Midnight madness

I said to Mike and Lisa: “It is important for people to understand that I operate from complete scarcity.”

Mike was like, “Holy shit. You operate from scarcity?? WHAT?”

It is nice to find the right words.

I went off. “Imagine you’re in the desert for a decade. You got no green trees, no water, no nothing. Then you’re presented with a DROP of water. You’re gonna have a very different response to that drop of water than if you lived in a place where there was tons of water. And that’s me. I OPERATE FROM TOTAL SCARCITY. It is CRAY-CRAY.”

Close on the heels of this, all hell broke loose in Mike and Lisa’s kitchen and it ended up with Mike making me and Lisa laugh so hard that we finally were completely undone by our own hysterics, and we both lay down on the benches by the table, weeping, out of control. For example, I did a spit take at one point, merlot spraying out of my mouth in an alarming fashion, mascara was streaming down our faces, and our mad wild shrieking laughter naturally just made Mike continue with the ridiculous pantomime he was doing – and it got bigger and crazier and louder and funnier – and it felt like it would NEVER END. Lisa and I were begging for mercy. We were limp dishrags of human beings by the end of it. Mike became an ape at one point, hurling himself around the kitchen, we were DYING, I am dying as I type this, he became a sniveling moron in a conversation with a Godfather-type character – doing both sides of the exchange and then finally he became an old doddering geezer with a cane going on and on about “the Wells Fargo wagon …” and sometimes he went back and forth between the pantomimes. I don’t know. I was laughing so hard I lost track of what was actually going on. Not only of what Mike was doing, but who I actually WAS.

It was literally pandemonium at midnight. Absolute uproarious chaos.

During the wind-down (which took forever, because that hilarity was a runaway train, man) – Mike said, “You know why this is happening? I had two cups of Starbucks at 10 o’clock. I never do that.”

So the caffeine had caused Mike to go apeshit crazy, egged on by the GUFFAWS of his wife and his cousin – we were seriously writhing about on the benches by the kitchen table. I could see Lisa on the opposite bench from underneath the table – this was when we had both felt obliged to LIE DOWN because we were so out of control … and Lisa was shaking with laughter, as the juggernaut that was Mike’s spontaneous outburst of humor went on and on and on …

Mike, later: “Sheila, seriously, you need to write about scarcity. Do it. You operate from scarcity. Write it now.”

To paraphrase Harriet the spy: “Scarcity. Think about this.”

I will. Creative juices flowing. This is my opening salvo.

Talking about scarcity leads to laughter like that. Of course it does. It’s all part of the Los Angeles O’Malley experience.

I went to bed later and my stomach literally hurt from laughing so hard for so long. It felt like certain nights in college, high watermarks of humor, where you laugh for, what, three hours straight. I was wiped OUT. I am actually still laughing today.

About Mike turning into an uncivilized ape-boy galumphing around the kitchen and then morphing into a wheezing geezer talking about the good old days when “you could buy things off a SHELF… or you would wait for your delivery from the Wells Fargo wagon …” and then into an angry impatient Godfather bitch-slapping a sniveling idiot who can’t figure out his cable bill and doesn’t know how to properly knot his tie.