Chaos Attraction

Significant License Plates and Synchronicity

2019-12-22, 1:17 p.m.

Note: this covers the events of 12/21/19.

Well, this day did NOT go as I had expected it to go.

My plans for the day were to drive down to Mom’s, get a ride with her to San Jose, and go see the traveling Broadway production of Waitress, then spend the night there and drive back for the party here the next day.

However, around 9:30 or so when I am trying to get packed up and dressed and hair done and out the door around 10 to head on down, I got a text from Scott, saying that all his family had tickets to a dinner/concert with Willie K (no, I hadn’t heard of him, but hey, Hawaiian!) that night in Nicasio (which I also had not heard of) but a bunch of people bailed at the last minute and would I like to come? He was asking all the friends on that one (Laurel and Brian were the other two who went). I checked online timingwise and it was technically doable to drive from San Jose to there to get there a bit late, so I said yes.


Waitress is an interesting movie and play. There are some aspects of it I really like and some aspects of it I really hate. For those who haven’t seen it, it features Jenna Hunterson, who came from an abusive household and got married young to Earl, and Earl has presumably turned into an abusive jerk himself since the wedding. They had one drunken night of sex and now Jenna’s pregnant. It’s the South and she’s married so she won’t be getting an abortion, but she is clearly unhappy about this. Jenna ends up having an affair with her (also married) gynecologist, Dr. Pomatter, and trying to secretly stash money and/or win a pie making contest (she works at a pie diner and creating new pies is her “thing” in life) so she can get the hell away from Earl, but it’s not that easy. Meanwhile, her waitress friends have their own issues but still think Jenna’s life is crap. Becky’s husband is a total invalid and she’s sleeping with their boss, Cal, to get some relief. Dawn is a total loser nerd and when she tries to find a date online, ends up with, and marrying, a creepy stalker, Ogie. Eventually Jenna gives birth and that gives her the strength to throw out Earl and politely break it off with Dr. Pomatter, and her old friend Joe leaves her the means to have her own pie diner.

I’ll skip talking abut the movie since it’s been years since I saw it, but I really liked Jenna’s relationship with Dr. Pomatter even though it’s well, wrong. There’s one moment where she says how nice it is to be able to just hold a guy for like 20 minutes and I was all “awwwww!” The guy in this show was pretty much a poor man’s David Tennant in body and looks and basically bending like Gumby. The leg maneuvers this guy did around a doctor’s table, lemme tell ya! And the friendships are good in this one, and Jenna’s pie making (she names them things like “Betrayed By My Own Eggs Pie”) is done creatively onstage.

This is also the most sex scenes I think I’ve ever seen in a live musical. “More than Rocky Horror?” Scott asked later. Actually....I think kinda yes, since Rocky usually isn’t quite as explicit as this one was, and this one had three sex scenes going on at once at one point, one of which involves kinkiness with a cleaver, and another involves a guy going down on a lady while they’re in Revolutionary War clothing, and then there’s Jenna and the doctor spread eagling on the table. Don’t bring the kids to this one!

What I don’t enjoy is the abusive relationships. Now, Earl being an abusive selfish ass who has no idea he’s an abusive selfish ass is an crucial part of the plot. Even I felt for him a bit when he said that Jenna was the only person he had in his life. I get the heebie jeebies on abuse anyway (see “Little Shop” with Audrey and the dentist), so that’s typical, comes with the show, etc.

But the Dawn and Ogie relationship super goddamned horrified me in the movie and it’s at least less bad in the musical, but still starts out terrible. In both mediums Dawn is portrayed basically as a awful super awkward hopeless nerd (note: the actresses who play her are generally attractive, but guess what she’s wearing on her face to make her ugly, right?) who ends up with a guy who’s as hopeless a nerd as she is, BUT ALSO HE’S AN IMMEDIATE STALKER and nobody, but nobody, has a problem with this. All her friends are all “great, now you have a guy now!” about it, and she marries him and I just wanted to scream. I would probably be cast as Dawn in Waitress if I ever auditioned for it, but I couldn’t stand the character because of the message of “You’re so pathetic that THIS guy, who is immediately stalking you, is all you can get.”

