Paul Rudnick

In an earlier post, I mentioned the many misspellings of my last name, including the especially unfortunate Redneck. But there was a wedding announcement in this past Sunday’s New York Times which made me feel better. Francesca Butnick, 28, is a fancy Manhattan lawyer who married Clifford Silverman, 29, another fancy Manhattan lawyer. The announcement noted that “the bride is taking her husband’s name.”

I understand completely.

In the same section, there was a larger announcement regarding the wedding of decorator Nate Berkus to Jeremiah Brent, a decorator who appeared on The Rachel Zoe Project: this was a wedding built by Bravo. The two guys are both handsome and accomplished; Jeremiah is the son of Gwen A. Johnson and Terry B. Johnson. The announcement mentions that Jeremiah had “changed his given surname”, which led me to assume that he’d grown up as Jeremiah Johnson, which was the name of a Robert Redford movie where Redford played a grizzled mountain man. The always-helpful blog Towleroad tells us that “The decor combined their color palette of black, whites and creams and included gold touches, and natural elements like geodes and minerals, mixed in with lush greenery. The ceremony wall was custom built and linens from Berkus’ own fabric line blended with his Target collection.”

I’m not sure what a ceremony wall is, but I want one.

In an earlier edition of The Times, an item discussed “A Utah woman accused of killing six of her newborns and storing them in her garage.” The item says that “The woman, Megan Hunstman, told the police that there were eight or nine dead babies in her home in Pleasant Grove”, although Captain Mike Roberts of the Pleasant Grove police only found seven, and claimed that Ms. Huntsman was confused. “She couldn’t remember the exact number,” said Captain Roberts, “so she threw a ballpark figure out there.”

Maybe towns should just never be named Pleasant Grove…

When I was a child, I made a solemn vow: I would never vomit. Vomiting seemed just too disgusting. I was determined to never undergo that indignity. I might become a thief or a murderer or even a Cub Scout, but I would never vomit.

Then, when I was maybe 10 years old, I got food poisoning and vomited enough for an entire daycare center. I was so dehydrated that I began to hallucinate. I was in my bed, watching the movie musical The Harvey Girls on TV. This movie opens with a glorious number called On The Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe, in which a train arrives in a prairie town. In my delirium, I decided that the train was roaring through my bedroom, and my parents found me huddled against the wall, avoiding injury.

About a week ago, I had whatever that current virus is. This resulted in agonizing stomach cramps, a fever and a hideous sensitivity to light. I couldn’t sit down, lie down or stand up; every position made me want to barf and collapse. I couldn’t open or shut my eyes; both options made me dizzy. The most awful aspect of all this was the following: I desperately wanted to vomit, to rid my body of its cackling intestinal demon, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I would lie in a fetal position on the bathroom floor and then crouch over the toilet, but it just wasn’t happening. I had become the sort of person who yearned to vomit, who dreamt of vomiting, who was praying to every possible vomit god. Finally, I vomited profusely and repeatedly, like a cartoon character or someone in a frat-boy movie. It felt sublime, and after a day or so of recovery, I was fine.

The only possible treatment for this sort of thing, as anyone who’s ever contracted it knows, is the cool embrace of the bathroom floor tiles. These tiles don’t really help matters much, but they seem to at least understand the pain involved. It’s like having a soothing floor-nanny.

Maybe the reason I’d always hated and feared vomiting was the loss of control. And the smell. And the taste.

Now I regard vomiting as a sign of great emotional maturity.

My partner John is going through a prolonged and hideous version of this kind of illness. John’s a doctor, so he knows all the possible causes and not-very-effective remedies. Plus, the cat keeps trying to sit on his stomach. Part of loving someone involves listening to them vomit, and rooting for them. John and I were once on a plane from, I think, Aspen, Colorado to Los Angeles. This flight is so notoriously rough that it’s been dubbed The Vomit Comet, for good reason. John was fine, but I spent the entire flight having that familiar inner debate: should I try to remain disciplined, or just head for the bathroom and get it over with?

P.S. Unless you are truly perverse, never Google “Vomiting” and look at the Images.

P.P.S. One morning during John’s illness, I awoke to discover that the cat had vomited on the floor in sympathy. I made this discovery with my feet.

P.P.P.S. The eternal question: after vomiting, do you look at it? Have you ever experienced a form of forensic nostalgia, a remembrance of lost meals?

P.P.P.P.S. I was once walking up Eigth Avenue, when a sturdy woman, wearing a white tank top and cutoff jean shorts, ran out of a Mexican restaurant. She balanced one strong foot on the base of a nearby lamppost and vomited more than I’ve ever thought a human being was capable of. A lake of vomit formed on the sidewalk. Her friend stood beside her, encouraging her. After the woman was, I imagine, empty, the two women went happily back into the restaurant, to continue eating.

