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It was, I remember it was a Thursday night,
and it was about midnight.
And I went into the kitchen to take my drugs,
which I've been taking for many, many years,
probably 14 years,
for, lo and behold, depression,
and its little partner, obsessive compulsive disorder.
(crowd laughing)
And just as I was tapping them into my palm
my fiance, at the time,
sort of darted by me
and darted downstairs into the basement.
And I say, "Honey, where are you going?
And he said, "I'm going to my lab."
Because he's a chemist and he has a lab,
he had, I should say, a lab in the basement
where he made his drugs while I took my drugs.
(crowd laughing)
So he went downstairs to the basement
and I tapped the four, 80 milligrams of Prozac into my palm,
and took them with water.
And just as I was probably downing about the last one
I heard from the basement
this blood curdling scream.
And I am actually a person,
even though I like I look like, you know,
with the frill and everything like that,
I look like I'm fairly sheltered,
(crowd laughing) I'm a person whose
heard a fair number of screams in her life.
(crowd laughing intensifies)
I'm a therapist and I'm also a veteran of mental hospitals.
So I've heard a lot of screams.
(crowd giggling) And, and this one,
this one was definitely was a scream to top all screams.
And I couldn't, I seriously could not imagine
what, what, what this could be.
The only thing I could think was that someone
had somehow climbed in the basement window
and was murdering my fiance.
Although it seemed unlikely
cause the basement window is so small.
(crowd laughing) But in any case.
I ran downstairs really, really fast.
And I flung open the door to his lab,
and he was standing there
and he was just ringed in fire.
He,
he had I should say, really long,
beautiful strawberry blonde hair.
And that was the thing that I remember the most,
was that it was just, it was just, you know,
like these Medusa like flames around his head,
and all his whole body was just fringed with fire.
And I stood there and I know that this,
this happened really fast,
but in my mind, this moment slowed down,
and I stood there, just for a second,
but it seemed like for a long time,
and I remember thinking,
"This is the oddest thing, that just two minutes ago,
I was a woman who was engaged to be married,
and who had had some significant difficulties in her life,
but had more or less overcome them,
and now all of a sudden my whole life narrative
is going to change.
And I'm going to be a woman who from this point on,
will say that she watched her lover burn to death,
in a fire.
How strange that that would suddenly
become a plot point in my life."
(crowd giggling)
I remember thinking that.
And then the moment passed and I ran forward,
and just as I did that, he was holding a beaker in his hand.
The fire was some chemical
that should never have touched air,
because air got into it spontaneously combusted,
and he dropped the beaker
and he started like patting the fire out,
even though his hands were also on fire,
he's patting, he just stamped it out
all over his body.
But a chemical fire is different from,
at least from what I saw,
a chemical fire is different from a normal fire.
In that this fire,
as soon as it was out of his body
and he was now no longer on fire,
it was, it started leaping
and like skipping around the room.
His lab was just packed with chemicals
that should not have been
in the house. (crowd giggling)
I mean, they were just packed
with toxic combustible chemicals.
And I pulled him out of the lab and I was like,
"Come on, we got to go, we got to go.
The house is going to blow up. We got to go now."
And he kept running back into the lab.
And finally there was a sort of strange
tug of war between us.
And then he managed to get back into the lab
and he took this fire extinguisher,
that I guess he obviously had there,
for just this sort of event,
and he was going, "Shit, shit shit."
He couldn't figure out how to work it.
And then he figured out how to work it,
and the fire extinguisher went pfffew.
And the whole room went up in like white,
this white, like, foam,
with this rancid stink.
And we ran upstairs and his, his hair was gone.
His eyelashes were gone.
His skin was bubbling.
(crowd murmuring) I was like, "I love you.
I love you. I love you."
I ran to the freezer and started throwing like,
whatever I could.
Like ice cubes, Tropicana cans, whatever,
(crowd laughing) just throwing that at him.
And I just kept saying, "I love you. I love you."
And he's like the kindest to the very end.
He's like "Lauren, just stay calm,
go to the CVS and get me zinc oxide,
'n aloe vera and bandages."
So I went to the CVS and I got him this stuff,
and it was in the car, that like,
his screams just kept going in my head.
It wasn't even the sight of him on fire, it was his screams.
And we, I came back and the next day we went,
soon after that,
we went to the emergency room,
and he had some scarring on his eardrum,
but he was pronounced basically hairless,
but okay.
(crowd laughing)
But the thing was, that I wasn't okay after that,
because I kept hearing his screams and I kept thinking,
what, you know, more than the sight of him,
it was those, it was the vision of it,
it was the sound of him.
And I kept thinking, I agreed to marry this man.
And when you agree to marry someone,
you agree to a degree of intimacy.
That includes all kinds of intimate sounds.
But this was a sound that I did not agree to ever hear.
And this was the sound of like the cortex being peeled back
and like pure limbic terror.
I knew what he would sound like at the moment of death.
And I did not want that knowledge of him
and I did not know if I could marry him with that knowledge.
And what basically happened is that I became depressed,
and our relationship became depressed.
I had always thought that depression
was something that happened just to an individual.
But from this experience,
I learned that it can have,
that depression can be the third variable.
It can happen between people.
We had, you know, all the diagnostic criteria.
