la Ketch's great adventure

I haven't been able to post because I'm so slammed at work because I took two days off this week but I just have to tell you about my trip...

I've been planning it for months but I couldn't tell you about it because it was a secret surprise. It was my cousin's birthday on Tuesday (Nov. 1 - the day after Halloween) and I flew out to California (back to the OC bitches) to surprise her. Boy did I ever too. Her husband JB, the funniest, most rockinst dude on the planet, was helping me mastermind the whole thing and he was convinced that she knew because my step aunt almost blew it when they were all out for breakfast by saying, "When is La Ketch getting into town?" They covered it up by scoffing at her and reminding her sternly with kicks under the table and extremely dirty looks that I WASN'T COMING UNTIL CHRISTMAS - wink wink shut your face. My cousin didn't consider that I may be coming for a special birthday surprise visit because why would I? It was on a Tuesday night. There was nothing special going on.

OR SO SHE THOUGHT! Little did she know that there was something very special going on indeed. ..

My cousin and I are best friends, we have been since we were very small. We grew up with our houses back to back and there was a gate in the fence seperating our back yards. We also grew up loving Pee Wee Herman. Love is not a strong enough word. We were... ahem, ARE sort of obsessed with him. We would watch "Pee Wee's Playhouse" every Saturday morning and then we would watch "Pee Wee's Big Adventure". We still watch it all on DVD. We have the talking dolls and the figurines from the show and the bed sheets and My cousin has "Chairy" the stuffed chair that is also a puppet.

So when my friend Lauren, who is an actor living in LA and knows about my fanaticism, told me that her manager just started representing Paul Ruebens and that there was going to be a big screening of "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" (the best movie ever made) to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the film and that HE was going to be there doing a Q & A and would I like tickets? I was like, "Can I please have three?" The reason I wanted three is because my cousin's husband JB is also a fanatic. That is in fact pretty much how they met. Someone introduced him to her as, "this guy who loves Pee Wee as much as you do." It was a match made in heaven. The clincher about all of this is that it was happening on November 1st, my cousin's birthday. Holy Jesus. It was too much.

For two months I've been sitting on this. I bought my plane ticket right away and JB and I began scheming on the best way to surprise her. We finally decided on an old standard. I would pop out of a box and scare the crap out of her.

JB picked me up from the airport on Monday night. He had crafted this huge box and covered it in polka dot paper, put a huge bow on it and a tag that said, "Happy Birthday". Then we drug the box into the entryway, I got into it and he brought her out. She said she thought it was going to be a bike. Then she started opening the box. It took forever to get open but as soon as I saw a little bit of light streaming through, I burst out screaming, "SURPRISE!!!!!" I was laughing so hard that I fell over and JB was hysterical laughing too. My cousin was not laughing. She had turned totally white. She said that she had never been so freaked out because first she had to process that a bicycle had just morphed into a human being and jumped out of a box and then she had to process that the bicycle morphing human was me. Then we told her about Pee Wee.

It was so awesome. We had the best day together the next day. We went out to lunch with my Aunt and my Grammy, JB and the kids and JB's mom. Then we drove up to LA and drank a ton of Margaritas and went and saw Pee Wee.

We didn't get to meet him. He's very shy with the public and the media (for obvious reasons if you've followed his story at all). We did get to meet Simone though! She was there and she talked to us for a while and we got our picture with her.

We were sort of disappointed that we didn't get to meet Paul. I sat next to a friend of his and I explained our story: that we are his biggest fans, that I flew in from New York and that I was my cousin's birthday, etc. "Please tell him, just tell him that we love him." I said. He promised that he would.