I believe that people should be called whatever they would like to be called. This applies to anyone who would like to be called queer, transgendered or Inuit. It does not apply to anyone who would like to be called Melodee-Kaitlynn or Starminder.

There is nothing more tragic than wanting desperately to wear a color which you know will look terrible on you.

Today a tall, able-bodied young man, carrying a beer and a large bag of chips, asked me for money. I told him that I would only give him cash if he promised to use it to buy potpourri.

A recent study proved that using those cylindrical foam rollers is superior to pre-exercise stretching. However, when a person is using a foam roller while lying on a mat at the center of a crowded gym, they should not make noises which indicate childbirth.

I was watching a TV report on an LA newswoman who kept chattering away about how, following her DUI arrest, she’d hit bottom and was now ready to take responsibility for her life. At no point did she mention that her lips were so filled with collagen that they resembled air mattresses. But then I chastised myself for judging this woman, because maybe her lips were actually filled with vodka.

Whenever someone says “My Mom is my best friend”, I always think, “And that’s why you don’t have any other friends.”

Never give a child, or anyone else for that matter, more than two choices. These choices can include, “You can stop whining, or I can beat you to death with your Princess Jasmine doll.”

Nicholas Martin, a wonderful director and a superb human being, died yesterday. Nicky was
one of the most truly adored people I’ve ever met. He was the chortling, ebullient, inspiring
center of a devoted theatrical circle; everyone in the theater knew Nicky, or wanted to.
He was a source of true delight, and he made every encounter, whether it was a working
relationship, a friendship, or just a hello on the street, into an event.

I only got the chance to work with Nicky once, when he directed my play The New Century
at Lincoln Center. Up until then I’d only known the Nicky Martin legend; people loved
him so much that he seemed mythical. He’d begun his career as an actor, and then moved
into teaching and ultimately directing. He was a master of re-invention, accumulating
fans from every new venture. One of his last projects was Chris Durang’s brilliant
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which won last year’s Tony Award for Best Play, and
Nicky was nominated for his direction. That play encapsulates all of Nicky’s favorite
themes, encompassing loss, hilarity and theatrical dazzle. Nicky had also directed
a memorable production of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, starring Victor Garber
as a matinee idol with friends, lovers and staff swirling around him.
Present Laughter was in many ways a portrait of Nicky.

The last few years had been rough on Nicky, as he’d suffered a stroke and then cancer.
But being Nicky, even his misfortunes became parties. After his stroke, I visited
Nicky in the hospital, and his room was not only filled with flowers and balloons,
but the supreme playwright John Guare was sprawled across Nicky’s bed, and the
matchless actress Dana Ivey was seated nearby. John had brought along one of his
students, and Andrea Martin, Debra Monk and Nathan Lane were due any minute.
Brooks Ashmanskas, the sensational comic actor who’s currently enslaving audiences
in Bullets Over Broadway, was an especially close friend of Nicky’s;
I think they’d met when Brooks was Nicky’s student at Bennington.

Nicky served as the Artistic Director of both the Huntington Theatre in Boston and
the Williamstown Theatre Festival; he could attract the finest talent just by paging
through his address book. He both loved and understood actors. The New Century’s
cast included Linda Lavin, Jane Houdyshell and Peter Bartlett, and I would sit beside
Nicky and share his pure joy at watching these world-class performers. Nicky made
actors, and playwrights, and everyone else, feel safe and appreciated. He had
the air of a sophisticated, giddy child, curious about everything and always expecting wonder.

Here’s a tribute, from his days at the Huntington:

Martin McDonagh is one of my favorite playwrights; his work has been produced many times on Broadway and everywhere else. At least two of his plays, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman, are outright masterpieces. In almost all McDonagh’s plays, the darker and more vicious the action becomes, the more wildly hilarious the proceedings grow. As more characters get dismembered, shot in the face and buried alive, everything only gets funnier, and not polite/literary amusing, but truly funny. McDonagh constantly toys with audience expectations. Just as we feel that a character has suffered enough and deserves a hug or at least a moment of relief, another character will enter and beat the first guy to a bloody pulp, and then the bloody pulp with also be diagnosed with tuberculosis. In The Pillowman, one brother asks another something along the lines of “But didn’t you know that if you cut off all of a child’s toes and fingers and left him alone in the middle of a forest all night long, that he would bleed to death?” The other brother replies, “Well, I know that now.”

