A Natural Comedian

I like to think I’m funny, yet when I’m with friends or family, I’m not exactly a laugh riot. Adam is a lot funnier in person than I am. I’m funny when I deliberate, write, and have ready made material. Recently, I found out who the true comedian is in the family. Not me, not Adam. It’s K.

When Adam takes A somewhere on a weekend night, I have a bonding ritual with K. We drive to our favorite sushi place, sit at the sushi bar, and scarf down sushi. Apparently, me drinking sake relaxes K – a very strange phenomenon. K never shuts up, from the 30 minute car ride there, through dinner, and the car ride back. The amount of information in K’s brain, just waiting to spill out, is incredible. Sometimes I put in a prompt here and there, but usually there’s no need.

This past Friday, Adam took A and a friend to see my brother-in-law, Sean, perform at a house concert in Media, Pa. (By the way, Sean is the greatest, funniest singer/songwriter ever, and he’s pretty famous, too. Check out Sean’s website by clicking on his name in the blogroll on the right side of the screen.)

I offered to take Kevin out for sushi. A little trickle of drool went down the right side of his chin as he said, “Yeah! That sounds great!”

The following is the story of K dissecting a frog in science, in K’s immortal words, as best as I can remember:

So, Mrs. Kirchner comes over to our table, and she’s like, “Did you see this?”, and she pressed down on its stomach, and a huge gush of dead frog juice spurts over my hand, and I’m like, “Aarg!”, and she’s like, “Oops! Sorry!” and I’m like, “Oh my god! No! That’s not an ‘Oops! Sorry!’. That’s an, ‘Oh my God, K, I’m sorrier than I’ve ever been in my entire life!’.”

I mean, there’s this disgusting dead frog corpse juice all over my hand, and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever smelt, Mom. Think of trash mixed with piss mixed with vomit. (Robin note: I dissected a human in med school.) So, I go to the sink, and it’s broken or something, and the cold water doesn’t work. I keep having to quickly dip my hand in scalding hot water, and I’m like, “Aah!!”. (Robin note: This must be a very noisy class, with Kevin saying, “Aarg!” and “Aah!” all the time.)

And our frog was totally screwed up. When we got it, one of its arms was in a praying position, and it was all stiff, and we had to move it so that we could cut the chest. We kept pinning it down, and it kept popping back up, and S (Kevin’s lab partner) and I look at each other, and I’m like, “Oh, shit”, and I just break the arm. Mom, I had to! And it was so gross! You could hear a little popping noise, and I’m like, “No! Aargh!”, and S is like, “Ugh! Aarg!” (Robin note: the poor teacher needs ear plugs.)

And then we’re scared that Mrs. Kirchner will get mad at us because we’re disrespecting the frog. In the beginning of class she was really serious, and said that in previous classes kids had disrespected the frog, and if she caught anyone doing that, they’d be in big trouble. I guess kids picked up their frog and made them dance around, and she got really mad. So we were like, “Is breaking the frog’s arm considered disrespecting the frog?”, and we decided we wouldn’t tell her.

So, we’re trying to find the heart, and we’re like, “Aarg! There’s no heart!”, because we couldn’t find it. We’re freaking out, until we realize it was attached to the liver. There was this blob stuck to the liver, and we cut it off, and apparently, it was the heart. (Robin note: Great anatomy lesson here. The blood circulates from the liver to the heart and back again. I wonder how it gets oxygenated. Hmmm….)

Luckily, the lab said to cut the heart out anyway, so it was OK. But we had a guy frog, and Mrs. Kirchner came by and asked us a question about something in a female frog, and I’m like, “Aarg! Mrs. Kirchner, we have a guy frog!”, and she’s like, “But where would it be, Kevin? You should have read the lab about the female frog, too.” And I’m like, “No! Mrs. Kirchner, it’s not a lab! It’s a textbook! You think we’re going to read, ‘In the female frog the reticular circulating metatarsal is connected to the ventricular perifrontal?’ No!” I pray we don’t get points taken off.

The frog’s better than the worm, at least. When we cut open the worm, the book said, “Find the liver”, and all you saw was a bunch of brown mush, and we’re like, “Where’s the liver? Aarg!”

Usually S and I hate each other. Well not “hate”, but pretty much dislike. But we sort of bonded over the dead frog. At the end, we were putting a pipette down the frog’s throat and making its lungs go in and out. That was pretty funny! (Robin note: Somehow I think that might fall under the category of “disrespecting the frog”.)

At the end of class, we had to take our bags up for a label, so we could store our frogs. (Robin note: Guess what’s going to happen now, folks!) You couldn’t really tell which end was which, and I picked up the wrong end, and brown, smelly, dead frog juice goes all over the place. And I’m like, “Oh, no! Aarg!”

Back to me: That’s the end of the lovely story, friends. I’m going to get Mrs. Kirchner a gift basket at the end of the year. It will include ear plugs, Valium, a soothing beach sounds CD, a yoga video, and a mop.