Christmastime is a magical time, a time for those who don’t
know how to socialize at parties to socialize at parties. So last Saturday night,
as part of its subliminal party-socialization-training services, the Fake Gallery
on east Melrose held its First Annual Fake Christmas Party — four hours of 20-minute
tours, with each audience member given close personal attention from powerful,
dedicated comedians in character as their favorite archetypal partygoers.

After entering through the National Mule Gallery around the corner,
I was greeted by a man wearing an I Wasn’t Invited T-shirt (Troy Devolld), who
applied a sticker to my chest: “Hello!” my chest now said. “My
name is Charles Hampton!” I felt pretty good about this, until I was guided
into a dark hallway where Fake Security (Mike West) informed me that I wasn’t
on the list. But I’m Your In (Mike Timpson) made up a story, and soon I was
past security, down the hallway and in the dubious company of You Still Owe
Me Money and I Like To Avoid Confrontations (Steve Hurley and Chris Hobbs),
who, after some brief and stilted banter, parted to allow me passage into the
Fake Gallery proper.

Inside, the place resonated with the festive cacophony of holiday
music forced through blown speakers mounted high above, as the crowd of performers
worked on the audience-in-progress. I Think I’m Going To Hurl (Laura Milligan)
offered me a red plastic cup and guided a stream of red wine into it, straight
from the box. The adjacent bathroom door opened and out popped the top half
of I’m Coked Out of My Mind (Pat Healy). “Charlieee!!!” he bellowed,
waving me over. “Charlie Hampton! Dude! Charlie Hampton! Hey, man, how
you doin’?! Come-on-in I-can’t-take-it-out-there it’s-crazy-come-on-in-what’s-been-goin’-on-Charles-Charlie-Charlie-Charlie-Hampton?!”

“I’m all right,” I said. “How’re your kids doing?”

“They’re with their mom this weekend.”

“I was hoping. Bleeding stop?”

“Yeah, that’s-all-over. And-Carrie’s-in-Special-Ed, which-is,
like, maybe, like, better-better, because she’s she’s she’s-gettin’-taught-more-and-probably-gonna-end-up-a-lot-smarter,
but-I’m-gettin’-my-thing-together-gettin’-my-G.E.D.-and-I-feel-fuckin’-great-like-energized-for-the-first-time-and-it’s-like-the-holidays-and-do-you-know-Craig?
Craig’s-like-this-really-cool . . .”

“Yeah,” I said. “I better go meet Craig now.”

“HEY, MAN!” someone shouted from across the room. “HEY,
MAN! I RECOGNIZED YOU!” Looking up, I saw that it was, in fact, I Recognized
You From Across the Room (Charles Ezell), heading this way through the crowd,
a beer in each hand, squinting to read my name tag. Instinctually, I ducked
behind the nearest I’m Still Not Talking to You (Ebbie Parker) and made my escape;
unfortunately it was into the path of I Make Inappropriate Confessions (Melinda
Hill).

“I have a yeast infection,” she confessed.

“Garlic-clove suppository,” I recommended.

“But I have hepatitis C, too,” she confessed. “I’m
not gonna live that long.”

Jesus. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to find
I’m Looking for Weed (Blaine Capatch). “Hey, Charles. What’s going on?
Did you ever end up talking with . . .”

“I GOT YER BACK, CHARLIE HAMPTON!” I Recognized You
From Across the Room recognized me again, this time from just a few feet away.
Here he was, beer in one hand, beer in the other, recognizing the shit out of
me. “Charlie Hampton! Buddy! Yeah! Got your back, buddy!”

“Come find me later,” said I’m Looking for Weed, and
he split. And then everything happened at once: I’m Carrying Your Child (Suzy
Nakamura) approached and requested, politely, at least $500 a month until our
impending spawn turns 18; I Have No Internal Editor (Dana Gould) detailed recent
difficulties with urination: “When I sneeze, I pee a little bit. It’s like
the lips of my urethra are about as elastic as two little pizza crusts. So what
I do is, I swallow bouillon cubes and dried gelatin.”

Let Me Give You Some Unsolicited Career Advice (Bil Dwyer) could
no longer contain himself. “Hey, Charles,” he said, smiling broadly,
stepping in between I Have No Internal Editor and me. “You know, my brother
books celebrity impersonators, and I think you’d be a perfect telemarketer for
him. Don’t you think? You’d be great at that. And that money is sooo
easy.”