I’ll say this for the musical: they at least give Ogie and Dawn a few traits in common: namely their pickiness as to how to handle whipped cream and that they both do Revolutionary War reenactments (which as mentioned above, is clearly a part of their sex life). And AFTER the horrendous stalker song Ogie sings as Dawn is clearly asking him to get away from her, which also gave me huge heebie jeebies, they drop the stalking or at least Dawn seems into the relationship and it seems to work somehow. So it’s....better, I guess? But still, I hate that Dawn is told that this guy is the best she can do, and I kind of wonder if Adrienne Shelly had a complex about her looks or something since she wrote the character like that and then played her like that. (And then, there’s how she got murdered.) Yuuuuck. So anyway, it’s a mixed bag show for me.

I also had some brief conversation with Mom about how I don’t plan on spending much time at her house because there is literally no room for me in it (I was at her house for a half hour and so much crap spilled in the hall that I could not clean it up in time), and she claimed she was going to do something about and I straight up said I won’t believe her until she actually does. She got very offended at that, but I just can’t claim to be optimistic about it since she’s been hoarding for 14 years, won’t go to therapy, won’t take meds, and wants people to “help” but then yells at them and still won’t get rid of anything, etc.


After this, I drove up to find where the heck this Nicasio place was, which was most of a two hour drive. I considered myself very fortunate that the rain held off all night and weatherwise it wasn’t horrendous because once I started having to drive on this long curvy windy dark road in the middle of nowhere for six miles, it was kind of freaking me out a bit and would have been worse if it had been raining. There was an “EXTREME SLIPPERINESS” sign at one point that really made me worry. I’m glad Mom didn’t see me driving this, she would have lost her mind.

I should mention that I had some interesting license plate sightings while doing this. I saw one that said “LOVETWN” on the freeway. And then while driving the long windy road, I was following a car with the license plate “LOV2GO1.”

I finally got to the place about 20 minutes late and then found out that everyone else had arrived about 30 seconds before I did (Laurel ran late), so that worked out .We sat at the “kids table” in the corner, which was fun.

I should probably mention for the crowd (though this is in the “Little Shop” entry too) that the guys have food allergies. Scott’s allergic to dairy and Brian’s allergic to dairy, eggs, nuts, and seafood, so they have to vet the menu before going, ask the waiters about what everything has in it while there, and then still get surprised because someone dumped the cornbread directly in the gumbo. Which is about what I figured would go down if we weren’t in an Asian restaurant, I suppose. We also found out from Brian that someone thought if he needed to be stabbed with an epi pen, they thought they should be doing it in the chest, Pulp Fiction style. I suspect someone just liked the idea of having an excuse to do that :p For the record, just use a limb like usual on that one. But nobody had that go on tonight.

At some point I ended up going off to Scott about how generally inept I am with cooking, recipes, etc. and how for tomorrow’s potluck I may just go get Chinese food. Now admittedly I have that problem no matter what when it comes to cooking anything for public consumption, but then there’s added bonus difficulty when trying to avoid the dairy on top of that, and somehow it seemed impossible for me to find some recipe that wasn’t too complicated and didn’t involve dairy or peanuts. I didn’t learn to cook at home because, well, my parents are/were screamers who expected me to know everything already and can’t teach for shit, and I associate cooking with screaming and judging and I freak at the idea of anyone eating my food, etc. It doesn’t help that I’ve somehow lost the ability to even make Rice Krispie treats without fucking that up somehow. I feel bad admitting this to someone who for obvious reasons had to learn to cook and be fine with it, but well, dude needs to be warned about this with regards to me that that’s an issue.

We established that yeah, I was following the recipe on the Rice Krispie treats so heck if I know why I was bungling it. I also ended up somehow talking about the time I tried to make peanut butter Rice Krispie treats with vegan peanut butter that was literally peanut butter and water and then burned them, and how I had to get someone else at the Craft Center to figure it out and even then they still bizarrely didn’t have much flavor. He said he had a recipe for that and would send it to me and would try to make that for tomorrow. Anita said to not bring dessert, but he was all, I can’t eat it unless I bring my own.

