I've Got This Round

by Mamrie Hart

  “Man, Stefon really let himself go. Maybe he got out of the club scene and this is rehab weight gain?”

  “I wonder if Bill knows he was born a twin but the other one was adopted in France. What’s Bill in French? Still Bill?”

  “Really cool the studio let Bill get out of his Trainwreck press tour to come live his true dream. Life’s too short, ya know?”

  Moulin Rouge is not the place you are supposed to be belly laughing; it’s supposed to be a sultry and swanky experience. Laughing at the show was as if your partner was dirty talking during sex and you return the favor by guffawing in their face. I was squeezing Jess’s thigh with a death grip. Luckily, the lights went dim, and Fat Hader exited the stage before I ripped her leg off and threw it on the table à la Aviva popping off her prosthetic on season 6 of The Real Housewives of New York City.

  We all agreed that this felt like the Moulin Rouge B-squad. It’s like how people expect the Hollywood Walk of Fame to be glamorous but then when they get there, it’s actually filled with dudes in knockoff Wolverine costumes charging five dollars for a pic. This wasn’t that big of a letdown, but it was definitely the dollar-store version of what I had imagined. And it was making me laugh so hard.

  I took some deep breaths and a few sips of champagne and tried to get back to normal. A few minutes later, the lights went dim again and the music started back up. The orchestral music was swirling as a spotlight shone at an opening at the far-left corner of the stage, several feet off the ground. We waited eagerly, staring at that spotlight waiting for something majestic to emerge and then finally it did. . . . Slowly but surely came . . .

  FAT BILL HADER SUSPENDED BY CABLES DRESSED AS AN ASTRONAUT.

  I lost my shit. Fuck the mumbles. Fuck trying not to injure my friends with my flailing arms and leg squeezes. I was losing my goddamn mind, arms a-flailing. At one point, my hand hit something hard, and I looked back to see an annoyed Gerard the Waiter trying to open this beautiful French brut as this brute American was acting like she was at a Larry the Cable Guy show.

  Fat Bill Hader continued to walk in slow motion as the overworked cables slowly tracked him to the center of the room. There, he met his lady astronaut, who had come out from the opposite side of the stage as they lip-synched a love song together. This was no Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor falling in love while singing “Heroes.” And if this was space travel, “Paris, we have a problem.” After what felt like days, they finally pulled FBH backstage, just as slowly as he came out. And just like an astronaut returning to Earth, I could finally breathe again.

  The show continued to be a ridiculous parade of costumes and dance numbers, each outdoing the last in level of showmanship and not making a lick of damn sense. After it ended, we bundled up and walked back into the cold Parisian night.

  We all stood there in front of that neon windmill, flabbergasted at what we’d just seen. The Moulin Rouge couldn’t have been more different than what I had imagined it to be. . . . It was even better. While I loved the mystique surrounding the idea of it all, it was comforting to know that its fabled level of glamour wasn’t really accurate. And as a redneck Gypsy who once stripped in front of her grandpa and had a baby lamb piss in her lap onstage, I felt right at home.

  After a few minutes of recapping, we said our good-byes—a kiss on each cheek, of course, because we were in France. It was such a quick visit, but that was okay because three weeks later, I was back in Europe with Jess, for a trip we actually had planned to be on together. Oddly enough, we found ourselves at yet another sexy stage show, but this one was going to be a little different. . . .

  Amster-dayum

  AMSTERDAM. 4/20. DIXIE CHICKS.

  One of these things is not like the others. However, all three of these things added together equals the most epic girls’ trip on the books. Or at least in this book. Let’s start from the beginning. . . .

  Okay, so I like cool music. I know I sound like someone who is rationalizing their taste after their friend finds a Smash Mouth concert ticket in their purse, but you gotta trust me on this. You’re talking to someone who decided to go to a George Clinton concert on her twenty-first birthday. I can do David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane face paint on myself with my eyes closed. I have shaken Neil Young’s hand and not fainted as he told me he loved my name. While most of my musical tastes fall in the rock-and-roll category, there’s always been a special place in my heart for country music. Lady singers, especially. I’m talking Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette,* and the queen, Dolly Parton. As far as I’m concerned, once you have fleets of drag queens impersonating you, you’ve made it. I can only hope to be so lucky one day.