The word telemarketer — that’s always my signal. Mentally,
I stripped naked, donned my Hello, I Must Be Going bathrobe and headed for the
back door, only to find it tragically blocked by I’m Trying To Drag You Into
My Argument (Eddie Pepitone), who proceeded to drag me into the argument he
was having with No, I’m Trying To Drag You Into My Argument (Sean
Conroy). Something about Hubble’s Law, JonBenet Ramsey and either Jamie Lee
Curtis or Curtis Mayfield.

“Curtis Mayfield?”

“No. Jamie Lee Curtis. But he thinks — and this is what kills
me — he says the universe is not expanding. Like it’s finite.”

“See what I have to deal with all night?”

[

“Do you believe the universe is expanding?”

“Well, yeah. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it
recedes, right?”

“Yes. But we’re all in the same spot we were before.”

“But do you believe JonBenet Ramsey was garroted by her father?”

“Garroted, yes.”

“Yes. Garroted, she was.”

“How can the universe be expanding if JonBenet Ramsey’s father
didn’t garrote her? That’s what I wanna know.”

No one, it turns out, can ever really leave a fake Christmas party.

—Dave Shulman

Bad Santa

My phone rings at 10:30 A.M. “Where are you?”
whines the voice on the other end. “You were supposed to be here at 8 o’clock.”

The voice belongs to David Hart, a.k.a. David Nkrumah Unger Liebe
Hart, the infamous producer of the truly bizarre public-access puppet show once
known as The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show. (Hart has since
removed the word science from the title to appease Christian Scientists.)

I’ve known the deeply religious puppet master for years, and every
few months or so, I forget what a pain in the ass it is to get suckered into
driving him somewhere. On this morning, I agreed to chauffeur Hart around town
so he could earn some cash painting Christmas decorations on store windows.

The disheveled 49-year-old puppeteer throws a toolbox and a ratty
suitcase into my car, both filled with paint cans and brushes.

“I haven’t had a girl since 1994,” Hart informs me on
the way to Little Armenia. I’ve heard this a thousand times. He’s even written
a song about his decade of celibacy, appropriately titled “I Haven’t Had
a Girl Since 1994.” Hart’s abstinence is not for lack of trying; he hands
out cards with his phone number to any woman he finds attractive. For a time,
he was banned from the La Brea Tar Pits because female passers-by complained
he was sexually harassing them. He went to court over the issue: “The judge
said that as long as I didn’t touch any of the women or rub up against them,
it wasn’t sexual harassment.”

Our first stop is an insurance agency, where David asks the receptionist
if he may speak to the manager and then offers to draw a portrait of her.

The manager gets off the phone and says, “No paint this year
— it ruined our windows last year.” David explains that the paints are
water-soluble, but to no avail.

Next, he tries a gift shop, a grocery store, a motel, a Chinese
restaurant, a pizza joint, a few gas stations and an International House of
Pancakes. They all turn him down.

Hart swears that he had all of these jobs lined up. “It’s
like The Twilight Zone. Either the managers aren’t in, or they changed
their minds. The same thing I go through with women I go through with businesses.”

Dejected, Hart calls the Religious Science 24-hour prayer line,
the no-cost alternative to the Christian Science church, which charges $20 for
spiritual guidance. David explains to me that the Church of Religious Science
is a spinoff of the Christian Science church.

“I’m trying to get work doing Christmas decorations, and
everyone’s turning me down,” Hart tells the spiritual-hot-line operator,
who then prays for David for approximately three minutes.

David says he just received a call from a pizzeria near the La
Brea Tar Pits that desperately wants Christmas decorations. But when we arrive
minutes later, the man doesn’t know what David’s talking about.

We walk over to the Screen Actors Guild. A young woman exits the
building who in no way resembles Sally Field. “You’re very beautiful,”
says David. “You look just like Sally Field.” She walks past us.

SAG headquarters is also a no-go.

Undeterred, we head to Culver City. Finally, the owner of a homebrewing
company is kind enough to hire David. David negotiates a fee of $125. Our prayer-line
prayers have been answered. But, as they say, “Be careful what you pray
for; you just might get it.”

It takes David more than two hours to paint a few windows. The
entire time he bitches about the model-train store across the street where he
is no longer welcome. He claims he is banned because he refused to become a
born-again Christian. Hart begs me to go over there and confront the guy. When
I refuse, he blames Bush’s presidential victory on people like me who won’t
fight against conservative Christians.

David’s interminable bickering is briefly interrupted when a female
jogger, wearing loose-fitting short-shorts, runs past. David considers approaching
her but, in a rare moment of restraint, says, “I can’t mix business with
pleasure. She’ll say that some guy on the sidewalk harassed her.”

