I am speaking of Reese’s. Those delightful confections produced by a division of the Hershey’s corporation.

This moniker, I think we can all agree, was chosen because “Reese” was someone’s last name. Who was Mr. or Ms. Reese? The visionary genius who first had the idea to combine peanut butter and chocolate to create a snacking experience unlike any other? I have no clue. What I do know is that you say the last name in question like this: “Ree-sss.”

I’m sorry, but it’s “Ree-sez.” They are “Ree-sez Cups” and they are absolutely “Ree-sez Pieces.”

I am at a loss as to why some folks choose to go with “Ree-sees” as their pronunciation of choice.

I guess it really bothers Kate, as she recently called both Steph and Bliss out when she heard them her utter this treat’s name.

Bliss did present a pretty good argument for the two of them when she pointed out that if you say it like that, when you say “Reese’s Pieces” the two words sound just alike. I’d never thought of it that way and the more I considered that fact, the more I realized that it is not even close to true. For it to work that way it requires “pieces” to be said “pee-sees” as in “This will be a pee-see of cake” or “Does anyone want this last pee-see of pizza?”

What was funny was how this small problem dawned on the two of them, just as Bliss finished stating their case. “I think ‘Ree-sees’ is the way it’s said. [Steph nodding emphatically.] Then when you say “pie-ces” it…will…rhyme? [Steph, no longer nodding, clearly lost in thought.]”

In conclusion, don’t listen to the Ree-see-ers of the world. Their reasoning is a complete pile of fee-sez.

Pretty darn good, friends.

Because Jerry and I served it at the absolute earliest point when it was ok to do so, it was on the bitter side. We had to stop in at the homebrew store the morning of the party to have Jerry’s keg looked at, and one of the employees tried it and told us that in a few weeks it would “mellow out.” (I’m not sure what a guy who can sip on a sizable glass of bitter beer at 10 in the morning without so much as flinching’s definition of “mellow” is, but I find this encouraging.) The flavors of the spices and roasted pumpkin (that we steeped rather than actually added) were pretty subdued, which does seem like a sophisticated and desirable result, but you’re also dealing with a guy who uses a garden trowel to add nutmeg to his hot cider. The way I see it, we basically have a Pale Ale on our hands. Pale Ale is a type of beer people either love or they hate. I’m on team “love”; whether it “mellows” or not, you won’t hear me complaining.

The five gallons in the keg disappeared during the party, meaning at least some folks came back for seconds and thirds.

But now, let’s move on to the foreign exchange students that showed up at the party.

Last week, our friend May, who is in grad school, mentioned to a classmate from Japan that she was attending our Halloween party over the coming weekend. That classmate took this as an invitation to the party and later in the week shared with our friend that she had bought her first ever Halloween costume (as they do not have Halloween in Japan) and was very excited to be attending her first Halloween party. In addition, she asked if she could bring a friend who was also here from Japan and two friends who were here from China, as they now had costumes and had never been to Halloween parties either…. There’s no way I could have set that record straight and uninvited these people? Could you?

May called Steph to fill us in on the situation and make sure it was ok and, sure enough, well ahead of May, dressed in the exact costumes that foreign TV and advertising probably shows everyone in the US wearing on Halloween, they arrived.

And the pumpkin, the princess, Dracula, and the killer from Scream were ready to do this Halloween thing right. After entering our house and shakily making introductions to a few of us, they seemed to loosen up and their cameras came out and the questions started flying. (Incidentally, can you formulate, without flipping over to Wikipedia, a rational answer as to why we celebrate Halloween? One of the guys asked me this question and I believe my response went something like “Would you care for another beer? I made it, you know.”)

Steph assembled some impromptu treat bags for the four of them, with candy and various Halloween party favors. They found this extremely exciting. I think they were also fascinated that we had all just chosen whatever we wanted as costumes — that some outfits were scary and some were funny and some were just plain irreverent. There was no aesthetic or theme holding everything together, which, when you think about it, is a little strange. This is not to say they weren’t over the moon everytime they saw someone dressed up as something they recognized. I think the biggest response was elicited by Thurston’s Mario costume or that of our friend Megan who, with no prior knowledge of our of Asian guests, came dressed as a panda.

I don’t think they would have had the time they did if so many of the people we know weren’t so damned inclusive. Steph and I both are both highly sensitive to situations where someone could feel left out — probably because, at numerous points in past, that someone was us — and we both tend to go out of our way to try and make “outsiders” feel welcome. I knew we couldn’t attend to our foreign guests and play hosts at the same time, and I felt torn about what to focus on for a brief moment, before I realized the exchange students were already engaged in lively conversations and photo shoots and candy-eating sessions.

If you ever decide to go out on a limb and attend an event that is completely ingrained in an unfamiliar culture, pray it’s with a group like our friends.

