just ignore her / she hasn't been well
What else but a child pronouncing “Milan” as “Mulan” can one depend upon to treat and dress those oozing scrapes attendant to persevering in this gruesome modern life? How am I to assuage the mean, organic humming just behind my jaw joints which ranges mysteriously and all day from a bee’s song to a jack hammer if not with preteens in shimmering plastic wigs singing offkey? Who in this world will be there to support me if NOT the eleventh best singer in a high school drama program play-acting the role of small business tyrant in the opening song of a musical which was once broadcast in full on MTV along with disinterested interstitial hosting by the girls from The Hills?? Some days I suffer bravely. Some days by ten a.m. I am swiveling my head around for an all-clear sign to the point of aching tweaks and clandestinely opening YouTube on my work computer, twitchy, to watch the most important creation the Internet age has yet to bring forth: the supercut of children performing the “Courtney, take your break!” portion of “Omigod You Guys” from the Broadway musical adaptation of 2001 Reese Witherspoon vehicle Legally Blonde.
Legally Blonde The Musical, an extremely 2007 product, is something I felt too cool for as a teenager because such is the burden of being a teenager. It was fully ten years after its release, and then some, I guess, that I was exposed to the above compilation video during the puked gin and reheated pizza scented end stages of an—if I am being totally honest—The Great Gatsby themed birthday party. Look, I hear you. There was a time in America where somebody named Emily turned 25 and things like that would just happen. I was wearing cobalt sparkles and melting into a careworn sofa with my legs in a near strangers lap and then I saw it. And then it happened. Only then did I understand. Only then could I begin to give thanks.
The productions included in this video range widely in everything from production value to execution, costume budget to talent level. The success or failure of the quick-change central to this scene is plain before the eye of the viewer and every note the girls shoot at and miss by a country mile is preserved here in all its ignoble joy. But when I laugh at this video I am not laughing at kids who tried their best in a school theater production and failed. Firstly, some of them are quite good and still, no. You must understand. To sit and watch this video is to be put under a glorious sedation, pink-hued and shoddily applied. When the one school has a boy playing Courtney so they change the line to, “Bradley, take your break!” it is life-affirming. When for some reason at one point every role other than Elle is being played by someone who is in the first grade, max, the body relaxes, the soul becomes more free. Anticipation mounts. We bounce. We know what’s coming.
Suddenly, the clean clips with which we’ve now spent several minutes give way to a bleary camera phone shot of a television. And on screen? That familiar scene begins anew. Courtney, take your break! Yes, wonderful. Just ignore her, she hasn’t been well! I love it. Go on. Try this! Latest from M[i/u]lan! Go on, try it on! Now we’re cooking. I take care of my best clienteleeeeeee! The big moment. I’m so happy. Then into that most exalted moment of juvenile splendor crashes disaster, dazzling mishap, a belly flop for all time. Sounding much like a garbage disposal experiencing first sexual climax, the deepest and most poorly timed of throat wobbles spoils for our young Shopgirl #2 her big high note. It’s a gift from me to, Eeeelllllllllllllllle! becomes something closer tl Sam Elliott scatting and to witness this is pure ecstasy. Watch while stoned and you almost think you’re going to die and you want to because it’s that good and nothing will ever bet better. Wherever that fine young person is today, I hope she knows that whatever hurt or embarrassment she felt when her voice cracked during probably the one performance the PTA paid to have recorded in her high school’s spring musical is counterbalanced today and forever in the supersized production of Legally Blonde The Musical that we call life by an equal and opposite metric ton of blissed out, frothy, psychically radiant, pharmaceutical grade pleasure for many, many gay people who are online a lot. I like to believe this must be consoling, freeing, even. We owe her so much.
also! this one here is my high school lol. the sound on this recording is almost completely illegible, which tracks alongside my memories of a school system so underfunded it would shortly be taken under receivership by the state. But actually this show was good!!!!
consider: Basically anyone who knows me even a little will find this shocking and very dumb but I am just now finally reading CHAOS by Tom O’Neill and obviously I’m obsessed. ** I only got through like six new Taylor Swift songs today and I did not think that those I did hear were especially good but I have to admire (and laugh heartily at) her for deciding to lash out at the Stanley-toting, salmon bowl air-frying, closed-door romance novel reading legion of millennial white women at the heart of her audience who judged her so vociferously for wanting more than life itself to slurp the scant last remnants of life out of Matty Healy through his dick. Like. That’s very funny, what can I say? ** Also funny: Mary & George on Starz!!!!! Genuinely! Julianne Moore is wearing elaborate collars and having lesbian encounters and pimping her gay son—the less bad and not ugly actor from the abysmal Amazon Red White and Royal Blue movie that had such a deleterious psychic impact on the small dog we were babysitting when we watched it that he feverishly masturbated himself to completion with a stuffed worm despite our being right there across the room yelling and begging and crying for him to stop. but anyway. Horrible film.—out to the desperate slut king and it’s amazing. ** Nearing ten days til Paris and thank god because I keep coming up with new things—all white Nike Killshot 2s, hair products in miniature, sort of grotesque Keith Haring packing cubes, striped socks, a spring jacket—I feel I must purchase in order to have a successful trip and it’s really getting out of hand. But anyway soon we shall be youngish lovers in gay Paree and I am sure I won’t post anything at all annoying during that time.