Free Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler

yards later we came to the end of the pier, where there were people scattered about. I immediately saw Johnny facing us, wearing a hoodie and holding a video camera. The sign was to his right. I knew that Ted's keen sense of unawareness would help him take a while to find either one, so I let him run around like a labrador retriever for a few minutes looking for the funeral party while I was trying to stop my urethra from fully discharging all over the Santa Monica Pier. Once he came down from the observation deck, waving his arms in the air, saying, "We missed it! I knew we were going to be late!" I got myself together enough to point to the poster.
    "What's that?" I asked.
    This was the sign we had made:

    Two days later I showed the video on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno . I haven't played any jokes on Ted since, but Brad did try to persuade me to fake Dudley's death again a week later to see if Ted would believe it. "Say he really died this time!" Brad howled.

Chapter Five
Wedding Chopper
    M y oldest friend in Los Angeles, Lydia, was getting married, and it was a miracle. I didn't ever expect her to have the wherewithal to actually follow through with a wedding that would require others to attend. She'd been engaged for over two years, and my assumption was that Lydia would approach her nuptials like most other milestones in her life: She would most likely lose interest.
    When she finally did notify me about the imminent wedding, it was by an AOL instant message: "Chels, save the date. The wedding is going to be on May 28 in the Palisades!"
    "Is this the invitation?" I typed back.
    "No! Of course not! What's your address? I'm doing them right now!"
    That is how Lydia operated. Her disorderliness had always been her strong suit, and this is coming from someone who hasn't worn a matching pair of socks since Reagan was shot. It wouldn't have been a surprise to me at all if I had received a third-grader's birthday-party invitation to her wedding with the time, date, and location all filled out in block letters on top of preprinted horizontal black lines.
    Something along the lines of:
Occasion: WEDDING
Time: 2-4 P.M.
Location: OLIVE GARDEN
    I typed in my address and asked her where the wedding was.
    "At Mercedes's."
    "The dealership?"
    "LOL!!!"
    I wasn't joking, but I quickly lost interest in the conversation due to the fact that despite my having spoken to Lydia at great length about misplaced enthusiasm, she insisted on using exclamation points in lieu of periods and continued pairing them with my least favorite invention, LOL. You wouldn't say LOL if you were out to lunch with someone, so why would you write it in an instant message or an e-mail? Just laugh alone in your office or house. I don't need to be notified that you're laughing. If someone is busy laughing, then how do they have the time to be typing the letters LOL? More important, I was midway through a letter to Dear Abby that I'd been constructing for the better part of the winter, and I wasn't about to lose my confidence now. I hated that after Abby crossed over, her daughter continued her mother's advice column without changing its name from "Dear Abby" to "Dear Abby's Fucking Daughter." It wasn't an easy pill to swallow for those of us who didn't read the column the day Abby's daughter informed readers that she was taking over. The one day she decided to mention her mother was dead happened to coincide with me taking a one-day tie-dying class at the Y, and for months I was left nonplussed by Abby's out-of-left-field advice.
    "I'll be there," I wrote back to Lydia. "Wouldn't miss it for the world."
    I hadn't spent a lot of time with Lydia since she'd gotten herself engaged. It wasn't intentional at all; we just sort of drifted apart after she asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding, and I coughed loudly enough to pretend I didn't hear her.
    I instant-messaged Ivory and asked her what Mercedes's was.
    "Some new girl Lydia's made friends with who works a