SHORT:
I’m back in NY. It’s 400 degrees and 90% humidity and I’m sitting in my kitchen shirtless eating cold soup and listening to Jim Gaffigan tell me what comedy is.
My therapist just made me walk through a swamp to go see him. He says that “I shouldn’t be ashamed to be somebody who needs to prepare for things”.
MEDIUM:
I wish I was more of an off-the-cuff, charismatic person, but I’m more of a practice jumping off the cuff 100 times before taking the leap person.
Does jumping off the cuff make sense?
Picture like a little dude jumping off the end of a sleeve…
Wait, hold on, I need to look into “cuff”.
Ok, according to a woman named Maggie Eriksson (with an incredible profile pic) on Quora, “It is said to have arisen in the 1930's in NY among a group of writers giving extemporaneous speeches. Some began making quick notes, writing them on the cuffs of their sleeves (which in those days were wide, white, starched French cuffs), then reading the notes "off the cuff". It means speaking without formal preparation.”
What’s Quora? Does anyone know? A popular girl from my high school worked there at one point. I think. If my LinkedIn-memory-haze is correct.
I start grad school next week. I’ve done none of my reading of course. I’m starting to be like, “why am I doing this”. I just read all these sentences back and am like, “I get dumber and dumber by the day”.
Grad school is for people who speak and write like Shakespearean characters. I used to do Shakespearean-person-drag when I wrote/spoke, but it’s honestly so tiring because (callback) it does not come naturally to me.
I like the comedy community because smart is stupid and stupid is smart.
All of this being said, I’m definitely going to end up writing intentionally deeply sad, not-funny plays at school. Everyone will cry and be like “wow, you’re not funny at all” and that will be actually amazing because that was my goal.
I hope my plays and tv stuff in school have “slippage”. Modern plays and tv are obsessed with “slippage”. Slippage makes thee world go round these days! If you don’t really get what slippage is, don’t worry, nobody really does.
LONG:
On the way back from my award-winning vacation, my girlfriend and I saw two people in Olympics jackets and hats and I really wanted to know what sport they played.
We went through security and sat down next to them while we were putting our shoes on and I whispered accidentally “excuse me, what Olympics r u” and only my girlfriend heard.
If anyone knows two people who flew out of San Jose airport on Friday night around 10pm who went to the Olympics, let me know.
And DON’TTT be like “maybe they just bought the apparel” because I SAW their suitcases and one was BIG and labeled “EQUIPMENT” and another was labeled “OFF SEASON EQUIPMENT”, so… THERE!
I sat at the gate wondering about the people. Then, I made a very norm-core Instagram post with a norm-core caption and asked my girlfriend, “Do u think this sounds cheugy ironic CHEUGY?”
She shook her head and was like, r u kidding me with this thank god ur going back to NY where ur other friends are and therapist is who can deal with this kinda SHITE.
Just kidding, she said, “yes”.
Over the course of this vacation I learned many things about my girlfriend including the fact that she’s clinically obsessed with hot tubs and that she has PEMDAS but for how things go inside her backpack.
In Tahoe, she found a baseball cap at a gift shop with a bird on it and fell in love with the bird. We went home and googled it and apparently it is a “Western Tanager” and I thought I saw one later that trip in Silicon Valley but she informed me, “actually no they only really reside in coniferous forests but they’re not too picky about what trees IN that coniferous forest they reproduce in”.
I’m now dating a bird-lover and I gotta deal with that.
It’s hard to compete with a beautiful red and yellow Piranga ludoviciana, but I’m trying my best.
Luckily the closest coniferous forest to NYC is a 33 minute drive and I’ve told her brother not to let her use the car unless she SWEARS she’s going to an UN-coniferous forest!
At the airport she tried to pull up a map of every W.T. spotting in the U.S.A. but it wouldn’t let her “explore more” because she’s not a part of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (classsiccccc. Hate when that happens!)
Instead she bobbed her head along to “a great song from the movie Dirty Dancing” as I silently scrolled through Instagram stories of gays having fun.
We were on a red-eye flight, so by the time we boarded in group F, I was like “group F? More like F this!!!” and we both laughed hysterically because everything and nothing is funny at the airport at 11pm.
My girlfriend could barely board the plane because we went to my sister’s OrangeTheory class earlier that day, and it murdered her legs.
My sister really wanted us to attend (and bring my mom). We won “loudest people to ever take a class” on the peninsula.
At one point during the workout, my sister told everyone to “think about what brought you in today” and my mom whispered “we were forced”.
My girlfriend almost fell off her treadmill because she was cackling so violently at Denise Pope’s amazing comeback.
A motif of our trip (is that right to say?) is that we kept getting Frappuccinos. I literally haven’t had one since I got stuck for 6 hours in the Honolulu airport in 2016 and needed “a little chocolate to calm down”, but on this trip? We kept getting them and I kept yelling MOTIF!
Anyway, after getting Frapps in the beautiful city of Cupertino/Los Altos, my girlfriend and I walked by a house in my neighborhood where some very kind, spiritual, etc. people live. They give out fruitcakes during the holidays and right now I guess is some sort of “poem holiday” because they had a thing of poems above their mailbox and my girlfriend was like “I’m gonna take a copy”.
I have no idea what the poem said (something about a butterfly’s clothes being the same as yesterday’s yada yada) but, we told my mom about it and she was like “oh my god that sounds exactly like OUR neighbors”.
And I was like “it literally was”.
And she was like “that’s so weird, that’s like EXACTLY what these people in OUR neighborhood do”.
And I was like “I know, that’s what I’m saying”.
We went back and forth forever until I was like “THIS HAPPENED TODAY!”
And my mom started crying because she thought we were talking about Brooklyn and thought we had similar neighbors to hers.
Ok now it’s raining again and the rain sound on my window makes me feel like I’m inside a dam popcorn bag !
Life is beautiful.
C u next week!
If this is your first time reading the newsletter, read the archives. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s not – it’s very much like when people slip on ice.
Sincerely,
Reid
Venmo: @rpope-venmo-26
Donate to The Audre Lorde Project
PROMO:
If you are in NYC come to THIS! on August 29th!
And mark ur cals for a special thing TBA on September 24th!
I also have a show for a podcast that I voiced a character for on the 15th at Art Bar & Cafe in Brooklyn (7:30)
& I am on an Emmys panel on the 19th in Manhattan.
