Enter SIR IAN MCKELLEN

ME: Sir Ian, why are you allowing this to continue? Does not your love and knowledge of the theatre compel you to make these actors stay in character.
SIR IAN: My good man, the only thing I’m interested in is making absolutely certainly that my pearly white percy stays lodged well within the delectable vagina of the young woman I met at a recent WNBA game. Delectable vagina–that is why I got involved in theatre in the first place.

Exit SIR IAN MCKELLEN

ME: I really need to stop involving that guy in my projects. But he was so damn good in Last Action Hero.
SC1: Can we get on with this? I’ve got a soup commercial audition.
ME: Okay, where were we? Ah yes, I had just made one of my patented references to a book I have no intention of ever reading. Sobbing Child 2, I think you’re up.
SC2: I want my mommy! I want to go home!
SC1: I want to go home!
ME: Okay kids, here’s what you do: Finish your chicken nuggets and then go out to recess for fifteen or twenty minutes. By the time you get done and back to class, it’ll be almost time to go home.
SC1: Really?
ME: Yup.
SC2: But school goes on all day. Are you lying to us?
ME: Me? Lie to children? Heavens no. You’re young, you have no concept of time, so it just seems like school goes on all day to you. Just eat up, run outside, and before you know it, your mommies will be coming to pick you up and take you home.

Exit SOBBING CHILDREN

ME: Shit. I need to get a different job.

Curtain

The inherent beauty of the TRP costume is its elusive nature. People will look as you and not know what or who you’re supposed to be. This ignorance will provide you with ample opportunities to act like a complete prick. Here’s an example of how many conversations will go when you are dressed as the TRP:

SOME DUDE:Hey, who or what are you supposed to be?
YOU: I’m Thomas Pynchon.
SOME DUDE: Who?
YOU: What do you mean “who?” Don’t you know who Thomas fucking Pynchon is? He’s only the world’s greatest living authour!
SOME DUDE: I thought Gabriel García Márquez was the world’s greatest living authour.
YOU: Fuck García Márquez! The TRP could take 7 fountain pens, 13 yellow legal pads and a vial of Liquid Paper, shove them all up his ass and fart a better manuscript than García Márquez could ever write.
SOME DUDE: Whatever. You know, just because you’re wearing a bag over your head in an obscure Simpsons reference, that doesn’t give you the right to act like an know-it-all elitist prick.
YOU: Yes it does so. 

See idiots? The TRP costume is nothing if not a conversation starter. And in order to keep the conversation moving, you’ll need to memorize a few important Pynchon passages. Most notably, you’ll need to learn the dirty limericks from Gravity’s Rainbow:

There once was a fellow named Schroeder,
Who buggered the vane servomotor.
He soon grew a prong
On the end of his schlong
And hired himself a promoter. 

There was a young man from Decatur,
Who slept with a LOX generator.
His balls and his prick
Froze solid real quick,
And his asshole a little bit later.

Those are the important two. There are a couple others you should also be familiar with. Page 334-335 of the 1995 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition should give you all the dirty limericks you need.

Now, for those of you who take Halloween costumes way too seriously, memorizing dirty limericks will not suffice. You’ll need to learn some hardcore Pynchon. Page 547 of Gravity’s Rainbow has some quality stuff, but I suggest memorizing a passage from The Crying of Lot 49. And not just any passage, I’m talking about what might be the third most impressive piece of non-Shakespearean writing in all literature:

Yet at least he believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than himself come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust–and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was not way of telling what things hd been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most if it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or a car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes–it made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest. 

Phew! That’s a lot of typing. But if you can remember that at whatever stupid Halloween party you crash, you stand a damn good chance of having the most impressive TRP costume in the room. As for me, I think I’ll save the TRP for next year. This Halloween, I’m a C.H.U.D.

Enter YOU

YOU: Hey, you really should be wearing a shirt out here.
ME: Nuts to you, idiot! I’m a shirtless denim model. My very nature forbids me from wearing a shirt.
YOU: Well, standing out here in this vast empty desert wasteland without a shirt is a good way to get a nasty sunburn.
ME: Poppycock! I am a shirtless denim model, the sun cannot harm me!
YOU: Oh yeah? What about the time you drove from Jersey to Arizona with your window open most of the time? Your left arm and the left side of your face were beet red, so just think what would happen if you don’t put on a shirt.
ME: That’s a lie! I have never in my life been sunburned on half of my upper body!
YOU: Yes you have. Your left half was all red and your right half was all pasty cracker white.
ME: Screw you, idiot! I’m out here in the middle of this vast empty desert wasteland, trying to make a meaningful soliloquy about the nature and desires of the modern American shirtless denim model, and you have to come out here and ruin it!
YOU: Hey man, I’m just trying to do you a solid. I don’t want you to get skin cancer.
ME: Skin cancer? Just a second ago, you were only worried about me getting a little sunburned. Now you’re saying I’m going to get cancer! What’s next, is the sun going to give me syphilis?
YOU: Maybe.
ME: Really? And just how is the sun going to give me syphilis?
YOU: Well, maybe Huitzilopitchli will see you in all your shirtless glory, come down from the sky and have his way with you, giving you syphilis in the process.
ME: I find it hard to believe that some little hummingbird dude is going to give me syphilis. Why would Huitzilopitchli want to do such a thing?
YOU: I don’t know. Maybe he’s upset that there haven’t been many sacrifices made in his name in the last few centuries. I mean, I know you don’t consider yourself a very religious person, and you have absolutely no Aztec heritage, but would it be so hard to sacrifice a few hobos in the name of Huitzilopitchli? Nobody will miss a few lowly hobos. We could go down to the train station and pretend to give out free sandwiches. Then when the hobos come close, we…