1. Best Dressed….

2. Worst Dressed….

3. Sexiest ’Stache Alive….

4. Most Likely to Succeed….

5. Best Supporting Actor….

6. Wax-iest….

7. Hmm…. Orange-est…?

8. Oldest….

9. Muppet-iest….

10. Soul Patch-iest….

11. Long Stray Hair-iest….

12. Furthest from the Bottom of a Nose….

13. Caleb-est….

14. Darkest….

15. Mesh-iest….

16. Mesh-iest, First Runner-Up….

17. Recipient of the Sam Elliott Award for Excellence….

18. Recipient of a Good Citizenship Award….

19. State Trooper-iest….

And for my friends, who I’m sure have been mentally matching ’stache to ’stache-donner, here’s your answer key:

Also, happy birthday to my sister Kate, who lives in England where it may or may not also be May 2nd right now.

I wish I could tell you the transition from 27-years-old to 28-years-old — an event that is free of age-related milestones that require doing or reflecting on something specific — was relaxing and breezy. Unfortunately, at the beach, I had to wrestle with the possibility that my marriage is doomed to fail.

You see, Kaiser and Megan’s present to me this year was to get us all spaces on a kayak tour, courtesy of the NC Aquarium, around the sound and protected swamp areas they maintain. When we arrived and got prepped, our guides Kurt and Jess — your consummate Laurel and Hardy of nature expeditions — gave each of us the option of taking our own one-person kayaks, or pairing up with someone and using a two-person model. Being rugged and, I’m sorry, but seriously muscled in the arm-area, I could have handled my own kayak no problem. And being so tough and self-reliant, I would have preferred this, but my waifish wife was worried she wouldn’t be able to keep up and, ya know, sometimes you just have to do what the woman wants and besides with her in tow it would slow me down so I wouldn’t finish the tour and be on the dock drinking a beer while the others were still figuring out how to use their paddles. Amiright fellas! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!

“These two-person boats are great relationship counseling,” Kurt explained to us as we slid them into the water. He grinned and called back to his better half, who was adjusting hip waders, “Aren’t they Jess?”

“Yep,” Jess answered indifferently, not taking his eyes of what he was doing.

Kaiser and Megan opted for separate one-seaters. For some reason, they were not interested in trying to get their paddling in sync while a bunch of strangers watched their every move and drew elaborate conclusions about their relationship. I got a little nervous as we hit the water. “Why weren’t we required to go kayaking before we got married? What was the state thinking? What was the church thinking? ”

After some clumsy paddle-contact and a little drifting around, direction-wise, we began moving at the same cadence and solidified our steering roles. And we took off! We were doing it! We were propelling ourselves through the water and through this little compatibility test! And we were going to make it!

That’s when we tipped over. In the muckiest part of the salt marsh we were passing through. I’m not going to say whose fault it was. All I’m going to say is, to review, me: rugged, well-muscled, tough, self-reliant. My wife: waifish. Also, a “land lubber.” Also not particularly “sea-legged.” Also, “not very good at the kayaking, particularly the part about not causing the boat to tip over.” I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about who was to blame.

The tour was still a lot fun. The bad news was, with the tip-over that Steph caused, she had sabotaged our kayak trip/marriage. I tried to mask my pain as we righted ourselves.¹ When we returned to the aquarium I fully intended to obtain a divorce packet (which I assume all public aquariums keep on hand). Then, however, I thought about the previous year’s trip. A trip which saw us conduct one of the most glorious displays of connectedness and closeness ever.

It happened during a game of Cranium, which we played on Saturday evening. It was couple-vs.-couple and things were getting a might competitive, thanks to a certain person in our group. I’m not going to point the finger at who it was, bu…. Oh screw it: it was Megan’s fault. So, as with the kayaking, there was an acute understanding that whichever couple could accomplish this arbitrary challenge most efficiently had the blissful marriage. The losers might as well pack it in that night.

The score was neck-and-neck toward the end of the game. That’s when I drew one of the “Creative Cat” cards that calls for you to sculpt an object out of clay, while your teammate has 30 seconds to guess what it is. I have a BFA in Art which, as I once revealed, gives one a serious advantage in Pictionary-type situations. Even with that, however, we were way up the creek with this clue. As I read it off of the card, it seemed totally impossible: “Buddha.” Pretty obscure for that context, and pretty hard to render a three-dimensional likeness of in 30 seconds.

The clay was handed over, the timer was flipped and, as the sand started to fall, Steph began guessing. “Pencil…! Bird…! Buddha…!”

Five seconds into it, we were done. All I had done so far was roll out a “snake,” twist it into a pretzel to make the crossed legs, and slap it on the lump of remaining clay. There was no way the monstrosity I was holding looked anything like a Buddha.

