Eddie Izzard’s Dress To Kill was released June 13, 1999.

I hadn’t been in Boston long when a lot of my plans fell apart. I was in a bit of a fog when I came across Dress To Kill one late night on HBO. I fired up the ol’ VHS and taped it the next time I could find it, and watched repeatedly over a period of a few months. I leaned hard on this and a group of albums (My Aim Is True, Hollywood Town Hall, Still Feel Gone, the first three Ben Folds albums, Bachelor No. 2, More Miles Than Money) to draw out the poison, as it were. It was hard to be a sad sack watching Izzard’s one-person Monty Python act. Cake or death? Do you have a flag? Babies on spikes? Slut Bunwalla? Izzard whirled from thing to thing, place to place, idea to idea, so quickly I had no choice but to pull myself to the front of my brain to follow. Uncle Tupelo met me where I was and stood me up straight. Izzard said, “Right then. Over here. Lots going on outside. Try to keep up.”

I don’t watch it from that place anymore. I watch it from the moon. With Steve. But I’m grateful to have found it at exactly the right time, and that it’s still just as funny when I’m not an emo donkey.