Yesterday I posted the link to the trailer for our new comedy short, Cat Scratch.  And this is our snazzy new poster!

Kinda go hand in hand in my book, which is how they ended up on the same post.

First up, the cat bite. My film partner Andrea and I recently collaborated on a comedy project with Christian de Rezendes and Breaking Branch Pictures, called Cat Scratch. And we got a pretty trailer for you to look at, for your viewing pleasure.

Secondly, the new Woe book is out on the market!  Woe of the Road: Tales to Make You Never Want to Leave Your House is….well, just that, really. A book of hilarious travel nightmares written by people who should by locked in their houses for the good of the commuting society.

More news soon, and likely a stupid humor post coming shortly.

And I’m back with even more film news.  Our second film Viral Video has been accepted into the 2012 SENE Film Fest!  Last year, our first film There She Is… won Best Regional Film and the Audience Award for Best Comedy film at SENE, so we’re very excited for our encore!  Click here for the trailer.  It’s worth it just to see me beating someone with a broom. 

Just a quick note from our film world.  My directorial debut, There She Is…, a beauty pageant mockumentary starring the talented Andrea Henry, will be screening at the Faux Film Festival in Portland, Oregon on April Fool’s weekend.  So if you’re in the area (or are not, but want to be our #1 fan), go out and support these funny folks!

2012 kicked off with a bang!  My humor book Mug of Woe (co-edited with the lovely Kyle Cranston), has won runner-up for Best Anthology in the New England Book Festival!  Less than 5% of the submissions are awarded or honored, so this was big news for our “little book that could”. 

(Of course, since this is a book on people’s most embarrassing moments, it is probably more appropriately the little book that “couldn’t,wouldn’t, and most definitely shouldn’t”.  But that’s a very long tagline to fit on a business card.)

 Either way. all of the writers who contributed to this book should be quite proud of themselves!  Our next volume, Woe of the Road, which features hilarious travel stories,  is coming out early this spring, so stay tuned!

That  good idea I had 28 days ago quickly became a dumb idea.

This isn’t a surprise, really. Rescuing monkeys also seemed like a good idea until  zombies gallivanted through London 28 days later. My “good idea” also had basic anatomy against it, as it popped into my head on my flight home from Orlando after four days of having my brain scrambled on every thrill ride in a 40-mile radius. Still, I just couldn’t see how “making sugar plums for Christmas” could possibly be a dumb idea. 

First, I had to answer the burning question,“What the hell is a sugar plum?”  I had always taken the name literally and assumed they were some sort of candied plum. Not only is this incorrect, but sugar plums do not necessarily have plums in them.  Back when people named these things, the word “plum” simply meant dried fruit. Sugar plums are dried fruit, honey, toasted nuts, orange zest, and spices rolled together into balls.  (Actual sugar is not a requirement in sugar plums, either.  They could have called these things “chicken fingers” and been just as accurate.)  

The recipe instructed me to blend all the ingredients together, roll into balls, and refrigerate.  Simple.  Easy.  Piece of cake. 

THAT is why this was a dumb idea. 

I can bake complicated things.  Those old-fashioned holiday cake recipes that take 18 hours of fermenting and marinating and liquoring and drying and setting the dessert on fire before serving?  I can do that. Easy recipes, however, NEVER go smoothly.  Therefore, when I followed the sugar plum recipe exactly, I ended up with a poo-colored fruity concoction that didn’t stick together in the promised ball-like formation.

The mixture wasn’t opposed to the idea of sticking.  It was perfectly willing to stick to my fingers, my hair. my refrigerator, my Mickey Mouse egg timer, and the wall behind my stove.  It was the sticking together in formation that it had issues with.  Any formation, really. A ball was preferred, but I would have taken a cube, or a pyramid, or even a cuboid.  But, no. The only formation I got was crumbs.  Big, poo-colored, fruity crumbs. 

The easy solution was to just add more honey until it stuck together, but I was worried that the honey taste would be overpowering.  The next few minutes consisted of dashes, and pinches, and teaspoons while stirring this concoction, until it finally stuck together in balls.  I rolled them, refrigerated them, and one hour later, I tasted them. 

They were awesome.