Three jaws dropped in silent disbelief. Steph was sitting on the opposite side of the floor from the rest of us, and is a big rule-follower anyway, still we made her take a solemn oath that she had not somehow seen the clue. “What Bob was making just made me think ‘Buddha’,” she explained. This round propelled my wife and I forward to win the game.

So as we made our returned to our point of departure in our kayak, I decided I’d stick this thing out. I guess it can’t always be wine and roses, right? “Richer or poorer….” “Sickness or health….” “Kicking ass at Cranium or drenched in slime and smelling of dead fish.”

–

¹ Of course, I’m laying on the sarcasm with a trowel here, but by the way Jess and Kurt seemed to want to delicately “diffuse the situation” when they were helping us get back in our boat, we could tell that they must have honestly had couples get into shouting matches as they sat there in swamp water with their belongings getting soaked and their kayak rapidly sinking. Poor guys.

My good friend Jerry Updyke, normally a humble bass guitarist, performs all four part to the ending tag of “Yesterday I Heard The Rain.” I can’t tell which aspect of the video is more impressive: his ability to harmonize or his facial expressions.

Probably because Steph and I’s friend and neighbor Thurston got the game Rock Band for his Xbox for Christmas, and Steph and I have been over there at least once a week playing the crap out of it. He, his wife Bliss, Steph, and I have switched around on all the instruments many times, and discussed the finer points of all of the different songs at great length. We’ve all not only created virtual game-versions of ourselves that look like us, but we’ve started going on pretend world tours, where, not to toot my own simulated horn, but the fake crowds just keep getting bigger and bigger. We’ve had such fictional success lately that we now get to treat ourselves to regular faux shopping sprees with our phony money, buying ourselves crazy farcical clothing and getting our imaginary hair styled in outrageous manners.

Perhaps this is why I have rock stars on the brain.

Or maybe it’s because Thurston has recently taken it upon himself to introduce me to a certain type of band that came into being shortly after Black Sabbath reached acclaim, and that is still around today. I didn’t acquaint myself with most of these particular groups in junior high or high school — which is the most popular time for this to happen — and now I guess I’m making up for lost time. If I had to describe the music these bands make in one word, it would be “metal.” The great majority of the records Thurston has given me feature songs about wizards, famous ancient battles, space travel, and Norse mythology. In each case, the outlandishness is taken a step further with the cover artwork, choice of font, and photos of a fully-costumed band, in the liner layout, whole-heartedly supporting the music’s theme(s). Not all of these groups qualify as “rock stars,” but this kind of almost delusional cookyness is a definite cornerstone of rock stardom.

With the exception of Bruce Springsteen (who I think made strides to appear even more blue-collar and normal than he was) and maybe Billy Joel (who’s never seemed to do anything but show up in a suit and play the piano), performing in arenas that hold 10s of thousands of people/becoming a celebrity that everyone wants to interview, and fabricating a mind-boggling bizarre new persona for yourself, seem to go hand-in-hand. Think about all the famous singers or musicians who, once they made enough dough, started buying things like broadswords or residences where the scariest, most unsolvable murders in history have occurred. I guess when I say I’ve found myself thinking about “rock stars” a lot lately I mean I’m thinking about the truly special ones who’ve gone totally weird for the sake weird and are always wearing make-up and Victorian gowns (even though they are dudes) and spending ludicrous amounts of money making trippy and/or disturbing and/or incomprehensible music videos (or even better, full-length feature films).

What I’ve been wondering about, specifically, is what a normal day at home, when they’re not touring or being photographed or filmed or attending the music video awards, is like for these people?

At some point, I have to imagine, Marilyn Manson has been chilling by himself in his foreboding chateau, in his fishnets and thigh-high leather boots, on his living room chair made of skulls, and he’s really just wanted a plain old peanut butter sandwich on white bread. (You know it’s happened. Even he was a kid at once.) What if he’s out of peanut butter? But he really wants this sandwich? I suppose he has a personal assistant who gets these kind of things for him, so he doesn’t have to leave the house and he can stay home in the pain and darkness. If so, let’s say that person is sick this day. Now, Marilyn Manson’s either got to live without a peanut butter sandwich — something he really wants, that is easily attainable by basically every schmuck in America — or he can put on his top hat and black trench coat and get in his replica of the car from The Addams Family and go to the grocery store where he will push a shiny metal cart around and wait in line behind soccer moms purchasing frozen pizzas and supersized bags of Doritos, and Nascar fans hauling around cases of Bud. And that activity, no matter how you look at it, is just not something that occurs in a twisted gothic dreamworld.

Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie probably had to go to the dentist at some point, right?

