From the Touching to the Tasteless

I know, you have been up all night. Night after night. Wondering. Worrying.

Where is Macaronimaniac? Why has the frequency of posting dropped off to a such a tragical trickle?

Sorry. I was out doing all sorts of things worth blogging about. So many I've had no chance to blog about them.

So without further ado, here is some eco-friendly, earth-saving, environmentally-sensitive material.

That means recycled.

First Recyclable:
Holly and Justin have been our neighbors for 3 years. About 2 months into those 3 years, they had kid #1. Which means said kid is deep into the Terrible Two's.

We are doing everything we can to help. Which mostly consists of reminding them that their baby monitor signal reaches to our house, and they are welcome to bring it over any time and have a martini with us.

The martini-with-static-purr lure was quite strong for a while there. But it hadn't worked of late, because Holly had been preggers with kid #2. Now he's finally arrived, and in addition to running the Feeders and Breeders program here in Portland RFD, I thought we should celebrate the blessed event with a nice hand-crafted baby gift.

Something the new parents and the sometimes delightful and charming, sometimes babymeltdown-goes-nuclear older sister can all enjoy.

As for the baby, we didn't really bother trying to please him. Being as all he really enjoys is the boob, and he's already got two of those to choose from.

But we do hope one day he will enjoy this. If his sister hasn't chewed it to bits by the time he's cognizant.



Isn't that so sweet you just need a damn insulin shot?

We got it done at Walgreen's, of course. Not actually the Walgreen's across the street. I wrote the poem. Cheez and I screwed around in photoshop. We uploaded the results. I arranged them. We hit done. And they processed it who knows where.

The shipping cost more than the book itself. But hey, if you want a copy, lemme know, because Walgreen's will be happy to ship you one, too. Why should baby Wyatt be the only one to enjoy Holly's boob?

Second Recyclable:
Having Seussified ourselves with that enterprise, we turned to preparing a piece for this year's Richard Foreman Festival.

For those of you too lazy to click on the link in that last sentence, let me sum up what you missed (albeit shorter and without the funny):
Step 1: artists in a variety of media are given 14 pages of disembodied dialogue written by avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman.

Avant-garde for those of you who do not have a liberal arts degree means no one knows what the hell he is talking about.

Not even him.

Maybe especially not him.

Step 2: Said artists have 10 days to create an original work based on the dialogue.

Some artists choreograph and perform original dances.

Some artists compose and perform original music.

Some artists stage and perform original one-act plays.

And then there is Macaroni and her squeeze the Cheez.

We took random lines from the already seemingly random dialogue and hand-crafted beautiful illustrations, with all the talent of . . . well, let's just say we're a little advanced over Wrigley, but not much.

But don't take my word for it. See it for yourself. I think you'll find this one is touching in only the most literal sense.


In the live performance arty version, we started with a quick thumb wrestle onstage, then I read the passages and showed the images while Cheez played "Under My Thumb" on guitar.

Not exactly Karen Finley shoving a yam up her butt, but cut us some slack. It was 100 degrees the night of the performance. No one wants orificial art when it's that hot.

And really, we have a whole Yamhill of art up our butts, most days.