They tasted just like an old-fashioned holiday dessert — something your Grandma’s grandmother used to make. I already know that my family —  who loves all things dried and nutty and fruity  – are going to demand that I make them every year.  And I’d be more than happy to do so,  except I couldn’t remember exactly what I added to the recipe. I threw stuff in, but I paid no mind to the measurements at all.  Did I double the cinnamon?  Triple the honey?  Did I even put in more allspice? I was pretty certain that I didn’t set it on fire, mostly because the mixture did not need my help to resemble the contents of an urn.   

I came up with a vague idea of what I added.  I had enough leftover ingredients, so I made another recipe following this “vague idea” to see if I could replicate the results. 

Naturally, that didn’t stick together, either.

This time, however, I noticed it wasn’t the right shade of brown, which gave me something to work with. Once again, I went willy nilly with the ingredients until the color, texture, and taste  matched the batch already in my fridge. This was good news, as it proved that I can replicate this again next year.  But God help anyone who asks me for the recipe, because the only steps I know for certain are:   

1. Follow the broken sugar plum recipe.
2. Add stuff until it’s brownish and sticky. 
3. Roll into balls. 

Next year, my family wants me to make figgy pudding, a labor-intesive recipe that takes weeks to get to peak flavor.  If history is accurate, this will be the only time you hear about it, because it will come out perfect.  Just don’t give me a roll of those pre-made ”ready bake” cookie doughs.   It won’t end well.

A typical picture of Grandpa and me. His eyes were on me. My eyes were on the score of the Sabres game.

One month ago, my grandfather passed away at the ripe old age of 91. Over these last few weeks, a lot of people have told me, “the world lost a great man.”  And they are right.  In the schoolyard kickball game of Great Men, Grandpa would be one of the first picked for the team.  However, being a “shot glass half full” type gal, I don’t find pining over what I have lost to be particularly uplifting or constructive. So, I’m going to talk about how the world was better, because he was here. Specifically, my world.  Because this is my blog, damnit. Yay, for egocentrism.  

I attribute part of my sense of humor to Grandpa, because he taught me comic timing. Granted, most of these teachings were completely unintentional. A relative said to me at the funeral brunch, “I could talk your grandfather into doing anything.” This was true. As long as Grandpa was spending time with us, he’d do whatever crazy thing we were into at the time, no matter how ridiculous he looked doing it.  My brother developed a passion for golf when he was a teenager.  Despite the fact that the only golf Grandpa had ever played involved maneuvering a ball around an obstructive windmill at Jacko’s Miniature Golf course, he took my brother out for nine holes.  They made it through the course, eventually.  This was no small feat.  Especially since Grandpa did all his putting with a nine iron.

Grandpa had a comedy style I could never replicate — unassuming, never mean-spirited, yet bitingly funny.  A few years ago, someone had gifted us with a tiny bottle of ice wine for New Year’s Eve.  If you are not familiar with ice wine, it is a dessert wine made from frozen grapes.  On this half of the globe, it’s made mostly in Ontario and has the defining characteristics of being:

1)      very, very, sweet

2)      very, very tasty

3)      very, very, expensive per ounce, and therefore,

4)      sold in very, very, little bottles. 

Mom rationed the ice wine among us like Moses with the last pouch of manna in the desert. After an hour or so of revelry, Mom reached to pour everyone another round of the very, very tasty wine, only to find the bottle, which was supposed to be half full, was empty.

It didn’t take long to solve The Case of the Missing Ice Wine.  Nancy Drew would have figured it out by Chapter Three by the rumblings of contentment from Grandpa’s end of the table. 

“Grandpa!” Mom exclaimed, “Do you know how much that little bottle cost?!” 

 “Well, honey,” Grandpa said as he set down his glass. “It was worth every penny.” 

Even at his funeral, Grandpa’s whimsical humor was front and center.  Leading the funeral procession, in fact. My parents made the executive decision to rent a car for the funeral, because their dog Fluffy (she lives up to her name) is a frequent passenger in their cars, and our all-black attire did not need the additional fashion accessory of yellow dog hair.  The ONLY car available was a compact Chevrolet. A compact fluorescent green Chevrolet.  And this radioactive Snot Mobile led Grandpa’s funeral procession. I don’t think Grandpa would want it any other way.   

The House (before Chewbacca closed on it)

Grandpa was the one who encouraged me to pursue my creative endeavors. He was a creative force himself, a remarkable craftsman who could build or fix anything.  He assembled a massive doll house for me for Christmas one year.  I’m sure he expected I’d be a normal little girl and put actual dolls in the house. But I knew something that most little girls did not — dolls are damn creepy. Action figures, however, were AWESOME.  So, in this quaint, three-story residence lived Chewbacca, She-ra, and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Spiderman and Papa Smurf were invited over for Christmas (which happened at least once a week in this house). When my brother was put down for his afternoon nap, Voltron and the Transformers would pop over for afternoon tea. I think this was when I realized that a creative discipline was the only type of discipline I would ever co-exist with. 

