Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Stats!

It’s that time of the year! Time for Thanksgiving Parade Stats! Here are the hosts, Meredith and Matt!

Here comes Dora the Explorer. What a great float! Did you know, Matt, her backpack is four stories tall, her hiking boot is a dainty size 98, and I wouldn’t want to be her optometrist because you can fit, get this, seventeen truck tires in each one of her big brown eyes.

Wow!

Oh, here comes our favorite lovable Medieval green monster, Shrek, and his sidekick, Donkey, taking a stroll through Times Square this crisp Thanksgiving morning. Matt, Shrek’s antennae are taller than a NBA regulation basketball rim, his head would fit a size 87 1/4 hat, and his tunic could cover, get this, eight of those chess boards, but the ones where humans are the pieces!

Wow!

Like they have at art fairs and stuff!

Right! I know! Those chess matches where the humans actually dress up like the pieces!

Right! I’d sure hate to be the one who has to do Shrek’s laundry!

I know! But I don’t think it’s something to really worry about!

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Okay, Matt. Here are my favorites of every Thanksgiving Parade. It’s the M&Ms characters!

Yup!

Now, get this, Matt…

Yes?

The white gloves on these melt-in-your-mouth-not-in-your-hands cuties are each larger than an olympic-sized swimming pool if you lopped two feet off of that pool. And the familiar M on the little guy’s chest is taller than Shaquille O’Neal with the late John Ritter standing on his shoulders.

Whoa!

John Ritter was surprising in “Sling Blade” playing a dramatic role like that. More surprising than two football fields standing up and getting married!

They just legalized something like that in Vermont! Wow!

Also, the lady M&M, with the addition of the white go-go boots is apparently just female enough to cause four men to touch theyselves every hour in this country, and that’s just those who admitted it to our pollsters. Thirty guys did not admit it!

Neat!

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Now, headed our way right behind this average high school marching band is a new float this year and, I gotta tell you, Matt, I love it. It’s already a classic. It’s Father Flynn from last year’s hit movie, “Doubt.” Apparently, each one of his ears could listen the confessions of the Lady M&M float for, get this, up to 9 hours.

Wow! Anything about the crease in his brow?

Yes! The crease in his brow forged from the life of being a celibate, ascetic priest float is so deep and long it could be used as a slot in which one could place and serve, get his, up to 900 slices of cantaloupe at a very bizarre brunch.

Wow! And his shoes are about as big as you’d expect!

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Here, doggy doggy!

I’m kind of wondering why you’re yelling that!

Because here comes Bolt! Although it’s not unanimous, he’s America’s favorite puppy and you can see why!

He’s so cute!

Well, you wouldn’t want to house train him! To do so, you’d need more newspaper everyday than gets printed anymore in this country.

Geez!

And if you’re an out-of-work journalist, you could maybe get a job cleaning after this little fellow, but the pure amount of shit he would generate would seem such a tragic turn in your life that you would fall into a, get this, Matt, literally massive depression!

That’s amazing!

Also — that’s not all we have on Bolt –

Good! More stuff on that, please!

The little black lightening bolt on the helium-filled canine’s flank is over four times the size of itself causing a time-space rift through which dark forces are entering our dimension and threatening our way of life.

Wow! That is big!

And his collar is so long that they didn’t bother finding out what could fit in it!

Okay! Oh, here is one of those floats that stops so you can watch the Radio Disney singer lip-sync and bump hips with the “Kung Fu Panda” characters!

Hey, Dr. Science-Patterson! My friend told me that birds are actually descended from dinosaurs? Is this true?? I can’t believe it! – Shockedasaurus from South Cracks, MT

Dear Shockedasaurus – Your friend is partly right. But, remember, partly right only counts in NPR quiz shows and pregnancy, and pregnancy is in that list sarcastically.

Yes, birds are descendants of dinosaurs…legally. You see, birds were, as a species — and it’s about time the species knew this — adopted.

Why? Scientists can’t tell for sure, but some fossil evidence suggests that the birds’ ancestors didn’t feel ready to have offspring as they may actually have had a very primitive form of “issues.”

Birds fly south every winter as a result of a vestigial need to try and find their real ancestors, but they’ve never been able to find them. And, thus, birds’ lives are not, as scientists have determined, complete. They often die depressed and what-is-to-birds-as-pennies-are-to-humans-less.

Please ask me more questions, kids! I have plenty of time to answer them!

One of our VP’s of Marketing went and saw some theater this weekend. Here is the A Note from the Director that was printed in the program!

A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR

The war in Iraq; a crushing recession; continued but now more subtle, insidious forms of gender, racial, and sexual orientation discrimination; and a commercialization of art and music like no time previous.

That’s right, folks! Welcome to the new true American Dream: baseball, hot dogs, and the smiling tanned visages that fill our TiVo’s with their chemically whitenend smirks. It sets the stage for this play as much, if not more, than the actual stage you see before you tonight.

One question I wanted to answer with this project when I undertook it is what is the state of theatre–past, present, future, here, there,
worldwide, not-worldwide–as more and more of the world’s citizenry retreats every night after the Dance of Cubicles into their caves of Ikea and Restoration Hardware, reaching–not out to the starving or the gay or the environment or the unpet animals–but in; into a dog-eared bag of BBQ or Hawaiian sweet onion potato chips (Thank you Hawaiian natives for letting us colonize you so we could get your yummy flavors into our junk foods!) with one hand and clicking the soft rubber, suspiciously almost-nipple-like buttons of their TiVo remote with the other hand, staring blankly with both eyes into TV’s bottomless Super Bowl, filled to the brim with publicity-starved flakes running their Amazing Races, mixed with the clover-shaped marshmallows of CSI detectives, topped off of course with the milk of tuxedoed ciphers handing fakely red roses to gaggles of giggling teetering bachelorettes? What a nutritious breakfast, kids! Full o’ all essential vitamins and lies!

And what does it mean that theatre and art and thought are dying in our arms after being stabbed in the heart (or lung, hard to tell which) by the era of Bush? It means, I believe, that the graveyards filled with the headstones comprised of tall gray corporate office buildings become more and more crowded, and the “loved ones” of said corpses will have only a harder time finding the right gravestone. The flowers, candles, and teddy bears of our grief are more often left at the wrong plot. And, at the end of his shift, the Caretaker of our great Cemetery snickers as he gathers the misplaced tokens and sells them to banks and corporations who sit at his great table to dine each and every night at precisely profit:30 PM.

“CTRL-ALT-LOVE” tells the story of a young aspiring sitcom writer who is too humble to believe that the super model who lives next door has fallen head-over-heels for him. The writer also has a roommate who is quirky.

Thank you for coming tonight and putting yourself on the front line for true art/life.

I only need one snuff film: the Word of the Lord.

It molests and then kills sin and wickedness.