Got your popcorn and Milk Duds?

Dim the lights, turn off your cell phones, sit back and relax, because it’s time for Clown Day: The Movie!

If you want to watch it in widescreen, please view it at YouTube.

Enjoy!

Clown Day was a huge success, except for the fact that students on our campus couldn’t have cared less that a clown walked among them. I’m still calling it a win because no one threw a pie at me.

I’ll recap the day and then let you enjoy the movie trailer we produced to commemorate events. I’m submitting it to Sundance. They take everything.

The day began with my clown assistant sister Marlene collecting me at my house. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to eat later, and she immediately chastised me for putting too much of everything on the bread. I can’t do anything right.

We piled in the car and headed to work, getting noticed by no one. We clowned around in my office with everyone who came to get an eyeful. Took video and pictures and then headed out to our first stops.

No one said anything to us. And I looked like this. I don’t get it either.

Students, if anything, simply glanced and put their heads back down. Only one student spoke. “Run! Run away!”

Wow. Tough crowd.

We headed for visits to various buildings on campus, stopping at my satellite office, where I followed a grad student back to hers, saying “Would you mind if I followed you back to your desk? in the creepiest way possible. Until I told her who I was, she would not look me in the eye. Note to self. Creepy is only fun for the clown.

Before we knew it, lunch time! We headed to a deli nearby, where I had my first and last PBJ sandwich. I know I made it wrong. I know I used the wrong jelly (strawberry), but that didn’t matter. I was a “mouth feel” thing. Jelly too slimy. Make clown sad.

So my videographer graciously offered me half his BLT sandwich. Bacon good. Make clown happy.

The rest of the afternoon was more of the same: Students not caring, but friends and co-workers loving it.

By 3PM, my clown assistant and I were exhausted. Clowning is much harder than I thought it would be. You always have to be ON. We felt OFF by then and decided to head home.

Made a quick visit to my clown assistant’s workplace for pictures. Found out that her co-worker’s son is a campus police officer where I work and got the email that I sent warning that a clown would be on-campus (can’t be too careful).

Can you imagine the morning briefing? Be on the lookout for a clown today. She’ll be unarmed and hilarious.

So what did I learn by clowning all day?

• A clown can hold her bladder for eight hours and not suffer any ill effects.
• She can also eat a whole pizza for dinner by herself.
• No one’s butt looks good in a clown suit. Hourglass figure? Forget it.
• A blue afro rocks.

Thanks go again to my sister for helping me with picture-taking and lugging all my clown paraphernalia around. Clowning is hard, but I think clown assisting is harder.

Jason Slipp, my good friend and co-worker, filmed and edited the following movie trailer. Thanks for your creative spirit, time and talent! (Movie to come in a later post).

Here you go!

We’re embracing the crazy again at The Junk Drawer. If I gave you the chance, what would you dare me to do? Something gross? Something scary? Something embarrassing?

If I offered the power to choose one of those things, and I promised to do it on camera, would you pay for the opportunity?

Read on and see how the crazy works.

Bill White, a columnist from my local paper, The Morning Call, sponsors a fundraiser every year for a food bank in our area.

He’s also responsible for one of my family’s most-anticipated holiday traditions – visiting elaborately decorated homes on a Christmas lights tour that he designs based on reader submissions.

He drives by every nominated home and publishes a tour of the very best ones, including driving directions to take from house to house. It’s a huge deal around these parts and my family picks one of the routes to enjoy every year.

What’s really fun is that Bill turned his fundraising efforts and the lights tour into a challenge for his readers to collect as much as possible for a chance to win a personal tour with him.

Those who make the largest donations to the Second Harvest Food Bank of the Lehigh Valley get to be driven around in style to see homes on the tour.

And I want a tour!

Here’s where you come in.

If I can reach my fundraising goal of $750 by December 14 that should guarantee me and my family a tour with Bill.

AND! My sisters and I are willing to match your gifts (up to $250).

What’s in it for you besides spreading Christmas cheer? YOU. GET. POWER.

Your reward for making a donation is to vote on which of the following you’d like to see me do. I MUST DO whichever one receives the most votes.

