Real life - You, Me and Dupree - part 1

Yes I know the movie’s a year old but I just saw it for the first time last night.

This is an excellent movie if you enjoy a light, amusing movie. If you haven’t seen the movie it’s about a couple, newly married, who end up taking in a friend who’s down on his luck. Their friend is a major screw up. Everything he does, he does badly! The friend, Dupree, manages to drive a wedge into the new marriage - first by alienating the bride and then it turns around and he ends up alienating his best friend when the new wife finally starts to understand the screw up named Dupree.

I guess the reason why this movie struck a chord with me is because we had a friend very much like Dupree. A guy who was full of all kinds of ideas of how to make it in life, but never came through on anything.

As far as I know this guy is still living in his small home town with his parents and he must be in his 40’s now.

It was 1998.

Chris and I were living in our very small junior one bedroom apartment. His friend who I had always found loud, obnoxious and irritating called us up and said he’d taken a job working with an Opera company here in Toronto and he needed to come to Toronto every second weekend for a few months in order to attend practices.

Uhm did I mention he’s an opera singer? Yeah well kinda.

When Chris told me I reluctantly agreed. This guy had rubbed me the wrong way even on my wedding day four years earlier! One of my cousins got up and sang an Italian opera song for us - so we’d get up and kiss. It was very sweet. He’d prepared his performance in advance. He’s no opera singer, but he did well and the sentiment was lovely because it was from the heart.

Our friend then got up immediately after my cousin and sang the song again! Of course his version sounded much better because he is an actual opera singer (always out of work!), but I thought it was so cruel of him to do that to my cousin.

You can probably tell that this guy, lets call him Mr. Z, loves the limelight and has no tact.

Back to 1998 … When Mr. Z called to ask if he could stay with us for one night, every second weekend, I reluctantly agreed. That was a big mistake, perhaps one of the biggest of my life!

A few days later Mr. Z showed up at our door and stayed the night after going to his opera practice. Mr. Z loves to party and so does my husband … but my husbands pretty good about knowing when to stop when he’s not influenced by his hard partying friends … however when a few particular people are around Chris goes into heavy party mode and doesn’t know when to stop!

Heck, there’s a few people that can put him in party mode just by calling him. His brother is one of them. When his brother calls … even if it’s 2 or 3 in the morning Chris will head for the fridge and get a beer or pour himself some bourbon because he loves drinking with his brother … so in essence they drink together over the phone!

Mr. Z’s first stay with us went ok. I’ll admit that I probably had fun and partied a bit with them too. Mr. Z left the next day and didn’t return again for almost two weeks. Fine … ok, maybe I can live with this … maybe …

We only had one bedroom so Mr. Z had to sleep on the couch when he slept over … unfortunately he was very much a night person and he was/ is very loud so I don’t think we ever got much sleep while he stayed with us.

After a couple visits Mr. Z started coming into town every weekend. I was already tiring of his presence and seeing him every weekend was getting to be a bit too much. I was tired and worn out, and I was beginning to feel like a servant in my own home.

Now do you remember how Dupree in You, Me and Dupree almost burned down the newlyweds house? Well … something like that happened in our apartment too. We have a nice burn hole in our old sectional couch because of him. He liked candles too.

He also broke two glass tables, my make up mirror and an aquarium! I’m pretty sure he broke a number of other things but that’s all I can think of at this moment.

He was costing us money! He ate everything in sight … plus he was the type of guy who would order food but then not have any money when it arrived. Or he’d suggest we go out and always forget his wallet.

I’ll continue the story of our Real Life You, Me and Dupree in the next post - Part II