Friday, September 25, 2009

Slaughterhouse 39

Slaughterhouse 39
START TIME: 9:45 PM
END TIME: 10:57 PM
WORD COUNT: 993

“Describe the night when you've had the most fun (or the funniest night of your life, if you recall it).” Brian Mascheri

Wow. It’s obviously a clear indictment of my faculties and capacity for a good time that there’s the tagline of “if you can recall it.” The gentleman asking this question has accompanied me for evenings that involved…well, the expression is, “those who know, don’t say, and those who say, don’t know.” I think the statue of limitations on several of those evenings has passed, but Brian’s a happily married man with kids, and I wouldn’t wish to threaten the sanctity of several domestically tranquil situations by hauling out the old…

…all right, one for tonight, and a bunch of people already know this one, so it’s better to take this to the wider audience.

The three-legged race with the hookers? Nahhh, that never really happened, and it SHOULD have (and I could type the story but it’s not the same without the hand gestures and vocal inflection), but I was really thinking about the ceremony itself.

For some reason, when you’re in your twenties, there are moments where you figure that you can do just about anything. You think you can drink until five in the morning and work at seven. You think you can go four days without sleep and make a coherent presentation. You think you can juggle three different serious relationships and no one will be any the wiser. You think you can drive a vehicle at 104 miles an hour and be making good time. Or, in my case, you think you can write the script for a set piece at a wedding in Hawaii and everything will go seamlessly.

(Oh, I did all of those other things, too, and I think I survived all of them with minimal scarring, but we’ll talk about the last one tonight.)

My friend Mark is fascinated with Japanese culture, and met his wife Alice at a tea ceremony in Camarillo, CA – she’s Japanese. She has Japanese family, and her parents and grandparents live in Hawaii, and Mark’s family is a diaspora across the Midwest and West Coast. Hawaii was the most sensible place for this wedding to take place. I was honored when Mark asked me to be his best man, and this meant a toast.

And I had an idea.

I wanted something shorter and simple, because I knew that there was a strong possibility that the day and/or night was going to involve liquor, and the less complexity that I was able to bring to the situation, the better. But what I wanted to do was give that toast in two languages, as there would be two tables of people who didn’t speak English. I Googled “Japanese translation las vegas” and found a man who was used to doing this sort of thing all the time. I even had a great idea for a joke, even though every guidebook ever published under the sun warns against using humor across cultures, because it doesn’t usually work.

So I had a very simple toast:

I would like to point out that among the many virtues that Mark has chosen in his friends, he has not chosen a best friend who can speak Japanese. However, he has chosen a wonderful woman to be his bride, his soul mate, his partner. Please join me in wishing them all the joy, luck, and happiness they can imagine.”

So I wanted that turned into Japanese. But – wait – audience participation! I could have one of the guys yell at me, “Jim! You don’t speak Japanese!!!” And then THAT guy gets interrupted by someone saying the same thing…IN Japanese! Hot damn! This was going to WORK. I knew it. And when I explained my idea to the translator, he was excited. “This is funny. They will laugh at this.” So I also had him translate

“Wait a second! You don’t speak Japanese!”


I was ready to go. I got mp3 files of the speech and listened to it, over and over again. I explained the plan to Ken and Brian, and we were well rehearsed and set, even the point during which one of them became terrified with stage fright and screamed “Godzilla!!” and sprinted for the exit.

I listened to the files constantly, and I had a phonetic printout of what I was going to say, and carried it with me constantly, rehearsing and rehearsing, weeks of getting ready. It was likely that I could have left the hotel and forgotten my ID and room key, but I would have been clutching a sheet of paper reading

MAH-koo-no-goy-YOU-jin no kah-tah-gah-tah-wah

tox-ON-no yoy-SIGH-no moh-tay-oh-uh-day-moska

so-no-NAH-ka-day-moe

And all of a sudden it was showtime. Ken and Brian were the only guys in the room who knew what I was about to do, and they were situated in the back. Our foresight in planning for drinking was going to pay off, and I had my translation page with me. I was given my cue, came up, and had eye contact with most of the room, without going to my sheet of paper.

And I nailed my lines. The Japanese table is smiling. Mark and Alice are having a hard time keeping up; they’re English speakers who know Japanese and I’m moving at the speed of a TV news reader, because that’s what the woman did who translated it for me. I had no idea I was going so fast I was baffling anyone who wasn’t a native speaker.

And I hit the end of it, and Brian shouts out:
“Jim! You don’t speak Chinese!”

My face goes blank. I’ll admit that I didn’t spend much time working with Brian on his one line in English. And Ken’s Japanese line about me not speaking Japanese didn’t project like I thought it might.

But it was a success. And the photo of us out on the balcony shows a bunch of excellent friends without pain, without anything to do but continue laughing like crazy. We’ve done so ever since.

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