The Specialest Bean: Birthday Tribute

O Mistress Bean, I miss you SO MUCH.  Everyone does. Your birthday is happening, and the lack of slip n' sliding, trampolining and YOU is definitely significant and depressing to many people.  Get your butt back to America, STAT! 

My first memory of S.Bean was when a bunch of us girls were signed up to be in a children's production of Bye Bye Birdie.  I was in the Chorus (surprising because I cannot sing).  I think the Special one had a speaking part, but I can't remember details.  I know Lumpkin had some sort of line too.  Not so much for me. Anyway, the Specialest Bean was someone I must have met before this time, but I can't sort out those memories without the help of hypnotism.  Either way, this was the beginning of a very important time in my life: The Era of the Bean!  Of course, there was no bean yet.  That came much later, but still. 

We went to sleep away camp, and she and I were in a production of a Midsummer's Night Dream.  We had extremely minor roles, but we took them very seriously.  The best part is, that Bean and I were sooo NOT theater kids.  Like you know who I mean, those people who believe they are going to be on Broadway or in movies or something like that.  We weren't those people at all, and still are DEFINITELY not those people at present (way too awkward), so why the heck were we in so many plays together?  Sometimes I think both of us were very flamey gay men/drag queens in a past life.  It would explain so much.

As a young girl, the Bean was basically (oh, base) a bean pole.  So gangly! Her mom would make her keep boxes of cookies in her room to help her put on weight.  No one would have guessed at the time, but she ended up having probably the biggest boobs of any of us.  Bitch!

She had the BEST sleep over parties of anyone.  We would stay up all night prank calling boys we liked, and we would order pizzas so Joanna or Lumpkin could answer the door in nothing but a towel.  Classy. 
Also, her Bat Mitzvah was the most awesome! Instead of dancing to the Spice Girls with blow up guitars, she took a small group of ladies to Hershey Park, which was totally amazing!!

Two Words:  Buzzy Shane.  Her grandfather is THE KING of horny old men.  His business card is a modified version of this... PS If you want to play fair, pick a number first, then scroll down to see. 

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Did you pick 3?!?!? Well did you!?!

When we were in high school, I went to Puerto Vallarta with Bean and her fam, and we went to Buzzy's place there, and it was full of posters of sexy naked ladies and there was a statue of people having sex. He is the epitome of dirty old man and he is probably the coolest person ever.  Also, there was a story where he got interviewed by some newspaper in Florida about the recall election thing that happened a while ago, and he gave his name as George Succotash.  I remember that newspaper clipping was on the fridge at the Bean household.  Amazing.  Hopefully we can get Miss S.B. to write a piece highlighting the true Viagra fueled magic that is her grandfather.

The Special Bean was originally the name of her first car.  It was a beautiful maroon colored sedan that looked like a kidney bean. Hence the name.

When we both decided to go to the same college, we elected to be college roommates.  I LOVED living with this girl.  She had many strange rituals, which nicely complemented my many strange rituals.  She slept on the top bunk, and I slept on the bottom.  It was an ideal place for her to flick hair rubber bands, and other fidgets into the air.  The best part was, that one evening, she went to bed in a pair of sweatpants, and I woke up in them.  She had removed them in her sleep, and dropped them down onto my bed, so when I went to bed much later, I found them in my covers and put them on. What else was I supposed to do?

At one point, her parents took us on a road trip somewhere for something?  And on the way, we stopped at a furniture warehouse, where Bean and I lounged on discount-priced sofas, and then we stole a framed photo of the employee of the month, Mike Flynn.  We kept the picture hanging up in our dorm all through freshman year.

Hecht's Furniture Warehouse Employee of the Month: Mike Flynn

She is a very fidgety person.  We came to call the objects of her fidgeting "fidgets."  Her favorite at that time had to be tape balls.  She would take a piece of tape, or sticker, roll it into a tube between her fingers (sticky side out), and play with it until eventually launching it into the oblivion of our dorm room.  As a result, our dorm floor was crawling with tape balls. All socks and shoes had a bunch of the tape tubes stuck to the bottom, and you would find them in unlikely places, like in the minifridge, or in a text book. 

She also has somewhat of a heavy hand with delicate things.  She had a long-running record of destroying jewelry and other fragile objects, with the excuse "it must have been loose."

