I went to my first school dance dressed as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was spring of 1985 and Amadeus had just won Best Picture.

Try using compound one-word verbs. They prove your point, providing evidence that dependency is not totally wrong and that’s an argument you can’t ignore; two words binding tightly by an unbreakable bond, almost asphyxiating, to make sense. Not even a period in-between. Hyphenation isn’t a problem, as long as they count as one word by all word count applications.

Twelve is a hard age. At twelve you might equally make trouble by stealing a second helping of sugary cereal from the Shabbat morning breakfast buffet or by masturbating in your sleeping bag as your unsuspecting camp counselor leads a guided meditation. Jacob, the worst 12 year old I’ve ever known, showed me this during a three-week session at Camp Watahooga. “Hey bud, it’s not fair if you get more lucky charms when no one else does,” I told Jacob in the morning, and then later, “hey Bud, like we said before, you need to go to the all-gender single-use bathroom if you want to masturbate”–all this in the course of one terribly unrestful shabbat.

You are the men and women we, the comedic community, need, but do not deserve. Thank you for your endless charitable work and for helping us overcome poverty, depression, and thirst by covering our five dollar IPAs after our performances. With Mother Teresa’s patience, you endure awful open mics in rundown hellholes, where you have forced applause for a terrible sock puppet act, an annoying whiny guitar comic, and your slightly below average significant other’s pun about “holy socks.”