[

David’s paintings are actually pretty impressive. He depicts a
snowman, a Christmas tree, candy canes, snowflakes, and Santa Claus drinking
a beer, rendered in glorious splashes of red, white, blue, green, black, orange
and yellow.

“My artwork is unique because no one else paints Santa with
blond hair, and all of my characters have mittens with three fingers,”
says the artist. “Also, I’m the only one who does blue snowmen.”

I ask David why he placed umlauts over all of the vowels of the
words Häppy Hölïdäys.

“Because I’m part German,” he responds.

Hart finally finishes his masterpiece, but not before the sun’s
gone down. Hart’s patron seems genuinely pleased and even offers an extra 25
bucks.

—Dan Kapelovitz

 

All I Want for Christmas . . .

I love David Sefton, UCLA Live’s executive director. He’s married
and straight, but he’s queenier than I am. When he sees my sparkly holiday outfit,
designed especially for me by British bad boy Alexander McQueen, backstage at
“A John Waters Christmas,” he lets out such a shriek that my fellow
performers Phranc, the hot folk-singing cardboard cobbler (who’ll be bringing
back her Gertrude Stein musical tribute Phranc-n-Stein soon), and Latina
lesbiana comic Marga Gomez are forced to cover their ears.

I’m the last-minute replacement for the San Francisco–based performance
artist Extreme Elvis, whose GG Allin–like antics of throwing his feces into
the audience was deemed a tad much for Westwood. Remember, Divine only took
a dainty bite of excrement in Pink Flamingos — she didn’t fling it.

At the pre-performance meet-and-greet, Mr. Sefton, who used to
be the director of London’s Royal Festival Hall, is acting all getting-Gertie’s-garter
meeting Waters’ alumni: the lanky Matthew Lillard (Serial Mom), hustlerish
Brendan Sexton III (Pecker), the majorly gorgeous Adrian Grenier (Cecil
B. Demented and TV’s Entourage), and a radiant Ricki Lake, wearing
no makeup and her hunky new Rican beau Apollo as a fashion accessory. Looking
youthful and stylish as ever is the great Mink Stole with date, the gifted actor
Dennis Christopher (Chariots of Fire).

The charming Mr. Waters, wearing a red crushed-velvet smoking
jacket with striped green dandy pants, looks like a patrician elf-chihuahua.
John loves Christmas, and admonishes students to perform fellatio on their teachers
and provide anilingus to librarians as a Christmas present. He also says that
books make the best gifts, and cautions that if you’re dating someone who doesn’t
read books, you should end the relationship. His favorite tome of the moment
is Call Me Lumpy, by a minor cast member of the old ’50s sitcom Leave
It to Beaver. What’s on his Christmas wish list? The end of capital punishment;
a gift basket of cigarettes, poppers and porn; a single leaf of arugula; and
a three-pack of tighty whitey deconstructed underwear with skid marks designed
by Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo.

After the talk, Mr. Waters graciously mingles with fans, signing
the arm of local filmmaker Augusta (The Velvet Hammer Burlesque). Being
the troll that I am, I can’t help but pinch the buttocks of a group of voluptuous
male coeds waiting to pay homage to Baltimore’s leading native. I was momentarily
distracted by the young and buff actor Ryan Reynolds, from the new movie Blade:
Trinity. Unfortunately, Ryan’s beard, I mean fiancée, Alanis Morissette,
was cock blocking me at every turn.

Maybe next Christmas.

—Vaginal Davis

Merry Xmas!

With love from the city of L.A.

While Councilman Eric Garcetti was preparing to wave to
the crowds along the Hollywood Christmas Parade route, a team of 48 officers
from the Los Angeles Parking Enforcement Bureau were spreading cheer to 600
of his constituents in a neighborhood where the median annual income is less
than $25,000. No doubt the vast majority of those ticketed and towed simply
failed to notice — on a Sunday — the temporary no-parking signs (which, according
to the city, were posted on the 24th). The citation fee is $60; the amount required
to get your car out of impound within 24 hours, $168.50. All in all, it was
a good day’s work for the Parking Enforcement Bureau, the city of L.A. and the
private towing firm Hollywood Tow. Which begs two questions: Could the city
do a better job of warning residents about the temporary no-parking? And if
they could, would they want to? A Garcetti spokesman said the office was looking
into possible mistakes made, and also whether fewer streets could be cleared
in the future.

Number of cars impounded: 570

[

Number of citations issued: 600

Cost to each individual cited and towed: $228.50

Total generated: $132,045

Amount to city of Los Angeles: $60, 225

Amount to Hollywood Tow: $71,820

—Christine Pelisek

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