Surely Alice Cooper has had to have a Roto-Rooter guy over his house to look at his plumbing before.

When these people who’ve worked so hard to cultivate an image that’s avant-garde and perverse, have to do mundane, everyday stuff, do they drop the act for a while?

If not, I guess it’s:

Interior designer: “So, Mr. & Mrs. Dio, do you see a carpet pattern you’re happy with?”

Ronnie James (in a Lord of the Rings-style outfit, getting up from the couch and assuming front man stance): “The winds of Loro are howling in ni-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!”

Interior designer: (Packing up things and leaving.)

Of course, if they do — if they put on jeans and go to the occasional ball game — isn’t that an admission on their part that the eyeliner and feather boa business is kind of silly? That when they don it, they’re nothing more than grown-ups who still play make-believe?

Which scenario best expresses what we expect of our rock stars?

I know I’ve got my answer.

This is a little late, but I wanted to share these pictures of Steph and I, taken at the Halloween party that Steph, Meg, and Bliss threw a few weeks ago. (This, by the way, is why I needed the pipe.)

This sea captain/whale combo is the first couple-costume Steph and I have ever donned. For a while now, I’ve held the opinion that couple-costumes are annoying. Whenever I see a Cleopatra and Mark Antony or a Romeo and Juliet, I can’t help but think these couples are overcompensating for some couple-shortfall they believe themselves, as a couple, to have. Why would they feel the need to be so…coupley? Recently, I’ve had a change of heart, though. It started when my friends JonScott and Sarah totally pulled off Mario and Luigi a few years ago. Friends Smitty and Nancy once did a great Laverne and Shirley. At the very same party the photos are from, friends Geoff and Regan showed up as Click and Clack from Car Talk. Brilliant. Now my official stance is: that couple-costumes — where the man plays a man and the woman plays a woman only — are annoying.

I’d planned to be a sea captain for over a month prior to the party (a role selected for its compatibility with my facial hair), and I’d set about gathering props at that time. Steph had the idea to be my whale two weeks before the party, but didn’t sit down and sew her outfit until about an hour before things got started. She finished with time to spare. Not even I knew she was capable of this. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. And, in addition to sweeping the “cutest” category of the costume contest that night, Steph propelled us into the winner’s circle for “best couple” as well. (And I’ll entertain no more comments about the suspiciousness of us receiving so much glory in a contest that we were overseeing. We won fair and square, people. Fair and square.)

In conclusion, this portrait is my favorite picture taken of me from probably the past 10 years of my life. Good job, Geoff.

Ok, after this I promise I’ll go back to writing about other stuff, but Jerry has just posted a video of the barbershop wedding performance on YouTube, and I have to share it with you.

Highlights include:

• Seth smiling and smirking his way through the whole affair, as he does with many things in life.
• Mrs. Updyke looking like the happiest bride in the world.
• Mr. Updyke, with beer in one hand and woman in the other, looking like a seasoned barbershop professional having a little fun.
• Me mostly sort of looking like I am in pain, which I was not. I was having the time of my life, but I was also trying to concentrate and not mess up.
• -02:57: Jerry assuring Seth he was playing the right note on his pitch pipe. Seth never grew to fully trust that pitch pipe. He always thought it was playing him the wrong starting note.
• -02:52: Me not sticking my opening note. If you’re going to be solid on any note, it should be that opener. And I swear I always hit it in our practices. Oh well. Everyone else stays right on key and I recover ok.
• -02:05: Jerry holding up his ring finger when we sing “Place a wedding band upon your hand.” This is the extent of what we could come up with, choreography-wise.
• -01:49: The crowd interpreting a pause as the end of the song and going wild.
• -01:02: Mr. Updyke leaning in to the mic and really emphasizing the crazy low note he hits here. People being greatly amused by this.
• -00:54: That’s right. Key change.
• -00:18: Seth taking us out with a cool-looking, commanding “bam!” hand motion that was actually a signal for “I’ve been holding this note for a long time and I am now out of breath.”
• -00:15: Seth, Andrea, and I coming in for some love and Papa Updyke shoving us away. He later explained to me that he was trying to get us to spread out and take a bow, but then came to the realization that it was too much to orchestrate.
• -00:09: The four of us celebrating the culmination of several months of work, and our shared musical bond, by warmly embracing each other.
• -00:04: Me getting a face-full of Updyke’s boutonniere, because he is so freaking tall.

Enjoy.

The newlyweds/my quartet-mates have both rehashed their versions of our collective barbershop experience on their blogs.

Here we have Andrea’s “Our Super Secret Surprise!” and Jerry’s “The Chronicles of Harmony-a” and “Barbershop?”.

All of these are great reading if you’ve ever been involved in anything like this, and include elements of the process I completely neglected to mention when I wrote about it.