high fidelity

Picture it: Fort Knox High School, 1996, I’m in the auditorium sitting in the section for underclassmen with my friend Erin, despite being seniors.  We’re watching the school talent show and the talent was admittedly lacking and the frosh are unsparing in their critiques.  Our friend Amanda ascends the stage to sing an anthem to Jesus.  Erin and I lean forward and tell the frosh that one word against Amanda it would go badly for them, very badly.  Amanda is our good, decent friend who, while very different from us, is someone we guard closely and resent anyone trying to hurt her.  Fourteen years can change a great deal, but fidelity is fidelity. 

Chaos Bean and I went to the movies with Amanda tonight for Recession Tuesdays.  Amanda had her niece and younger cousin with her.  The movie may or may not have been appropriate for her niece but the niece spent her time playing on a phone and eating Skittles.  She didn’t notice, watch or care about the movie. 

On the way out of the movie some unsuspecting Austrian (or Bavarian) man decided to challenge Amanda on her choice to bring the niece to the movie saying, “Did you stop to think before bringing a small child to this movie?”  One might have warned him to stop and think before getting smart with Amanda around ‘us’ but mainly around Chaos Bean.  Amanda told him it was none of his business and he protested that saying that it was (somehow) his business. 

 Chaos Bean, is the consummate German, she is honest, direct, has a keen sense of justice, and amazingly efficient.  She was, as it were, loaded for bear and she unloaded all over this old man who thought he’d put his two cents in where they weren’t solicited.  Starting with, “Did you stop to think to mind your own business,” and then as he walked away mumbling and then shouting, “Idiots!” she called him, “lame,” and followed up with the strongest language, “it must be hard to walk with balls that big, douche bag.”  He mumbled again and she said, “Did you stop to think before you [insert German wartime atrocity]?”

You know how, after an argument, you think of what you should have said?  In our family we filibuster vigilantly.  We don’t have those moments you have where you think of what you might have said, what you should have said.  We say it.  We bring it. My apple fell under the Ashkenazi tree and hers fell under the aristocratic Prussian one.  I’ll hurt your feelings, get under your skin and make you cry.  Chaos Bean will shake the very foundations of the Earth.   

Bean doesn’t take garbage off anyone but she certainly isn’t going to take garbage off a Barbarian and certainly not a faux-German Austrian.  He was mistaken to get smart with someone around Chaos Bean and he’s lucky he walked away having directed his ire at Amanda.  This man walked up to us hoping to bully someone and shame them and instead had his proverbial pants put on.    

 Chaos Bean likes to say, “The hipsters are commenting about how that was ironic,” and the fact that was I wearing the black and gold of the German National Football Union (soccer team, for the uninitiated). 

What is impressive, most impressive, is that Darth Bean didn’t use stronger language.  She didn’t once use her beloved “F Bomb,” or in our eyesight fly the state bird of New Jersey.  She did, in so many words, tell him: where he could go, walked him to his bus stop, and pay his fare.  This guy is going to send post cards once he gets there.  I cannot underestimate the saltiness of her language – she doesn’t curse like a sailor; sailors curse like a Chaos Bean.  Amanda must have rubbed off on her pretty well because she let him have it – and have it hard – without using language that was untoward even if her closing was pretty awful. 

However, we are a bit concerned that someone has taken our Chaos Bean.  We’d like her back.  

The movie was unremarkable and at this point I have no idea what we watched.