TMI Thursday: Sparkle Belly

NOTE: I thought I set this up to post at 9:15 am this morning, but apparently I didn't change the time, so it was set to post at 9:15 PM. Since I typed the whole thing out AND since I still wanted to wish Will a happy birthday, I went ahead and let it post, but it's too late to tie into Lilu's TMI Thursday. As such, I'll be pushing the Latin lesson back a few hours. Enjoy.

I will give you a little bit of a warning here: this isn't my usual brand of TMI Thursday fare. You see, yesterday, while I was beseeching you all for your pity (and entertaining myself with pictures of nurses)...I mean...beseeching you all for your pity for my sick children *shifty-eyed*, I failed to remind everyone that it was Big Willy's 32nd birthday. You might remember Big Willy from such birthday shout outs as this one.

So, I'm going to tell you a story that took place featuring Will. While it has a definite lack of bodily fluids, I does feature me naked and on film.

That caught your attention, didn't it?

While a senior roaming the hallowed halls of Saint Joseph's College, I lived in a single room on the first floor of Gallagher Hall. It was the "healthy living floor", which is hilarious considering I lived there. Some of the other perks of living on Gallagher first were Kody Hooker puking on your window nightly, a lovely view of the coal-fueled power plant, and all the watermelons you could smash. The other perk was that next door lived my good friend, Will.

As my days of being a Puma were winding down, my friend, Young Bob, faced a dilemma. You met Young Bob briefly here. Anyway, Young Bob was a Communications major, and in one of his classes, he was given a song and told to comprise a video to go along with it. Unfortunately, Young Bob is a bit like me: morbid and sarcastic with an eye toward the symbolic. The song was in-your-face-chip-chip-chipper-sugar-rush-sweet-and-happy. This was not going to be an easy task for him. The most footage he had was of a puppy chasing itself around a yard and a Wal-Mart greeter waving to him from the front of the store.

This is where I came in.

Young Bob knocked on my door with camera in hand. "I need help with this. I need you to...do...something...anything. It just has to be...fun."

"Like, bottle of chloroform and a black van fun?" I asked.

"Uh, no. More like something I can use for my video fun."

"Oh, right. Video evidence of the other would be dangerous." I thought for a second. "It is getting kind of late, though."

"I'll buy you Steak 'n' Shake."

"Deal. But, I can't do this alone."

So, I pounded on Will's door. Half-drunk on Russian history, I ripped him from his room, threw him into my car, tucked away thousands of dollars worth of expensive camera equipment, and we were off. Where? We didn't have a fucking clue, but we were off.

Forty-five minutes later, we were in Lafayette, IN. Our first stop was a sprawling Meijer store wherein resided a purple dinosaur kiddy ride that, I knew from a previous late-night trip, would support my frame. Digging through my pockets, I found a handful of pennies that I fed into the machine (it was one $0.01 per ride! Can you believe it?) and began lurching up and down, back and forth upon the back of this prehistoric mechanical bull.

And then I started to sing.

(to the tune of "Help me, Rhonda" by the Beach Boys):

Hump the dino!
Hump, hump the dino!
Yeah! *clap*
Hump the dino!
Hump, hump the dino!

It was at this point that a surly old woman, freshly escaped from some retirement home, shambled up to us and growled "What are you doing?"

"Humpin' the dino. What does it look like?" I responded, the ride still bucking feebly under me, the camera still rolling. "Mind you, I paid good money for this ride, and I intend to enjoy it."

"Not you," she uttered, a fog of smoke and halitosis belching from her maw. She pointed a gnarled finger toward Young Bob and his camera. Her nails had the sheen, texture and color of unpolished granite. "Him. What are you doing?"

"This is for a school project," Young Bob returned.

"You can't film in here," she shot back. A moth flew from her disheveled and misshapen coif.

"Seems like a good waste of perfectly free advertising," I stated. "Not to mention, all the money you're making off this sweet ride."

"Get out," she hacked, spittle flying over her lips. A froth formed at the edges of her mouth, and suddenly I wondered if she had had all her shots prior to escape.

Because Jesus hates a conflict, the dinosaur ground to a feeble halt, and I swear I heard it sigh audibly as I clambered down from the saddle. I patted it on the snout. "That'll do, Pig," I projected just loud enough. "You, too, dinosaur." A look of unbridled fury was shot to me by her sickly yellow eyes; I doubt she picked up on the literary reference.

Undaunted, we pushed forth toward the summit of Caradhras. Because civic planners drip with genius, a Wal-Mart hove into view as we left the doors of Meijer. A few quick moments later, and we were there. A quick tour of the facility showed there were no dinosaurs to hump ride, but there were unattended lawn tractors. Digging around in my trunk, I found a wide-brimmed straw hat that I stole from the costume shop after filming a western-themed TV show earlier in the semester. Plopping it on my head--and Will with his John Deere hat (or maybe it was Caterpillar...I don't recall)--Will and I sat on two lawn tractors and pantomimed driving and riding. We did this for a good fifteen minutes while Young Bob went about getting different angles and such for the shot.

