“Thank You Much …… For the Walking Stick.”

One of the best parts of our trip to Memphis – along with the general hilarity of being two ladies on the road for seven days – was introducing Jen to Drunk History, which she had never heard of. I was trying to explain it to her in the car as we careened along Danny Thomas Boulevard looking for the highway, and it was difficult to get across why this web series is so hilarious and brilliant. So we came back to the hotel. We both took long hot baths. We drank Scotch. And we lay on my bed and watched all of the Drunk Histories on my laptop.

Me and Drunk History go way back. My brother introduced me and my sister Siobhan to them when we were all holed up in the hotel in Boston, when my dad was in a crisis in the hospital. We spent all day at the hospital. It was a terrible and frightening time. My sister Jean was getting married in 5 days. I told the rest of the story here. She was going to have gone to New York that very week to pick up her custom-made wedding dress and then couldn’t get there because of our family crisis, so Jean texted cousin Kerry in New York (who was, of course, aware of what was happening – my dad is her godfather) and said, “Hi. I need a favor, cousin.” Within 30 seconds, cousin Kerry (who was taking care of my cat Hope while I was away) texted back, “Anything.” This is my family. This is who we are to each other. If Jean had said, “Could you please go to Zimbabwe and pick up my wedding ring? I know it’s inconvenient … but I can’t leave Boston …” cousin Kerry would have found a way to come through. Jean asked if Kerry could go to the dressmaker’s shop in Manhattan, pick up the dress, and store it in her apartment where I could then go and pick it up. Because I would have to go back to New York for a day – get my shit for the wedding – and then drive back up to Rhode Island with the wedding dress. But we also thought that Dad might die. That he might die that day or the next. The wedding was coming, but everything was in flux. This is life. But the wedding dress needed to be picked up and Jean needed Kerry to do it. And that was exactly how it went down. Kerry came through big, I picked up the dress, and all was handled – but there was a good 24 hours in the Holiday Inn in Boston when Jean, in the middle of her own family tragedy, was trying to deal with the fact that she couldn’t pick up the dress, and she had to send a Western Union telegram to the seamstress on Staten Island, and it just got crazy. With everything else going on, my dad in a major health crisis (he almost died), there was a wedding happening in only 5 days. We all stayed in the same hotel room in Boston. It was me, my mother, my brother and two sisters. There were fold-out cots. I felt like we were living the lives of our cramped Irish ancestors. We spent all day at the hospital. We crawled back to the hotel at night and crashed, only to do it again the following day. We all got to know each other’s ring tones. There was a sense of hilarity in all of us, which just came out of our crisis. We’re Irish. We laugh at wakes. This is not a cliche. It is how we handle great stress.

And one night, back at the hotel, after a long day at the hospital, Bren, Siobhan and I sat in the bar. It is kind of a mythical night to all of us, we still laugh about it. We were so stressed out and so upset, and we just had a couple of beers and told stories and laughed so hard we were in tears. I was laughing so hard I was leaning all the way back in my chair, guffawing like a hyena, and Siobhan said tentatively, “Uhm, there’s a man behind you.” This poor guy next to me at the bar was very politely leaning away from my violently tilting body. If you weren’t Irish you would never have guessed that the three hilarious siblings in that bar that night were spending the day standing over our father’s sick body, praying for him. But to Irish people it makes sense. So that was the night Brendan started telling us about this Drunk History thing. Siobhan and I had never heard of it. Brendan told us the entire plot of one (the famous Oney Judge one), and explained the concept to us: Someone gets drunk and tells a historical event. Then famous actors act out what they say, word for word, lip synching to the drunk person’s narration. Unless you’ve seen one it is hard to grasp. But Brendan told it so well that Siobhan and I were weeping with laughter (and I was tilting backwards precariously into the man beside me, who was a good sport about it). God, it felt so so good to laugh like that. Nobody had laptops, so we couldn’t go back to the room and watch them, but there was a little computer console in the bar – it was a stand-up one, on a platform – it looked like a slot machine – and you could pay with a credit card for 10 minutes of time or whatever. The computer had seen better days. It was running Microsoft Word 1982 or something like that. But we were on FIRE to see this Oney Judge thing. We were in the middle of the damn bar. But we clustered around the console, and – a group effort – got it up and running. The browser was slow as molasses. Brendan was in charge. He found the Drunk History we wanted, and, standing there in the hotel, with our father sick three blocks away, we watched it, and HOWLED. We were WEEPING and snorting and crying and rocking and swaying, and we watched it three times. God, we needed it. We leapt to grab that laughter, we clutched at it, we reveled in it, we went NUTS with it.

So I will always associate Drunk History with that time in my life, with that night in the Holiday Inn bar in Boston, when we were all so terrified, with my sister and Pat getting married in 5 days, and Kerry shlepping to the dress store in Manhattan to do a favor for her beloved cousin – and I could just see her in my minds’ eye: being efficient and no-drama and just going into Family Crisis Let’s All Pull Together Mode. And because so many people were helping us and praying for us and with us, we were left free to fully have our emotions. Everything was done for us. I had called Kerry at 3 o’clock in the morning on September 11th – when my mother had called me – and said, “I need to come drop off Hope.” Kerry was instantly awake, saying, “Of course. Whenever.” I packed up Hope, jumped in the car, drove into the city – it was September 11th so it was already an eerie and tense time for New Yorkers – and then there was Kerry, at 6 o’clock in the morning, in her pajamas, at the door, holding out her arms for Hope’s carrying case. She was calm, loving, and may have had her own feelings about what was happening (of course she did: she loved my dad), but she held it together for me.

It may seem strange to think about all of this when I write about Drunk History but that is honestly the context of my introduction to these marvelous pieces of performance art. I will always be thankful to Derek Waters, because they came along at a time when, boy, we NEEDED them.

Within 5 seconds of watching the Michael Cera Alexander Hamilton one, Jen suddenly realized what it was, what the concept was, and she freakin’ LOOOOOOOOST IT. She reached a level in her laughter I have rarely heard and we had to stop the video so that she could thrash around on the bed, shrieking. We watched all of them that night. We watched all of them every night that we were there. Any time we had free time in the hotel, we’d cue one up. We watched them at the motel on our way home. We can’t get enough.

This may be Jen’s favorite one. Don Cheadle’s speech at the end (well, actually his two speeches: one to the crowd and one to Mary Todd Lincoln, ie: Zooey Deschanel) reduced her to a ball of weeping laughter. She said, “Watch his THRULINE. That is an ACADEMY AWARD WINNING PERFORMANCE.”

We have been quoting it nonstop ever since we first watched it in that beautiful Holiday Inn in West Memphis, Arkansas.