Humor Blog Highlights

Hand Me a Scalpel – This Can’t Be That Difficult…

Okay, I’ve had enough. If Mandy Moore gets to be a recording artist, I get to be a brain surgeon.

If you are one of the blessed few who read that sentence and asked, “Who the hell is Mandy Moore,” I almost hate to destroy your blissful state of ignorance. I envy you. I used to be just like you and would do anything to regain the serenity of not knowing who Mandy Moore is. I just found out a few days ago who Mandy Moore is, and I’ve been royally ticked ever since. I chomped on my Lucky Charms so hard this morning, I almost bit my tongue in half.

I was hoping we had reached our limit on this whole adolescent pop diva thing. I knew about Britney and Christina. And there was some singing blonde chick named Jessica who married a guy from NSync or 98 Degrees who isn’t gay. (One of those guys is openly gay, right? I thought I read that somewhere.) Maybe they’re just dating. I know one of the Backstreet Boys got married because my teenage cousin, who lives in New Jersey, let out an anguished wail that shattered windows in the governor’s mansion here in Raleigh. That’s the thing: I’ve been blissfully unaware of most of the details on all these entertainers. I know they exist, but I’m just too busy to care.

But last weekend I needed a break, so I pulled myself away from the computer to watch South Park and Saturday Night Live. I was flipping channels between shows and came across Mad TV. Mandy Moore was the special guest. She walked out onto a stage in front of a small studio audience. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She was blonde and cute and wearing a little black dress. She giggled a lot.

She decided to take some questions from the audience. I wished I were in the audience so I could ask who she was and why she wasn’t home since it was obviously past her curfew. But a Mad TV cast member posing as an obsessed fan asked a bunch of goofy questions instead, and that led to some carefully-scripted spontaneous hilarity. He mentioned her first hit single, “Candy.” That’s when I knew she was a recording artist. But she didn’t sing anything. She just stood there and said her cute lines and swished her cute skirt. Then they cut to commercial.

The reason I wanted to throw rocks at the television was this: One of my freelance writing jobs involves working with independent musicians. I write reviews and interviews, trying to help them build press kits and promote themselves. True artists. People who work as bartenders just so they can play their music – music that they wrote themselves — in NYC dive bars until all hours of the night and then drag themselves home just in time to watch Mandy Moore get national exposure on Mad TV. I’m surprised more of them aren’t flinging themselves off their fire escapes.

They practice for hours every day. They play anywhere they can. They struggle with writer’s block, serious competition, and that idiot in the back of the bar who keeps flicking his lighter and shrieking, “Freeeeee Bird!!!! FREEEEEEE BIRRRRD.” They have grown to loathe “Free Bird.” They kind of liked it a long time ago, but now they would like to track down every radio deejay who still insists on playing it and strangle them with their guitar strings.

But Mandy Moore moves to Orlando and decides that the usual cheerleader and Jr. Miss circuits aren’t enough for her. She wants to be a recording artist. She doesn’t play any instruments or know how to write songs, but she’s seen Britney and Christina and Jessica and wants to get in on the action before all the heterosexual boy band members are taken. She gets coached and made up and hires a promoting team and other people to do the pesky stuff like write songs, and PRESTO! She’s a recording artist.

Okay, fine. That’s a great new approach to the career ladder. I wanna be a brain surgeon. They’re smart and get to wear cool white surgical coats and make lots of money. I think they have to go to school for a long time, but I wanna be a brain surgeon now.

I wanna get to poke around in people’s heads. I don’t know what all that stuff is in there, but I know you get to sew their heads back up when you’re done! I’m good at sewing! I sewed a button back on my dress a couple of weeks ago, and I learned how to cross-stitch in Girl Scout Camp. My patients will all look so pretty with little cross-stitches going all around their foreheads! I’ll use cool purple thread and body glitter, and when they wake up, they’ll think it looks so cool that they’ll forget all about the fact that I just sawed off their brain stems. Or whatever it is I’m supposed to be removing. I don’t think it even matters what part you take out because I saw a drawing of the brain when I accidentally looked at my textbook back in my high school biology class, and it just looks like this big white fluffy cauliflower thing. I think you can just chop of any part of it and it will be okay.

I’ve gotta hurry up and prepare for my new career. I need to build myself a web site with a bunch of photos I’ll get taken at Glamour Shots. I’ll also need to get myself a guest spot on some brainy medical show on The Discovery Channel. I’ll just giggle and wave my scalpel around and take staged questions from the audience.

Oh, that’s right – I’ll need a scalpel and some of those other surgery-type things. Maybe someone’s selling some of that stuff on eBay. Gotta go.

About Jennifer Layton (2 Posts - 2002)
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