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No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Last week I spent pretty much a whole day sitting around a table in a conference room. This was one of those conference rooms with big windows and a view and glass jugs with iced water and condensation on the jugs under tasteful recessed lighting on a settee in a built-in alcove. As always when in that kind of conference room, the question that needs to be asked is whether the conference is one for good… or one for evil.

I didn’t really feel that evil, being there, but the chairs we were all sitting in around the table definitely indicated otherwise. They were these big, black leather contraptions, with lots of dials and levers underneath. Significantly, the backs of the chairs rose up and fanned out, way up past the sitter’s head level. They were the kind of chairs where if you spun around to face away from the door, you would be completely concealed from sight to somebody entering the conference room as you sat there in your chair, stroking your evil-cat, or dreaming about your world-destroying laser that is almost complete, save for one last, crucial component, the worlds biggest ruby, currently held in the private collection of some eccentric billionaire in a mansion in Paris! But when I have that ruby, I will install it in my laser and the world will be mine! Ha Ha Ha!! HA HA HA HA!!!

But really, I self-aggrandize. I was there at that meeting of (apparent) evil-doers only in my usual role at this kind of thing - the role very accurately portrayed by that guy acting as Chris Kattan’s (sp?) assistant in the movie Undercover Brother. Most of the action was going down at the other end of the table from where I was sitting. But let me tell you, even in my limited capacity, it’s not easy being a super-villain. After about an hour or so, I realized that somebody had left my evil villain chair on its “eject” setting. It was really uncomfortable. And my ass was killing me, even with like four hours to go. I reached under the seat, thinking that maybe I could adjust the setting, but my hand found an unruly mess of control dials and joysticks and levers. In the end I decided not to activate any of the buttons or switches. Who knows what one of those levers or dials would have done? So I just sat there and took it.

The guy next to me, further yet from the action, he couldn’t take it after only like three hours. I don’t think there was anything wrong with his chair. He was just SO FUCKING BORED. He kept fidgeting around, there in my peripheral vision. I looked over at one point, and he lifted up his arms and slid down out of his chair, down under the table like a misbehaving four-year-old at a restaurant where the service is slow. The guy crawled around under his end of the table for a while, looking up at the underside of the table and feeling it with his hands. I’m not sure what he was doing – looking for gum maybe? I wanted to pass him a coloring book and some crayons or something to keep him occupied, like maybe one of those restaurant placemats that have connect-the-dots puzzles next to the kids’ menu. After a while, the guy crawled back up into his chair. He was an older guy too, and it was really hilarious. This is the kind of old guy I want to be. The next time I looked over at him, he was sitting in his chair like a good boy, but he was leaned really far forward and was pressing his face flat against the table, squishing his nose and pushing the ear-pieces of his glasses up off his ears. “Ohhh!” He moaned with boredom against the table through his squished lips, “Oooohhhhhh!” At this point, he didn’t care if anybody could hear him. Everybody at the table just politely ignored him, except for me, because I thought it was really funny. I guess I have a lot to learn about being a super-villain.