The Theme of the Prom Was “Illicit Sex”

Funny when you remember stuff. I was driving across town last night, listening to music but not to Bruce Springsteen or anything even Bruce Springsteen-like, when I suddenly thought about the Springsteen song “Secret Garden.” You know, the one from Jerry Maguire. No clue why.

The song has only been significant in my life exactly once. Before a prom, can’t remember which one, eligible students received some kind of invitation to it. (Do schools even send out invitations to prom? Isn’t that kind of a waste of money and paper? Wouldn’t a poster-painted banner reading “Prom: Go or Suck It” do the trick just as effectively?) This particular prom had a “Secret Garden” theme, which basically equated to a green photo backdrop with, like, plants and shit and maybe an old gate. But to introduce the theme, the invitation had lyrics to “Secret Garden,” which was probably still on people’s minds as a result of Jerry Maguire. And that would have been fine if the song wasn’t clearly about sex, with the garden symbolizing vagina, as it so often does.

Here are the lyrics that went out on every prom invitation that year:

She’ll let you in her house
If you come knockin’ late at night
She’ll let you in her mouth
If the words you say are right
If you pay the price
She’ll let you deep inside
But there's a secret garden she hides

She’ll let you in her car
To go drivin’ round
She’ll let you into the parts of herself
That’ll bring you down
She’ll let you in her heart
If you got a hammer and a vise
But into her secret garden, don't think twice

You’ve gone a million miles
How far’d you get
To that place where you can't remember
And you can't forget

She’ll lead you down a path
There’ll be tenderness in the air
She’ll let you come just far enough
So you know she's really there
She’ll look at you and smile
And her eyes will say
She’s got a secret garden
Where everything you want
Where everything you need
Will always stay
A million miles away

Which, of course, is pretty tame by today’s standards but still grossly inappropriate for a high school function. I may not remember correctly, but I think apologies were sent out the following day. I couldn’t tell you whether it resulted from incompetent oversight or the students trying to sneak a smutty joke onto official school material, but I’m willing to bet it’s actually neither of these and, instead, simply the prom being planned by people who didn’t take advanced English.

Again, don’t know why I thought about this, but I think about it whenever I hear this particular Bruce Springsteen song or, apparently, no Bruce Springsteen song at all.

Problem No. One: People Enjoying Olive Garden

Among many problems I have with the commercial where the cousins all like going to Olive Garden together, the one that most confounds me lies the one male cousin saying to a female cousin, “You gotta tell me Aunt Jessie’s story again.” The hell? I can accept that these young, apparently related people convene at Olive Garden for some kind of bonding-through-suffering ritual or possibly in preparation for a fart contest later in the night, but I don’t understand why one cousin doesn’t seem to know his own aunt, or why he needs another cousin to re-tell her story. It’s completely baffling. Who wrote the script? Why was this the only bit of banter that made it to the final cut?

More: Am I supposed to take away that my peers could conceivably enjoy Olive Garden, or that I should go there with only cousins, excluding the very young and middle aged-to-old members of the family? That is: Is Olive Garden courting the twentysomething demographic or the even harder-to-snag cousin demographic?

The Bucket of Truth

To be honest, I had reservations about moving to Los Angeles. It has a lot to offer, sure, but accessing these offerings can pose problems I wouldn’t face in the other cities I could have moved to. Waiting for long lines of movie stars to cross the street, for example. It’s a hassle. And Reese Witherspoon has spit in my face on three separate occasions, once without provocation. That being said, Los Angeles also offers certain advantages. For example, I live in an apartment I would never have found in San Francisco or New York. No exaggeration: This set-up simply does not exist in those more compact cities, and certainly not at the price I’m paying now. I love it. And my love for this apartment is probably crippling my social life, solely because my end game is always to come back to it.

However, this apartment is not all perfect. It isn’t haunted — which is what I assumed would be the case when the landlady quoted me the price — but it does have a certain sinister presence. It’s the mirror.

Are you familiar with the Upright Citizens Brigade? The TV show? Specifically the pilot? It concerns a house that features a Bucket of Truth, a simple plastic pail on a pedestal that, when you gaze into it, offers you an unyielding glimpse at your actual self. The result of such perception is hysterical screaming, because no one can comprehend a completely honest vision of themselves without their psyche shattering. (Go buy the DVD. You won’t regret it. The house in the episode also features a Hot Chicks Room.) My apartment essentially has this in the form of the bathroom mirror. Something about the positioning of the mirror beneath the fluorescent light just happens to make anyone, everyone, you, me and your supermodel friend all look like roasted shit.

No lie: The week I moved in, I was under the perception I had given myself two black eyes and then had somehow forgotten that either one had happened. They weren’t at all noticeable when I saw myself in other mirrors. I erroneously assumed that these mirrors were all broken. Now I understand that the fault lies in my mirror, which is probably cursed. In addition to the it making my face appear to be about six different colors — black, blue, occasionally yellow and always least three shades of red — it highlights every dermatological imperfection, every stray facial hair, every single goddamn pore. The pimple that went away months ago? Its wraith still festers on your face when you look at yourself in my bathroom mirror. Shadows are deepened. Oil shines. The basic configuration of your maxilla actually changes, so that the right shifts away from the left, droops down and turns you into some kind of radically asymmetrical monster. It’s fucking brutal.