I doubt I’d still be a writer if it wasn’t for Grandpa. Every instance of writer’s block, every period of frustration, each unfinished manuscript, he was the one who always told me to keep going.  He taught me more about writing than anyone. I spent many hours of my childhood “writing books” with him.  He’d fold a sheet of paper in half and draw a cover for our “book”. Then I would open it up and write a story on the inside that matched the cover he drew.  The only rule was that my entire story had to fit on the inside of the “book” with no spilling onto the back cover.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this highly frivolous space limitation taught me the most invaluable lesson a writer could learn — make every word count.

I was reminded of this lesson when I visited on Columbus Day weekend, just days before he passed. I visited him every day at the hospital with my family. On my last day in town, I drove to the hospital, alone. The entire way there, I scrolled through my brain trying to find the right words to say to him.  When I entered his room, he was sleeping.  Not wanting to wake him, I simply gave him a kiss and said, “Thanks, Grandpa.”  When I exited, I felt an overwhelming sense of peace.  Our last moment was brief, simple, and to the point. Given his lifelong lesson of editing, it was the best way I could have said goodbye. 

Several Christmases ago, Grandpa gave me a bottle of Polish liquor.  I opened it the night I wrote his eulogy, hoping one shot would give me the clarity I needed to craft it. (Note: Nothing that is 100 proof gives you clarity. Burning throat and frequent typos, yes.  Not clarity.)  I cracked it open again tonight to write this blog post.  This time, however, I’m not looking for clarity. Instead, I’m pointing my glass at the sky and giving a brief, simple, to the point toast to one helluva great man.

Thanks for everything, Grandpa.

Yeah. I know. It’s late.  I was due back here on this blog weeks ago.  And it’s really sweet that you waited up for me to come home.  Darling, really.  But it’s REALLY late now, so why don’t we just go to bed and talk about it the first thing in the morning? 

No?  Fine. Have it your way.   

Valid Excuse for not blogging #1:  Encountered general Woe.

Our book Mug of Woe had a fantastic book reading this past Friday at Books on the Square in Providence.  The readers were hysterical and the audience was wonderful.  Thanks to the store and everyone who came out. Our next event is a reading/humor writing workshop for the good ladies at The Hive Archive in Providence on November 15th for their Hive O’Clock Happy Hour. Hope to see you there!

Also our follow-up book, Woe of the Road, is currently accepting tales of travel gone wrong.  So if you have one (and who doesn’t?), submit it to us by November 30th.

Valid Excuse for not blogging #2: Actively avoiding paparazzi. 

The films I’ve been making with this lady have been getting some silver screen time all over the country.  Our film There She Is… screened at the Broad Humor Film Festival in Los Angeles in September and will be screening in New Hampshire early next year. Our horror movie screened over Halloween weekend.  And our new film Viral Video has been accepted as a selection of the Boston Comedy Festival.  It screens November 12th at the Charles Playhouse! 

And there are other flicks coming soon. I’m working with some of my former filmmaking students on a sci-fi project called The House.  They are doing some amazing special effects on a fairly small budget and the film has live action and animation components.  I’m pleased to be a part of it.  You can check out the budding Production blog right here at Rosebudstudios.net 

 So that’s what’s been keeping me, honey. I haven’t been out gallivanting around with another blog, or vlog, or Tweet feed. And I can’t  say that it’s not going to happen again.  However, if I can borrow an expression from my grandfather, I promise that a new humor post is coming to this site quicker than poop through a goose.  OK?  Peachy. 

Oh, and I’ll take the trash out first thing tomorrow.  Cross my heart.

In sketch comedy, a blackout sketch is a short scene comprising of a setup, a punchline, and a quick fade to black.  These sketches require a shocking, unpredictable punchline to work well. This makes it a completely inappropriate title for this article.  With a setup of “navigating my house in a tropical storm power outage”, the punchline is as predictable as the demise of my floor lamp that didn’t have the sense to hide in the closet with the vacuum cleaner until the neighborhood lawn furniture stopped doing its “I Can Fly” rendition from Peter Pan.

