The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (4 page)

Death of a Catchphrase

L
ast Saturday night,
at approximately 8:23
P.M
., the phrase It’s All Good quietly passed away while appearing in a prime-time commercial for Buick. The cause of death was officially determined as “overexposure,” though the phrase had indeed lived an extended and prosperous life, having a long-standing returning role on
The Jerry Springer Show
and
The View.

Survived by his wife, You Go Girl!, and his children, Don’t Go There and Talk to the Hand!, the slang star was born in a school yard when several third-graders were fighting over a piece of Laffy Taffy and it fell onto the ground. Kenny Moses, a grammatically challenged fat child, scraped the dirt off of the taffy with a Popsicle stick and proclaimed, “It’s All Good!” After spreading through the school like wildfire, it was apparent that the phrase showed promise of a future in slang when several adults repeatedly asked, “Will you please stop saying that! What does that mean?” Soon It’s All Good found a home in the hallways of middle and high schools. It was just a matter of time before someone noticed that It’s All Good had star quality with a potential for greatness.

Spotted soon after in a nightclub by agent and retired slang star Dy-NO-mite!, It’s All Good immediately signed with the once household name and found himself trudging to cattle calls.

“It was hard on him,” said Dy-NO-mite!. “You go to these auditions, you give them all you got. You’re spit and polished. And for what? They come back and say, ‘Sorry, we need something with more pizzazz,’ or ‘Thanks, but we’re really looking for a noun.’ That gets to you, man, that can really eat you up. There were a couple of auditions when I thought, ‘This is it!’ but later we’d find out that it went to
Hasta La Vista,
Baby, or Run, Forrest, Run! Those were hard times, I tell you, hard times.”

Finally, however, It’s All Good got his first big break into slang when he played a brief and nearly unnoticeable part on an episode of
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Star Will Smith decided to use him at the last minute, replacing No Way, José, who had just checked into drug rehab for the third time. Within weeks, It’s All Good was appearing on every episode and soon became a regular, which led to guest spots on
Dawson’s Creek, Felicity,
and
Dharma & Greg.

“All of a sudden, It’s All Good was everywhere,” remembered his wife, You Go Girl!, who met her future husband on the set of
Ricki Lake.
“It was overnight, it seemed. People couldn’t get enough. He was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.”

His star was riding high. Jay Leno, Letterman, and Conan were calling. There was talk of an HBO special, a record deal, and an opening slot on the Britney Spears tour, and rumors were flying like gunfire about a possible Budweiser campaign. Things were looking great. And then disaster struck.

Negotiations with the beer giant crumbled when It’s All Good insisted that his younger brother, It’s All Aight (commonly known simply as Aight), be included in the campaign as well. Worried that “Aight’s” troubled past and affiliation with Sean Combs (then known as P. Diddy) would negatively affect the campaign, Budweiser pulled its offer when It’s All Good refused to budge. Word got around that he was difficult to deal with, and the phone stopped ringing.

“He got a fat head,” Dy-NO-mite! recalled. “But then another brother team, Wasssup? and What Are YOU Doing?, was hired for the campaign. That was the nail in the coffin, man. Punks!”

It’s All Good dropped out of sight, and it seemed that his once brilliant career was over. Younger, more splashier slang expressions such as No You Di’in’t and All Ate Up started to fill his spots, and most people, with the exception of teenage, truck-driving males in Yuma, Arizona, and Mudlick, Idaho, began to forget their former favorite expression.

Despite the production of bumper stickers, T-shirts, and Post-it notes with his image, It’s All Good was on his way to has-been status. But one day last fall, it looked as if his luck was about to change. Dy-NO-Mite! received a call from Buick, which was looking to create a “trendy and dope” ad campaign. And they wanted It’s All Good for their slogan.

“I found him in a seedy slang bar, sitting in between Keep On Truckin’ and Where’s the Beef?,” the agent recalled. “It was pitiful. He had begun selling some of his letters, even vowels, to pay for the booze. I almost didn’t recognize him. ‘’s All Goo, ’s All Goo,’ is what he said to me. He was a broken phrase, just broken.”

His agent cleaned and sobered him up and took him to the shoot. According to people on the set, the talent of It’s All Good had not faded, and he produced what some say was his best work to date. It was a glorious comeback. Tragically, however, it wasn’t to last.

When the first Buick commercial aired on Saturday, It’s All Good uttered his last breath and quietly faded away to the other side.

“He’ll live in our hearts forever,” You Go Girl! said as she wiped away a tear, “or at least on that Buick commercial until next year’s models come out. I heard No Way, José got that part.”

