Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(10)

“But we were here during—”

“Too. Distracting.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

The twins scurry for the door. They’ve never once been interested in staying a minute longer than necessary.

Lawson waves. “It was nice to meet y’all. Good luck with the show. When’s it on?”

“Saturday nights at eleven,” I say.

“Cool. Bye, Delia. Bye, Josie,” he says. “I guess we’re in-laws or something now that our dogs are married, right?” He blushes and laughs awkwardly.

“Sure,” Josie says, straight-faced.

Lawson starts toward the door, giving a whistle. “Come on, boy.” Tater trots after him. As Lawson opens the door to leave, he turns once more and waves clumsily to Josie. She gives him an okay this is really the last one wave. Then he’s gone.

“I’m ready whenever y’all are done teenaging,” Arliss says.

“Whatever,” Josie says. “You’re teenaging.”

“You are.” Arliss does a mocking, coquettish wave.

“I was being polite.”

“Polite would be not wasting my time with sassmouth so I can get to what I really want to be doing with my Friday night, which is sitting on my back patio with my dog and listening to the new Jason Isbell album.”

While they’re talking, I see my phone light up, buzz, and skitter in a semicircle on one of the chairs off set. I run over and check it, my guts quivering. Nothing. A coworker texting to ask if we can swap shifts next week. There’s nothing in this world worse than a phone notification that’s not for the thing you need.

“It does too sound boring to a normal person, right, DeeDee?” Josie calls to me.

I put my phone back down. “What? Sorry.”

“Arliss’s Friday-night plans sound super boring, and we’re way more fun.”

“For sure.”

Arliss snorts. “I’ve had pieces of popcorn stuck in my teeth that I enjoyed more than doing this show. All right,” he says with a clap. “Let’s roll.”

“We love you, Arliss,” I say. I’m not lying. Try as he might to push us away, Josie and I both think he’s terrific and want to be his friend, even though he hates us. The more he doesn’t want to be our friend, the more we want to be his. If coolness is doing your own thing and not caring what anyone else thinks about it, then Arliss is pretty cool.

“I warned y’all once about sassmouth,” Arliss says.

???

I don’t remember exactly when we started roasting some of our letter writers, but I know that it came out of necessity to keep our sanity. As two young women working in a field whose audience contains its fair share of middle-aged dudes with endless appetites for inconsequential minutiae, we get explained at a lot. Actually, the basis for the Dracula lore is blah blah blah…Actually, in Lovecraft’s mythos yakity yak yak…Actually, Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the monster herka derka diddly dee. That last one we get constantly. Arliss inserts an old-timey car horn aoooooogah sound now after we read one. We have a bit planned for the next time we get one of those.

Still annoying but somewhat more flattering (because at least they’re paying attention) are the letters complaining about the continuity errors in our show’s universe: On the episode that aired on June 21, Delilah said that you were both 200 years old, but two months later, in August, Rayne made reference to your being 250 years old. Which is it? (Who-gives-a-pair-of-shorn-yak-nuts years old is the answer, by the way.) And then there are the pervs. Use your imagination. No, really. Almost anything you can conceive of. And more, if you have a bad imagination. We don’t read their letters on air. We should really give them to the cops. We used to yell at them on the show, until we figured out that some of them were getting off on that too. It’s fun being a girl. Josie gets it the worst.

Most of the letters come to the show’s email address or our Facebook page, and we print them to read on the show. Sometimes, though, people mail stuff to us at the station. We’ve gotten animal bones; DVDs of movies people thought we should see; DVDs of movies people thought no one should see, therefore we should see; DVDs of movies people made themselves; and so on. I have, taped up in my bedroom, a fan art drawing someone from Fargo did.

We drape a black blanket between our chairs, where Arliss will crouch with the Frankenstein W. Frankenstein puppet and hand us the mail. (The second “Frankenstein” is pronounced Frahn-ken-shteen. You better believe we get letters.) Arliss sets a box of letters behind the drape, fits the puppet on his hand, and kneels with a grunt so that only his puppet arm is visible. “We’re rolling.” When Arliss helps us with a segment, he just points the camera at the set and lets it roll.

Josie and I take our seats, sit quietly for a few seconds to give Arliss room to fade us in, and then start.

Josie kicks us off as usual. “Welcome back, vampire bats and black cats, it’s time for our favorite segment and yours…the mailbag! Where we hear from you out there in TV land! Oh, Frankenstein? Frankenstein W. Frankenstein?”

Arliss raises the puppet and speaks in a high, hoarse voice. “Whattya want? I was sleeping and dreaming about never having to do this again.” Arliss has the most fun when we let him play himself.

“Frankenstein!” I say. “It’s always so nice to see you!”