Any friend of Bizzy’s was a friend of ours, we figured. Usually that statement is literal. She doesn’t go out on her own much, because she’s one foot tall and doesn’t have thumbs, and she pretty much knows only the people we introduce her to. We were glad to hire Bengey to help fill his calendar and also check one more item off our Sisyphean wedding prep to-do list. And look, once you’ve committed to doing someone that kind of favor, why not give him the green light to “do Michael Jackson” as well?
“Great,” Bengey said. “I’ve got an outfit, and I’m also a dancer.”
“Oh, okay,” Maris added. “One song seems like it could be fun I guess. Maybe ‘The Way You Make Me Feel.’ It’s already on our playlist.”
Making the playlist was literally the first wedding planning we’d done. Technically, two playlists. A sixty-minute compilation for the preceremony “cocktail hour,” and 180+ minutes for the reception itself. We compiled it while on a road trip a week after we got engaged. We were very excited about the playlist, and when Maris invoked it, I remembered that the wedding was Her Special Day as well as mine, and it would be rude to impose unwanted dance performances on her. After all, I was marrying Maris, not DJ Bengey.
“Yeah,” I reiterated. “That sounds good. It is already on the playlist.”
“Great,” Bengey replied.
We all stood up, including Bizzy, who hopped off the couch, ready to be walked, confused that the three of us had been talking together so long, not walking her. Maris and I shook Bengey’s hand, and I didn’t think about Michael Jackson until the day of our wedding. And even then, the concept of our wedding DJ impersonating the late King of Pop at the reception merely flickered across my consciousness, an abstraction more than a reality.
I had other things on my mind that day. I wasn’t nervous, just busy. There was family to wrangle. There were pictures to take. I had to remember to bring my change of shoes to the venue.
There’s no real reason to be afraid on your wedding day. Even if everything goes wrong with the logistics, it’ll be fine. You’ll still end up married. And as long as you don’t leave in the middle, you aren’t going to ruin the event. No matter what you do, half of the people in the room are there explicitly to support you. You could cry, stammer, trip, or punch someone in the back of the head, and at worst, you’d lose 50 percent of the crowd. It’s your wedding, and a general rule of public speaking is even more true on that day: everyone is rooting for you, and nobody is going to be mad if you screw up a little bit.
The only legitimate wedding-day fear is that your partner will get cold feet and bail. And if you have any inkling that could happen, holy shit, you two shouldn’t be getting married in the first place.
I’m not exactly an unbiased source, but in my opinion, Maris and I had a very good wedding. Some of that comes down to good luck: The weather held out. There was no family drama. No one “spoke now or forever held their peace.” But in my (again, biased) view, we also did a good job with the planning.
If you are wondering how to make a wedding excellent, here are a few tips:
No bridesmaids or groomsmen. You’re trying to celebrate your love, not rank your closest friends and send them on a yearlong scavenger hunt for matching outfits and accessories (or two scavenger hunts if the bachelor or bachelorette party involves a planned scavenger hunt).
Plenty of chairs, but no assigned seating. People decide who they want to sit next to every day of their lives. They can also do it at your wedding. If there’s friction between relatives, they can suck it up for three hours. This also enables superior, buffet-style dining, so no guest has to passive-aggressively be like, “Hey, not to be a pain in the ass, but . . . I’m pretty sure I asked for the fish. No big deal, but I haven’t eaten red meat in eleven years, so there’s no way I would have chosen the steak. Just wondering if maybe somebody else got the fish that I absolutely, definitely ordered. No presh.”
Limit the speeches. We let only our parents talk. Well, everyone could talk, but no one else was given a microphone and the room’s full attention. If a friend wanted to say a few meaningful words, he or she could quit being a coward and say them to my face.
And if you really want to make your event memorable, hire a Michael Jackson impersonator and fail to consider the practical ramifications of that decision for several weeks. Sure, this offhand gesture of goodwill toward an acquaintance could become legitimately uncomfortable. But, in my experience, it led to the second-best moment of my wedding day.