The floor lamp was on the injured reserve list an hour after the storm hit.  And the power was still mostly on at this point, which wasn’t a particularly optimistic omen for how the rest of “Jenn alone in a dimly lit abode” was going to go. The lamp is one of those ultra-bright floor lamps good for reading extra fine print on pyramid scheme contracts or performing an in-home root canal.  In the wee hours of the afternoon, I had lost partial power, a common occurrence in my building during a storm.  Most of the power outlets worked, but the lights wired into the building did not, which meant I had to kick my inner Extreme Home Makeover into gear and push floor lamps and desk lamps into every room I went into.  Well, not ALL of them.  Just the ones I actually wanted to see in.

There is a reason they never tape Extreme Home Makeover during a blackout, and it’s not just so the movers don’t accidentally set down the armoire on the family cat.  It goes back to something that horror movie serial killers have long known — humans have poor depth perception in the dark. This is why it is oh-so-easy to coax a scream queen into the open arms of an ice pick wielding sociopath.  Or coax a lamp into a wall, which is exactly what I did, cracking the light bulb.  I’d have had better luck getting the armoire-flattened cat to move my lamp, with that freaky night vision they have.

Push-on light. The one that worked.

I considered retrieving the big flashlight in my car, but Irene was a-blowing, and going outside would only have ensured that I ended up tied in a granny knot around a lamp post. I didn’t need light THAT bad. It’s not like I live on a sun rock in a terrarium over here.  And I did have light options. I had a box of these battery-operated push-on lights, which would be fantastic if I was landing Boeing jets in my foyer.  If they all worked, that is.  However, only one light in the entire box actually worked, which meant that if I wanted to get from the living room to the kitchen without doing a Dick Van Dyke tumble over the printer stand, I had to carry this sphere o’light with me like I was The Tall Man from Phantasm.

I wouldn’t mind this, but it’s not like I got any significant light from this ball o’ brightness. It barely illuminated one piece of bread when I made my peanut butter sandwich for lunch.  I don’t know what the hell I put on the second piece of bread. For all I know, I missed the bread completely and peanut-buttered the stove burner.  I suppose I could have opened the refrigerator door for extra light, but the flickering power was causing my refrigerator to make noises I haven’t heard since Dana Barrett found the demon dogs in her refrigerator in Ghostbusters.  I was already dealing with a broken lamp and a possibly peanut-buttered stove burner.  “Demon dogs loose in the kitchen” would just be the third piece in that triple threat isosceles. 

Plus I had far graver concerns.  Specifically, Richard Nixon. 

I have a thing for odd toys.  My Mom is well aware of this hobby, and when she visited Washington D.C. a few years ago, she bought me a talking Richard Nixon doll.  Chatty Nixon sits on my windowsill and is activated by sound.  Any sound, apparently.  Like really loud tropical storm winds.  Every 30 seconds.  And when the wind ripped juuuuuust the right way, the talking Yoda doll in my living room piped in on the debate, so I rode out the rest of the storm smack dab in the middle of the Tatooine Caucus. 

That’s the summary of the effects of the storm on my abode so far: a broken dental light, a peanutbuttered stove burner, and the Deathstargate scandal.  Considering how the rest of New England is doing, I feel very fortunate.  However, the power is still partially out, so who knows what’s going to happen in the upcoming days.  Maybe I should just let the demon dogs out of the fridge.  At least they’d lick up the peanut butter.

Quite obviously, my family does not hail from The Emerald Isle.  There are no O’Dlugoses or McDlugoses or Dlugosigans jigging around Dublin.  I’m pedigreed Polish, because we’re the only ethnicity that would put a “D” and an “L” together without an apostrophe just to snicker when telemarketers try to pronounce it. Due to the distinct lack of blarney in our blood, the following statement from my Mom was a tad out-of-the-ordinary.   

“Have a safe trip, dear.  Oh, and your brother demanded that I cook a traditional Irish meal on Saturday.“

An unusual request in a month that does not have a warning label on its Ides?  Certainly.  But, it’s by no means a faulty request. I come from a long-line of exemplary cooks and bakers. Missing even one family holiday dinner creates a void in one’s gut that no amount of Lean Pockets or Ramen can plug. My brother missed the St. Patrick’s Day gathering this year.  My heart went out to him. I missed Easter in 2005.  My duodenum gave me the silent treatment until Labor Day.

