Free It's All Relative by Wade Rouse Page A

theme parties.
    I sat in silence, staring at him, cradling my butter knife, thinking the world would be a much better place with one less mime in it.
    He sensed my discomfort.
    â€œHey, would you mind if I went and washed my face?”
    He grabbed a duffel bag he had shoved away under the table, and when he was around the corner, I seriously toyed with the idea of just leaving—simply standing up, running to my car, and driving away. That is, if my legs would only work.
    â€œA mime is just a person in makeup,” I told myself, before altering the line to better suit my state of mind. “A mime is just a man … and I need to have sex with a man.”
    When the mime returned, sans white face paint, I was stunned. He was cute, very cute, actually, in kind of a Billy Crudup sort of way. He had shed his bodysuit and changed into tight jeans and a formfitting T-shirt. He had a great body, lean and muscled, like a gymnast’s.
    He’s smokin
’, I thought irrationally, kind of like when I saw Jeffrey Dahmer on TV for the first time and my initial reaction was, “He’s not bad-looking … 
for a serial killer
.”
    And then the waitress came over to take our order and my date did exactly what I had prayed he wouldn’t: He broke into mime mode. He pantomime-rubbed his belly—“I’m so hungry!” he seemed to say—before stretching his mouth into a rubber-faced smile—the “How delicious!” part of his act, I guess.
    It was finally at that moment I had the breakthrough my therapisthad never been able to reach: I realized maybe I wasn’t
terrified
of clowns and mimes. Maybe I just despised their act.
    I don’t even remember what I ordered, but it got a series of mime-like gestures of jealousy, like, “Why didn’t I get that?”
    For the next hour I sat quietly as he entertained the waitstaff and surrounding children, doing a painfully bad Marcel Marceau shtick.
    Just get out of the box already
, I wanted to scream.
There has to be a lid on it, otherwise you couldn’t have gotten trapped inside it in the first place
.
    And it’s not windy inside the restaurant, and there is no trapdoor in the floor—I can still see your legs under the table
.
    And please, please, stop fake crying because that little boy wouldn’t give you a bite of his chocolate cake. You’re just scaring the kid, and he’s going to carry lifelong scars from this day, just like I have
.
    At the end of lunch, the mime turned his attention back to me and said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to ignore you. It’s just so hard being a recognized artist.”
    Recognized artist?
    When did a mime officially become an “artist,” I wanted to know? If so, shouldn’t caricaturists and rodeo clowns be included in that special group of gifted performers?
    â€œExcuse me,” I said. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
    Instead I walked straight to the door and left.
    The last image I had of my mime as I scurried past the restaurant window was of him sitting there, his mug all squenched up in a troubled look, his hands in midair, doing the “I’m confused!” bit to a nearby group of diners. As they laughed, he transformed his rubber face into some sort of goofily asinine expression and began swirling his right forefinger around his temple in order to indicate that I was crazy.
    Perhaps I am, I thought as I strolled down the street, but at least I knew I was sane enough not to have sex with a mime.
    I mean, can you imagine the hand gesture that would have prompted?

ST. PATRICK’S DAY
The O’Rouses
    T he only Irishman I knew growing up was my father.
    Okay, he wasn’t Irish in the least. And we lived in the Ozarks.
    He was “pretend Irish,” as my mother called it, “which is exactly like being a little bit pregnant,” she’d finish. “Either you are or you