(The best moment is not a great story. It was the quiet instant right after the ceremony when everything was in transition, and Maris and I had a moment to ourselves to find an out-of-the-way place to check in with one another and be in love. That is not a euphemism, I swear.)
Through the ceremony and cocktail hour, DJ Bengey performed admirably, hitting all the right cues, and even turning the music down a little bit when my dad thought it was too loud. He stuck mostly to the list of songs we’d given him, although he did defy Maris’s “No line dances!” direction, much to her dismay but the extreme delight of my aunt Judith, who had been waiting all evening to show off her Cha Cha Slide and Macarena skills.
Then, about halfway through the reception, the music stopped. DJ Bengey stepped out from behind the table that held his equipment. He had peeled off his suit jacket and replaced it with a red leather bomber. He held a microphone in one hand. The other was sheathed in a rhinestone-studded glove. He was, of course, doing Michael Jackson.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced. “I have a surprise for the bride and the groom. I told them about this a few weeks ago, but I’m pretty sure they’ve forgotten by now.”
While this performance was not exactly top of mind for me, I had absolutely not forgotten about that conversation. When someone tells you that he intends to impersonate Michael Jackson at your wedding, it tends to stick with you. But while I remembered that Bengey’s performance loomed, I hadn’t told anyone else about it.
So when he emerged in costume, it was a surprise for everyone except me and Maris. And, given Bengey’s intro, our guests had no reason to believe that we weren’t also stunned by this turn of events. Some relatives who had not noted what the DJ looked like earlier were not even aware that’s who Bengey was. They assumed an intoxicated friend had hijacked the sound system for an impromptu toast.
“Hit it!” said DJ Bengey to my friend Will, whom he had deputized as assistant DJ for this crucial moment. Will hit it. The opening snare drum from “Billie Jean” blared over the sound system, full blast. “Billie Jean,” if you remember, was not the Michael Jackson song we had put on our playlist. It is also not a good song for weddings, period. If you aren’t familiar, it’s basically a five-minute-long recounting of a paternity suit. The music choice felt, let’s say, inauspicious for day one of a new marriage.
But there was no time to quibble or protest. Bengey retrieved two Party City–type plastic fedoras from the DJ table. He placed one on my head and one on Maris’s. By the time the signature bloop bloops of the song had kicked in, a circle had formed around DJ Bengey. Some of the party guests clapped their hands to the beat in delight. Others peered at the spectacle before them, not quite sure what was happening. A sense of intrigue filled the room like the synthetic cloud made by a fog machine.3
To his credit, DJ Bengey had some excellent moves. His hand motions were crisp. His footwork was fluid. He even pulled off a credible moonwalk. By the second chorus, he had brought the whole crowd onto his side with his skills, despite not looking a lot like Michael Jackson. He’s Black, yes, but also he’s at least 6'2" and has dreadlocks. Through all of MJ’s numerous style choices through the years, he was never 6'2" with dreadlocks. But despite that discrepancy, DJ Bengey managed to evoke vintage Michael Jackson even to the 20 percent of the audience composed of old Jewish cousins who pictured late-period surgical mask Mike more readily than Thriller Mike.
Here’s the best part, though. The song’s outro began. In cas
e you don’t remember, “Billie Jean” takes roughly as long to ease into its conclusion as a flight after the pilot announces the final descent. (“Another thirty minutes of this? Really?”) In the waning minutes of “Billie Jean,” Bengey danced back toward me and Maris. With a practiced flick of his wrist, he plucked the plastic hat from my head. He leaned toward me and stage-whispered “The hat lights up” over MJ’s pleading vocals and of course the ongoing synthesizer bloops. I think he even winked, but I may be remembering that wrong.
My closest friends and relatives as well as Maris’s closest friends and relatives stood in a circle around us. After all, it was our wedding, and we were talking to a man dressed as, and dancing in the style of, Michael Jackson. They furrowed their brows, not having heard Bengey’s promise, and watched as he hit the little button on the inside of the hat four . . . five . . . six times.
