Amy Miller

Riding Miss Daisy

This was one of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed in live comedy. I was crying. He wrote this in 30 minutes. I hate him, actually. Just kidding I love him.

seankeane:

Last night, I participated in Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction, a monthly LA show that made its San Francisco debut last night. The competition is split into two parts: in the first, contestants read prepared pieces of erotic fan fiction (topics last night included Animaniacs, Angry Birds, and the sitcom Family Matters). Before they read, contestants from the second round draw topics from a bag, and write their own pieces while the prepared works are read. Second-round topics included Watership Down, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and X-Men. I was fortunate enough to draw Driving Miss Daisy as my topic, and I’ve included my piece after the jump.

WARNING: Not Safe For Work. Not safe for anywhere.

Read More

• 3 months ago
• 10 notes

Farewell, Sweet Old Lady

Being that we’re a few days away from Christmas it must be time to hear sad stories about family pets dying because pets are jerky drama queens and they know EXACTLY when the holidays are. Sadly I will volunteer to be your first. Just before my 17th birthday, my sisters and I went to get a Christmas tree and also came home with a puppy. Parents love impulsive pet adoption and we were long-time experts at it. I mean if you don’t want us to get a puppy, don’t let us leave the house unattended all the time. We’re teenagers and we need easy ways to fill the love holes your shoddy parenting left in our souls.

She was a lab mix and we named her Rudy (after Rudolph) even though she was a girl. Because what’s good enough for a Huxtable was certainly good enough for this orphaned Christmas tree lot mutt in white trash country.

Shortly before my freshman year in high school, I moved from the Bay Area to Redding. Already pretty lacking in the friends / coolness department back home, moving did not help matters much. It’s safe to say this dog quickly became my only and best friend. If you’re not exactly sure just how uncool I was, one of the earliest photos of me and Rudy is from a few days after we got her. I am dressed in traditional renaissance garb, floppy peasant’s hat and corset included, smiling with multi-colored braces and preparing to perform in my high school choir’s annual madrigal dinner, where we served game hens to the parents of Redding and sang and told them jokes in horrific British accents. What was the joke book I used for material, you ask? Why yes it WAS Kids Are Punny: Jokes Sent by Kids to the Rosie O’Donnell Show. I really didn’t want to go. I loved the singing but hated the politics and considered quitting the dinner to stay home with the new puppy, feeling intensely bitter about my serfdom in multiple ways. Sadly, choir was actually sort of cool in Redding and still I was on the bottom rung of popularity. I should have been a fucking table head! Not a peasant. Have you heard my singing voice and my jokes? Not to mention my stellar waitressing abilities. That fucking feudalist choir director. Get with the times, man. People are painting Chapel ceilings!

Later on when my sisters left home, or what was now our home, things got bad. Real bad. I no longer had any allies in the transition from our supremely fucked up childhood to our mom becoming a widow and rapidly spiraling into a deep(er) alcoholic depression. Every night at home (when she came home) it was just me and mom and the dog. And usually Quantum Leap because it was on CONSTANTLY. No disrespect to Dr. Sam Beckett but Rudy kept me sane. No one saw it coming that many years later as mom got sober and moved around the country on her own that Rudy would be a support to her too.

Rudy was a peach of a dog. She had that scary kind of dog empathy and eye contact that made you feel like she really knew what was going on. She never responded to dog commands. If you were to say SIT in a stern voice, you could expect little response. If instead you said something like “Hey can you just sit down? You’re driving me crazy.” THEN you might get what you wanted. Over the last few years, some of her spark went out. She’s been slow to move around, incontinent, deaf and mostly blind. Dogs aren’t really supposed to live for 16 years. Until a few months ago, her tail still worked atleast. And every time I went to visit, despite her complete inability to see or hear me she always got up to greet me and wag her tail. We still had a special bond. But then even the tail broke. How the hell do you break your tail?

It’s no surprise that a 16 year old dog would die but it doesn’t mean it’s fun. Given the timing, I assume maybe she didn’t want to deal with another year of mom running around frantically preparing for Christmas, gift-wrapping at an anxiety level appropriate for someone performing emergency open heart surgery, and worrying about who would feed Rudy and make sure she didn’t accidentally pee or get hair on the meticulously cleaned furniture while mom was away visiting family. It must be so humiliating to just start accidentally peeing on stuff one day after so many years of being a distinguished lady, and then have someone shame you for it. I had that thought during my grandmother’s final days too. My grandmother wore pearls, makeup and hose every single day I knew her. Would a poised and independent lady like that want everyone to see her in a bed, helpless and losing touch with reality in her final moments? Keeping loved ones alive is always so much more for us than them. None of this is meant to be disrepectful or compare my wonderful grandmother to a dog. Not that Rudy was really a dog. But it does give me a lot more empathy for the shitty few years my mom has been dealt and just how it feels for all of us to see those close to us wither away while simultaneously feeling a sense of relief that the withering is over when it ends, and then in turn, guilt about that relief.

Christmas or not, it seemed like as good a time as any for an old gal like Rudy to peace out, almost exactly on the 16th anniversary of her joining our family, and exactly at the age I was when we met. Plus you know, like a million more years.

It’s hard not to feel like the passing of the old family dog signals some kind of adulthood warning. Like hey look out I’m dead now so you are of age to work on starting your own family and getting your own damn dogs! I already gave you a bunch of extra years to figure this shit out! 

I will really miss you, Rudy. But no promises.

• 4 months ago
• 3 notes