ACT TWO
SATURDAY

I know I'm late with this, but you guys aren't 733t enough to get it on time.

My mom dropped me off at the (ho)motel this morning at about 8:30. I saw three people, two of which I recognized, going up a staircase, so I dashed out of the car and followed them up. It turned out to be Marvin and Beasty and Matthew, who were heading up to the conference room waiting to start the show. The door was closed, so we all stood at the top of the staircase, except for Marvin, who ran away for some reason.

Early this spring I took a trip to Germany for a few weeks. I've been taking German for some years now, so I was able to understand some of what people were saying, but most of it was completely unintelligible to me, especially when I was listening to the Germans talk to each other rather than speaking slowly for a stupid American like me. This is exactly what it felt like listening to Matthew and Beasty talk to each other.

After standing on the landing for a while we went down to the lobby to ask them to help us break into the room. The lady at the desk said the door was already open, so we went back and discovered that she was a big fat liar. The meeting was scheduled for nine o'clock and we had about a half hour to kill, so we wandered around the grounds. We eventually went up to the room Beasty was sharing with Cynthia, flyingcats, Maryam, and Matthew. Maryam was there; she and Matthew had only been late to the RU and hadn't been in some awful tragedy, which is good, 'cause I made fun of their absence in my last post, and I don't want to go to Hell for it.

Many of us walked back over to the meeting room. On the way there, I met Sam, who said "Mr. Morris", shook my hand, and never spoke to me again. Sam, Leen, Dave, Ellmyruh, Brunnen-G, Mousie, Rivikah, Matthew, Maryam, and probably some other people whose existences I've forgotten got in last night after I left. Everyone got really rowdy last night, too, and so the security guard Otis had to take them to jail and lock them up until they got sober again.

People began conglomerating in the conference room. Ellmryuh wore her ladybug slippers and everyone laughed and took pictures. Lynette crocheted or knit or sewed or whatevered something. Rivikah worked on the RinkMobile. I'd printed out last night's RinkUnion report, and everyone wanted to read it. They were all jealous because I'm 733t and can post about the RU during the weekend while they have to wait until at least Monday.

I think I had the longest hair there with the exception of Maryam, whose hair is approximately the same length as a bridal gown.

Sam looks nothing like I imagined, and I'll probably end up reading his stuff in a different way from now on because of it. Leen looks like she does in the maybe one picture I've seen of her. Dave was a lot younger-looking than I thought he'd be, and he had on a shirt that said "iM L33T LIKE JEFFK." Ellmyruh's voice was ALL WRONG. Brunnen-G was able to understand Beasty and Matthew, because it turns out she's basically British plus boats. Rivikah is exactly how Dave described her last year.

Dave spent some time crying about how he didn't have a lectern, so Sam kicked him from the room and talked about Leen. Apparently, the two of them went to a model horse show, and Leen did really well. Sam announced the existence of Sinbad of the Seven Seas and also suggested that, since they'd watched it at the first two RinkUnions, maybe we wouldn't have to watch it again at the third. The threat of a riot, however, quickly ensured that, yes, we would be watching the movie.

That came later, though. First, Sosiqui gave Sam a BAG OF HELL and invited him to eat it. Rivikah, meanwhile, spent all her waking hours working on the RinkMobile. She gave us colored pieces of paper and told us to write our names on each side. I did, and I added "is cool" on one side and "can kick your butt" on the other. She somehow got them laminated within the next couple of hours without leaving the room, so now "Eric can kick your butt" is preserved for all eternity. At some point during the day, I posed for a picture with my arm around this hot girl, and Dave commented that Sam should just start a RinkWorks dating service. That joke would have been funny, except Sam already did in 1999; it's called RinkChat.

Eventually, people started passing all sorts of stuff, but I don't remember even like half of it. Cynthia and flyingcats passed out bubbles and personalized bookmarks. Mousie passed out happy face lollipops and happy face smallish beach balls. Ellmyruh passed out her business cards, which had her name and work and address on it. Cynthia passed out her business cards too, but she's unemployed and homeless, so they only had her name.