The hat did not light up.
Cool as a beer in the back of the fridge, DJ Bengey dropped the hat back onto my head. He leaned in to whisper again: “The hat used to light up.”
He shrugged and moonwalked across the room while I doubled over, fully overwhelmed by the moment, my head buried in my hands, my eyes streaming with laugh tears. And when I told Maris what he’d said, she laughed, too.
I guess what I’m saying is sometimes things work out for the best.4
The Best Moments of My Wedding #3–10
Hearing my wife’s vows
Reading my wife my vows
Seeing so many friends and relatives together in one room
The custom T-shirt my dad made with the punch line to one of my stand-up jokes about him on it that he changed into before giving a toast
The presence of cake1
Maris’s four-year-old niece’s incredibly vigorous dancing
Changing into sneakers after the ceremony
Lin-Manuel Miranda writing us personalized song lyrics about getting married on Twitter
Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down
For the last four years I have couched every admission that my personal life and career have trended in a positive direction with a caveat about the state of the world at large.
“I’m doing great other than how terrible things are,” I’d say. Or, “Everything’s been really good except for . . . you know . . . everything.”
The assault on civil liberties, reproductive health, and the social safety net has made increasing progress thanks to the relentlessness of its perpetrators and the colossal shithead charisma of an American president who makes people the world over shake their heads and mutter, “This fuckin’ guy?” But things haven’t just gotten bad recently. For a lot of people, things already were bad.
The realization manifested in different ways for everyone. Some of my friends, disillusioned with electoral politics, threw themselves into grassroots organizing. Others, determined to change the system from within, ran for office. A few simply followed the president on social media and moaned in anguish at each incoherent post. I struggled to define a line between activism and obsession, and on the other end of the “how much to engage” spectrum, self-preservation and cowardice.
I imagine that if you have made it this far into this book without throwing it into a fire or sending me an angry/concerned email, you may have wrestled with similar questions. It’s hard to know how to look out for people, and how much to give of yourself. What constitutes giving too much, and, on the other hand, what’s stopping you from giving more?
I attended the first Women’s March in New York City in January 2017 and the second one a year later.1 The first year, my wife, Maris, made a sign reading: NOLITE TE BASTARDES CARBORUNDORUM! an almost-Latin phrase taken from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale that means, roughly, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down!” Maris and I met up with friends in Midtown Manhattan for the protest. We trudged through the crowded city streets, energized by fear and outrage and thwarted by the slow progress of the marchers in front of us. It took almost two hours, but we walked the twentysomething blocks from Grand Central Terminal up to Trump Tower. We booed, gave the building the middle finger, and then headed home, unsure of precisely what to do next.
There was a real emotional power to coming together in support of a common cause, and in this case the cause was “the rights of 50ish percent of the world’s population.” There were signs promoting abortion rights, demanding an end to the gender (and racial) pay gap, decrying sexual harassment and assault, and calling for equal rights for transgender women. Even if you are the kind of person who does not think those are all worthy goals (and they are, by the way), you would have to be a real asshole to oppose an event with the blanket goal of improving the lives of women.
Maris and I lasted only half an hour at the second Women’s March, in part because it started at the foot of a Trump-branded property by Columbus Circle on Fifty-Ninth Street. When you get to give a Donald Trump–adjacent building the middle finger at the beginning of a protest, there’s nowhere to go from there but down. We shuffled five blocks north in thirty minutes and then, not knowing what we were walking toward, we wriggled past the metal crowd control barriers and doubled back the way we came. We felt guilty, but nobody would miss us, we reasoned.
It’s easy to support the kind of protests whose goals even the most ardent and disingenuous opponents have a hard time willfully misconstruing. The ones that are planned months in advance for a Saturday afternoon. Where parents bring kids with hand-knit hats and cute puns written in glitter to protest gender inequality. In New York City, it’s not exactly a controversial stance, even in Midtown Manhattan at the foot of a towering building bearing the Trump name.
