My friend Ted just became the drummer for the Meat Puppets. In case you don’t know who the Meat Puppets are, go to iTunes and download the songs “Backwater” and “Lake of Fire.” The Meat Puppets, in addition to being Kurt Cobain’s favorite band, were my friend Ted’s favorite band as a teenager. Now he’s their drummer. Heavy. I mean think of your favorite band growing up, then imagine yourself on that poster from your bedroom wall, posing shirtless, twirling a drumstick, spray-spitting Jack Daniels into the atmosphere. That’s Ted now.
And he didn’t audition. He was sound-engineering a documentary about the Meat Puppets in Austin, and one day the band’s delinquent drummer was a no-show for rehearsal (again) and Ted, a proficient drummer as well as being familiar with the Puppets’ full songbook, offered to sit in. They gave him the job.
Last time I hung out with Ted, he taught me a term that I fell in love with: MICROWAVING. In the dating world, microwaving is when you call up an ex-girlfriend (or boyfriend) for sex. Ya know, like you’re heating up an old dish. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard the expression, especially because the existence of my sex life had relied on it for the past year. I had always called it “ex-sex.” One weekend, an ex of mine and I had sex 22 times in one weekend to the song “I Need You Tonight.” It was ex-sex in excess to INXS.
Anyway, discovering “microwaving” made me think of Sniglets. A singlet is a “word that should be in the dictionary, but isn’t” (ex: Furnidents: The indentations left in carpet after moving heavy furniture. Blivet: to flip your pillow looking for a cool spot. ARG (Audio Retinal Gyration): The act of trying to read the label on a LP record while it’s playing on a turntable.) Sniglets were invented by Rich Hall, a comedian and cast member of SNL and Not Necessarily the News back in the early eighties. Sniglets cracked me up when I was a kid. I watched Not Necessarily the News every week just for Rich Hall’s Sniglet segment. They were brilliant observations delivered by this quirky guy with a funny lisp. Rich Hall paved the way for Jerry Seinfeld.
I’ve performed several times with Rich Hall over the past few years and have become pretty good friends with him. We try to book dates together at the Riviera Comedy Club in Vegas when our schedules allow.
So I was thinking, Rich Hall is my Meat Puppets. He was an icon of my childhood and he’s now part of my adult life. Funny how that happened. I guess what it says about life is that passion and doing what you love eventually puts you on a poster or marquis with your hero. I don’t know if that’s always the case. It’s just a theory I came up with via the word “microwaving.” Certainly your determination to have sex with someone other than an ex-girlfriend does not always put you in that position. I’ll have to come up with a new theory for that one.