As it was late, not much was open. We soon found ourselves in downtown Lafayette (such as it is), where the Tippecanoe County courthouse stands. Also, there is a cannon on the lawn of the Tippecanoe County courthouse. For some reason, Will and I thought it would be fun to spend ten minutes chasing each other around the cannon, giggling like school boys...all while being filmed. Finally, since Young Bob was not saying "Okay, that's enough!", I ran around to the fuse end of the cannon and straddled it. Sure enough, seconds later, Young Bob told us he had enough footage, and we could continue on.

Back in the car, we drove around for a while, unable to locate anywhere else to wreak havoc. I decided that, since we were in Lafayette anyway, I should do a psycho drive-by of an old girlfriend. Will, in a moment of inspiration, stripped off his shirt, and folded it around his head into an Instant Ninja Mask. I say inspired because my old girlfriend happened to live on the same street as a bunch of the Purdue frats...who were, of course, busy doing frat stuff. So, Will, bedecked in his Instant Ninja Mask, hung out of the car window and screamed "Behold, Infidels, the Gleaming Sword of Islam!" We were greeted with the typical drunken "Woo! Islam!" from the frats. Awesome.

After having soiled some memorial cannon and successfully stalking girlfriends of day gone by, we returned to St. Joe, but Young Bob still had half a tape of film that needed to be recorded. Trying to come up with some inspiration, Will and I both sat on my two-seater couch, arms folded, seeking something that would spark a creative bit of genius in us. What happened then was a good fifteen minutes of me cocking my head one way, and Will doing in the same, so that the two of us looked like our heads were connected by the same string.

Finally, unamused by that span of my life I'll never retrieve, I said, "We could do something with the grill."

This is where things went...weird.

Young Bob said, "Whatever you want." So, for some reason, I took off my clothes. And then I put on the same straw hat that I wore earlier for the lawnmower scenes. Decency got the better of me, and I wrapped a towel around my waist. Not to be undone, Will also stripped and wrapped a towel around his waist. Instead of a dopey straw hat, he put Instant Ninja Mask back on. Having nothing else at our disposal, Will grabbed a Wisconsin hat and we plopped that on the grill.

Some of the alumni of Gallagher Hall had put together some donations and made a really nice patio area for all of us right outside the west entrance to the hall. There was a deck and a nice brick patio which had a gas grill set up on it. This was the scene of our little display as Will and I stood there, acting for all the world like we were grilling the aforementioned hat, both still wearing only towels.

That's when this guy named Eric Schneider showed up. Schneider was a good guy, lived above me somewhere, but was originally from Chicago. And on this particular night, he showed up drunk. After a quick explanation of what was going on, Schneider started giving us directions like he was the director. Only thing was, he acted like he was directing porn.

"Will! Will, I need to see both nipples," he started. "Okay, good. Good good good. Now, I need a look of despair! LOOK OF DESPAIR! That's the money. Now, give me Sparkle Belly! Yes, yes, that's right. Sparkle Belly." And then Schneider started to sing.

"Sparkle Belly. Sparkle Belly.
Sparkle Belly, rub my nipples.
Sparkle Belly, rub my nipples.
Sparkle Belly. Sparkle Belly."
Of course, being the professionals and veterans of the stage that we were, we followed our directions perfectly. This went on for a few minutes. And then, the coup de grace: Schneider yelled, "And now, run off into the night!"

So, Will and I turned (still wearing only towels) and took off running into the night. We went about fifty yards, and then we heard "Now dive, DIVE!" So we did. In only towels. That didn't stay on so well.

Picking ourselves up, laughing until our sides hurt, and reaffixing the towels, we returned and Schneider and Young Bob gave us slow claps. "Excellent job! Well done." Schneider praised us. And then Young Bob: "The perfect thing was that, as you guys took off running and then dove, the tape ran out."

"Then, I guess this means we're done, right?" I asked.

"Yes," Young Bob confirmed.

"Alright. I'm going to go put some underwear on," I said.

"Jesus, dude, I didn't know you were naked under there," Schneider said. "I wouldn't have had you dive like that."

"It's alright. It was my choice," I offered.

"Whatever. I would have had you rip the towels off first and then go tearing off into the night."

So, there you go. There's the tale of my time spent on the camera naked. Like I said, it's not the usual sort of bodily-function-saturated Thursday post that you've come to love, but it did feature nipple rubbing. Young Bob offered to digitize the video and send it to me (he still has a copy, naturally dubbed "Sparkle Belly", which he watches from time to time for nostalgia and comedy's sake), but since I didn't ask Will, and I didn't feel comfortable slapping his nipples on the internet without his permission, you got the verbal story.