlord will default on some unnamed thing that will undoubtedly get him arrested and us kicked out in the street. And we have to get there in ten minutes. Thanks for letting me clear that up.

So there’s Moron and wife skidding down the side of Mount Ellenville, pumping the brakes and praying to a merciful God that they see their children again.

And here’s where we get really stupid.

We ‘re pulling up to our landlord’s bank about three minutes after its noon closing time. As I’m guiding the brake-less car into the parking lot, Mary El says, “Oh, maybe they’re open until one on Saturdays.” Information we maybe should have known before we break-necked down the side of a ski-slope, careening brake-less around bald eagles and hand-gliders.

But wait, she’s the smart one.

I go in and pay our rent and leave my checkbook in the lobby. This is just an average Saturday. If I had a dollar for every ATM card I’ve lost, I might have some money left in my account.

We pull up across the street to our bank and slowly grind to a grudging halt. Mary El is talking about her awful respiratory infection and wondering out loud if she will still be alive to see the boys graduate high school. I say, “Don’t worry, you’ll be as healthy as a clam.”

Mary El is smiling her evil elf smile. “That’s HAPPY as a clam. You don’t see too many clams doing cardio work-outs.” My idiom idiocy is a constant source of amusement for her, and is, I suspect, one of the top five reasons she keeps me around.  When Jesus dropped the cross, Mary El had to remove herself before someone caught her laughing hysterically.

I have no choice but to laugh as well and point out that she left the house in black pajama pants covered in red lips, so who is she to stand in judgment?

Not that she’s leaving the car. That’s my job, me in my red sweatpants and hoodie sweatshirt. Recently, on a weekend when the boys were still dressed in their mismatched sleeping clothes and Mary El and I were in our usual clown outfits, I hugged Mary Ellen and said very seriously, “You know what I love about our family? Our impeccable sense of fashion .” Our family crest is a picture of a sleeping sloth with the word “comfort” in Latin below it. It’s LEVAMENTUM, I looked it up.

I get into the ATM booth and get in line behind two ladies who are carrying on an ongoing conversation about how one of them almost slapped a woman who was working at Rite Aid. They were both about four feet tall. I should just carry a book wherever I go. I have three checks to cash (one of them a $13 royalty check for one of my plays—I knew it would pay off someday!) and a $50 bill Conor got for his birthday that we’re afraid to try to buy Chinese food with because the woman who runs the place is a lunatic who scares the bejesus out of me.

I was waiting to pick up our food one time and the dragon lady was screaming…screaming… at a middle-aged Chinese man working there in her native language. She had this scary crazy look in her eyes, while the man just nodded and smiled thinly. I was wincing for him. It sounded like a mugging in Tiananmen Square or the drums from the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Suddenly she bursts out laughing. This was just normal conversation! What would she do to me if I offered her a fifty first thing in the morning?

So the crazy pygmies leave and I step up to the ATM while another guy gets in line behind me. I think the pressure involved in this situation is universally apparent. If you don’t share my fear of some judgmental jerk pointing out with outrage that there is a three transaction limit, then you’ve obviously never had a credit card denied at a grocery store in front of a line of customers and we’ll probably never be friends.

I start by inserting my card and typing in my pin number, bip, bip, bip, bip. I use the touch screen to attempt to choose “deposit” but I hit “withdrawal” instead. OK, no problem, I’ll just get out the twenty first. Out pops the twenty, do you want another transaction? Yes please, bip, bip, bip, bip. I sneak up on “deposit” and gingerly choose it. Put your money in the slot.

I take the twenty and put in back in, then look at the fifty in horror. I know the guy behind me saw me do this and thinks I’m one of those people who likes to take out and put money into ATMs for funzies.

OK, don’t panic. Just put the checks in. Another transaction? Bip, bip, bip, bip. Checks are in. This has taken about five minutes, but I feel like I’ve been standing here for about seven hours. Still have to put the fifty in. Bip, bip, bip, bip. That’s the fourth time I “bipped”. Did I hear an almost imperceptible sigh from the man behind me, or did I just imagine it? Maybe I should have just handed him the fifty and ran.

Now for the twenty to avoid Chinese New Year. Bip, bip, bip, bip. At this point I’m visibly disgusted and sigh myself as a prophylactic measure. Damn ATM machine, making me all slow! Can you believe it? Modern technology, huh. Are you buying any of this, patient stranger?

I take my twenty and wait those interminable moments until the ATM decides to release me from my private hell. Then I turn around and look at the guy right in the eyes. I’m quite ready for him to just punch me in the face and be done with it. I say, “I’m sorry.” Like a possum playing dead, absolute honesty has always been my go-to confrontation antidote.

