My Goodness, Do They Like to Cluck!

That’s Aubrey Plaza dressed as a chicken. The picture quality is pretty bad, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Back in 1999, my mom and my older brother John acted in a community theater production of The Ugly Duckling. It didn’t click until fairly recently, while watching an interview on Letterman, that they shared the stage with an up-and-coming celebrity.

Aubrey Plaza, for those who don’t know, plays April Ludgate, a government office worker on NBC’s Parks and Recreation. She also recently starred in the critically acclaimed film Safety Not Guaranteed. Notably (or perhaps not), she’s from my home state of Delaware.

Delaware rarely produces famous people, so when it does, we lose our collective mind, all of us claiming undue ownership of whatever scrapings of our hometown hero’s narrative we can find (“I used to drive past Ryan Phillippe’s mom’s house all the time” or “Judge Reinhold used to ride his bike in a park that I have also been to” or “Joe Biden has really soft hands”). We make ourselves into extras in the proverbial films of minor celebrities’ lives. It’s kind of pathetic, I guess, but it happens so infrequently that it doesn’t really matter.

So what the hell, let’s do this thing.

New post

Howdy, blogorspheres–

I have a new post I am trying to work out. It has to do with Aubrey Plaza and the fact that she ONCE PLAYED A CHICKEN in a local theater production of The Ugly Duckling in which my mother played the mother duck, and my brother played the eldest of the ducklings. You can understand why this would be something I would want to handle correctly. There are funny stories that I want to get right, and there is video–VHS format, nowhere else online–that I want to get onto YouTube as effectively as possible (I do not have any fancy equipment. My best bet at the moment is to use my sister’s Flip Video doo-dad to record it from the TV screen). I want to get this story right, so give me a day or two.

Your pal,

Ed

The Squirrel and the Chipmunk: A Comic Adaptation

I took a David Sedaris story from his book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk–a retooling of the animal fable tradition–and turned it into a comic.

Sorry my handwriting looks like that of a six year old.

Overthinking Rabbits and Chickens

The following is a very short piece I wrote during my senior year of college. It is about my gleeful, over-analytical reaction to a YouTube video. Revisiting the piece, I am at something of a loss to explain myself. My enthusiasm seems a bit forced, but I assure you it was sincere. While I still maintain that the video is hysterical, and probably the finest thing civilization has yet produced, I can’t help but wonder if it is the best idea to take ownership of that opinion.

Oh, well. Here it is (video added below):