Theres a point in every family get together when there’s just the close few families left. We’ve gotten through the unwanted kisses from distant relatives visiting for a birthday. I can stop being polite because after the off key song has been sung, the cake was handed out in “oh I just want a little piece” portions, and everyone who’s only kind of important had to head home for various reasons; the people here at the table don’t give a damn about your politeness. Who’s usually left is my teddy bear father, with an intimidating size but a warming smile, my mother who’s overly animated with an unrestrained laugh, and my sister who’s probably sitting next to me with my fathers smile on her face, my mom’s contagious laugh, and a resemblance to me that makes us unmistakable sisters. Then there’s my aunt, the nicest and most caring person you’ll ever meet, my uncle who’s a living characterture, and comedian, and my cousin who’s the 10 year old with the witty one liners.

The volume at the kitchen table skyrockets and then quiets down with the ebb and flow of conversation. Mainly because the majority of the adults have gone through at least a couple bottles of pink zinfandel; dad’s broken into the Captain Morgans, Lauren’s on her 4th or 5th “bud heavy,” Caitlin's probably playing in the living room, and I’m the sober one who watches and enjoys the conversation. But at one point, usually around my uncle’s 3rd glass of wine, the “Suzi and Lauren Stories” begin. Theres a set of stories that never get old for anyone at this table to tell. There are specific monologues each person delivers, and each get’s an incredible amount of pleasure from re-telling the same story heard at the last time we all sat around and played out this kitchen table tradition. It brings back the days where I didn’t have a filter, and when Lauren was the agreed upon good child.

After my uncle, or as I named him when I was younger, Crazy, takes another sip of zinfandel he’ll tell the story of that one Christmas Eve; “We were playing ring around the rosy, and I picked her up with her long brown hair and kept swinging in a circle. But when she stopped the so many ornaments that her hair caught from the Christmas tree, just dangling off her curls!” He animates the story with his hands, and puts imaginary hair on his very bald head, and with a huge smile and raspy laugh; he’ll move around in a circle mimicking the moment when he took all the ornaments off the tree with my precious hair. His voice is sharp and loud, and when he talks it’s like an entrancing performance that never fails to make you have a good belly laugh.

Then right after that mom will cut in with an “or that time” and Lauren and I know exactly which one she’ll say. She tells the one where I turned 3 and I was asked what I wanted for my 3rd birthday. “I want to be five!”, “I can’t make you five sweetie.” Then she goes on, in her well versed lines: “then when Suzi turned five I asked her, how does finally being five feel Suzi?” and then she’ll pause, and finish it off with a mimic of a child’s voice: “well I’ve only been waiting for twenty years!” Then the table will erupt with laughter. Everyone knows the pauses, and the punch line, but regardless of how many times it’s been repeated it’s still as funny as when it happened.

These two stories always get the ball rolling, and my uncle will start with his part of the kitchen table scripted play of the younger years. He’ll tell the babysitting stories: one where I ordered him to play my little Playschool piano while I jumped on the bed, for at least a couple of hours and I wouldn’t let him leave until I was finished, the one where he said we could watch the little mermaid, and I disappeared only to reappear again in a Beauty and the Beast ball gown, and I said “well I have to get dressed up if we’re going to watch a movie together!”; and then he’ll tell the cornerstone story of the night.

I was 5 or 6, and Lauren was about 10. My aunt and uncle took us out to a regular dinner, and a restaurant who’s name is long forgotten. Adorable little me, and well behaved Lauren are fun to take out because we’re a tag team of hilarious conversation. At one point, we start talking about how Lauren gets ready to go to school. All the normal things are said from well behaved Lauren. “I get up, I brush my teeth, I put on my clothes, I eat breakfast, I grab my bag, and I get on the bus, Auntie.” A perfectly normal answer. But when I am asked how I get ready my response is: “well I wake up, I put on a couple of Band-Aids and I’m on my way!” This takes my aunt off guard, so she asks “why do you need Band-Aids Suzi?” trying to hold back her laughter. And little doll-like me responds with a little eye brow raise, placing both hands on the table, and a voice of a car salesmen, “well you see Auntie, I have a lot of boo-boos.”

With the punch line delivered, we will all do the curious thing of repeating those last words over again. It happens every time, and now everyone can get the exact tone of voice I used; mostly because this story could now be told by anyone at the table. Not like it matters much because it’s my uncle’s lines to deliver.

Around this moment, there’s a slight pause. This pause lets everyone fill up their drinks, and let’s my mom say to Lauren and I, “I cooked, you clean!” We never move very fast, and in most cases we don’t move at all. Eventually, with the grief of my mom about the dishes, we all come back and the stories start up again.

