Today is my sister’s birthday. She’s 28, which is really funny to me, because that means she is ‘catching up’ to me by being two years closer to 30. Once we are both in our 30s, then it will be fair again, somehow. I can’t explain why; this is my fuzzy logic at work.
Little known Lisa and Tricia fact: We originated the phrase "check yaself before ya wreck yaself." This photo was taken moments before we invented it at the pool club's Halloween in July costume contest in 1983.

From the time we were little, we always had a lot of fun together. We both cultivated our strange senses of humor early on, and used to stay up late laughing about something stupid that we’d just thought of. Before she was even in kindergarten, she was making up weird voices and playing messed-up games with me. I’ve written about it before, but our games were often kind of dark and involved death. We played Cabbage Patch Kids hospital, and most of the time our patients did not make it. We pretended our bathtub was a crematorium. Our Annie dolls were constantly reliving that scene in the movie where Annie is hanging off of the big metal structure and Punjab has to fly in and save her… only a lot of times when we played it, Annie fell and the other dolls gathered around and talked about how sad it was that she was dead. Ah, memories.

I could go on and on reliving some of my funniest memories of her, but instead I will just list some stuff here:

* I tried to take her to a walking labyrinth in Sedona for her birthday one year. We drove up there and on the way, I realized I’d left the directions to the labyrinth at home. So I tried to remember where it was from my memory of the one time I had already been to this labyrinth, and couldn’t find it. Finally, I was so confident that this one street was where it was. I drove down there, getting her all psyched up as we sped down this road, saying things like, “This is it! You are really gonna like this!”…and we got to the end of the road and it was the City Dump. We never did find the labyrinth. And that was the year I took Tricia to the City Dump for her birthday. How can I possibly top that? (I like capitalizing City Dump!) I knew Tricia was really gonna like this.

* She’s good at doing accents, and one of my favorite things is when I make her use her old Native American Indian man voice. She says, “Spirit of the Wind! Please leave me alone!” in that voice and I crack up every time.

* We’ve had some car adventures, like the time she choked on an ice cube while I was driving and I pulled over into the parking lot of some school we were driving past, and ran around to her side of the car, pulled her out, and hugged her from behind and screamed, “I don’t know what to do!” in her face. That’s how I found out I suck in times of stress. Luckily, she coughed up the ice cube and then just laughed her ass off at my lack of tact. Screaming “I don’t know what to do!” is not the way to perform the Heimlich maneuver and calm the victim. Trust me on this one.

* We directed a play together a few years ago as co-directors, and it was a lot of fun because we think the same way about a lot of stuff, so I would start giving a direction and Trish would finish my sentence or add to it, and vice versa. It was cool because we scouted out an actor for the show, and he accepted the part and was the most grateful, sweet guy in the world about it. Plus, she had to jump in and take over a part when one of the girls in the show just stopped showing up for rehearsals, and she did a great job. In one scene she played a mentally-challenged girl who did nothing but sit in a chair with a scowl on her face and yell “NO!” while eating popcorn. During one performance, the popcorn was pretty dry and she inhaled a piece and had to cough it out on stage—and she did it in character and it was hilarious. Poor Allison was acting opposite when it happened, and I was watching from the side of the stage and it was the funniest thing to see the two of them trying so hard not to laugh and keep the scene going.

* The other night in Target, I was waiting for her to pick something out when I spotted the shelf where Uristat was displayed. I said, “URINARY TRACT INFECTION” in a loud, robot voice for no real reason. She started laughing and we kept talking about urinary tract infections in monotone robot voices the rest of the night. Stuff like, “Please do not swim downstream of ME. The bacteria in my URINARY TRACT could hit you.” And it is because of things like this… totally nonsense mutterings, stupid voices and gross humor…that my sister is still my best girlfriend in the world. Plus I can call her and bitch about stuff, or ask her opinion on whether or not I should dye my hair a certain color.

It’s really cool being your sister, Trish. Now if we could just work on your halitosis problem, and finally teach you how to read, you just might become a productive member of society yet. Happy Birthday, you old whore!


(Gratuitous movie quote: “All right, Joanne Greenwald, you horrible thing. Here’s your chance to go out with a real stud.”)