Ticia and Don showed up with Rose, and all the girls in the room went "Awwwww." So did Stephen, 'cause he's a girly-boy.

Sam read a bunch of ridiculous E-mails and Forum posts he's gotten; most of them were stupid, but the author of one showed reasonable intelligence, or at least reasonable math skills, when he made the point that "SAM IS GAYER THAN THE GAYEST MAN ALIVE THEREFORE HE IS INFINITELY GAY!!!" After that, Dave read his new review of Battlefield Earth, which sounds like a mindbogglingly stupid movie. Which, of course, is the point.

We took a short break. I think I drank some water again, and I talked to Stephen about the younger brother of an old friend of his, and Mousie showed off a rug she made, and then activities started again.

After the break I think Stephen showed us transparencies of Radebur's plans for a new how-to guide at RinkWorks for movie-making (I don't quite remember when in the day this happened, so if you want to know you should talk to Ellmyruh, who recorded things in such great detail that she can tell you exactly when someone scratched his leg, even if it happened before she actually showed up). Then we played a memory game, where Sam had us write down the names of everyone in the room (except Rose), and then we went around and each said our favorite word, the occupation we'd least want, and our favorite sound. Then we tried to remember them all and we wrote them down on a piece of paper. gremlinn won because he used his super math skills to build a time machine and go back and write down the answers.

After the memory game we broke for lunch. Everyone went to Chili's and broke up into groups because the lazy staff didn't feel like kicking out customers and pushing tables together. I ate at a table with flyingcats, Rivikah, and Sosiqui. It turns out Rivikah lives on like an ice farm in Canada and she used to grow bees, and she pointed at a bellows on a shelf above our heads (Chili's employs the popular "random junk on shelves" style of decoration) and said it was used to pump smoke into beehives in order to kill them so you could steal their honey. That was kind of creepy, so I avoided making eye contact with her for the rest of the trip lest she decide I was next. When the waitress came I ordered a quesadilla with absolutely nothing. When the food came I got a gigantic plate with five microscopic quesadilla slices surrounded and in some cases tainted by such sundries as sour cream, chopped tomato chunks, purple glop with beans, and that gross wet shredded lettuce upper-scale Mexican restaurants always give you even though no one eats it and it all just sits there and rots. I got another plate and put the quesadilla slices on it after scraping off the sour cream and lettuce. The plate was like three feet wide, but the quesadilla slices had a total area of about three square inches (fourteen milliliters). We ate and, remembering last night, divided the check evenly and just let the waitress keep the change.

We went back to the meeting room. Since not everyone had shown up yet, we passed the time by assaulting each other with the smiley face beach balls, breaking sixteen water glasses and four windows. Then Sam passed out some unexpected prizes. Mousie got a hat for driving a van last year. She also got a jar opener for providing the food for tomorrow's lunch. Ellmyruh got a cookie cutter for documenting every tiny detail both last year and this. I got a giant wad of cash for being so freaking 733t.

Then Stephen announced that he would give a free copy of Sinbad to whoever wrote the best poem about RinkWorks; special points would be awarded to poems glorifying Stephen or Mia, his co-dictator. This plot point features heavily in the next paragraph (which is pretty heavy itself).