  These women are the classics, the standards. In the steakhouse of country music, they’re the prime rib. But every so often, you just need some greasy drive-through, ya know? In other words, sometimes you just need to crank some Top 40 pop country and scream-sing about a terrible ex-boyfriend or how you’re drinking beer in a field somewhere. It’s one of my unconventional methods of therapy. No disrespect to actual therapy, which is super useful and necessary for lots of people. Therapy is great! But this particular emotional release of singing/screaming at the top of my lungs is something that’s been working for me since high school. Your lover do you wrong? Crank up Wynonna Judd’s “No One Else on Earth.” Leaving your home state to go follow your dreams on the other side of the country? Why, that’s a perfect moment to dance to Jo Dee Messina’s “Heads Carolina, Tails California.” Get to California and feel like white trash in West Hollywood? Crank Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” to eleven and get pumped about where you came from. I connect with these songs.

  Unlike my bust size, my love of country music developed early in life. This is thanks, in part, to the fact that I grew up in Boonville, North Carolina. Imagine your quintessential small town in America. Now, shrink that down to 10 percent and throw in a lot of cows. That’s Boonville. To say I grew up in the sticks would be giving it too much credit. I grew up in the twigs. A place where lyrics about hooking up down by the river were relatable, seeing as the Fridays of my senior year were spent camping out on the banks of the Yadkin River with the quarterback and a quart of MD 20/20. While the average person might scoff at a song about a woman slashing the tires of her cheating boyfriend’s Dodge Ram, if you lived in Boonville, you not only related to this, you probably had a cousin on probation for that very charge! That’s how country Boonville was. Pop country feels like home to me like jazz does to New Orleans.

  My high school years were prime time for country-pop music. You had your Martina McBrides, your Faith Hills, your Sara Evanses. It was a golden age for stacked-bob hairdos and flared light-wash jeans. But of all the music that blasted through my shitty Honda Accord speakers during those high school years, the most frequently played had to be the Dixie Chicks.

  The Dixie Chicks are comprised of three gals, two of them sisters, who all sing like angels and play their instruments like devils. Specifically, a devil that went down to Georgia because one of them rocks the fiddle like a BOSS. Right out the gate, you know that the Dixie Chicks are the shit because they have the word “dixie” in their name. “Dixie” refers to the historical nickname for the South, but in my heart it’s in honor of Dixie Carter from Designing Women. Both Dixies, the group and Julia Sugarbaker, have more sass in their left titty on a typical Tuesday than most people carry in their whole body during a lifetime.

  When the Chicks burst onto the scene (or should I say “hatched”?) with their breakthrough album, Wide Open Spaces, I was in love. Who are these brassy blond songbirds who can not only carry some sick three-part harmonies but also play their own instruments?! I can’t tell you how many high school afternoons were spent cruising around the back roads of my little county with my friend Emily, windows down, singing our asses off to that album. I can close my eyes and be taken back to those moments: the humid country air whipping through our hair, the smell of
honeysuckle in our noses, and the occasional fast-and-furious rolling-up of the windows because we were passing a chicken house and those reeked so fucking bad.

  Our love of singing that album was not confined only to my Accord or Emily’s Plymouth, either. Occasionally, when we were feeling ballsy, we’d sneak into the one bar within a twenty-mile radius of my house to sing “Wide Open Spaces” at karaoke night. Yep, just your average bar filled with drunk rednecks and two sixteen-year-olds in head-to-toe Abercrombie & Fitch, trying to break out some show choir harmonies. Two members of the Little Rascals standing on each other’s shoulders in a long trench coat pretending to be one tall adult would have blended in better than we did.

