A Weekend With Mrs. Sizemore

A couple of things about Mrs. Sizemore:
1. She is awesome.
2. She is exhausting.

Both of these things tend to come into play when you spend a weekend with her.

A couple of months back, Mrs. Sizemore, who is a massive comic book fan (and I don't mean "for a girl"; I mean she has a giant box bigger than she is in her apartment filled with other boxes that when unfolded will hold several thousand comic books) and who has been reading ENTIRELY TOO MUCH NIGHTWING recently, up and decided that she wanted to learn trapeze. Which, when she said this I was immediately all OH EM GEE ME TOO and so currently we are both taking trapeze lessons at a place called the Aloft Loft where, in addition to teaching budding superheroes and/or strippers how to hang upside down from things, they also put on a regular show called El Circo Cheapo.

El Circo Cheapo is exactly what it sounds like - a show with very cheap tickets (even cheaper if you don't spring for a fancy thing known as a "chair" and agree to sit on the floor) that features various circus/aerial acts hanging from things and generally being way more amazing than I will ever be. So on Saturday night, Mrs. Sizemore and I went to that. It was absolutely incredible, from the double trapeze act staring our teacher Sarah, to the unbelievably graceful and romantic German wheel duet, to the hilarious audience volunteer that some Canadian dude stood on top of while juggling machetes.

The problem with El Circo Cheapo is that it is in a cab dead zone and ends after the Damen bus stops running, so after the show we spent a good deal of time walking up Damen until we found a really ambitious cab driver (when Mrs. Sizemore asked "Can you take us to Irving Park?" he replied "I can take you anywhere in the world!" which I'm pretty sure is not true because, you know, oceans and whatnot). Mrs. Sizemore had it in her head that the perfect wrap up to watching upside down people was eating greasy diner food at nearly 1 in the morning, so we headed to a diner on Irving Park Road that oddly enough is named "The Diner". I should point out here that it being Cinco de Mayo on Saturday, I had used it as an excuse to drink pretty much all day long, which is the only explanation I can offer for sending an email to StereoNinja in the middle of the night which pretty much just read "Chocolate milkshake, bitches!" Meanwhile, Mrs. Sizemore was attracting a great deal of attention to herself by ordering the most excruciatingly specific meal ever ordered at 1 a.m. by someone who was not completely stoned. It was while we were enjoying our food at The Diner that Mrs. Sizemore asked what I was doing the next day.

"Nothing," I replied.

"Good. Do you want to go see Avengers again tomorrow?"

The important thing to realize here is that I hadn't actually seen Avengers yet, given that it had only been released the day before and also I suck at going to the movies. But by this point, Mrs. Sizemore had already seen it twice. I agreed to go, but admitted I was skeptical of whether or not I would like it because I have a huge thing for Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo is no Edward Norton, but she assured me that while that was true, he totally IS Bruce Banner and I should just go with it.

We met up the next day to head over to the matinee at the Davis Theater which we chose to walk to since it had mostly stopped raining. This gave her plenty of time to explain to me the various versions and back stories of every character, how they were the same or different from the comic book versions and why Thor is amazeballs. "Because he has a hammer?" I guessed.

"He has TWO hammers and they are called his biceps," she answered.

I am not about to ruin The Avengers for you by telling you all about it, but I will tell you that 1. Ok, FINE, Mark Ruffalo is an awesome Bruce Banner and 2. stop reading this right now and go see it, because it is for reals the best superhero movie to date (which of course it was going to be because, hi, Joss Whedon).

The one spoiler I will give you is that near the end of the movie, Tony Stark decides that they should go out for shawarma later even though he doesn't know what it is. Neither did I until I googled it, but that didn't stop Mrs. Sizemore from insisting that we ALSO go eat some of the same after the movie because when she picks a theme for the day, she REALLY picks a theme for the day. For some reason I agreed to this even though I know I like neither kebabs nor falafal which didn't bode well for the shawarma. I also allowed her to talk me into walking there because "It's a couple blocks from the theater".

It isn't.

What IS a couple blocks from the theater is a comic book store, specifically, a comic book store that Mrs. Sizemore had not been to the day before on Free Comic Book Day and that she was hoping would have some of the books she hadn't been able to find the day before (which they did). She used my Avengers euphoria against me to get me inside the store. She then used the hilariously stereotypical comic book store guy to help talk me into trying out this whole "reading comic books" thing, and before I knew it, I had a bag with issues 0 and 1 of Avengers vs. X-Men and had dashed off another incredulous email to StereoNinja: "I'm in a comic book store. Buying comic books. WTF is happening to me?" While I was doing that, Mrs. Sizemore was accidentally seducing comic book guy by knowing absolutely everything about every comic book ever written in history and not shutting up. In the midst of this she also bought several back issues she was missing, Thor's hammer, some little action figures, and a book called Darth Vader and Son that I had been coveting but didn't buy because we'd been there an hour already and I was starving. She also talked comic book guy into giving her a poster right off the wall and started shilling Nightwing to the store's lone other customer ("It's not shilling if it's actually good," she insisted). Throughout this, I kept pointing out to her that the one thing they didn't sell in the comic book store was FOOD and eventually I managed to drag her out of there.

We continued walking to the shawarma place, which was always "a couple blocks away" no matter how many blocks we'd already walked. We walked past a goose that was hanging out in the road by himself as if he were trying to hail a cab. "Look, a goose!" Mrs. Sizemore was excited, apparently because she doesn't know anything about geese.

"Do not go over to the goose," I warned her.

"Why?" she asked, ignoring me and walking toward the goose.

"Geese are mean. I'm serious, cut that out. They attack people."

Evidently she didn't believe me. "Hey goose!" she said walking up to it.

"HSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!"

"Oh my god, it hissed at me!"

"They do that. I told you so. You're lucky it didn't attack you."

Finally, some two miles from where we'd started, we found the shawarma place, where I informed her in no uncertain terms that we were NOT walking all the way back because it was far, and it was dark, and we didn't know the neighborhood, and there was an angry goose running around. We argued about the relative hotness of Thor vs Hawkeye while she simultaneously gloated on Twitter about getting me to buy comic books.

It was after 9 at this point, and I was exhausted. Mrs. Sizemore is evidently NEVER exhausted, because her suggestion was that after we ate, we should get a cab to her house, walk her dog, go buy a bottle of wine, go to her friend's place where she is supposed to be feeding the cat, feed said cat and then sit there and drink the bottle of wine while we watched Captain America. I said that suggestion sounded good, but not quite as good as mine which was that after we ate, I should go the fuck home and go to bed. I am much older than she is, what do you want from me? We decided to compromise and are now set to watch Captain America on Tuesday instead.