In other news, everyone auditioned for the 10 minute play festival but the only one who’s heard anything was Brian (who got precast in one show that wasn’t in the auditions) and Scott, who got an email from the astronaut guy wanting a head shot from him (huh?). So I’m guessing Scott got into that one, which he should. I am bummed but unshocked that I did not. I assume I’m not getting into anything since all my friends auditioned and are better than I am and I don’t really fit anything. Oh well. We discussed casting and auditioning at other places and Scott said that when they were auditioning in Woodland, they had the same experience I always do elsewhere of barely getting to read at all and then all the established favorites read 4 times apiece, you can’t get in there, etc. So I don’t feel so bad that I’m the only one who gets that treatment elsewhere. Winters is a lot more open and nice about these things, and also cast more on who can do the role best rather than on looks and age (hence why Mrs. Abramowitz was played by a 20 year old). I don’t really fit anything in general, being me, so...what can you do. As Laurel’s said, nobody knows how to cast me. Well, I guess I can get into giant shows better than small ones anyway, if pickiness isn’t a factor!

As for the concert, it was good. Willie K does all kinds of music, covers, lively stuff, Christmas songs, ukulele, etc. (I’m told he used to be able to do opera before he got lung cancer). So I enjoyed the music, especially the jazzed up Christmas stuff and his rendition of “Chain Of Fools.”

I also wrote down some snarky lines of his:

* He snarked on how the Bible says “be fruitful and multiply” and his dad had 13 kids. “He passed the aloha all over Canada.”
* When teachers said he wouldn’t amount to anything: “And they loved Freebird, so I gave them 2,” and flipped two bird fingers.
* “How can you be 8 years old and have the blues? How can you grow up in paradise and have the blues?” Being one of 13 kids.
* “Stop sending me weed. I have lung cancer, fools...You wanna do something for me, send money!”

Under the circumstances of well, lung cancer, I’m glad I saw the guy. He was fun.

After the show was over, I tried to load the GPS and then I could not get the Internet to work, and then I worried because I didn’t know where the hell I was or how to get home. Scott said to follow their car...which was, no joke, the “ILOV2GO1” I’d followed in there. Seriously, y’all, the synchronicity stuff with this dude just keeps coming. So I followed them out of there and basically all the way out until they left to go to Fairfield again.

The Internet kicked back in about halfway through the long and windy road again and then the phone indicated that I’d gotten a message from Scott (we’d said we’d try to call if something came up while I was driving). So I tried to call him back, got voice mail, tried to say “oh, my Internet came back on,” and then hang up, and then tried to get the music to come back on and the car was not having it. Turns out that’s because the voicemail was still going and blocking the music (which is probably good because the song I had been listening to was this one and that is waaaaaaaaaaaay too on the nose for this situation), and since I was driving windy road, I could not go “press 1 for whatever option” about it, and just hung up. (Yeah, he got it like that. I apologized.) He sent a text asking me to check in when I got home, which I did.

Oh yeah, and I haven't mentioned the third license plate I saw on the way home: NGIVUP.

...Honestly, I think at some point this is gonna happen between him and I. There are just so many synchronicity moments like this that go on for me. License plates with romantic messages and hearts in them. Seeing hearts everywhere. Seeing rings (rings?!? again, that's a bit soon) all over the place too. Getting ah, interesting emails that I won't get into because that's even weirder, but was all, "How the heck did I get this one?" Hell, I was trying to listen to the Sleep With Me podcast to try to get to sleep in the middle of the night today and there was a mention of a "Scott and Jennifer" in that!

Even if it won't happen this year, even if it probably doesn't next year (though I admit, I'd like it if by next Holidailies I got to say "look what happened while the rest of you were out!"), and even if tomorrow I will be grumbly that I'm not going to see him for weeks and he was hanging out with Cameron the entire time at the party and I wished I'd said something and didn't, blah de blah angsty whining....

It's not a psychic premonition or anything, I just think someday, this could happen. Assuming he gets over his issues someday, anyway.


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