Power Love

Your definitive resource. That's all, just your definitive resource.

27 March 2010

I like showing up early to movies, but

when the theater's empty, it seems like overkill. And a bit like a game of Clue.

26 March 2010

POWER LOVE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Dear Sirs,
As requested, here is the Executive Summary for the Power Love Variety Hour. I took the liberty of checking one flimsily constructed website to research the elements of a proper Executive Summary because I am very serious about the world-dominating impact the Power Love Variety Hour will have on the world and possibly the galaxy if there’s a means of communication with the rest of the galaxy, I don’t know, I haven’t explored this aspect in my Executive Summary because there wasn’t a line item for it on the template, but if it’s an avenue to explore in order to facilitate the world-dominating impact of the Power Love Variety Hour on the world and possibly the galaxy, then please send more money.

Delineated below are the five required sections of the Power Love Variety Hour Executive Summary. The website said I should also have a “business plan.” The business plan explanation was really long, and it was boring, and once I saw the term “net operating income,” I fell asleep, which was unfortunate since I was, at the time I was reading about business plans, skydiving. I have decided not to include a business plan herein.

Executive Summary
Power Love Variety Hour
2010

Goal: To convince you to support, by whatever means most comfortable to you, the production of the Power Love Variety Hour. We are also accepting gifts of space that we can make a stage out of, and beer.

I. Business Concept
The Power Love Variety Hour is a 75-minute show of circus-like proportions that’s been slightly scaled back. Originally, I had planned on seals juggling beach balls and men dressed dandily, tip toeing across tight ropes. This vision may have been inspired by a poster I saw at the Quincy Brown Line stop and you know any idea advanced by the CTA has success written all over it.

It must be noted that currently, there isn’t actually any space in which the Power Love Variety Hour is actually existing, which is good because we’re flexible, but I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that a general lack of existence is a trigger for multiple existential meltdowns.

On the upside, I have choreographed a Bob Fossi tribute dance, complete with top hat and fishnets, which will be performed to Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come ‘Round Here No More” (we will of course edit the lyrics for grammar). In addition, I am polishing my stand-up comedy routine, which includes (spoiler alert!) making paper airplanes out of Domino’s menus and sailing them across the room.

We will be holding auditions for other acts. Apply now.

II. Financial Features
Because I use a proprietary algorithm that I invented, I can tell you that financial forecasts for this venture predict a windfall of profits and adulation that will continue for years until the last Power Love Variety Hour episode, after which we will gracefully walk away from the spotlight after having influenced the variety hour world, the entertainment world, and the entire planet in ways so profound words will have to be created in order to describe it.

III. Financial Requirements
What we really need to get this project off the ground is human capital—peeps with big dreams, open hearts, and a nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic. More than likely, we’ll need hallucinatory drugs.

IV. Current Business Position
Except for the debilitating existential meltdowns, we’re all good here.

V. Major Achievement
We’re Jeff-award winning because, who isn’t? In addition, we don’t leave rotting food in the refrigerator and we usually clean up after ourselves in the bathroom, except when things get really busy, then cleanliness slips through the cracks, but we’ll pay more attention to this in the future.

VI. Concluding Remarks
In this age of economic uncertainty, what is certain? Only uncertainty. Why should you throw 100% of your support at the Power Love Variety Hour? Because in uncertain times, the Power Love Variety Hour is about as uncertain as you can get. Please contact us at your earliest convenience. Thank you for your support.

20 March 2010

TANGLED

Outside it’s raining—spring rain, which means it’s a fine mist one minute and a torrential downpour the next. In her mud room, she unzips her yellow rain coat and shimmies out of it. Boots kicked into the corner. Hat flipped on the wall hook. She has to take her sweater and jeans off before she can unzip her head, but once she does, she’ll be invisible. She pulls the zipper from her forehead to the nape of her neck and takes off her body like she’s stepping out of a fur coat. She hangs it on the hook next to her hat.

In the kitchen, he’s on the counter, in the silver-rimmed bowl her mother gave her. There are streaks of gray light oozing through the window over the sink. In it, he looks like brain matter, but she knows that once she gets the lights on and the tea pot going, he’ll be back to his cherry red, jelly norm.

She’s filling the tea pot when he says, “I forgot to pick up my prescription.” She makes a face that he can’t see, but he can feel it. “I know. I know. I’m sorry. I was rushing home. I wanted to be home. I forgot,” he says.

She looks out the window at the kids playing tag in the yard next door. She could give them the finger. She could dance naked in front of them. “How many pills do you have left? Enough for tonight?”

He jiggles in the bowl. He is almost opaque, but on his edges, she can see through him to the bowl underneath—like Jell-O, she thinks. His cherry red casts a blood-like tint on the flowers decorating the bowl. “I took the last one last night.” He pauses his customary pause. “I’m sorry.”

“The last thing I want to do right now is put my body back on and go out there,” she says.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Of course, it’ll take me less time than it’ll take you. It takes you forever to pour yourself back into your spine.”
“True.”

She pours the water into her mug, then dunks a tea bag in there. From across the room, he can see the string of the tea bag being pulled then dropped, pulled then dropped. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Of course you are,” she says. “You’re always sorry.”

He thinks about that for a second. He sees apologies like periods—the declarative sentence, the end stop. She sees apologies like a trampoline—it’s the thing you jump off of on your way to taking action. “You can’t change people,” her mother told her when she presented the bowl to her daughter. Now, as she walks back to the mud room, she thinks about how she could put her body back on and walk away. But then, she doesn’t know anyone else she could drink tea with while she’s invisible.

04 March 2010

Happy Grammar Day!