  Wide Open Spaces and Fly weren’t just catchy albums. They also had massive critical acclaim, too, racking up Grammys left and right. I thought nothing could stop the Dixie Chicks from soaring . . . until the Bush incident. The Chicks were performing at a concert in London right around the time when America was invading Iraq. Never one to shield her opinions, Natalie told the crowd, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Big whoop, right?! I mean, as I write this, that misogynist Cheeto of a man (Trump) is our president and says such blasphemous vitriol that I feel like I’m tripping every time I turn on the news. Meanwhile, Natalie says one comment and people started throwing their Fly CDs into a bonfire. Isn’t that unbelievable? And not just because the visual of a bunch of burning CDs is so archaic. But just like that, the Chicks went into hibernation.

  Despite not having a new album in a decade, I’d still listen to all their classics on my fave Pandora station. One day, while Swiffering with “There’s Your Trouble” blaring on my speakers, I went to go “thumbs up” the tune and show that algorithm who was boss. I looked down, and there was a pesky little pop-up ad blocking the button. Now, normally I would “X” out that pop-up like it was a porn ad and I was sitting in a prayer circle, but this one stopped me. The Dixie Chicks were going on tour!

  I dropped the WetJet and ran to my laptop to Google it. Sure enough, there were dates! My teenage heart soared! But they were all in Europe! SPLAT! My heart dropped to my half-cleaned floor. There goes that dream, I thought to myself.

  Later, while checking Twitter working, I decided to look at the dates anyway. Okay, most are in April. I technicallyyyy could go then. You got your Brussels, your Oslo, your—shitting me, they’re playing Amsterdam on 4/20?!

  My former stoner self was squealing on the inside. Going to Amsterdam on the unofficial holiday for smoking weed is ridiculous enough, but throwing a Dixie Chicks concert on top of it? This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I had to go, and I knew the perfect travel crew for this adventure. Enter . . .

  JESS & TESS, THE HOT MESS EXPRESS.

  Now, y’all already met Jess in the previous chapter, but let me tell you about Tess. Tess is not only my PR guru, she’s a Roman candle of a woman, blasting off fun wherever she’s pointed. She can handle her scotch like she has the BMI of 1989 John Goodman, and she also does wacky extravagant stuff like getting a Bea Arthur mosaic put on the bottom of her pool just because she knew looking at it would make her happy.

  Not thirty-six hours into each of them agreeing with a huge “DUH,” Tess was already blowing up our group text about lodging.

  “Girls, I have found the perfect place. You’re gonna die.”

  I was nervous. Did she mean we were going “to die” because the place was so damn posh? Or were we going “to die” because she wanted to save some scrilla and had booked us in a skeezy-hostel-from-Hostel situation? It’s always a game of roulette when you are traveling with someone for the first time. I clicked the link with squinted eyes and, sure enough, I DIED. My corpse finger mustered up the strength to click through the pics of a hundred-year-old potato boat that had been renovated into a two-bedroom houseboat in the seventies. That’s right—a rusty-on-the-outside, beautifully-modern-on-the-inside, century-old boat docked smack-dab in the middle of one of the most beautiful canals in Amsterdam. We were going to have this glorious vessel for three whole nights, and it would still be cheaper than getting hotel rooms.

  Cut to two months later as we three ladies stood on the dock of our rusty abode. We were nervous it might be like a bad online date, where our boat looked like eighties Corey Haim in his profile but present-day Corey Feldman IRL. We opened up the rusty hatch, walked down the stairs, and BOOM! It was glorious. Sighs of relief all around.

  Being jetlagged as hell and dehydrated from our flight, we each drank a bunch of water and made ourselves stay up to adjust to the change in time. LOLZ. More like, we each drank a bottle of red and passed out for five hours. We didn’t mean to nap so long, but when you are in the belly of an old boat on a canal, it feels like you’re strapped to a giant’s bosom in a baby sling, being rocked back and forth. Once we woke up, we had to make up for lost time, aka head to the Red Light District.

  And pardon me as I reach into my pocket and pull out another KOHLRABI!

  For those of you who do not know what the Red Light District is or are not familiar with TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool album, this is the neighborhood for sex stuff. Anything from innocent peepshows, to full sex shows, to legal prostitution can happen there.