I love all of McDonagh’s plays, but the only work which had puzzled me was The Cripple of Inishman. I’d seen two productions, and neither had really worked for me. Many of the characters in McDonagh’s plays have thick Irish accents, and this requires an American theatergoer’s close attention. On Wednesday I went to a matinee of the new Broadway production directed by Michael Grandage, and suddenly the play made wonderful sense. It follows the desperate life of Crippled Billy, a young man living on a bleak Irish island in the 1930s. Everyone in the play mocks Billy relentlessly, and his otherwise doting aunts decide that even a blind girl would have problems kissing Billy. Even though I knew the play, the many plot twists still surprised and delighted me.

In this production, Billy is played by Daniel Radcliffe, who’s both accomplished and movie-star magnetic, while happily joining an amazing ensemble of actors. I especially liked a beautiful young English actress named Sarah Greene, who plays Helen McCormack, a cruel and gleefully violent local girl. This actress never tried to soften the role or distance herself from it, which made her irresistible.

McDonagh has also begun writing and directing movies, including the terrific In Bruges with Colin Ferrell; even though all of the characters keep talking about how boring Bruges is, the movie made me want to move there. McDonagh’s movies are also giddily violent, but I think it’s even harder to chop people up onstage.

Here’s a photo of McDonagh, who’s a handsome devil.

1. So many people online kept insisting that he was gay, so he began to wonder.

2. He needed time to save up for the ring.

3. He kept waiting for Angelina to leave Brad (because Jennifer Aniston kept assuring him, “Oh, it’s gonna happen!”)

4. He kept waiting for Brad to leave Angelina, because even though George is straight, he’d still marry Brad, duh.

5. His bride-to-be is a lawyer so on their first date, she surprised him with a binding pre-dessert marital contract, and he really wanted the tiramisu.

6. He finally met someone who was smarter, sexier and prettier than he is.

7. He’d bought expensive wedding gifts for so many other people and he was finally getting fed up.

8. He’s being paid a fortune by the Soviet government to distract the media from what’s going on in Ukraine.

9. He was getting tired of Jewish women referring to him as Mister Picky and Mister-I’m-Too-Fancy-To-Marry-A-Normal-Woman-And-Be-Miserable.

10. He finally accepted the fact that Jo, from The Facts of Life, on which a young George had appeared as a handyman, was never going to marry him.

Recent criminal activity:

Felicia Smith, a 42-year-old teacher in Houston has been arrested for giving a 15-year-old student a “full contact lap dance” in front of her entire class. In his deposition, the boy says that he slapped Ms. Smith’s butt several times and that the teacher’s dance caused him to have “an erected penis.” Smith concluded the four-minute-long dance by telling her student, “Happy birthday, baby.”

My verdict: I feel that Ms. Smith should go free, as long as she wasn’t teaching grammar.

49-year-old Thomas Kroger, of Ceres, California, was found dead in the freezer of an auto body shop on April 14th that was owned by his husband, 26-year-old Jacob Cervantes, who has pleaded not guilty. The pair got married in August of last year and Kroger’s death may have occurred anywhere between December 1st and April 10th.

My verdict: pending. Maybe the happily married couple were just playing a sex game called “Let’s pretend that you’re a loin of pork”, that went terribly wrong.

72-year-old singer/songwriter Paul Simon and his songbird wife, 47-year-old Edie Brickell, were both arrested at their home in New Canaan, Connecticut, after a dispute reported by Brickell’s mother, which involved “shoving.” The pair were charged with Disorderly Conduct and released.

My verdict: Edie Brickell is at least six inches taller than her husband, and she’s 25 years younger. She should be ashamed of herself for shoving a tiny little old man. But at least she didn’t put him in the microwave.

This is a clip from Addams Family Values, featuring a song I wrote with the wonderful
Marc Shaiman.Even though the scene takes place at a summer camp, the song is part of
a Thanksgiving Day pageant: no one has ever questioned this. I wrote the lyrics
while sitting alone in my apartment; watching the song being performed,
with gusto, by actual children, was another matter entirely,since the song
is called “Eat Me.”

This scene also includes some of my favorite actors ever, including Harriet Harris,
Christine Baranski, Peter McNichol, Julie Halston and even the movie’s director,
the sublime Barry Sonnenfeld, in a cameo appearance as a camper’s Dad.

I just got back from Ground Zero, which is always a disturbing and enlightening experience. Several of the major new structures, including the transportation hub and the Freedom Tower, are getting closer to completion, and the architecture is staggering. The site of a terrible tragedy has become a bustling, international tourist destination. This was on a much smaller scale, but I was reminded of visiting South Beach in Florida, a few months after the designer Gianni Versace was shot to death on the steps of his mansion. Tourists were already posing for photos on the steps, with their young children, and searching for bloodstains.

