From Sundance to Greenville, Durham and Louisville!
February 1st, 2012
Dear Journal,
I’m on a plane home from Utah on Delta’s special “seats smaller than Americans” flight. This week I went to the Sundance film festival with my brother Joe and sister Patti, the Birbiglia-hillbillies. They like to tag along to whatever trip or shared condo situation they can lock into.
My brother Joe and I are like the Manning brothers. I’m Peyton and Eli, and he’s that brother who doesn’t play football. Joe got me to go skiing this week. He said, “Let’s go skiing! It’s only 96 dollars a ticket. Two please.” So we went skiing, which is really not my forte.
My forte, in case you’re wondering, is watching American Idol while sucking on peanut M&Ms until they’re just the peanut in my mouth. Then I chew the peanut. Then I take a nap.
My favorite part of skiing is those boots. I enjoy the feeling of walking with my feet in two bear traps, without all that messy blood. Once I get those bear traps strapped down and I stop crying, I’m ready to attach those two sharp leg spears and hit the slopes!
The most painful part of skiing with my brother Joe is that he’s actually better at it than me – which really burns me to the core. When I watch him smoothly link turns together, all I can think is, “This is the same guy who wore a bathing suit in the shower until he was 14 years old?” Then I try to think of some way to publicly humiliate him.
So Joe and I get to the top of the mountain. And I follow him down a steep mogul trail. Joe told me to keep my shoulders pointed down the mountain. Apparently he has a life insurance policy on me that’s pretty good and he knew that if I were killed instantly there would be much less paperwork.
So I followed Joe’s form and I was pleased to make it down the moguls. And I’m feeling pretty good about myself, just speeding through the flatter part of the trail. And that’s when it hits me. The trail, that is, hits me…in the face. And then I hear laughing, and then I hear my brother taking pictures with his camera.
And I feel a shooting pain in my right shoulder, the same shoulder I had fallen on in a New York City subway last year – the shoulder that I had spent months rehabbing with a physical therapist. And I’m trying to remember exactly what my physical therapist had told me about skiing…oh yes, she told me never to do it.
And all I can think is, I need a hot tub – I need to be sitting in water that is hot and salty enough to be a very salty soup. So I get into the hotel hot tub – and nothing can go wrong in a hot tub. You can do things rappers do – like drink champagne…and verbally degrade women. The only thing you can’t do in a hot tub, I learned, is have your cell phone in your pocket. I mean, you can do it, but your cell phone is really not cool with it. There’s no amount of any-tub minutes that will bring your phone back from 400 degrees of water being sprayed at 75 miles per hour. If you think sperm can’t live in a hot tub, you should see how poorly a Motorola Flip 4000 does. When I got out of the hot tub, I tried to turn my phone on and it literally started laughing. Also, my brother Joe was laughing.
But the festival was great. I got to show my film four times. At night I would go back to our Birbiglia-hillbillies condo and we would all watch Showbiz Tonight’s coverage of Sundance-which was very different from the Mike Birbiglia-experience of Sundance. Showbiz Tonight had party footage of Richard Gere and Robert Redford, but all I could recall from our party was watching my brother Joe fill his backpack with chicken wings wrapped in cocktail napkins. On my final night there, our film was awarded a prestigious audience award, which was a complete shock. I had no speech prepared. So I went on stage and stuttered for 3 minutes – it kind of sounded like me skiing.
So here I am sitting on Delta’s flight for 1970s-sized people. I’m landing in 2 hours, spending 9 hours with my wife and cat and then hitting the road for Greenville, Durham, and Louisville. I’ve asked Joe to come along on this trip, because I’m interested in having him watch me do some things he can’t. Like win the Super Bowl. And that concludes this week’s entry in my secret public journal.


