The first scenes are always about me. And somewhere after the intermission Lauren will feel left out, and she has to chime in. It’s an odd sense of joy you can get out of hearing yourself be funny as a child, and it’s now Lauren's turn. The first story she starts: “Remember that time Auntie threw me off the porch?” Theres a fake argument in where my Mom and Aunt, who are sisters, say something along the lines of that she did not throw her off the porch, nor was it with the intentions to hurt her. It was December with over 2 feet of snow piled up, and maybe a 6 inch drop off the porch. But as according to the play, the Lauren segment ensues with the Chinese man story, told by my mother.

When I was younger I had a hard time with the English language. Although my mother could untangle my knotted syllables, everyone else was left to say ‘uh-huh’ in hopes that would satisfy as an appropriate answer. Lauren would continuously ask my mother “what’d she sayin’ mama?” My mother, being in charge of too many things at once, would simply reply with “nothing Lauren, she’s just speaking Chinese.” Lauren would take the answer and go back to whatever she was doing. On one occasion the three of us were playing on the stoop of our apartment building when a tenant of the building came walking out. Simultaneously, I was babbling away to my mother when my sister stops the man and asks “Mister, do you know what she’s sayin’?” The man was Asian. We had to play inside for the rest of the day.

This story is Lauren’s favorite; although I don’t think she notices the glow she gets when my mom tells this story: I notice. It’s in the way everyone laughs because she’s funny, even though she’s been quiet the whole time. The play continues into the story of my Aunt asking what does the banana say. She talks quietly, a technique for making everyone focus, and starts off with a setting of her and my mom sitting in the living room before I was born; they were deep in a conversation that they can’t remember today. Lauren had a toy banana and because they weren’t paying enough attention to her, she kept repeating herself and shoving the banana into my aunt’s view. Eventually there’s a pause in their conversation and she turns to Lauren and says ‘what does the banana say?’ At this point in the story my Aunt’s gotten to normal volume and has gone through mimicked motions of when the event actually happened. During the story she shakes her head, pretends to be in a conversation with my mom by turning in her chair, and huffs at all the right points. The next line she will always deliver in a whisper yell while her hand is outstretched holding a pretend plastic banana. Lauren being four and soaking up language like a sponge, says: ‘the banana says f*** you Auntie!’ with a big grin on her little face. The table explodes in laughter.

The comfortableness of the family dynamic is mostly based on how well we know this play already. Each one of us has our designated scripts, each one has a stage direction of their usual chair, we have points where we should laugh, or make comments, or fake embarrassment - usually me - but it’s not a random comedy sketch. We fall into this sequence of stories to make those connections again. The adults feel the joys of the “good ol’ days” and as a group we can laugh together. My uncles the comedian, my mom’s the story teller, Lauren and I are the subjects, and everyone else adds to the laugh track.



Process Note:

My essay needed to have a very specific ethos to convey the right type of atmosphere in the story; I also had to make sure that you could tell the difference between flashbacks and flash forwards. I made my ethos very simple and innocent so that I could paint a portrait of each person in a good light. I also made myself sound really perceptive of the situation; I did this so that you could picture everyone better. I think writing about your family shows a lot of how your relationship is with them. My family is really welcoming and funny on their own, and I had plenty of material to choose from, but I kept having to change words to make it more clear who they are as a person and how that is shown through their actions. Your ethos while writing about your family will ultimately make or break your essay.

In my piece I used the logical connections in each individual story and twisted them so that they were incongruent; this let me lead you on with normal story and then put in the surprising punchline at the end. I also used a timeline that included flashbacks to retell a story as it happened, as well as real time narrative to describe the kitchen setting. In some areas I zoomed into the motions of people so that you could picture in your head the person talking, because that makes the reader feel like they are sitting in the room with us. This organized my piece in a way I wouldn’t have thought of if I just went to write this as I normally do. It kept the material flowing, and kept the story interesting for the reader (I always find these stories funny!). I really just wanted the person to feel like they could also be in the “indian pow-wow” with us; that was my overall goal.

I also wanted to have my family read this and have the same kind of reconnecting as we do in person. After my second draft I did send it to some of them, and my aunt ended up laughing and crying; she loved how I told the stories, but she also really loved that I wrote it at all. She told me that it was really amazing that I could make her feel like she was in my kitchen with us all just by reading my essay. My mother pointed out all the flaws (very normal for her), and said that my ending paragraph could be longer. I liked how I didn’t end my story at the end of the evening; this added to my narrative timeline as rhetoric. I used her advice to try to do something different, but in the end what I had was exactly what I wanted. I had Shannon read it for the peer editing workshop, and all she could say were nice things. She especially liked when I left the punchline at the very end of the paragraph in a short sentence. With this piece of advice I tried to use that kind of incongruence once more, so that I wouldn’t be repetitive. The last piece of advice was from my dad, who said that I needed to play more on the idea of this being a play and all of us are actors. I completely agreed and I added in sentences so that the reader would be reminded of that motif. I really loved writing about my family, I love their company and I loved having a way to show them that. Plus their hysterical.