I was watching a forgettable rom-com on cable, which was called, I think, Someone Like You and starred a young Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman, often in their underwear, as battling roommates. At one point the couple steps out onto their balcony, and as they chatter, the Twin Towers loom behind them. After 9/11, some moviemakers would digitally remove the Towers. If you revisit the musical The Wiz, you’ll find a vast, choreographed number swirling through the World Trade Center plaza. Seeing the Towers, especially unexpectedly, is unnerving, but it also makes me grateful for the photographic record.

Among the New Yorkers I’ve spoken to about it, no one seems enthusiastic about visiting the new 9/11 museum, which has been painstakingly thought out – there’s been a recent dispute over the depiction of Muslims in some of the exhibits. For people who were in town on that day, the events still feel raw. I’m not sure why, but I have more trouble looking at photos of the crumbling Towers now (I watched the buildings come down from my rooftop.) At the time, there may have been a numbness which has only just begun to recede. And I don’t want to claim any personal stake in the tragedy, as my home wasn’t harmed and I didn’t lose anyone.

Many artists have set stories in and around the events of 9/11. Because I’m a comic writer, I took a more oblique route. In my play The New Century, a group of characters from all over the US end up in Manhattan, and at least two of them visit Ground Zero. Shane, a young hustler/stripper, visits Century 21, the discount flagship which sits right beside the site. In the days following 9/11, I was always struck by the fact that the large Century 21 sign was just about the only landmark still visible amid the rubble. The fact that the store re-opened, in 2002, felt like a hopeful development, and the store’s motto, on the shopping bags, had always been “Fashion Worth Fighting For.”

I wrote The New Century as a tribute to the spirit of Century 21, because I think of the store as an emblem of survival. When the play was produced at Lincoln Center, I received a wonderful note from the store’s owners, who enjoyed the play; they also enclosed a gift card, which I used immediately. Today I was back at Century 21. It’s a great store, and one of the country’s last few true discount palaces. Most such stores don’t really offer designer goods at a substantial savings; they usually just sell not-so-great merchandise manufactured especially for the outlets. But a passionate shopper can still unearth amazing bargains at Century 21, from topflight manufacturers. The Ground Zero store is always busy with customers from all over the world.

While I was shopping, I ran into one of the store’s owners and we had a terrific conversation. This was the sort of encounter that could only happen in New York, and I was so impressed that the owner was shopping at his own store. Because I’m an idiot, I immediately asked him if he got a discount, and he said yes. Then I asked him, “How much?” As soon as I said this, I realized that I was being insanely rude, so I yelled, “Don’t answer that!” and he smiled.

There’s no correct way to approach a tragedy. The facts, and the loss, remain indisputable. My favorite depiction of the Twin Towers remains the truly awe-inspiring documentary Man on Wire. This film follows the fearless wirewalker Philipe Petit’s 1974 highwire travel between the towers. The footage is terrifying and breathtaking. Even just thinking about this movie gives me vertigo. But it’s a way to remember the doomed buildings. Watching Petit scamper back and forth between the buildings’ summits is unsettling and triumphant.

On Home Shopping yesterday, while the salesfolk were hawking nylon tote bags “in all of today’s most trending colors”, they began asking the shoppers who called in an additional question, on the air: “If you could change places with anyone in the world for one day, who would you choose?”

Many people chose the Pope, which may reveal something about the Home Shopping demographic, although I kept wondering: why did these callers want to be the Pope? Because they admired him? Because they’d use their Freaky Friday body-swap day to declare divorce, birth control and gay marriage to be just fine? One caller was flustered by the question and then firmly replied, “Walt Disney’s wife” (who died several years ago.) Again, I wondered about her choice: was she too modest or afraid to want to become Walt Disney himself? Walt met his wife Lillian when she was a secretary at his studio, and she also worked as an ink artist on several cartoons. Walt originally wanted to name his most famous creation Mortimer Mouse, and Lillian is credited with encouraging him to use Mickey. The Disneys had a long and happy marriage, and after Walt’s death Lillian remarried. She became a philanthropist, donating fifty million dollars to build the Disney concert hall in LA. Which of these attributes had attracted that Home Shopping caller?

Here’s my thinking: it’s a terrible question. On one hand, the question may simply require a natural curiosity about someone else’s life. But since the callers tended to name famous people, the question seemed to be more about dissatisfaction. The Home Shopping sales staff was pretty much asking, “If you could be someone better, someone rich and famous and powerful, someone who didn’t have to buy cheap nylon tote bags, who would you be?”