The icing on the fidget cake occurred when she was in a large lecture hall at school.  She had a pencil and a rubber band at her disposal.  Some people might decide to put the rubber band around their wrist for later and to take notes with the pencil, but not the Bean!  She is Specialest for a reason!  She fashioned a sort of bow or slingshot with the rubber band, stretching it between her fingers, and used the pencil as a kind of arrow-projectile.  And then she launched the pencil directly into her eyeball.  Of course she screamed, got up and ran out of the lecture hall, half blinded.  Lots of people witnessed this. 

During college, someone also discovered the Bean's pornstar doppelganger.  Blare Segal. (NSFW!).  I think the name Blare Segal is supposed to remind you of "Barely Legal," which is pretty brilliant and subtle, if it was intentional, and not just the name of her first pet and the street she lived on as a child.

Blare Segal!

She wasn't able to make it to the famous Druid Snuggie Solstice Card photoshoot, but she did send a picture of herself wearing a snuggie, being a wizard.  So of course, she was secretly photoshopped into the picture!!!
Then there was a surprise unveiling where we ate Afghani food and then revealed the card to her. It was pretty emotional and fantastic.

The Bean is tall, but not THAT Tall!  Just to be clear, we were actually at stone henge when we took the picture.

Then there was the time more recently when we were at a party at Joanna's apartment, and the Bean ripped off her own shirt (reasons unclear) with such forcefulness that she managed to knock over a lamp and blow a fuse.  Half of the lights in the apartment went out.  The Specialest Bean has SUPER POWERS!!!

To wrap things up, WE ALL LOVE YOU SO MUCH AND WE HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT BIRTHDAY!  Go watch a marathon of Degrassi or something. CHILLAX and enjoy yourself!  Think about coming home and going to OC and partying like it's 1989!  PS- Do you want to share needles?  Do you want to be my baby mama?

Korean Food

Tonight the gang went out for Lumpkin's Birthday.  She insisted we go to the Korean Restaurant, because for some strange reason she thinks that Korean is the best food. I honestly do not get it.  No offense to Koreans, but I am just not into your cuisine!  And I consider myself to have a pretty adventurous palate, but a bowl of chunks of cow liver and pears floating in blood broth doesn't do much for my taste buds. The thing is, in Baltimore, the Korean restaurants stay open all night (or so it seems).  You can basically go there after all the bars have closed and get a huge number of appetizers and food and even fun foreign beers!  I have heard that they are running a brothel out of some of these places, and I guess it doesn't surprise me that much.  Just adds to the mystique!

 The array of mini appetizers is pretty exciting, until you start to really look at what you are getting.  Besides the kimchi, fruitcake potato salad and various gelatinous mysteries, there is literally a bowl of guppies slathered in sesame seeds.  When I say guppies, I mean the tiny little fishies that you might see in a stream.  The whole fish, head and everything.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my actual camera, so I will have to make do with pictures taken by my phone. Not the best quality, but hopefully some descriptive language will help to really set the scene.

 I so wish I had a real camera so you could actually see the little heads and eyes and faces of the guppy coleslaw, or whatever this is. These little wormy things are actually whole mini fish.  The scary part is, you don't really notice that at first, so only until you are about to scoop some into your face do you see the little heads staring back at you. I didn't have the nerve to taste it, so it could be absolutely delicious.  I just couldn't do it.

We also got some "milky rice wine" that came in a plastic liter bottle, and you drank out of what I usually think of as cereal bowls.  I think Joanna was expecting an actual bottle of wine, and when it came we were confused.  It had 2 inches of sediment at the bottom, so she shook it up, then we got nervous about an explosion.  I asked the waitress if it would explode and she looked at me like I was totally retarded.  It was very sweet and milky.

This magical lump is what I call fruitcake potato salad.  It has the texture of creamy whipped potatoes with a lot of mayonnaise, and then it has bits of what appear to be canned vegetables.  They add nice little spots of color that make the eating experience so much more exciting.

More appetizers.  Mostly various vegetables and egg bits covered in red sauce that I will call Korean Ketchup.  That last one is Joanna eating sprouts.  She was thrilled.

There was also the ever popular fish pancake, which is mostly green onions and various seafood mashed into a pancake shape and fried to hell.  It's decent, but REALLY greasy and when I say seafood, I mean chewy white hunks of things.

Melissa and Katie got some sort of Noodle Dish.  It was noodley!

 We got veggie BiBimBop with a fried egg on top!  When I am forced to go for Korean, this is my usual.  It was just OK this time, but I have had it at another place where it was actually delicious and I wasn't even completely drunk when I ate it! It also reminds me of the song we had to sing at Jewish Day camp... Bim Bam bim bim bim bam, bim bim bim bim bim baaammmmm....shabbat shalom HEY! and so on.

