My friend Don is demanding. He always wants to spend time with me. (By always I mean once every few months.) He wants me to be more of a friend to him than I think I am capable of. Ive never had this problem before, where someone wants to see me more. I have no frame of reference. As a result, I treat his overtures with a certain amount of suspicion In spite of that, we do, on occasion, go out and have a good time with one another.
The last time I saw Don, he was in the middle of some kind of insane diet where he was only drinking a concoction of water mixed with lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. He apparently lived on the stuff for over two weeks. Hed drink four or five bottles of this magic elixir a day and thats all that entered his body. By the time Id seen him, almost two weeks into it, his eyes had become tiny, yellow rocks. They were dull and glassy. He looked like a stuffed animal. And his tongue had become covered in a kind of yellow shag. At his insistence, I looked into his mouth and saw what appeared to be thousands of tiny yellow pinworms burrowing out of his tongue. When I asked him whether or not this was safe, he made it a point of telling me that Howard Sterns sidekick, Robin Quivers, had done it and lost over 20 pounds. Well, I said, I guess you really did your research.
Much to my surprise, he didnt die.
He asked me out tonight, and I said, Yes. Citizen Kane was playing at the Michigan Theater, so I thought that might be something cool to do. Ive never seen it on the big screen, but Ive always wanted to. I mentioned it to Don and he immediately shot it down with an, Ive seen Citizen Kane before. Yes, everyones seen it before, but this is on the big screen, Don. He wasnt buying it. He wanted to see something else, something like American Wedding, the third in the American Pie trilogy. So, guess what we ended up seeing?
Yup, I missed a chance to see Citizen Kan on the big screen in a huge, old movie house with a live organist to watch American wedding at a nondescript second-run cineplex in a decrepit shopping mall. Im such a fucking pussy, but I didnt feel like fighting about it.
(Citizen Kane didnt warrant even one sequel. There was nothing more to be said With American Pie, however, there was so much more to be explored, so many more baked goods for the main character to plow his penis into Who am I to say what makes one a classic and not another?)
I actually didnt hate American Wedding that much. I was concerned going into it that, not having seen either of the two earlier works, that I might be at an intellectual disadvantage. That turned out not to be the case though. Actually, I was a quick study when it came to unraveling the motivations of the characters and such. Oh, and guess what? Theres an extended bit on ball shaving, an old favorite here at MarkMaynard.com. (The protagonist shaves his balls and, instead of flushing his pubic hair down the toilet or tossing it into a garbage can, he tosses it out a window, where it then gets sucked into the hotel kitchen through a window fan. Close your eyes now and imagine a lovely, white wedding cake covered in ball hair.)
And to think, I almost had to sit through Citizen Kane.
It was fun. Don and I just sat in the audience and kept drawing comparisons to Citizen Kane.
Its an homage.
The best thing about it was the fact that grandmother, a woman of close to 80 years of age, was just telling me a few days ago that she and one of her friends had decided to go to the movies. They got to the theater and decided to see American Wedding because it sounded nice and wholesome. By the time they found out that it wasnt especially patriotic or wholesome, they wanted to get up and leave, but they were too embarrassed. They sat there for the whole movie As I sat there tonight, watching the film, it was fun thinking of my grandmother and her friend and what they must have been whispering to one another. (The film starts with the main female character crawling under a table in a restaurant and blowing her boyfriend Another seen features an unaware mother massaging her neck with a chain of beads the size of coconuts that had previously been inside another characters ass.)
So, I had fun with Don. I would have liked to have seen Citizen Kane, but this was good too.
When it comes to ball shaving theres no comparison. American Wedding kicks the ass of Citizen Kane.
