Girl Talk Vs. The Boxer Rebellion, by Paul Shirley

Friday, September 10, 2010 3:50 pm

Last night, my youngest brother, whose name is Tom and whose smile is infectious, arrived at my house for a poker game.  I asked Tom if he was excited about the concert we’d be seeing the next night: Girl Talk, in Kansas City’s Crossroads District.

He sat down at the table, began counting out poker chips and said, “I’m not going to that.”

I was shocked. I thought we had established the previous weekend that A) Girl Talk was a must-see and that B) Tom was going with me.

I said as much.  He looked up from the stack of poker chips and, shrugging, said, “I’m going to an underwear party.”

“I don’t care whose underwear you’re going to see.  You’d still be better off watching Girl Talk,” I said.

He put down the chips, now stacked neatly in piles of ten and sighed.

“Paul, I’m going to an UNDERWEAR PARTY WITH A BUNCH OF COLLEGE GIRLS. Why wouldn’t I go to that instead of a concert?”
On the surface, it would seem that he had a point.  An underwear party with college girls does sound pretty spectacular, especially to the target audience that is a 20-year old male.

But as much as I like college girls in their underwear, I disagreed with my brother.  I explained to him why he should pick Girl Talk.  Tom, of course, didn’t listen. Well, he did listen; he just didn’t change his mind.

Which is why I put a date and time at the top of this post.

I’m going to present my side of the argument – why Girl Talk live will be better than an underwear party before these events happen.  Then, I’ll go to Girl Talk and Tom will go to the underwear party, and I’ll report back – as honestly as is possible – with whatever information I have, after the events.

So, without further ado, why a Girl Talk show is a better option than an underwear party, even for a 20-year-old…

In my mind, one’s choices in entertainment should be rated by their odds of being singular experiences.  When given an option between two ways to spend an evening, one should pick the event that is more rare, assuming, of course, that both events have the potential for the same amount of fun, give or take. I don’t expect a person to pick “getting clubbed with a mace” over “sex with his girlfriend” just because chances to get hit with a mace don’t come around very often.

Tom maintained that an underwear party was the singular experience of which I spoke – how often, he said, was he going to get to go to underwear parties with college girls?

A valid question.  But let’s break down this “underwear party.”  According to Tom, the party will consist of a fraternity-organized (strike one) bus leaving Kansas City for a heretofore unknown “ranch”, where the college students will disembark and commence “partying”…while wearing their underwear.

As Tom explained the logistics, I pointed out several potential problems.  First, in my experience, most girls willing to “party in their underwear” are not the sorts of girls who should be “partying in their underwear.”

Tom rebutted by saying, “Paul, this is college – the girls are still thin.”  Not a bad point, youngest Shirley.  Except that this college is in Kansas City.  It’s called Rockhurst and it has a student population of around 3,000.  Kansas City – bless its heart – is known neither for its college-like atmosphere, nor for its attractive girls.

Summary: This isn’t an Arizona State underwear party.

Tom said, his hands motioning at his side like an angry Serbian, “Paul, it doesn’t matter.  Even if there are only 4 or 5 girls who are hot, it’s still worth it.”

This is where, I believe, my brother’s argument loses steam.  If attractive, clothing-starved girls are the goal, the Internet works 24 hours a day.  (Except at 8:15 a.m., when people are checking their fantasy football rosters, and at 4:30 p.m., when they’re on Facebook.)  If attractive girls, clothing-starved girls in vivo is the goal, strip clubs are open most nights of the week.

Let’s mash the pause button in my debate with Tom.  I sense your displeasure with my logic, reader.  You’re screaming that I’m missing the point: Tom thinks he might, eventually, get to see one of the underwearers naked and, possibly, that he might get to roll around with her on top of some nondescript college dorm sheets.

This is the great myth.

Unpause.

This is what they* want you to think, Tom.  Better yet, they* want you to think that an orgy might break out, or that you’ll have a threesome involving twins who’ve spent their high school years looking for the perfect participant for their naughty, incestuous dreams.

These things will not happen.

Tom’s best-case scenario:  that he’ll take one of the underwear girls back to his dorm room.  And even that is a stretch; long bus rides back from weird ranches have a way of neutering potentially debaucherous behavior. What, at the ranch, was a purred, “Sure, I’ll see what your collection of ceramic frogs looks like” becomes a dismissive, “Maybe next time, Alex**”.

*Frat boys.

**See, Tom’s name is not Alex.

And even if Tom were to get one of those girls back to his room, and have the wildest sex a college junior can imagine…well, even then, he should go to Girl Talk.  Because if I don’t miss my guess, my brother Tom will have no trouble getting girls back to his bedroom in his life.  Tom is funny, outgoing, tall, and good-looking.  He has a Potential Sexual Partner (PSP) number of 175.  We in the Shirley family don’t want him to reach his PSP because we in the Shirley family don’t like herpes, but even under the worst of circumstances, Tom will probably see 60 different girls naked in his bedroom.  (Assuming that he doesn’t make an egregious Midwestern life error and settle down with someone at age 23.)

On the other hand, he might have two – three, at most – chances to see Girl Talk at his prime, at an outdoor venue, on a late-summer evening.