The birthday girl got BBQ!  This place was less exciting than the other Korean place we sometimes go to, because that place actually uses a blow dryer (like the kind you use for your hair) to blow air into the burner and really get the fire going.  The place we were at tonight actually had hotplates, which I guess could be seen as a more sanitary way to cook your meats, but way less fun.

Because this is Lumpkin's birthday, of course there was a Hagen Daz ice cream cake!  AND EVEN marshmallows and circus peanuts with candles!!!

The writing on the cake was done in this really concentrated blue gel frosting.  It got everywhere.

Delicious!  Then we all felt really sick.  Imagine the mess of Korean food with a layer of ice cream floating on top all mixing around in your stomach.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LUMPS!   Please pick a different theme next year!!!!!

Lumpkin Jennings

I have known Lumpkin Jennings since I was a little kid.  She used to live down the street from me, but we were mortal enemies at the time.  I have a distinct memory of her eating candy at the bus stop in the morning, and my parents have confirmed this.  Laffy Taffy or some sort of chocolate.  Maybe marshmallows.  I also have a weird memory of her standing there at that same bus stop having a daddy-long-legs crawling on her, like on her head, and she didn't know it was there.  I do not know if that memory is real or not.  Either way, she is still eating candy at inappropriate times, and is often infested with insects, so not much has changed in that respect.

Anyway, we were enemies back then.  Or at least that is how I remember it.  I remember stealing Lumpkin's Silly Putty and walking around the neighborhood squishing ants into it, so that it was like a ball of ant corpses. I thought this was the most evil thing you could do to a person.  The sad part was, I brought this up to her years later and she had absolutely no clue what I was talking about. However, she did have a serious fear of ants at some point afterward, so maybe I had a subtle influence.

I don't really know why we were enemies, there was no actual event that I can recall.  It was a neighborhood gang rivals thing, us verse them.  I was friends with a few girls on the street, and then Lumpkin was friends with this other girl.  Once one of the girls in my gang pushed Lumpkin off the monkey bars in someone's backyard, and Lumpkin broke her arm!  The other girls were better at evil doing than I was, apparently. (We are all still friends to this day).

Time passed, we moved away from each other, then close to each other again, then we became reacquainted in Hebrew School! And then we became real friends! I remember thinking Lumpkin had the BEST style.  This is hilarious, because this was like 1995-1996, when bell bottoms and polyester clothing, and peace signs and ying yangs were totally awesome and cool for middle schoolers.  Lumpkin had things from Contempo, and other mall stores, and she was one bad ass mothaa fucka!!  She had a pair of silver platform sneakers.  She was my hero.

She taught me how to get in trouble in Hebrew School. We had middle school dramas, we went to sleep-away camp and had sleepover parties.  At camp, her travel trunk was completely full of snack foods, and midway through the summer, it started to reek with the most disgusting stench.  It ended up sitting outside the bunk house on a giant rock for a week.  Favorite sleepover prank:  Get underwear wet and stick them in the freezer!

At some point, her parents went away on a vacation and she was alone, so she ate nothing but Pez purchased from JoAnn Fabric's for a week.  As a result, she developed some sort of weird growth on the inside of her mouth.  She still appears to subsist on nothing but Pez, Symphony bars, white cheddar popcorn, marshmallows, sardines and samples from Whole Foods.

One time, she got us all in her car and wouldn't tell us where she was taking us.  It was a surprise.  We ended up at her orthodontist's office, where she was getting a new retainer made.  Thanks a lot, Lumpkin!   She had a lot of retainers back then because she would lose them regularly.  I remember one had a teddy bear sticker inside of it, and one was colored like a watermelon with seeds and everything.  

Once she was at my house, cutting her toenails. She left them scattered on my bed, so I put them in a baggy and sent them to her in the mail.  I think she appreciated it.

She broke her face at some point when she slipped in the bathroom, and has a metal plate in her cheek.  She also almost lost her left hand in a car accident, and was not even squeamish about the GRUESOME pictures of her opened flesh.  Imagining her with a hook instead of a hand is only somewhat disturbing.  She could totally pull it off.  Later, she was upset that her incredible, hot-orange Member's Only jacket had to be cut off of her and was covered in blood, rendering it unwearable in the future.

Her survival in general is somewhat of a medical mystery.

In summary,
Lumpkin Jennings is TOTALLY AWESOME and I LOVE HER!!!!

HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY!!!!