1. Eat my first ever peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Many of you know I find these two foods together a rather disgusting combination. I’ve gone my entire life without one, but I’d make an exception if it meant others could go a little less hungry.

2. Ride a horse. Some of you may recall this being on my list of 10 Things I Don’t Have the Guts To Do. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. And the horse should be, too. Do horses have weight limits?

3. Wear full clown gear to work all day. Face paint, big red shoes, wig. Everything. I will work as normal on my clients’ computers, go to meetings, and eat lunch with strangers. In public.

If you’re willing to donate, please use the ChipIn tool below to make a secure contribution. And THANK YOU!

Then leave a comment indicating which task you’d like me to do. If I hit my goal, I’ll get the job done and post back with a video of me in action.

REMEMBER: ALL DONATIONS DUE BY DECEMBER 14! That’s not a lot of time, but I know you can do it.

You have the power!

What are you lookin’ at, jerk?, I thought.

I’d just left my Catholic grade school to walk home immediately following mass, held at our church adjacent to the school.

As I reached the halfway point of my four-block trek, some creepy guy in a car slowed down, drove my walking pace and stared at me.

For a 10-year-old, this was disconcerting. You know, Little girl, want some candy? and all that. I’d always been leery about walking on that particular block anyway, since there was a mental health facility nearby.

Anxieties peaked after the day two guys wearing their orderly whites came running down the street and shouted over to me on my porch “Did you see someone run down this way?”

Rut-roh. An escapee. Not good.

So I’m walking along, when Creepy Guy slows down and stares at me. He rolled down the window and said “What’s that you got on your head?”

And then it hit me.

I still had my white church veil pinned to the top of my head from mass.

Oh.

I felt silly. But also completely skeeved out by a guy who would scare a little girl half to death. And about something so trivial, no less. Weirdo! With one swipe, I removed the veil and tucked it in my pocket and bulletted home.

So.

The veil.

All girls in our school were required to wear their white veils to mass, which we attended every Friday.

If you forgot to bring your veil, you had to wear a Kleenex on your head.

A Kleenex. That made you a target for snickers. But if someone sneezed, it also made you convenient.

Most veils we wore were smallish and lacy, the size, look and feel of the doily your Grandma put under crystal bowls full of hard candy no self-respecting kid would eat.

Some veils were longer, like the one my classmate Theresa wore. I wonder if she ever became a nun like she wanted to be for the longest time. We could all see her becoming a nun because she wore her uniform well below the knee, kept tissues tucked under her sleeve and piously said grace before lunch.

I wore my doily, er, my veil in the style of a taco, which is to say I folded it in half and fastened it to my head with the rounded side toward the back, two bobbypins in the front on either side of my head.

I rocked that look, trust me.

Other girls wore their tacos folded out flat in a circle, but that made it harder to pin because you essentially had to rip a hole in the middle of it to stick the bobbypin through. Slobs.

Theresa’s was basically a wedding veil, which hung down almost to her butt. That required all sorts of special rigging because of the weight and because her hair was thin. She would have been better off just Crazy-gluing it to her head and leaving it there 24/7, practice for nunhood and all.

But no one, not even Theresa, wore a headscarf veil, tied under the chin. That was reserved for old, crunched-over Italian women who dressed in all-black wool, even on sweltering hot days. Sweatiness is next to godliness, you know.

We mercifully didn’t have to wear veils to high school masses. I think the administrators took pity on us. There’s just so much other stuff to tease girls about. Thank you for one less thing.

OK, so for all the non-Catholic readers, did you learn something new today? For the Catholics out there, holla! Do you remember wearing veils to church? What style did you wear?

Oh, and that’s me in the picture. Not wearing a veil. Probably worried about Creepy Guy on the way home.

So yeah. I was chatting online with a friend who gives me inspiration to workout every day.

I told her that with new leg and butt exercises, I’m really seeing and feeling results there and was thrilled about it.

So much that I’m convinced “my ice cream brings all the boys to the yard.”

Except that that’s not the correct lyric.

It’s not ice cream. It’s milkshake.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.