After that, we had performances. Lynette performed a monologue and recited two poems. Sam read something he wrote (it wasn't a poem, but it wasn't quite a story, but it was good nonetheless). Stephen, Dave, Brunnen-G, Mia, and I think someone else performed the Book-A-Minutes of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series. Sosiqui read a poem. ahmoacah had everyone involved read a short chat transcript which she projected with the overhead projector; in it, gremlinn eats her brain. Then she revealed that she had made a Jell-O brain, which she had gremlinn eat. He gobbled it quite hungrily, and there was speculation that this was how he got so good at MathBot and WordBot. Then Faux Pas read his entry for Stephen's contest, and then he read this poem Darien wrote, and everyone laughed. Then Sosiqui read the same poem Darien wrote, but she did it like a valley girl, and everyone laughed. Then Darien read the same poem, and everyone booed at him. Then Stephen read the flesh poem, and Dave read the pain poem, and if you don't know what those are then I'm sorry for you. Cynthia was up next; she sang a song as if she were a banjo, and then she sang a song as if she were Cynthia singing a song. Mia and Lynette sang a song from Jekyll and Hyde, which is apparently a musical now, which sounds like a cool idea, except the song was all serious and lovey and stuff, so I think I'll skip the play. famous read her entry in Stephen's contest, then she sang, with Jaguar and then with the whole audience, a song called "Black Socks". Then she sat down and Jaguar sang the Masochism Tango, and I'll never look at him the same way again. Ticia read her entry to Stephen's contest, then Lynette read her entry into Stephen's contest, and then I read mine, and then Cynthia read hers. Stephen is some kind of overgrown simian, so it's exceedingly easy to predict what'll please him, so I aced the contest and scored myself a free copy of Sinbad. People thought it was unfair and unethical to give me one, since my poem was blatant flattery, so in order to show everyone that he doesn't play favorites, he gave a copy to Ticia, his girlfriend's sister, as well.

After that we took a six-day break, and Rivikah finished the mobile. It ruled. It has all these three-dimensional RinkChat smileys on it hanging by strings and labeled by the people's names. The face everyone voted for me to have was "punchy"; someone asked someone what "punchy" meant, and it turns out it's supposed to be like drunk or something. Someone's going to pay for that.

After that we watched Sinbad of the Seven Seas. There is absolutely no way to describe the glory of this movie to someone uninitiated. I became very glad I'd won the contest. I'd say more about the movie, except I'm still in awe over it.

We broke for dinner. I sought a Pizza Hut with about ten other people. It was in the lobby of a very nice nearby hotel. They didn't want common folk in there, though, so we went back to the hotel room and decided to have some pizza delivered. We took about three hours deciding what to get, and then another hour and a half figuring out how to call, even though Beasty was holding up his cell phone and saying "Use this".

While we waited for the pizza to show up, someone explained the RinkChat game to me. I think I finally understood the basic gist of it, although the finer points still continue to elude me. The game takes about a week to finish, and the pizza showed up before that, so when it came we all cast the cards aside.

The pizza was good.

Then we went to the improv comedy club. Sam said it would be entirely clean, and apparently it normally is, but this time they had some comedy troupe from Los Angeles with them, so they kind of threw that rule away. The show involved a lot of audience suggestions, and we got a couple good ones in. During an advice show sketch, Lynette said "I've made some friends on the Internet, and I want to meet them, but my parents won't let me. What do I do?". The best advice she got to that was "Five words: Dead parents can't follow you". During a segment where they asked for a quote from a movie, Sosiqui gave "In the name of all that is evil, budge!" from Sinbad. The guy thought she said "fudge", and so she corrected him; he said "Yeah, 'cause it didn't make any sense the other way" and she was put to shame. Still later, they asked for some movie titles, and I of course suggested Sinbad of the Seven Seas. None of them had ever seen it, so they played it as a Greek-mythology-and-some-pirates movie, complete with an evil wizard. The whole show was very funny, and I was halfway to tears at some point. For some reason, during the intermission Dave asked me how long it takes to wash my hair, so I beat him up.

We went back to the motel, getting back at probably around 11:30 or so. Everyone stayrf at the motel to do things like talk to each other and play games and have fun and make out with their girlfriends, but those are all lame things to do, so I went home in a stunning example of nonlameship.

STAY TUNED for the next entry, whenever it gets posted. It covers all of Sunday, including the episodes "Stephen Screws Up", "Stephen Drives To The Wrong Beach", and "Stephen Fails To Beat Down Dave". Be there or be a perverted sacrilegious commie.

-Eric Sleator
Sat 17 Aug A.D. 2002