Enter WILMER VALDERRAMA

YOU: Um, why is that dude from That 70′s Show here?
ME: I don’t know. These one-act plays usually don’t make much sense. Actually, I’m somewhat offended by the flagrant disregard for the Aristotelian unities.
WILMER VALDERRAMA: I have an eight-inch schlong.
ME: No you don’t.
WILMER VALDERRAMA: Yes I do. I use it to have the butt sex with sexy ladies.
YOU: What kind of sexy ladies do you have have butt sex with?
WILMER VALDERRAMA: I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.
ME: Shenanigans! You’re just saying that do make people think you’re some kind of slick butt sex player. But you’re not.
WILMER VALDERRAMA: Jennifer Love Hewitt is an eight.
YOU: Oh boy.
ME: An eight? On what scale?
WILMER VALDERRAMA: 10. She’s an eight out of ten.
YOU: Oh crap.
ME: Eight out of ten? You’re saying My Jenny is a B? A low B? You little piece of shit Latka wannabe! Now we tussle.

Tussle ensues

YOU: Stop it please! There’s already too much violence in the world! We don’t need Wilmer Valderrama tussling with a shirtless denim model!

Tussle continues

WILMER VALDERRAMA: Please stop tussling with me! Your shirtless chest is so smooth, my girlish slaps have no effect on you.
ME: Ha, ha, ha! There’s not a man alive that can compete with the well-oiled chest of a shirtless denim model. And you’ll get no quarter from me until you’ve been properly subdued.

Tussle subsides. WILMER VALDERRAMA is subdued

WILMER VALDERRAMA: Oh, I have been subdued! Alas! Woe!
ME: Your old timey interjections can’t save you now.
YOU: Wonderful. You’ve subdued Wilmer Valderrama. Now what?
ME: Um…
YOU: This is horseshit. None of this makes any sense. And don’t try to claim it’s postmodernism. It’s not, unless you cynically define postmodernism as a half-assed collection of random nonsense.
ME: But…
YOU: No! You shut the hell up! I don’t want any part of this retarded one-act play. It’s only a matter of time before Sir Ian McKellan shows up, asking where he can find some pussy.
WILMER VALDERRAMA: If he wants to find some pussy, he should ask my giant wang.
YOU: Shut up, you no talent man whore piece of trash! We get it, you boned Lindsay Lohan. Big deal. If I had a nickel for every freckled slut with an eating disorder that I’ve banged, I’d have 35 cents right now. You are worthless. Your TV show is the worst kind of unimaginative sitcom garbage and your future success hinges upon your portrayal of Erik Estrada. Why do you even exist? What can you possibly contribute to society? I know people on the Howard Stern show might find this hard to believe, but there are many, many sexy ladies out there, sexy ladies who are more than willing to have sex with a man, even if he’s not a talentless sitcom actor. Hell, you can go to any mall in America and find sexy ladies who are twice as sexy as Lindsay Lohan and Mandy Moore. So why should we be impressed by your sexual conquests? Huh, Wilmer? What makes banging Lindsay Lohan more impressive than banging the sexy Asian lady who works at the hair extension cart at the mall? Tell me, Wilmer! Tell me what it is about guys like you and John Stamos that turns Howard Stern into such an ass-kissing sycophant?
WILMER VALDERRAMA: Did I mention my schlong is eight inches long?
YOU: Fuck this guy. I’m leaving.

Exit YOU. Enter SIR IAN MCKELLAN

SIR IAN MCKELLAN: Wassup, bitches! Anybody know wher–
ME: Actually, Sir Ian, I don’t think we’ll be needing you anymore.
SIR IAN MCKELLAN: Oh, alright then. Toodles.

Exit SIR IAN MCKELLAN

ME: You know something, Wilmer? Maybe being a shirtless denim model isn’t all it’s cut out to be. Sure, I get to stand around without a shirt, but I should be looking for so much more in life. Any idiot can stand around without a shirt, just like any idiot can have sex with sexy ladies. At first I thought I was better than everybody else, just because I was a shirtless denim model. But now, now I see that anyone can be a shirtless denim model. Like being a talentless man whore, it’s a profession that requires no skill, no dedication and no shirt. How can I possibly be satisfied with a life of doing something that any greased-up bozo could also do? And how could I ever live with myself knowing that I walked around boasting about my ability to do nothing remarkable, as if I were better than everyone else. You know Wilmer, you and I aren’t so very different. I believed that I was the only man on Earth who could stand shirtless in the midst of a vast desert wasteland, just as you believe you are the only person who has sex with sexy ladies. Funny, isn’t it? Just moments earlier, we were tussling. I even subdued you. But now I see that we have nothing to fight over, for we are the same man.
WILMER VALDERRAMA: What are you talking about?
ME: Hush now, Wilmer. There is no ‘you’ or ‘me’ anymore. We are one. Hold me.
WILMER VALDERRAMA: Please don’t touch me.
ME: Don’t fight it, Wilmer. We must become one, for our souls were meant to be together.
WILMER VALDERRAMA: Help. Please.

Curtain