And then all the boys stand around laughing at me because I’m old and shouldn’t be trying to quote the lyrics of songs meant for hot, young things.

The end.

This weekend I took my oversized comforter to the laundromat with washers and dryers that could accommodate it. When I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a guy who’d just taken several Hefty bags full of laundry out of his trunk.

Unbeknownst to him, one of the bags tipped its load and he was plopping his drawers and socks all over the lot, leaving laundry breadcrumbs every few feet behind him.

As soon as I could park my car and hop out, I alerted him to his wayward drawers. He thanked me and went back to collect his whitie tighties. When we met up inside the laundromat, he thanked me again and said “Well that was embarrassing.”

I wanted to hand him my blog business card and say “No it’s not. Just read this. I trump everything.”

For instance, today I took my car to a mechanic to have my muffler replaced. The shop is located at the intersection of one way streets, which for a directionally-challenged dolt such as myself, creates serious problems.

To make matters worse, one of the roads that would lead me directly out of there was blocked off for construction.

When I paid my bill and drove away from the shop, the mechanics waved me off and I went on my merry, lost way.

I couldn’t get left!

I could only go right, right, right and right again.

Which dumped me back in front of the mechanics, still standing there, now laughing at me, and waving me off for a second time.

Hi. Me again. I’m lost. Can you tell?

Dying.

The next attempt went better, but put me many blocks from my destination. I almost had to use my GPS to go two tenths of a mile.

I swear. I shouldn’t be allowed to drive a car, or frankly, mingle out and about with society in general.

It’s hard being me.

There’s always one idiot at the gym who you avoid like the plague once you get a sense they’re not quite right. You’re afraid their weirdness might rub off on you and then you’ll have to take an extra long shower afterward.

You resent the fact that you pay all this good money to work out in a nice quiet place all alone in your thoughts until she shows up and gets on a machine next to you.

I am that idiot.

Yesterday on Facebook, I posted a note that I was resisting the urge to put this song on my iPod because according to the Frederick Statute of Singing Songs Out Loud, Article 5.34.1, I am only allowed to play songs where I don’t disturb others with my high-decibel, off-key singing to songs I don’t know all the words to.

Did I listen to my own advice?

I did not. It got downloaded.

Which is why when the song played on my iPod this morning, I couldn’t shut up. It’s the one song that I must sing out loud and with gusto.

There was a guy on an elliptical machine two over and a couple people in front of me.

It was a disaster. The guy to my left was not listening to his own music. So that left him listening to me and mine.

The words slipped out involuntarily. No turning back.

I know he heard me. Had to.

Hit it, Kathy!

Why do you build me up, build me up… buttercup, baby….

He didn’t look over.

…and mess me around….

Quiet voice, quiet voice….

…you never call, baby, when you say you will….

Still not looking, but he’s pumping his legs harder. Is it me?

…. hey, hey, HEY!!!!!….

I’m on fire now.

….I-I-I-need you-ooo-ooo more than anyone baby….

I am now flipping my head back and forth, rockin’ out in Crazytown. I can’t be stopped. I no longer care, but I know he must be cursing me.

It happened. I’m cool with it. I just don’t think elliptical guy wants to see me again and he very well may want his money back, at least for today.

I’m sorry. I’ll take it off my iPod.

Maybe.

My parents raised me right, I swear. I’m polite, courteous, respectful of my elders, and have good table manners.

But I will bare my teeth, growl and possibly stab you if you try to take food away from me. Especially if it is my very favorite dessert, The Perkins Chocolate French Silk cream pie.

It’s a treat I allow myself only once or twice a year. It’s a special thing to be preserved and protected, and certainly not wasted, for it is divine.

Which is why when I dropped a slice of it on the floor Saturday, I picked it up, plated it and ate it. The whole sad, malformed blob of it.

I did not cut off the dirty side. The side that probably spells bacterial infection.

Shut up. I did this two days ago and have suffered no ill effects.

The fact that I ate some combination of cat hair, floor wax and outside world dirt proves one thing: Mothers everywhere are all wrong. You can eat off the floor like an animal and survive.

You won’t look at yourself the same way again, but you will survive.

