Mom and I put our name on the list and wait for Johnny outside. He was Jonathan when we were growing up, but now he’s Johnny. He was cool and funny in high school, but now he has a tattoo of a Tim Burton heart over his actual heart, and he’s getting art-world famous with his surreal, mostly pornographic, collages on Instagram. He sent us two framed prints for the new house. They are so cool. You would love them.
Johnny gets out of his Uber druuunk. The three of us squeeze onto a tiny bench, and he smokes a cigarette. I want one so badly in that way that you want to do what you always used to do with certain people. But I haven’t smoked a cigarette since 2007, and I’m certain if I smoke one now, I won’t ever be able to stop because life is so fucking hard, and I have a baby, and who wants to smoke around a baby? I love that joke you used to tell about that, about smokers justifying their smoking. Like, “Well, I’m in the car, so I should smoke. Or, I just smoked a cigarette, so I should smoke another cigarette. Or, oh, I’m around a baby, I should smoke a cigarette!” You would kill me if you were able to see how severely I just butchered that goddamn joke.
Johnny is exactly the medicine that Mom and I need. He has always made us—including you—laugh until we’re unable to breathe, the best kind of laughter. We eat ramen and drink beer and laugh obnoxiously loud and talk about sex (Johnny’s sex) and watch videos of Iris and cry about you and eventually head back to our hotel where we order up a cot for Johnny, take selfies, and stay up giggling slumber-party style into the a.m. hours.
• • •
The next morning, after a nice brunch with my in-laws, who live in LA, I find a hair app called Blow Me and arrange for a stylist to come straighten my hair in the hotel room. We get dressed. I put on mascara for the occasion and sparkly, dangling earrings that belong to Mom. My shoes hurt before I even leave the hotel room, and I know my heels will be bloody within hours. All of this is your fault.
Around three o’clock, we head out. It’s hotter than usual in LA today, and we have to stand directly in the sun in a very long line to get past the gates and security stations. Once we get to the front of the line, we take a photo next to the iconic gold statue that we can post online. The red-carpeted pathway on which we walk is parallel to the real red carpet with all the A-list celebrities, but there are so many photographers lined up along the sidelines that it’s hard to see what’s going on. It’s yet another very crowded event full of beautiful people in beautiful clothing. How did you do all this? (Drugs.)
Once we get into the lobby, it’s even more congested. We find ourselves stuck in a clump taking synchronized baby steps to get into the theater. Jon Stewart is standing right beside me. He’s very short. I am ever-so-slightly starstruck. It’s Jon Stewart. Of The Daily Show. (!!!)
We find our seats in the center section, next to the Parks and Rec people. I notice that I’m two rows behind Mandy Patinkin. This is a huge deal, as I have an irrational crush on Mandy Patinkin. Not the young one—the current one. He basically looks like how I imagine Mike will look in thirty years so, really, I have a crush on an older version of my husband. I snap numerous stalker-style pictures of him over the course of the night and post one on Instagram during the show, which drags on for hours. Tina Fey is standing in the aisle at the end of our row chit-chatting with Mike Schur, your boss and showrunner of Parks. The Orange Is the New Black ladies shuffle down the aisle quickly like giggly teenage girls to get to their seats before the show starts. They look stunning without the beige jumpsuits and face tattoos. And then, it happens. I spot Coach Taylor, which is basically like spotting the president! I get that I’m referring to a fictional character, but Friday Night Lights is our favorite show of all time, and this is a huge, huge fucking deal.
Remember when you sent me the full Friday Night Lights box set a few years back, before it came out for public consumption, and you taped that index card to the front and wrote Clear Eyes Full Hearts Can’t Lose in blue Sharpie? It’s still taped to my desk at work, next to years of neon Post-it notes from students that say U R Snapchat Famous and Your bebe is CUTE! and Should I go to college? One student wrote a Post-it recently that said, They say you should dance like nobody’s watching but really you should dance like everyone is watching so you will dance better. It takes me weeks to realize that this was a quote from one of your Vines. They quote you all the time. I want to text you so badly in this moment and say, OMG, I’m in the same room with Coach!! But I can’t. That is why I’m here.
Since the event is live, we are only allowed to get up and move around during commercial breaks, and in those commercial breaks, chaos erupts. Everyone is up and schmoozing and buzzing around the room. There’s a big digital clock on giant flat screens on either side of the
