“Peter & James / Cookie Monster Story”

Peter: Okay, what time is it? Okay, about forty years ago… ha ha ha ha ha. My very good friend of extremely long standing, Mr. James Lee Stanley, ladies and gentlemen.
James: Don’t get up, really. You probably noticed by now, I’m a solo performer. Sometimes that’s wonderful, like tonight. Sometimes it sucks, you know, like when you outnumber the audience. Which I’m sorry to say has happened. Uh, but most the time, it’s pretty great, and because I’m a solo performer, I get invited to a lot of places that I think wouldn’t happen if I were like a seventeen-piece funk horn band, you know. Being a solo performer, perfect strangers feel comfortable inviting me into their homes, and I get invited to a lot of parties. I got invited to a party thrown by some flight attendants in Chicago. I like flight attendants. I do. They’re clean, punctual people, and I think, I think that’s important. So I went to the party, and uh, I was the only person at the party not employed by the airlines. As you know, when people work together in some sort of insular fashion, such as the airlines, a vernacular unique to the workplace evolves, and uh, and that’s certainly the case with the airlines. So, if you don’t work for the airlines, you may not know what they’re talking about. Thank you. So when you’re working for the airlines, and you have this language, and you don’t work for the airlines, you may not know what they’re talking about. Now, I—well, if you have a somewhat immature, silly, teenage, childish view on sex, some sort of arrested development kind of, lame, high school humor such as I do, uh, you may find yourself at odd ends with this vernacular. You know, I know this is stupid. This is genuinely stupid, and I recognize it as such. It does not change a thing. If I’m at one of these parties with the flight attendants, and they’re talking about doing a layover, I start laughing, you know. I mean, it’s lame, it’s lame, it’s lame, but I start giggling. If they’re doing a turnaround in Detroit, I’m intrigued. I’m just like, I’m there for that stuff. I just find it really amusing. It was when they got to deadheading that I felt perhaps I was out of my element so. Thank you both. So, I, uh, I drifted over to a corner and began to drink. I had, I don’t know, fifty-five, sixty beers, and uh, I realized I was actually sloshing whenever someone stepped on me. So, I went off to find the bathroom. Now, I don’t know what the bathroom looks like in your homes, but I’m a musician, and I have been in some pretty funky bathrooms in my time, you know. Some bathrooms that you can’t believe what kind of surreal funk. Now, I’ve been in bathrooms where the shower curtain had something growing on it that evidently they couldn’t kill, some blue green thing, living thing that actually turned black in the summer and opaque, I guess, and had a [???] bouquet, I must say. And I’ve been in places where the towels have actually gone down in the corner wet, and have evolved into a lower life form, you know. It’s peculiar to be looking in the mirror and to see the towels undulating. You look at them, they’re still, but you look away, you look back. It’s very peculiar. And of course, there’s the orange tear duct where the water’s dripping. There’s the bar of soap stuck to the sink, little curly hairs in the soap, you know, we’re talking, we’re talking, I’m telling you, we’re talking funkdom supreme here. You can go in these bathrooms, be as disgusting as you want. Feel okay about yourself. Feel like you’re not out of place. Well, the bathroom in this flight attendant’s condo was a shrine. Clear plastic shower curtain, not a water spot on it. Chandelier in the bathroom. Crystal chandelier in the bathroom. Mirrors on the walls and ceiling so you could watch yourself in a variety of angles while you did it, into eternity. Designer towels that came from God to the wall, accompanied by a sign that said, “Please don’t use the designer towels”. She had paper towels for us, but the designer towels were just to look at, I guess. You go into the bathroom and watch the designer towels when cable goes out. I don’t know what, you know. And she had a simulated marble sink. There was a brass pedestal. In the brass pedestal, a bar of soap that had never ever been wet. You have to ask yourself, what is this bathroom for? What is going on? And she had blue shag rug all over the floor of the bathroom, and I suppose, by way of continuing the integrity of the design, she brought the blue shag rug up around the bowl of the toilet, over the tank of the toilet, over the top of the tank of toilet, over the lid of the toilet, and around the seat of the toilet. It looked like a Muppet toilet, you know. “Sit down, James”. You know, right, I’m really going to sit on the Cookie Monster’s face. I don’t think so. Cookie! No, no, no thanks, not a chance. And you know what, while we’re on the subject of toilets, ’cause I don’t have much time, I’ll get this all over with at once, because I don’t actually believe that women ponder the way men uh, do it. So I’m gonna share this with you. I’m gonna enlighten you in this area, and it will help the understanding of the sexes. It will help us communicate with each other, hands across the water, if you will. So here’s what we do. I promise to be tasteful. We approach the facility from an erect position. One we maintain throughout the act. We’re talking number one, of course. We raise the lid, we put it back against the tank, and then we commence. Now, this works with supreme efficiency in my bathroom, but when you ladies go to the trouble of upholstering your tank and your toilet and your lid and your, then the lid and the seat, they stay up there, two maybe three seconds, just until we are irrevocably involved in what we’re doing, see, and then FWOP! This thing comes snappin’ down at you. AAAH! You leap out of the way. It’s a completely involuntary survival instinct kind of a thing, you know what I mean. Cookie Monster lunges for your loins? Run away! You just run away. You don’t think about it. Run away! You just run away. Now who, I ask you, who could be accurate when they’re sprinting across a bathroom? So while I was using her Maxi 4000 to blow dry the lid, and the seat there, and the tank, and the top of the tank, and the designer towels, and the mirror, and the chandelier, and the shower curtain, simulated marble sink, the brass pedestal, and the bar of soap that had finally gotten wet, I got a idea for a love song.