Bon appétit!

A co-worker of mine sneezes so violently I’m afraid his spleen may come flying out one of these days. And it startles me every time. I told him “Geez, dude. Ring a bell before you do that.” Was that rude of me? I think it was a little bit rude.

I went to a church bazaar at lunch with another co-worker this week. It was their last day, so they handed us grocery bags and said “Anything you can fit in this bag is one dollar.” So we loaded our bags with a lot of stuff and paid our dollar on the way out, thinking all the while “We really should pay more than a dollar. This doesn’t feel right.” When we left, the handle of my co-worker’s bag came off, the bag fell to the floor and broke her ceramic bundt pan. Clearly, Jesus would have wanted us to give more generously.

I went to my credit union to deposit a check. While signing paperwork at the table near the teller windows, I dropped a pile of deposit slips, the flip-calendar thingy and then my purse, and I hit my head on the corner of the table picking up all the dropped items. A clerk sitting at a nearby desk rolled her eyes at me. I’ll give you an eye roll, lady. To add insult to injury, the ink in the pen chained to the table ran out. Tuesday was not a good day for me.

Those who follow me on Facebook know now that my husband puts mayonnaise on everything. This week he put it on pizza. Commence vomiting.

The reporter from NPR who interviewed me on-air about Windy the Plastic Bag emailed me Monday to ask how she was doing up in her tree. That both cracked me up and warmed my heart. Incidentally, when all the leaves on Windy’s tree come down, I’ll post new pictures of her. What’s left, that is.

Someone in my blog audience got her first boyfriend and she stopped commenting here. I miss her. But her boyfriend adores her, as well he should, and so it’s all good. But still. Sniff. Pass me a tissue.

The student assistant who works in my office is 6’ 4” tall. It means that he can see over the partition to my cubicle. He’s caught me more than once doing something I shouldn’t by peering over it to ask a last minute question. So now whenever I’m shoveling, say, six miniature Halloween candy bars in my face, I have to make sure he’s really gone before I begin another session wherein I disgust myself for all I can eat in one sitting.

I know I made a co-worker green with envy when she watched me back my car into a parking space in one quick, perfect action. I’m an excellent back-in-parker-inner. Admit it. You’re jealous, too.

Hope you guys had a good week! Don’t forget to turn your clocks ahead on Sunday. Or is it back? Whatever. Just turn it whatever way you feel and hope for the best.

In my entire blogging career, I’ve never seen another blogger with a whole category for embarrassing posts. Of my 449 posts, 52 are labeled that way. Is it any wonder?

I drove to the grocery store today and parked. Before heading inside, I swapped my sunglasses for regular, grabbed my list, ATM card and coupons. And then my stomach growled. They always say you should never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. I was going to have to be strong.

Anyway.

I got out of my car, locked it, and then in what I can only characterize as Ethel Merman-esque, sang aloud to myself I’m huuuungry!

Well, to myself and that lady who was sitting with her window down in the Jeep next to me about six inches from my face who I hadn’t noticed until after I opened my stupid mouth.

She stared straight ahead. Didn’t flinch. That means she either played deaf, didn’t appreciate my singing talent or was embarrassed for me.

Yeah. Like there’s any question which.

After wearing the same walking sneakers for five years, I thought it was time to get new ones. I buy mine at an independent sports shop where the owners take a very serious approach to footwear.

They want you to come into the store wearing the shoes you currently use so they can examine them for wear and help you find a better-fitting shoe if you need it. They also encourage you to take sneaks for a test run up and down Main Street.

Awesome, except for one thing. This puts my old smelly shoes in the vicinity of people with functioning nostrils.

No, I never wore my shoes barefoot, but that hardly matters. There’s some kind of foot-to-sock-to-shoe funk transference phenomenon going on there that only the wearer of the shoe can tolerate. In fact, I keep them in the laundry room where they can’t hurt anyone in the house.

Motivated by the desire to get a really good sneaker, I soldier on and lace up the Funky Shoes and head to the store.

I’m excited that I can find a new sneaker almost right away. A very nice salesman tells me he’ll be right with me and when he comes back he says “Oh, that’s the new model of the ones you’re wearing now.”