  Before we went, we needed some liquid courage. We found an unassuming bar just outside the district that was full of dudes (shocker). “I don’t even know what to expect!” Jess said as she took down her third shot. “Do people actually have sex onstage?” Tess and I nodded, and Jess looked a little queasy. “I don’t think I can watch that.”

  “We’re going,” I said, motioning the bartender for another round. “It’s part of the culture. You gotta experience it!”

  We made a pit stop at a café for a strawberry-flavored joint, because nothing says “tourists from America” like three giggly girls surrounded by a cloud of smoke that smells like a scratch-n-sniff sticker. When we got to the Red Light District, I immediately found which sex show to go to. “This one has a neon pink elephant wearing a tie! It’s gotta be good!” I squealed. My reasoning had no logic to it, but the girls agreed.

  I grabbed tickets from the box office and headed into Theatre Casa Rosso, passing framed posters of various acts we were about to see. Of course, I couldn’t read the signs because I don’t speak Dutch, but if they didn’t say “Cumming Attractions,” I think we’ve all lost here.

  Now, what I’m about to describe next is not for the faint of heart. And it almost made this Hart faint. We walked in and immediately decided to distance ourselves from the stage by grabbing the front-row balcony so that no one was blocking our view, but we were at least a good fifty yards from the splash zone.* We were the only people on the balcony besides a group of American girls who were in the very last row of the whole theater. I looked back at them as we carefully made our way down the stairs, each one of them had their hands either over their eyes or in front of their mouths.

  Onstage, a man and a woman were having sex on a rotating circular bed as a generic techno song blared. At least, I assumed it was two humans. The sex resembled two cyborgs rubbing sprockets. Totally robotic. It was like they were going down a checklist of positions. After a few minutes of us giggling like wild women, we became entranced. The second the song was over, the duo popped up and walked offstage. Then the next couple came out. Same thing. This move, that move, this move, song ends, byeeeeee. It was like they clocked in for work (or should I say cocked in? Hey-yo!) and then as soon as their shift ended, they said, “Peace, bitch, I’m off to happy hour.” Next up, two girls came out and performed a double-sided dildo routine. It was like the last scene of Requiem for a Dream but if the performers were actually on Ambien, dreaming. We weren’t the only ones who were clearly expecting a different show.

  “This is so not what I thought it was gonna be, Tiffany,” I heard one of the girls a few rows behind us say in a thick-as-alfredo-sauce, Long Island accent. “I
didn’t know, Renee!” Tiffany clucked back, sounding like Janice from Friends. I can only assume that Tiffany was the poor maid of honor, tasked with planning a bachelorette, who had talked it up like they were about to Thunder from Down Under. I couldn’t blame them. Even I was beginning to regret the fifty-dollar entrance fee, too. So I turned to Jess and Tess and offered them an out.

  “Guys, whaddayasay we boogie out of here and go flirt with some real-life Dutch boys? Or even just go get drunk on our bomb-ass boat?” I could tell they had the same idea, but before they could admit it, the lights went dark and a bass-heavy techno song started pulsating through the speakers. We all leaned in, trying to understand the lyrics, which were spoken by the most Euro voice imaginable, like a rejected member from the nineties group the Real McCoy.* After a few rounds of the repetitious voice, I finally caught on. I looked over at my girls to see if we were all doing the same thing: bopping our heads to the driving beat while trying to mouth along with the muffled words. Then all at once we had it. We sang in unison. . . .

  “Dark orgasm. Dark orgasm. Yesss. Dark orgasm. Highly addictive!”

  Those were the only lyrics. We were voguing in our seats, singing about this highly addictive, dark orgasm, dying laughing. The Long Island girls were dying, too, but only because I don’t think any of them had breathed since they’d entered the theater. Meanwhile, we were in our own little world of singing and dancing, which was way more entertaining than anything that was happening onstage. That is, until we were snapped out of our dancing by a high-pitched “Oh my gawd!” from behind us. We looked back to the stage, and there she was: an Amazonian of a woman, clad in patent leather ass-less chaps, a belt of a bra, with a leather crop in hand. She force-strutted around the stage in a manner that can only be described as a Clydesdale in stripper heels meets a Xena: Warrior Princess cosplay costume.