Salon.com > T. Wright Townsend

It’s OK to get angry

Thu, 02 Aug 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Matt Besser is angry about some things. "People take toasting way too seriously," says Besser, "especially the clinking glasses part. There are always a few people who are seated too far away from each other to easily clink. I say just raising the glass suffices, but some people need to make sure that everyone clinks everyone else's glass -- like it's some NASA 'go/no go' situation, as if there is some rule that if everyone doesn't clink then the toast isn't true. It's not like we're trying to trick a genie."

Besser is sitting on the arm of a couch in the green room after a performance of his first one-man show, "May I Help You ... Dumbass?" at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Manhattan. Besser, a founding member of the theater's eponymous improv comedy troupe, has built his show around the idea of irrational anger in our society.

"Don't invite me to a surprise birthday party," he says. "I don't have room for that secret. I've got enough real secrets I have to keep: dark, life-destroying secrets. Adultery, man-boy love, true hair color -- real serious shit. I don't need to carry around your stupid birthday secret for two weeks. I've got enough real lying and covering up to do."

Great American loser

Fri, 10 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000

In a race in which the two major-party candidates spent a combined total of around $70 million, and in a time when money is increasingly essential to a candidate's success, a guy who bases his campaign around a pledge of accepting no money whatsoever isn't going to do very well.

"I knew from the beginning I wasn't going to win this thing," said lawyer and then-U.S. Senate candidate Dennis A. Breen a couple weeks before Election Day. The natural question, then: So why run?

The balloons at Breen's "victory party" Tuesday night at the Elks Lodge No. 1246 in Summit, N.J., were appropriately red, white and blue -- there just weren't very many of them. And most of the kids tearing around the room were doing their best to pop them with toothpicks stolen from the 6-foot-long subs. Family, friends and neighbors sat around card tables, cheese curls in aluminum casseroles between them, chatting as they watched CNN on a big-screen TV.

Breen, running as an independent for the Senate seat vacated by Frank Lautenberg, had rented out the Elks lodge in his hometown of Summit. (Summit is also the town where Jon Corzine, the Democratic candidate -- and winner of the seat -- lives, and where Bob Franks, the Republican candidate, grew up.) Breen brought $4,000 of his own money to the campaign, and with the last of it bought a keg of Coors Light, some bottles of generic orange soda, a few subs and a couple of bags of balloons.

Homecoming

Mon, 23 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

The driver pulls up our Town Car to the front of the Queens Borough Elks Lodge No. 878. This is the site where James Gray wanted to film one of the final scenes in his new "corruption in the system/strife in the family" movie, "The Yards."

The Elks wouldn't allow Gray to shoot in the lodge, so he filmed the scene elsewhere, but he wants to show it to me anyway. We walk up the front steps of the building -- a gray stone monolith on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst -- and that's when we hear the bagpipes.

The bleating becomes louder as we follow the sound up a set of inside stairs. On the second floor of the lodge, in a large, gymnasium-like hall with vaulted ceilings, we find the New York Fire Department's Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Band practicing. "This is so great!" says Gray, barely able to contain his joy at happening upon something so surreal at 7:30 on a Monday night in Queens. "I'm serious. I can't believe this!"

The 31-year-old filmmaker is like a little kid, excited by what he's seeing. Which is this: a bunch of burly men, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, manipulating ancient Scottish instruments, honking away at ungodly decibels. That the Emerald Society is, in fact, a band at all is a matter of faith, since each member is practicing his own chords (or whatever bagpipe notes are called) at the moment.