I’M DREAMING OF A WET CHRISTMAS: The last time I went to Mass on Christmas, I was good and drunk. It was Midnight Mass at the Old Mission and the year was 1989. With me at the time was my brother Josh; he was drunk too. He had just gotten his PhD in philosophy. To celebrate, we’d just gone to the movie Road House, where the main character, played to perfection by the pulchritudinous Patrick Swayze, was a badass bar-house bouncer with a philosophy degree. Somewhere along the way, alcohol was bound to get involved.
I’m not sure we learned anything about the birth of the baby Jesus. But we were reminded how delicious repressed laughter can be. Except for us, it wasn’t repressed at all. There is another word for it. Obnoxious. And we were especially so.