Ugh. He’s already looked at them. Can he smell them, too?

I take a seat and nervously remove my sneaks, hoping that the guy isn’t flat out killed by what’s about to be released into the air. He’s not. Is he a robot? He crouches down in front of me to examine the shoes for wear. 

He flips one over and rubs his hand over the sole, pronounces them dreadfully worn and asks how long I’ve had them. I answer four or five years and wonder whether someone could calculate that by the number of seconds it takes to pass out from the smell, sort of like aging a tree by its number of rings, only in reverse.

He does not wince or choke. In fact, the robot smiles and says he’s glad I’m replacing them. He sets down the shoe he touched with his bare hands. Lord have mercy.

I’m desperate to put the shoes back on — the clock is ticking on this bomb! Thankfully he doesn’t make small talk. He asks what size I need. Before I could answer, he went for the reach again.

Oh no.

Don’t do it, man.

Just don’t.

He picked up one of my sneakers and pulled it close to his face to read the size label under the tongue.

Does he know how mortified am I right now?  Does he know he just carelessly peered into the Chernobyl of Shoes? Can’t he just toss me a heap of ten different-sized shoes and let me rummage through them? I’m convinced he’s named Employee of the Month every month for sticking his nose in the abyss of customers’ shoes and coming out alive. That, or he’s desperate for a $100 sale.

He leaves briefly to get my size and I snatch my old ones and move them up on the chair next to me, as if that’ll help. The fumes were released already and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I am Pig Pen, sitting in my own stink cloud.

He returns with my new shoes and I thank God they fit perfectly and feel great. I take them for a quick spin around the fitting chairs and give a big thumbs up. Good. Now my funk and I can pay up and leave. I’m certain the salesman needed a decontamination shower after I left. Certain.

When I got home, I immediately deposited my old shoes in the trash bin in the garage. Good-bye stinky ‘ol shoes! I later toss a bag of garbage over top of them, latch the lid and let it all simmer.

The next day I remembered I should have kept the old sneakers to wear for lawn mowing. So I went into the bin, removed the garbage and salvaged the shoes for another God knows how many years.

So let me ask you, how bad do you think they smell now?

I had a very distressing visit to the dentist yesterday. Not for the usual reasons. I didn’t have any painful work done, only a cleaning.

Simple, right?

The visit turned distressing the minute I realized my dentist replaced his usual swirly water spit bowl thingy with a rudimentary funnel-and-hose device in which to deposit my mouth gunk after the cleaning.

“No fair, dude,” I complain. “What is that thing? I don’t like it already.”

“Sorry,” he says. “We replaced the bowl with this to save about a thousand dollars.”

Crap.

So the cleaning is uneventful, I am praised for my mad flossing skills and we get to the part where I’m going to need to spit.

I’m stressing because I see the little cup of water to sip from and now I have to figure out how to aim everything in that small funnel with graceful precision.

I sip, I swish and then the dentist grabs the funnel & hose contraption and gestures for me to use it.

Maybe it’s because I needed an instruction manual with kindergarten-type pictures, maybe it’s because my mouth is bigger than the circumference of a grapefruit, or maybe it’s because I only thought I’d had novocain, but when I went to spit I did it super stupendously wrong.

The spit fell out of my mouth, onto my paper bib, onto my pants and onto the arm of the chair I was sitting in.

And then the dentist, in his most professional dentisty voice possible, said “You got some on the floor, too.”

Not one drop of it went into the funnel.

That is why dentists should never ever screw with the swirly water bowl thingy!!!

It’s his fault they needed a mop after I left.

God.

When my husband Dave and I were first dating, we’d hit the dance clubs every other weekend.

During one such outing, we went to popular nightclub that had a big, hulking guy standing outside the doors to take the cover charge and make sure you were of age to get in.

Hulking guy took the money from Dave and then stared at me for an uncomfortably long time. Of course, I thought it was because of my stop-traffic hotness.

It wasn’t.

He spoke.

I remember you.

Oh, yeah?

Fancy Feast and pot pies.