It’s not completely disadvantageous, really. If I can make yourself look halfway passable, I’ll eventually see my reflection somewhere else and be delighted at how non-ogre-like I look. But even looking forward to that possibility, I still must work up courage to step into the bathroom and now that my confidence will take a critical hit.

So that’s the story with my new apartment and the dark secret it holds. I mean, there was that one time when I woke up in the middle of the night and used the bathroom and my reflection had glowing red eyes and swore at me, but that was probably a dream, right? Right?

Yeah, seriously, I hate my bathroom mirror.

Say EYEYSSES to the Dress

Glancing up at the office TV — which happened to be playing Say Yes to the Dress because I have no say in watch channel it’s on — I at first thought I was having a stroke, that the part of my brain that controls reading had ceased to function.

Then I realized that this was not the case, nor had the captions started running in some Indonesian language. And then then it occurred to me that what this caption might be trying to say was “This dress is shit.”

Least helpful caption.

Dance of the Lemurs

Yes, more lemurs. According to The Sun, what appears to be a funny dance is actually the lemurs springing into the air to escape a predator.

What I think: The lemurs actually move in this manner to disable bystanders with laughter, so the predator instead turns on them.

Pope: “I’d Rather Not Learn New Saint Names”

There is a German man who lives in Italian castle. Some people believe this man to have magical powers. And because of this, world media has to take note when he makes a statement, even if the statement has no bearing on life as it is lived now on this particular planet. I think it’s like when Carlos Santana gets a Grammy nomination, and everyone involved quietly acknowledges that the nom is a nice gensture even though Mr. Santana’s time has passed and his new music doesn’t have the impact the old stuff did way back when.

But the pope’s most recent statement doesn’t only remind us how out-of-touch and backwards the Roman Catholic Church is but also indicates that Pope Benedict is just old, as it’s one of the most classic old people statements he could have made. The statement goes something like this: “Names aren’t good today! Your new names are stupid! You should name your kids good, old-fashioned names like they had in Bible times!” That is it, basically, with the addendum that children given names not drawn from the Bible or the list of saints are missing out on the Holy Spirit, which apparently prefers Josephs and Margarets to your flash-in-the-pan Carters and Addisons.

i would totally take child-raising advice from this man

To an extent, I agree with the pope’s line of thought. I would be a lot more likely to take seriously a person with a “normal” name, rather than one that seems very off-the-moment (Kaylee, Aiden), stripperish (Amberlee, Jaide) taken from vampire culture (Cullen, Sookie), or like a normal name spelled in the manner of someone trying to get ride of Scrabble tiles (Korynne, Jaysen). A lot of the most popular names of 2010 are actually old-fashioned names, and I’m more or less okay with that, even if I might want to name my child something that would decrease his or her chances of being reduced down to an initial. My name? Not that weird. But I made it through my formative years without every being Drew M. And I like that.

Of course, the pope’s statement focuses more on the religious nature of baby-naming, and on this subject I’ve always been curious: Isn’t it true that if all Catholic children were only named after full-fledged, canonized saints, then there would never be a new saint with a new name? And even if one of those weirdos with a crazy, “new” name — like, say, Jennifer — converted to Catholicism, she should logically drop her pagan name and take a good Catholic one. She could have Jeonilla! After St. Jeonilla! Who was hung by her hair, lacerated and finally beheaded!

Obviously, despite Jeonilla’s steadfast faith in the face of physical suffering, her name isn’t very pretty by today’s standards. And while your new daughter Jeonilla may have a church-sanctioned name, she might also grow into her name and become a plain, sad woman who ends up murdering her mailman, whom she deludedly thought would love her even though it turned out he never could. Not the way to salvation, Jeonilla. (My condolences.)

Which brings up my second point: A lot of saints’ names are pretty awful, and if you saddled your kids with them, you’d probably be doing more harm than good. Please have a look at a list of names that would likely (but not certainly) set children down darker paths:

• Odilio
• Fanchea
• Melchior
• Bartilla
• Canute
• Basilissa
• Reingold
• Otho
• Idea
• Felician
• Emerentiana
• Cadoc
• Haberilla
• Chrysostum

No exaggeration: That list represents just only the saints celebrating feast days in January, and therefore is only one-twelfth of the bummer names the church would be okay with you calling a child.

Lest Pope Benedict forget, unusual and decidedly non-Catholic names have been attached to many sainted and beatified people. Take Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk-Algonquian woman who converted to Catholicism in the 1660s. Yes, she chose Kateri because approximated the Mohawk pronunciation of Catherine (as in St. Catherine of Siena), but the connection isn’t obvious and no one refers to her as Catherine Tekakwitha. (Also, she’s not St. Kateri yet, but Blessed Kateri, as she hasn’t yet passed the final stage of canonization.) It boggles me that Kateri could get the pope’s approval by virtue of a tangential relationship to Catherine while something like Jayden (lame and insubstantial as that name might be) couldn’t squeak by with the explanation that it’s a variation on James. And who knows: Maybe little Jayden will grow up to be a bringer of many miracles and a thousand years down the line the Robot Pope will be urging space parents to name their kid-pods after St. Jayden so they might always remember his sterling example.

In closing, I’d like to say that this would be a rare fumble in what we can all agree is a pretty terrific record that the church has as far as interactions with children.

Already-Solved Crossword Puzzles

Light reading.

Homer strives not to be challenged.