Sickening

W
hen I found
my seat on the airplane, the woman sitting beside me looked completely normal. She wasn’t missing teeth, she didn’t have any pronounced facial scabs, her hair appeared freshly washed, and I sincerely doubted that the octogenarian sitting next to her was a deputy extraditing a passenger. So, when she open-mouthed coughed as she was flipping through the airline magazine, I politely cleared my throat. When the second open-mouthed cough shot out of her like a bullet approximately a minute later, I cleared my throat again and gave her a warning look, which involves furrowing my brow, turning the corners of my mouth downward, and deeply expressing with my eyes “If you want to keep coughing like that, we’ll give you a sedative, put you in a crate, and stick you in the cargo hold with the rest of the livestock.” After approximately sixty seconds had passed and she erupted her foul lung discharge with no preventative barrier yet again, all bets were off and I reached into my purse and pulled out my bird-flu mask.

Curiously enough, the next cough that came from her body was, as expected, blocked by her manicured hand, which had finally roused enough initiative to reach up and cover her rictus of a mouth. Apparently, nothing says “Pardon me, but I’ve seen better manners on African dictators who use skulls for candlesticks. Kindly resist the compelling urge to spread your foul disease via your cannon of a mouth by simply covering it” like an N95-rated bird-flu mask that barely leaves anything but my eyes visible and lets everyone on the plane know that I drew the short straw and got the seat assignment next to Typhoid Mary.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t always the kind of person who keeps a bird-flu mask in her purse just in case she finds herself in an episode of “When Open-Mouthed Coughers Attack.” Nope. I used to be the kind of person who would ignore the vestiges of illness and was even known on occasion to extend an acknowledgment of blessing should someone sneeze in my company. But no more. Once you have seen the white light of disease, there is no going back, there is no ignoring the things you have been enlightened about. And for me, it happened on a sunny Saturday morning when I was flipping channels while enjoying a hot cup of tea, unaware that what I was about to see would bring to my life change in such epic proportions that I would begin to carry nothing short of a hazmat suit with me at all times. On that Saturday morning, I began watching a Discovery Health Channel show about how people get sick.

And there, on the television, was Holly, a girl who was standing in an elevator with a man who was getting ready to destroy her life.

He coughed on her.

Poor Holly. There she was, completely unaware while millions of minute mucus particles, each carrying the flu virus, exploded into the air like rain. It was their germ mission to land on her and try to find their way into an opening of her body, much like a date I once had attempted with me. Then one successful particle invaded her through her nose.

It was all over.

I knew how Holly felt, because I had been sick three times that fall, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. In fact, I suspected that my most recent illness was due to a lady who had gotten into an elevator I was in and coughed all over me like she was plucked out of the Middle Ages before she got off on the next floor. Now that I had seen Holly’s show and knew how germs worked, I was going to protect myself.

My husband, however, saw danger.

“What is all this?” he asked when he came home as I was unloading the groceries I had just bought. “Antibacterial hand wash, antibacterial tissues…do I sense an obsession?”

“No,” I said simply. “It’s not an obsession. It’s not an interest. It is my new way of life. I am now a germophobe.”

“Why can’t you have another hobby?” my husband pleaded. “Like exercise or dusting? Laundry would be a
very
good hobby for you. Think of how healthy we could be if we actually had clean clothes! Oh God. You watched a Discovery Health Channel show about cold and flu germs, didn’t you?”

“I will just admit to being more aware of the bacterial challenges around me in the everyday world than I was last night when I went to sleep,” I confessed.

“I thought we agreed that you weren’t going to watch ‘Things That Invade Your Body’ shows on Discovery Health Channel anymore after what happened last time,” my husband said with a very stern face.

He, of course, was referring to the parasites and tapeworm documentary we watched together about people who had gone to crazy, unsanitary places in the world and had come back with some new friends in tow, such as jungle butt worms. My husband was particularly horrified by the story of one gentleman who had recently returned from Vietnam with a new pal he named George, which was a worm that lived—kindly steady yourself—under his skin and would travel all over his host’s body, until one night while he was on a business trip and staying in a hotel, the host spotted George wiggling across his upper thigh, had enough, grabbed the closest sharp object, which I believe was a ballpoint pen, and dug that little asshole out. While my husband writhed in disgust, I promptly added Vietnam to my list of Places Too Gross, Too Lacking in Private Potties, or with Entirely Too Vague of a Cuisine to Visit (any country that considers the heads of animals as dinner gets on the list).