I once overheard two actresses chatting, outside an audition room. One of the actresses, who was otherwise a gifted and delightful person, asked her friend, “So tell me – who’s having your career?” She was serious, and this struck me as one of the saddest and scariest questions I’d ever heard.

Everyone gets depressed and cranky at times, and everyone’s felt pangs of envy. Personal re-invention can be necessary and thrilling. But sincerely wanting to become someone else is a surefire route to madness. At one point the perky Home Shopping salesladies asked one of the young showroom models who else she’d like to be. At first the model refused to answer, which I applauded. But since she’d been put on the spot, she finally sputtered, “My Mom.” I think this choice was just a loving tribute to her mother, but it’s also a Freudian arcade ride.

That’s Walt and Lillian pictured above, with their rodent goldmine. Now that I think about it, maybe all that Home Shopping caller wanted to be was obscenely rich.

Justin Bieber has done it again: by posing reverently at a Tokyo shrine to Japanese war
criminals, he’s offended millions. He’s tweeted an apology in which he explains that
he’d had his driver pull over to what he thought was a place of prayer, and he concludes,
“I love you China and I love you Japan.” Earlier Bieber had visited the Anne Frank
house in Amsterdam, where he’d written, in the guestbook, that if Anne was still alive,
“Hopefully she’d be a Belieber.”
Just to save time, here are some future Bieber apologies:

“So sorry to black people everywhere. Thought Martin Luther King was Luther Vandross.
Shouldn’t have compared myself to him, as a ‘sexy-time dude.'”

“Jews, u know I luv u. Thought concentration camps were for gettin’ ready for the SATs.”

“Shouldn’t have called my new album 9/11 – thought you could buy Big Gulps there.”

“Got it – all female cops not really strippers. Yay u!”

“Props to India – didn’t mean to tell Calcutta audience Don’t Have a Cow.”

“Gay dudes rule – will stop callin’ gay shit so gay.”

“Helen Keller u rock – thought u wuz snooty.”

“My bad, Pope Francis – ur not a nurse!”

After attending this week’s Auto Show, I began recalling my other favorite cult events, including the Beauty and Hair Show and of course, the epic International Cat Show. The Beauty and Hair Show was held at the midtown Coliseum, which has since been demolished, but it was an orgy of booths and kiosks devoted to personal grooming. One of my favorite stops was the Eva Gabor Elegant Lady Wig Collection, a sizable corral staffed with ladies in matching gold mesh mini-togas, all wearing wigs with sophisticated names like Nancy Newport or Countess Mitzi. I was later told that the Eva Gabor wigs were a favorite of transgendered sexworkers, for their durability.

Many booths featured the most extreme forms of nail ornamentation, including 24K gold 3-inch press-on talons. Each of these nails was also encrusted with diamond chips and enamelled with a tiny animal print, and a hole had been drilled at the tip of each golden nail, so that a charm on a tiny chain could dangle. There were women wearing this sort of massive nail art on every finger, and I wondered how they could use a phone, or the toilet.

The B&H Show was attended by hairstylists and manicurists from all over the country, dressed to thrill. I saw a male couple from DesMoines, wearing hand-sequinned graduation robes over their Hawaiian shirts and harem pants, with little fezzes, sprouting tassels, set at an angle on their heads. The show climaxed with a ruthlessly competitive hair-off. The models were all volunteers, which meant that while these men and women weren’t especially attractive, they had a passionate desire to be models. They would allow the battling stylists to glue yards of hair extensions to their actual hair, and this combination would then be sprayed and sculpted into everything from a bobbing, woven Easter basket, filled with actual Easter eggs, to a replica of the Chrysler building, which included tiny twinkling electric lights.

The Cat Show was held at Madison Square Garden and it was packed with owners and animals so it smelled, well, like a cat show. There were cages everywhere, filled with cats, and the owners were often fairly large people wearing even larger sweatshirts with iron-on full-color photos of cats. The many breeds of cats were displayed on a small stage, where the owners would hold the cats stretched high in the air, like furry sausages. It was like a slave auction where the slaves were incredibly bored.

That year the centerpiece of the Cat Show was a hugely publicized special guest appearance by a recently cloned cat. A substantial crowd had gathered to watch the clone wandering around a chickenwire enclosure. All I kept thinking was: how does anyone know if this cat is really a clone? Everyone was happy to believe the brochure. As far as I could tell, it was just a not especially distinguished cat, waiting to pick up its check and head out for a smoke.