What?

Fancy Feast. You used to come into Weis Markets and buy a ton of Fancy Feast cat food and pot pies.

Dying.

I remember you would buy hardly any food, but would always buy a load of cat food. I thought you had ten cats.

Dying some more and not wanting to give him any response, I grabbed Dave’s arm, nervously smiled at hulking guy and slipped inside.

Dude. You’re a tool.

Thanks for setting up my date night in the most awkward way possible, (though Dave never asked about it, the sweetheart he is.)

It was better left unsaid that when I moved out on my own, I had hardly any money to speak of. Times were very lean. But I had my own apartment and a cat named Baby who thought I was most righteous.

A cat for whom I didn’t mind feeding the very best stinky goodness money could buy. Oh, yeah. And I survived those first years on chicken pot pies, 3 for $1.00. Mere pennies more expensive than the cat food.

Sure, I was just scraping by, but I didn’t mind.

What I did mind was a stupid former grocery store clerk knowing it and remembering it out loud.

So I guess the lesson here is that when you think your grocery store cashier is making judgements about you by the things you buy, and you tell yourself “Nah, they wouldn’t,” think again. They’re taking notes.

I work at a university where we sometimes hire student assistants to help out with our tech support workload. Today one of my assistants came in for his shift and I told him there was a client who could use his help.

The client had left a voice mail message describing her problem, so I thought I would just play that message for him on speakerphone and he’d be on his way.

I knew I had several messages stored in my voice mail archives, so I started message replay and hit a certain key to speed past the first few to get to the pertinent message.

I didn’t speed fast enough.

See, I sometimes archive messages from my husband, who has a tendency to leave me wise-cracking voice mails to lighten my mood.

When I played the series of messages, I skipped fast enough through a few and then the student (and everyone else in my office) heard the following from my husband:

Hey, giant pootie!

I was mortified. I looked at the student and he smiled uncomfortably.

I died a little.

The thing is, I don’t even remember why Dave started addressing me as Giant Pootie. I don’t even know what it means. I had to ask.

Dave thinks it’s from circa 1986 when we started dating. It might be a variation on Puddin’ Head. Or it could be an offshoot of Pootie Cat, which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

And we will never know why I’m a giant Pootie. What part of me is the pootie? And why is it so big?

OK, folks. Here’s where you dump all the insane terms of endearment you have for your significant others or kids in the comments.

I’m quite sure they’ll make more sense than mine.

Last weekend I met with a fellow local blogger to talk about the blogging process, technical and otherwise, what works and what doesn’t. In preparation, I jotted down some tips that have proven useful to me.

One of them is “Don’t waste a good post on Facebook where only your friended people can see it.” I did that recently with a status update about my failure to understand that Fiber One cereal needs to be eased into slowly, as I’d eaten twice the daily recommendation for three days in a row and paid for it dearly. That update saw over 20 comments. Shoulda, coulda been a post.

The tip about not wasting good material on social media sites also extends to comments I leave on others’ blogs. My friend Maureen wrote a piece some time ago about treating her parents to an anniversary dinner at a fancy downtown restaurant, complete with a ride in a stretch limo. She made reference to the Petula Clark song, Downtown. A song that prompted me to leave a comment, one that she said I should have blogged about.

The comment:

The stuff I remember. Here goes. When I was 12, I took part in a musical show at my school. Each grade had to perform some kind of dance or act. We did a little number to the Petula Clark song. We wore pink satin sleeveless dresses and if we were any older, we would have looked like hookers. We also wore long white gloves. Anyway, when I was being measured by the seamstress who was making the dresses, I was standing in a room full of other girls when she exclaimed “My, someone’s getting her breasts early!” I died a little and that’s what I remember every time I hear that Petula Clark song. The day I got noticeable boobs.

So today’s lessons are:

1. If you’re trying to develop a following on your blog, make it a home for all your best stuff. If you have an entertaining little nugget for Facebook, consider fleshing it out for a post instead.

2. If you’re a seamstress taking measurements for pubescent adolescents, watch what you say in front of other people. Childhood embarrassment lasts at least into your 40s.