As any daughter who has a functional stove would, I inquired if I could bring any side dishes. 

 “Naw.  We have sauerkraut and pierogis.”  

Our traditional Irish meal suddenly translated to “traditionally served in an Irish Pub in Warsaw.”

On my brother’s list of demands was an Irish soda bread. I have a bakery near me that sells a delicious, homemade Irish soda bread year round. This makes zero sense as it’s an Italian bakery, but we’ve already shoehorned pierogi-pressers into this traditional Irish meal, so interjecting linguini-Liberaces didn’t seem like a particular stretch.  I offered to procure the bread. 

However, I had forgotten one small detail.  I couldn’t actually get to the bakery.

This conversation took place on Thursday and I was slated to spend the evening with this guy for our weekly writing session.  Such sessions go very, very, very late into the evening, far past when the fat lady sings, the cows come home, and pigs are cleared for liftoff.  I was leaving first thing Friday to drive home, so the only viable option to “procure” this bread was to bake it myself when I returned home from the writing session in the o’wee hours of the morning. 

I’m reasonably proficient at baking. I bake a bread for every holiday.  However, I do not bake Irish Soda bread on St. Patrick’s Day. I bake Irish Spice bread, which wouldn’t work for dinner, even for the early bird special at Dlugosingans Pub at Warsaw Plaza.  For one, it’s a breakfast bread gorged with citron and raisins and sweet spices.  Second, it requires something called “golden syrup”. In nearly eight years of baking this bread, I still don’t know exactly what the hell that is, but I do know three things for certain:  

1. It can glue fingers to any kitchen surface.
2. It comes in a can that looks like those Moo Voice Can baby toys that tip upside down and make a barnyard animal noise.  Note:  Customer service does not find it amusing when you attempt to return it as “defective” because it does not squeal “Magically Delicious!” 
3. It can only be found in the top secret ethnic section of the supermarket, which usually requires a password and an Irish jig to enter.  I took Irish Dancing in college and might be able to hoof out a few steps in a pinch, but certainly not past the witching hour. 

So, I was going into this soda bread with no previously tested recipe to go on.  At roughly 2:00 in the morning.  Super.

Here’s a very basic baking principle:  baking soda combined with buttermilk makes stuff rise. This is exactly how soda bread works.  Also, probably the Pet Semetary.

I did not have buttermilk, so at 1:30 a.m. I found myself at the cashier of the local 24-hour drugstore with a quart of buttermilk in hand.   The cashier working behind the counter looked at my purchase and exclaimed: 

“Buttermilk, huh?  My grandpa takes bath in this stuff.  He’s 95, and looks like he’s 60.”

For the record, once a vision of a near-centenarian with taut skin snorkeling in a kiddie pool of buttermilk is in your head, he ain’t going to leave quietly. No matter how many times you threaten to take away his water wings.   

I arrived home — along with the newly acquired centenarian who was belly flopping somewhere in my frontal lobe — and pre-heated the oven.  After uttering several unladylike phrases at the 60-minute baking time, I rolled up my sleeves and got down to the task at hand. And that’s when the next stupid idea came to my head.   I decided to test my baking soda to see if it was still good. 

It’s a simple process, really.  One spoon of baking soda into a little vinegar – if it bubbles, it’s good.  If it doesn’t, it’s dead. Just like the mood slime in Ghostbusters II.   Easy peasy. 

One bubble. 

I got one FREAKING bubble.  Out of pity. 

I trashed my cupboards.  Bubkis. I suppose I could have ran back to the drugstore, but slip-n-sliding grandpa had just gotten out of my head, and I did not want to risk hearing about some Fountain-of-Youth sanctioned baking soda enema that bleaches some body part that has no business being bleached in the first place.

So, hell, with it.  One-Bubble Soda Bread went in the oven.  And I waited. 

And waited.

59-minutes of waiting, beating off the Sandman with a spatula until finally, mercifully, my Mickey Mouse egg timer dinged.     

I don’t know what I expected to find in the oven.  A raisin-studded manhole cover, perhaps. A Godzillian Communion Wafer was another reasonable hypothesis.  I certainly didn’t expect what actually came out – a fully risen, golden-brown, crackly-topped Irish Soda bread.  In my jubilation, I yanked the potholder from the top of the refrigerator sending everything residing up there crashing down on top of my barely functioning cranium. 

One of the Top O’ the Icebox residents was a brand new, unopened box of baking soda.

And, oh, did it bubble.