Ode to an Inside Joke

How an inside joke with Alex Dobrenko turned into a hot little orb of love

Little Rae and Alex, pre-joke

Hello readers! This essay is a tribute to long-term friendship, and in particular my fifteen-year friendship with Alex Dobrenko of Both Are True. Alex has been a constant source of humor throughout my entire adult life, and whenever I am with him, I am constantly laughing. It seems only fitting to memorialize his least funny but longest-running joke ever. I also want to thank Phil Kaye, who plays the anonymous “friend at a concert” in this essay, and who has been instrumental in carrying this terrible, precious joke through the years.

This essay was originally published in Ghost City Review.

Once, fifteen years ago, I asked a stupid question. I was on board a ferry boat, a rising college senior, red-cheeked from a day at the beach. A group of friends lounged on the deck, high on the sweet, auspicious air of early summer, bare arms slung over shoulders. The late afternoon sun glanced off the waves and projected sparkles. Everything was wide and inviting ahead.

I wanted to know the plans for the night, so I turned to my friend Alex and said,

“So are you guys, like, partying later?”

The syntax and word choice were odd. I was a serious student, the type of person who would use the word “syntax.” Alex, with an inborn instinct for comedy, mined some hilarity from my dumb question. He turned to the group and yelled,

“Hey, everyone, are we, like, partying later? Anyone, like, partying?”

The small group giggled and repeated my badly composed question—Anyone, like, partying later? I blushed a happy pink, the butt of the joke but also the queen of the joke. I’m a fiend for this kind of fond teasing. This kind of love.

So? That would usually be the end of it. A silly, frivolous joke. Barely a joke, really.

But that year this phrase became a habit—Are you, like, partying later? If Alex and I encountered any discussion of nighttime plans, any mention of events on campus, indeed any use of the word “later,” he turned to me and said, Are we, like, partying? Later? The phrasing evolved—later, are we gonna, like, party?—and became truncated—later, wanna like…? Eventually the entire joke was contained in just a glance my way and a single word: party?

Other people began to reference the joke. I found myself in random groups talking about the coming weekend, and someone would turn to me and say,

“So, later, are you, like, heading somewhere with people imbibing alcohol?”

Oh, this insignificant, unsophisticated, artless, middling joke that we couldn’t stop telling.

*

Five years later we were twenty-five, and a group of these friends reunited at a concert. Dusk was falling and the stage lights were coming up, and for a moment everyone left behind the trials of early adulthood and became free: wearing cutoff shorts, covered in mud, stripes painted on our cheeks. A band dressed as aliens took the stage, and the crowd started thumping, bellowing the lyrics, shutting our eyes against the strobe lights, waving our hands in the deepening night. Someone grabbed my arm through the mayhem and yelled,

“Hey!”

I was tossing my long hair wildly and stomping on the muddy earth. I paused just long enough to hear a friend shout: