everybody plays the fool

by jenny pritchett

Here’s a great idea: Write a song about someone you like. Someone you don’t know very well, someone you’ve known for, say, three weeks. Write the greatest song in the world about how you have a crush on your softball coach, how you suck at softball but you stay on the team because your coach is cute. Then invite her to an open mic night. Sing it to her. Her and a few hundred other people. See what happens. You only live once, right?

See, Sadie’s Flying Elephant at Potrero and Mariposa has a dyke open mic night each first Sunday of the month. It’s called "k’vetsh," and notable regulars like Michelle Tea do spoken word with the rest of us aspirants, some of whom bring guitars and sing songs about their softball coaches, to their softball coaches and to their roommates who come for moral support. This is what happened.

At some point about three weeks ago, I decided I had a crush on my softball coach. This was for many good reasons:

1). She showed no interest in me whatsoever.

2). She creamed me with a softball so badly my entire kneecap was bruised for two weeks.

3). She didn’t laugh at any of my jokes.

So I sat down with my guitar and wrote a song about how much I dug her. The chorus was very complex:

Chorus:

I have a crush on her,

I have a crush on her,

I have a crush on my coach.

I worked on it for a long time, almost an hour. When I decided I was ready to ride off into the sunset, I saddled up my white horse, strapped on a sidecar, and with my usual lack of foresight drove the horse into the mud. This is a metaphor. It’s like those pictures where you have to figure out what doesn’t fit, like the artist has drawn a peacock tail on a fox. The sidecar (my softball coach) did not fit on the horse (me). It’s not that they don’t like each other. It’s not like if the sidecar hadn’t recently disconnected from its motorcycle and the horse hadn’t thrown its rider into the East River in December that they wouldn’t make a good match. And it’s not like the horse is not attractive. Because the horse is very attractive. There is nothing wrong with the horse personally. The sidecar was just chilling at the side of road, mending, and the horse gallopped up a little too fast.

So Jenny the intrepid dork got the nicest "no" of her life and is gallopping back into obscurity, saddle slightly askew. But this is okay. Rather crazy than bored, I say. And to prove that I am no stranger to self-abasement and that I intend to continue to self-abase as long as I live, I have included a list of great ideas I have had in the past:

1). Hanging up on a person’s answering machine eight times before learning he had caller ID.

2). Running into the love of my sophomore year in college at the end of my senior year and having to remind him what my name was.

3). Accepting my bachelors degree drunk and naked (except for the robe).

4). Reporting Frontier Air to the Better Business Bureau for leaving my guitar in Chicago (instant popularity with the airlines, trust me).

5). Telling my girlfriend I thought her sister was cute. Talk about things they should teach you in kindergarten.

So never fear. There is a time and place to execute every great idea you have, and fortunately San Francisco has an abundance of venues like Sadie’s. But if you are as dedicated to great ideas as I am, please remember: Your life is not a VCR. You cannot rerecord.

But you can relocate. And if Frontier Air did not have me on their black list, I would recommend their excellent rates on one-way tickets outta Dodge. See you in Tahiti.

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