“It’s all right,” he says, and he seems to mean it. He’s one of us, the credit-card-denied-at-the-grocery-store-in-front-of-an-angry-line-of-customers gang. Thank goodness, and thank you patient stranger. I almost hug him.

In a few moments I won’t have to hit my brakes on the way back up the mountain and my lovely wife will be laughing so hard at this bald, Ape-like Moron that she nearly pees her red-lip pajamas.

Too Much Penis Information

“Dad!” Conor calls from the other room.

“What?”

“Do you care about Mom’s vagina?”

Confused? Shocked? Revolted? Me too, and he’s my kid.

I struggle with what to say next. “Intimately!” is the best I can come up with.

Some background. First of all, somewhere along the line Conor lost his “shame” gene. Or he never had it. He will walk into any room at any time, naked as the day he was born. He’s 13 and looks like he’s 16. This is not easy for anyone else in the house. Mychal will frequently say something like, “Will you put that thing away, I can’t see the TV!” Mary El and I just try to maintain strict eye-contact with our wayward, nude boy. We don’t want to ask and we ain’t gonna tell.

Mary El is definitely the more affected of us two. She talks a good game, but she’s modest by nature. Plus, as she is want to say, she is surrounded by penis and testicle having BOYS all the time. When Conor was a baby he used to give his Mommy what he called “movie star kisses” that were as long and passionate as a three-year-old can muster. If he tried that today Mary El would have to press charges, then shower continuously for three days. Our little “Naughty Man” is becoming a naughty man!

Thank God I don’t have girls. At the first sign of secondary sexual characteristics, I would have brought them to the nearest convent and asked that they be kept in perpetual prayer in a locked basement until they were in menopause. Forget about being one of those Dads who scare off boyfriends, I’d be one of those Dads who calls the SWAT team if you’re five minutes late bringing my precious angel home. I don’t have any Mafia connections, but I’m half Italian. I can find some. Got it punk? And pull your pants up, you’re going out in public with my girl. Did you give me a dirty look? I didn’t think so…

Yeah, God made the right decision with the boys thing.

But in spite of their differences in modesty, Mary El and Conor have one of those close, almost spooky relationships where they think the same thoughts sometimes and can communicate without speaking. Mychal and I (who share an Italian soul) will be barking at each other about some silliness as we are want to do, and Conor and Mary El will be in quiet hysterics watching us and carrying on a two way conversation of smiles and nods that is basically saying, “Can you believe these two schmoes?”

Mary El is Conor’s go to person for emotional support. He can, and very readily will, say anything to her. Sometimes too much. Sometimes WAAAAYYYY too much. He still thinks the term “Nocturnal Emission” is the funniest thing that has ever been spoken out loud in English. He’ll talk to her about the girls he likes, and how he has “zero game” in his own estimation (just wait…) He coined the phrase “retarded monster” which refers specifically to a class photo a few years back where Conor was standing in the back row next to the girl he liked at the time. There is space for another child between them, and Conor’s shoulders are up around his ears. Now, being a “retarded monster” is any socially uncomfortable thing he ever does. It’s like teen poetry.

Let me say right now that I am not the least bit jealous of this relationship my son and wife share. Here’s a specific example why I’m not, which led to the aforementioned cringe-worthy exchange:

Conor walks into Mary El and says he has to show her something he’s worried about. On his penis.

He didn’t go to me. See why I’m not jealous?

After Mary El forces the frightened, panicked look out of her eyes, she says something along the lines of, “Shouldn’t you go to someone who actually HAS a penis?”

“No, I want to show YOU.”

“I never had to care for my penis. I’ve only had to care about my vagina.”

“Mom, no one cares about your vagina anymore.” (See? He’ll say anything!)

“Yes they do!” Mary El is strangely offended.

“No, they don’t.”

“Your Dad does.” Why, oh why did she have to bring me into this?

“Dad…!”

In the end, the second choice that is me had to weigh in on Conor’s malformed member, much as a hired forensic scientist testifies as an “expert” for the prosecution. “Mr. Petti, what qualifies you to render an opinion in this case?” “Well, I would say my 44 years of Penis-Having speaks for itself.”

So after being forced to defend the “careability” of my wife’s privates, I had to have an up-close-and-personal-encounter with my son’s private. Ain’t fatherhood grand? But I’m not going to get into the intimate details of how this encounter transpired…

Ha! You thought you were going to get off the hook that easy? You’re in for the full Monty, boys and girls, just like I was! Welcome to my world. Ready for it? Are you sure?

He had a pimple.