So, even if Tom hits his best-case scenario (pretty college girl back in his dorm room) – which, let’s be honest, is unlikely, through no fault of Tom’s – the experience would have to be significantly better than Girl Talk live.  According to my math, if we assume that Tom will see 60 different girls naked or near-naked in his life, but that he will only see Girl Talk twice, his night will have to be 30 (60/2 – 60 different girls, 2 shots at Girl Talk) times more entertaining to warrant his decision.

And because I’ve seen Girl Talk live before***, I don’t think that’s possible.

***Seriously, you’d think he’d listen to me, right?  It’s not like I’m speculating on how good this will be.

But I’ve been wrong before.  Maybe Tom will encounter a mind-blowing experience on the order of “first whitewater rafting trip” or “first drink of really good Scotch”.  Or maybe I’ve created a Girl Talk bubble in my mind, thanks to those two really pretty girls who were dancing in front of me when I last saw him play.  Maybe Tom was right to choose the underwear party.

We’ll find out tomorrow.

Saturday, September 11, 2010 3:15 p.m.

When, after an opening set by the weird, wild, and wonderful opener, a Kansas City band/performance act called Quixotic, the heavens opened up and let loose with a storm of Learian magnitude, I thought – for a moment – that the verdict was going to be a landslide; that there was no question that Tom had been right.

But then Girl Talk came on.

I’ve written about the Girl Talk live experience before.  Back when I was employed by ESPN.com, I attended the 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival, where I watched Gregg Gillis work his magic from a vantage point in the heart of a crowd that swayed, danced, and bobbed its collective head with Girl Talk’s every smashed-up beat.

Now that I’ve seen him twice, I don’t think I’m any closer to understanding why Gillis’ brand of music mixology works so well.  The closest I can come is that Girl Talk what you think really good DJs should be, but what really good DJs never quite are.  He’s figured out how to distill songs down to their very best parts.  Then he layers and melds them to create what I still consider to be new songs.

Then the audience dances its gonads off.

What remains unclear is the order of cause and effect.  Does the audience – having heard that Girl Talk is “fun” – come primed to have a good time and then, because of that priming, proceed to have “fun”?  Or is Girl Talk/Gillis so good that he would turn a crowd – any crowd – into an exultant mass of happy-goo, no matter what the circumstance?

We’ll never know because, like trying to find an impartial juror for HTC vs. iPhone, the task of returning Girl Talk to anonymity and obscurity would be an impossible one.

The more important question: Who cares?  Girl Talk was a lot, lot, lot of fun.

Tom tells me today that his night was also a lot, lot, lot of fun.  It turns out that the underwear party was really a boxer party.  (Called, predictably but endearingly, the “Boxer Rebellion.”)  He says that there was no shortage of attractive girls and that merriment was set on “high”.  The details of his night will remain known to me, to him, and to our friend J. William Torson, who was in my dining room when Tom relayed them.  But suffice to say, Tom enjoyed himself.

As to the details I can provide:  Tom states that the fat girls stayed home, that wife-beaters and boxers were just as provocative (if not more so) than underwear, and that his dance card was, shall we say, full.

Tom did not reach the best-case scenario I outlined above.  Nor did he find the best-best-case scenario (remember the twins?) within his grasp.

Nonetheless, I’ve decided that Tom was right to attend the Boxer Rebellion.

As I shared Girl Talk’s music with the rest of his audience, watching people dance around like banshees, it occurred to me that most of us were harking back to our own youths.  At a Girl Talk show, Gregg Gillis helps the members of his audience act like children.

Tom, on the other hand, actually got to be a child. Tom’s night was about youth and mystery and possibility.  And while I know that he’ll have plenty of underwear parties – be they in a public setting or in the privacy of his bedroom – in his future, he doesn’t.  I have the advantage of hindsight.

So, for me, a 32-year-old male who, like all 32-year-old males, needs help remembering what it feels like to be 20, Girl Talk was the right choice.  But for Tom, a 20-year-old male who still possesses an ability to which we all aspire – the ability to just “be” – to attend the Girl Talk show would have been to miss out on what it is to be his age.

Tom needed to experience the Boxer Rebellion.  I needed to be reminded that the Boxer Rebellion existed, or that youth existed, or that fun existed.  Girl Talk helped me do that.

Tom didn’t need to go to Girl Talk any more than a soldier in Afghanistan needs to play Call Of Duty. Tom experienced at the underwear party what we were trying to simulate at Girl Talk.

Some might say that a more direct method would have been to attend an underwear party of my own.  That would have been, first, impossible and, second, really creepy.  Despite humanity’s efforts to the contrary, there are some things that age prevents us from doing.  This is why 32-year-olds go to Girl Talk, and is why my 60-year-old uncle plays Call Of Duty.

Tom saw some girls in their underwear, and his imagination took him to places I know he’ll probably never go.  But that’s okay, because he enjoyed the trip.  I was doing the same thing – Girl Talk’s music wasn’t real, in the sense of anything tangible.  It, too, was gone as soon as I experienced it.

But it promised something fantastic.  Like the Boxer Rebellion promised an escape from Tom’s reality, Girl Talk promised an escape from mine.

Two events, targeted at two different people.  I’m glad we each went where we were supposed to go.  I just wish I didn’t have to admit that my youngest brother, who is more than a decade younger than I, was so…right.

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