A Crazy Stream of Consciousness

 

Image purchased from Shutterstock

If I could have one talent that I don’t have now, I would love to be a stand-up comedienne.

Is it okay to call myself a comedienne, or do I have to say “comedian” for the sake of political correctness?  Well, okay, I don’t mind being a comedian if that will make people happy and shut them up.

Now that I have that out of the way, I must start by saying that I admire anyone who can get up in front of an audience and talk and be funny.  Being funny in normal life is relatively safe, as long as you hang around with people who have a sense of humor.  Being funny in front of an audience of strangers requires an enormous amount of chutzpah.

I love being funny in print.  I can say anything I want as long as it’s going into a computer or on paper.  I don’t have to see anyone’s reaction until people start posting comments, and if they don’t like what I wrote, I don’t have to give a rat’s rear end.  The commenters are somewhere miles or even states and countries away from me, and they are not going to come after me with a baseball bat or heckle me from a table in a nightclub.

Okay.  I can be very funny onstage if I am in a play or a sketch, where I can be someone other than myself.  Put me in a comedy, and I’ll get laughs galore.

Put me onstage being ME, or some version of me that I’m making up, and I’ll probably fall flatter than a piece of paper, even if I can remember all my jokes and keep from stammering and going blank, or whatever unpleasant thing will happen to me.

Speaking about unpleasant things that could happen – I don’t know what I’d do with hecklers.  The best answer I ever heard anyone give a heckler in a comedy club came not from one of the comedians, but from the evening’s singer.  She looked at the woman who was heckling everyone that evening and said, “You look like you’re sitting on a vibrator.”  I don’t know if I would ever have that kind of presence of mind onstage.

Of course, I have never actually TRIED to be a standup comedien ... er, comedian.  Sorry about that.

I just don’t have that kind of grit.  What would I do if I got up there, told jokes, and nobody laughed?  What if they were all talking and not even paying attention to me?  What if I stumbled?  What if I forgot what I wanted to say?  Why am I going through all this when all I’m doing right now is sitting at a computer, typing?

Maybe someday I’ll have the guts to try to stand up and be funny.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, I have to be content to write funny, and I am getting pretty good at that

Always Plan for Death and Other Events

Note:  This story describes a Catholic wake and funeral.  We writers always hear, “Write what you know.”  Being a Catholic church singer, I know Catholic funerals very well.

My name is Eunice O’Neill, and I died in a car crash five days ago.  Why am I still hanging around, you ask?  I don’t know.  I went through the whole thing:  the tunnel; the light; seeing all my dead relatives, two departed dogs and a hamster; everything.  Then they told me I would have to spend some more time down here because this is my Purgatory.  Eventually, they’ll let me in up there, but I don’t know how long that will take.  In the meantime, we have to make the best of things, so I decided to haunt my wake and my funeral.

One of the nice things about being dead is that you don’t have to walk around anymore because you can float!  Floating is fun, especially when you float right through someone because you can see all their insides when you do that.  I know that doesn’t sound like fun, but when you’re a ghost, you have to take what you can get.

I floated into my wake early, out of habit.  I forgot that there was no need to get a good seat because I don’t get tired anymore.  Of course, nobody was there yet, so I took some time to check everything out.  Hmmm.  Big wreath of flowers from Uncle Joe and Aunt Kate.  One, two, three, four ... twelve Mass cards.  All those Masses should cut down some of my Purgatory time.  Guestbook, holy cards ... right where they should be.  Some nice pictures of me from fifteen years ago.  So far, everything was in order.

I put off the most important thing until last because I didn’t want to face it:  how I looked in my coffin.  The coffin was fine.  It didn’t scream “cheap,” but it wasn’t extravagant, either.  It was somewhere in the middle, just like my family.

I had to know if I looked presentable, so I took a peek at myself.  If a ghost could scream, I would have done it.  There I was, wearing the one dress that I hated, and a pageboy wig that looked like the Dutch Boy on an old paint can.  It wasn’t even the right color.  My real hair was light auburn; the wig was dark auburn.  My sister Alice must have picked it out.  She never had an eye for color, but she was Mom’s favorite.  So, of course, who else should be in charge of my hair?

Tammy Faye Bakker must have done my makeup.  I looked like a $10 hooker.

You can imagine how I felt later when my sister Alice and her husband passed by my coffin.  Alice was crying, and she said, “She looks so peaceful and nice,” meaning me.  That idiot brother-in-law of mine answered with, “Yeah, she looks better than she did when she was alive.”  If I still had legs, I would have kicked that bastard right where it would hurt the most.

The funeral Mass the next morning was okay.  Only the family and a few friends came, but almost everyone I knew had been at the wake the night before, so that was okay.  Cousin Lizzie, who insists on singing at every family function, even though she has a voice like a foghorn in a hurricane, butchered the “Ave Maria.”  The organist managed to keep up with Lizzie, who doesn’t read music and can’t count, but I could see he was suffering through the whole number.  The regular church singer sang everything else, and he has an awesome set of pipes, so it wasn’t a total loss.

A lot of people said they would miss me because I was a lot of fun.  Maybe I’ll use my time here on earth haunting them.  It’s only right.

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Inspired by a prompt posted by author Rachel Christiansen on Facebook’s Writing Prompts Group on June 8, 2018:

Write about a funeral from the dead person’s viewpoint.

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