Here, Take This, I Love You: Chapter 7

What better way to say “Happy holidays” than with a ridiculous bookmark featuring me and David?

In my early twenties, I took my love of holiday cards to the next level by creating my own, often inappropriate, satirical holiday cards to send to friends and family each year. There was the year I asked a Joan of Arcadia castmate to pretend to spank me and another year where I purposely cropped my face completely out of the frame so it looked like a terrible mistake on Kinko’s part. (If you are a Gen Z who does not know what Kinko’s is, perhaps it is time for me to write an in-depth essay on my seismic love for the shuttered copy, fax, and print center that dominated that field—and my heart—in the ’90s and early ’00s.)

When I first met my husband, David Cross, I felt like I had finally met my dark-humored match, and as our relationship grew, we began to send holiday cards out together. One such card was in the form of a bookmark decorated with photo booth-style pictures that had been taken for a scene in David’s fantastic dark comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret in which he played the title character. In the show, I played—wait for it—Todd’s girlfriend, Alice. And while these funny photos only existed for a split-second joke in the show, we repurposed them to create ridiculous holiday card bookmarks with very Christmas-y red tassels at the top. 

The photo strip tells the story of Todd and Alice’s terrible first date: in the first picture, they’re kissing; in the second picture, as Todd pulls away, we see Alice slack-jawed with her eyes rolling back; by the third picture, it’s clear that my character has fallen asleep mid-kiss; the final image shows Todd, blissfully ignorant, smiling from ear to ear as Alice falls out of frame from boredom. The bookmarks are hideous and they are amazing. Who among us doesn’t want to open their copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to see me and David’s dumb faces making out? (Don’t answer that.)