We had the nerve vegetative symptoms.
We had a psychomotor retardation.
We stopped having sex.
Our appetites in all sorts of ways fell off.
And I remember thinking,
"I really, really don't know if I can marry this man."
Because his screams kept re-playing in my head.
I didn't know how I would ever integrate that
with the rest of him or with our relationship.
Now it's about four or five years later.
And I am actually, my ring kind of fell off,
but I am in fact married.
(crowd laughing)
(crowd applauding)
And so I think, I've been thinking like,
"What was it that enabled me
to move beyond those screams,
and move beyond that knowledge of him,
and move beyond depression that existed between us?"
I don't have any grand answers,
but I do have some sort of clues.
And one of them is just simply time.
As time went on, lo and behold,
his scream started to sort of fade in my mind.
And I was able to sort of put them
in a different place in my brain.
And also as time went on,
I was able to start remembering the event
a little bit differently.
This is something that is interesting in depression,
when you're depressed,
you will look at your past and see it in one way.
And as the depression starts to lift,
you maybe look at your past or look at past events,
and see them in another way.
And whereas, while we were depressed,
I had thought, "This guy is just such a loser.
He's such a goon.
I can't believe he almost house blew up our house."
(crowd laughing) I started thinking,
I started remembering,
"Well he had got the fire extinguisher.
He did figure out how to work it in a crisis.
And like that's something that I
never would have been able to."
And I started to sort of see him as being intentionally
competent again. (crowd laughing)
Where I hadn't seen him that way before.
And the other thing that happened,
was I went to a writer's conference,
and this was the first time we'd been away
from each other in a while.
And I got really, really drunk at this writer's conference.
And there was all these famous writers there,
like Susan Orlean, n' Gorvy Dalm,
it wasn't Janet Maslin, but it was some, like,
really serious hire of the New York Times.
(crowd laughing)
I got really, really drunk.
And I told them the whole story of the fire,
at this conference, at this dinner.
And they were all like, "Don't."
And I said, "Should I marry him?"
And they were all like,
"Don't, definitely do not marry this guy."
(crowd laughing)
Except Gorvy Dalm.
(crowd laughing intensifies)
And if Gorvy Dalm says you should marry someone
than you should marry them.
So I came back and we decided that we were in fact,
going to go ahead and get married.
Benjamin said, "Given everything that we've been through,
the kind of wedding I propose
is that we have a naked wedding."
(crowd laughing)
I said, "That's, that's not going to happen.
(crowd laughing intensifies)
"You know, you blow up the house,
you're not going to get a naked wedding."
(crowd laughing continues)
He said, "It's really important,
given the descent and the ascent
and the symbolism of all, that we have in naked wedding.
And this is one thing that I really, really want."
(crowd laughing)
So, I said, "If you really, really want a naked wedding,
you can have your naked wedding, I'm wearing a towel.
(crowd laughing intensifies)
So he said, "All right, you wear a towel,
but everybody who comes has to be naked too."
And I said, "There's no way that my friends,
who are all writers and have such
significant neuroses and anxieties...
(crowd laughing continues) There's no way,
that my friends, are going to come to our wedding
and be naked, and you can't force them to do that.
(crowd laughing continues)
And he said, "Well, all right, its voluntary, whatever."
But the day before the wedding,
like this kind of strange giddiness came over me.
It's the giddiness that I liken, sometimes,
to what happens when a depression is lifted
and you're like, "Whoa, like here it is."
And I decided, I went to a tattoo parlor.
(crowd laughing) And I got this,
this belt tattooed around my waist
of all his favorite molecules.
(crowd laughing intensifies)
Including the molecular structure of fire.
And I thought, I was 30 at the time,
and I thought, "This tattoo belt looks really awesome on me.
Maybe I should go naked."
But I still was up in the air about it.
So anyway, the day of the wedding comes,
he's in the bathroom, I'm in a bathroom.
Our friends come over, and the weirdest thing,
oh, we hired two witches to officiate the ceremony.
(crowd laughing) They were also,
like legally, legally married, but,
(crowd laughing)
So the witches come, all my writer friends come,
you know, they've got, you know,
all kinds of aches and pains and are just,
are are just not the type to go naked.
And the weirdest thing is that his friends all went naked,
and this strange hush came over this house.
And I swear to God this is true,
my friends all dropped trout, they all went naked.
(crowd laughing) His parents went naked.
(crowd laughing intensifies)
And then it was time for us, we came downstairs,
we walked down the stairs.
He and I were both in bath robes.
He took off his bathrobe.
And then I took off my bathrobe, and I was naked.
And we got married that way.
But I wasn't facing the crowd,
I was facing away from the crowd.
So it was only my back.
And then at the end, these witches,
who were pierced, like all over, said, you know,
"In order to fully consummate your wedding,
you now need to turn around and face the crowd."
Which is something that, having a large chest, I was like,
that was just totally something I didn't think
that I could do, but I did.
We both turned around.
We face the crowd and I was just like, "Here I am."
And it at this moment, when we were like,
when we were completely bare and silly
and scared and strong, and all of those things together.
And it was at that moment, that, you know,
we said, "I do, in sickness and in health,
for better and for worse."
And we're still married today.
And that's the end, thank you.
(crowd applauding and cheering)