My record is spottier in terms of showing up for more difficult demonstrations. The ones called for at the last minute to protest a new flare-up of an old injustice, a cold sore on the lip of liberty. When, say, a man selling loose cigarettes is choked to death by a police officer and a vigil is planned. Or when a few hundred people barricade an ICE facility, using their bodies as a barrier between undocumented immigrants and incarceration. In those cases, it’s easy to not show up, because I am scared of the fight.
When President Trump implemented his original ban against travelers from several majority-Muslim nations into the United States, people mobilized hard and fast. Crowds assembled outside airport terminals. Makeshift legal clinics sprouted up in waiting areas to help reunite people with family members, including some who were literally in the sky as the order was handed down. The administration hadn’t considered these issues, or, more likely, did not give a shit what became of these people.
I missed the first round of protests, ironically because I was already at JFK airport in Queens, waiting to board a cross-country flight. It felt like riding out an entire hurricane in the eye. Wow, it sure looks turbulent right outside, but weirdly I’m untouched. While I sat in the terminal, I donated some money to some refugee assistance organizations and read the news on my phone until the battery nearly flatlined.
When I tour as a comedian, I usually set up a merch table after the shows and donate the profits to a good cause, an LGBT youth crisis hotline or hurricane relief in Puerto Rico, and then I personally match the donations. And sure, that’s nice. But also it gets my albums and posters and pins into people’s hands. So how nice is it, really?
I never quite measure up to the person I’d like to be. My contributions to causes come from a distance. I try to use my modest platform to disseminate useful information or raise funds, but I am trying to do more, especially in light of the fact that my straight white male privilege shields me from many of the uglier abuses faced by women, people of color, and queer people (not to mention those whose identities involve an intersection of those qualities).
Wouldn’t it be better if I were an immigration lawyer or a labor organizer or a tenants’ rights advocate or a special education teacher like my friends from college? Or maybe this is the best way to support the good work being done by people in those
fields. Or maybe that is just something people who don’t want to try harder say to avoid having to try harder. It’s hard to know what the right way is to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, on Election Day 2016, I was too intimidated by the phone-banking website and the prospect of being hung up on by strangers to actually sign up to make calls on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. Say what you will about Hillary Clinton—not to me; whisper it into a paper bag and then throw the bag in a fire, because I do not want to talk about her with you—but by November 8, 2016, she was the better and only choice for president, and I did not help because why? I didn’t wanna sign up for an email list?
Around the same time as the airport protests over the travel ban, the news was interviewing a white supremacist—because they do that now—and then someone ran by and punched him in the face. And it was awesome. I watched the footage, on loop, a lot. I can say with confidence that it was as good as any of the Captain America movies, even though I have never seen them.
Seeing an avowed white nationalist get punched in the head by a concerned citizen felt as good to me as I imagine it felt bad to him. Some people wrote essays about how we should not celebrate the punching of a Nazi, how it is a slippery slope, and who is to say who is and is not a Nazi? “Is anyone with ‘unorthodox views’ or ‘unpopular opinions’ all of a sudden a Nazi?” they asked. The answer to that question is “Of course not.” First of all, racism is astonishingly orthodox and popular in the present day. Second, you have to draw the line over who’s good to punch somewhere, and at least a segment of that line should point at anyone who says white people are intrinsically superior to people of other races.
Even though I don’t support all, or even most punching, I come down squarely on the side of people who punch Nazis, simply because it rules when bad things happen to white supremacists. It’s a moral good, and I bet it feels amazing to do. I’ll take it this far: I’d like to think that I’m the kind of guy who would, himself, punch a Nazi in the face. But I worry that I don’t have it in me. Or that I wouldn’t do a good job at punching. Or that I’d accidentally punch a non-Nazi with that swooping haircut they have now and then I’d have to be like, “Whoops, sorry, Macklemore!”
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