The wife and I got our weekend off to a rip-roaring start on Friday by meeting our friend R. for drinks after work. We do this--let me think--approximately five days out of the week. It's helpful! And therapeutic. We frequently cry in each other's company: for example, on that day, I broke down weeping as I clutched my Sapphire martini. "Oh, God!" I wailed. "This really isn't very dry!"

R.--who I should point out actually works for the wife--had similar grief issues. "You scag!" he screamed (we don't judge during our sessions). "Why must you withhold praise?" The wife put a calming arm around his shoulders, and murmured, "It's only because you don't deserve it. And you steal. You steal everything. Yesterday you stole my car. The cops picked you up in Ballard." R. wailed with remorse. "I'm sorry! The plasma center won't let me in any more!" he cried.

You can see why we all needed a calming drink after a tough week.

But not as much calming as we needed after the wife and I decided to watch Bride of Chucky on cable that evening. Here is a brief transcript of how this came to be.

(Skot is surfing the cable menu looking for, Jesus, anything. He passes by the Travel Channel special called, If You're Not Young, Beautiful and Rich, I Guess You Could Always Die, and something on the Food Network with Bobby Flay, who, having barbecued every other possible thing on the planet, is planning to shove his gorgeous cock into red-hot coals and then have co-eds rapturously lick his perfectly scorched member while the house band plays "I'm Burnin' For You.")

(Anyway. Skot eventually hits Starz or something. He sees the title Bride of Chucky.)

Skot: BRIDE! OF! CHUCKY!

(Skot raises his arms in some sort of puzzling victory salute. The wife looks vaguely defeated.)

Wife: Whatever.

Skot: BRIDE! OF! CHUCKY!

(The wife here gives a sigh and goes to make something that contains a lot of gin. She then spends several minutes spinning her wedding band on her finger and glaring at it, for some reason. I assume it is out of purest love.)

Bride of Chucky is the work of my man Ronny Yu, who has also includes in his oeuvre the indelible Freddy Vs. Jason, a movie so spectacularly wonderful that it featured one horny slut beating another horny slut to death with a hippie in a sleeping bag. BoC is hardly less exacting in its pursuit of the utterly surreal, and includes among its wonders the spectacle of John Ritter taking a faceful of carpenter's nails into his face and, defying all jaws not to precipitously drop, a particularly unbelievable scene involving puppet sex between Chucky and his indecorous puppet bride Tiffany. I should note that this scene wantonly includes shots of naked puppet ass and puppet French kissing.

The movie is completely fucking deranged on almost every level, of course. Always the voice of Chucky, poor Brad Dourif is yet again called in: you never know when this guy will turn up. Mississippi Burning? Aw, he's a racist! Exorcist 3? Aw, he's the devil! Alien: Resurrection? Aw, he's an evil scientist! Voyager? Aw, he's an amoral murderer! But he's still my stuttering Billy Bibbit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest! Every movie I see him in (or hear him in), I still kind of hope that Jack Nicholson shows up with a kindly whore for him to fuck.

Oh, and there's also Jennifer Tilly around somewhere, whose chief role is to simply always nearly fall out of her shirt. Not to get all sexist or anything, but it wasn't that long ago that horror movie rules simply dictated that at some point, one of the gals (probably the slut) yanked off her top? Why else was Jennifer Tilly created if not to take off her shirt? I don't think it was for her incisive political analysis. Anyway, I don't want to be a neanderthal about this either. I'm just saying: let's get horror movies back to where they belong, which is to say, as completely prurient endeavors. I am totally happy to stipulate that if Jennifer Tilly is in the movie, then she should spend almost all of it naked. And to provide balance, let's say that they also have to get, I don't know, Josh Hartnett as well, to hang out the whole time with no pants. I can live with that.

"Jesus. Check out Tilly's rack."

"Yeah. And check out Hartnett's dong."

(Long pause.)

I really think that this sort of strategy could bring a lot of people together on some common ground. Plus, we'd see a lot of tits and dongs. IT'S WIN-WIN, PEOPLE!

Oh, and on Saturday night we attended a simply huge theater party that marked the dissolution of one of Seattle's longest-lived and most respected sketch comedy groups, Bald Faced Lie. They are very amicably breaking up after many years of brilliant service: I once had the honor to work with them on a show they produced; at least two of them I count as among my very best friends in the world. They will be missed. It was quite a gala, and I think that practically every Seattle actor I've ever met was in attendance: the admonishment not to take drinks out into the alley was quickly and overwhelmingly ignored.

An awful lot of people that night that I spoke to mentioned my dumb blog, saying that they read it all the time, which, as always, made me happy and embarrassed: I am really lousy at taking compliments. (Criticisms I can handle: my friend C. said, "You're too wordy!" To which I thought, "Well . . . yeah, I sure am.") Anyway, it was all very sweet (except for C., and C.? Suck it! Look at me being all wordy again! Ah, you're not even reading.) and I wanted to send all the kind folks a message, so here it is:

JESUS CHRIST, GET BACK TO WORK! YOU'RE RUINING THE ECONOMY!

Thank you.