Bethany Van Delft and her fiancé reckon with the zombie apocalypse.
Bethany Van Delft’s “hip & grounded, laid back delivery” has earned her the honor of performing at the prestigious Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, San Francisco Sketchfest, as well as appearances on Comedy Central, TV Guide Channel, NickMom, and 2 Dope Queens podcast. Her "series at the Women in Comedy Festival "38/7%" was a huge hit, and monthly show, Artisanal Comedy, has been named “one of the top indie nights to check out”. Her latest project, a hilariously cringeworthy storytelling show/podcast with Nick Chambers “Starstruck: Close Encounters of the Awkward Kind” is becoming a fan favorite. Unashamedly in touch with her inner nerd, Bethany has been a panelist on “You’re The Expert” and “Literary Death Match”. She hosts MOTH mainstages around the country, MOTH storyslams & Grandslams, is thrilled to have a MOTH story re-posted by SULU! (aka George Takei) and honored to have a story included in The MOTH's 2nd book "All These Wonders".
This story originally aired on May 25, 2018 in an episode titled “Science fiction: Stories about aliens and zombies.
Story Transcript
So me and Jayme, we’re sitting on the couch in our living room watching TV and a commercial for a movie, a zombie movie comes on. Shaun of the Dead. When it’s over I say, “I don’t understand this whole like fighting-for-your-life-in-a-zombie-takeover thing. Like what are you fighting for? To be the last human in a world full of zombies? Because that’s what’s going to happen. They're going to totally take over and then you're going to be the last person fighting for your life in an undead world. Like I’m not doing that.
I’m going up to the first zombie I see, I’m going to stick my neck in his mouth, I’m going to get bit and I’m going to amble all over the world until a human fighting for their life knocks my head off.”
And he whips around, grabs my shoulders and he goes, “What the hell is wrong with you? We’re getting married. Take that back right now. Say that you will not get bit first. Tell me right now that you will fight for your life against the zombies with me. Like we’re in this together.”
It’s true we were engaged, but, until that moment, I hadn’t really thought about the difference between living together and being married. I wasn’t a little girl who had dreams of weddings or dressers or seating plans or anything. I didn’t even have a wedding plan, except for the one with my first boyfriend wherein we would marry at Studio 54, because we would be loaded enough to reopen Studio 54, and we would both be dressed in flowing white kiyana and we would dance down a lit-up runway to Grace Jones’s “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You).”
But when he found his husband that plan didn’t seem like it would work as nicely with anyone else, so I ditched it.
I'd been in relationships before, good ones. I'd even been engaged before. But anytime I saw a little fault or a crack in the foundation, I'd dash for the exit every time. But there was something different about Jayme’s type of love and patience. I knew this by the way I grew with him and the way I missed him and the way I started believing that every fight was not the last fight.
I would hear people say, “You'll know when it’s the one,” which I thought was a load of hooey because I never knew it was the one, but this time I did. Like Jayme was the one so we were getting married, which I thought was living together with matching dishware.
But that night on the couch, I realized that maybe being married is having a commitment that’s so strong that you might have to reconsider fierce convictions, like whether or not you'll fight when the zombies come.
So I looked at him and I said, “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I won’t get bit first. I promise. I won’t leave you with the zombies. I promise that I will fight the zombies with you until the very end.”
We went out and got How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse and we read a chapter everyday and we studied like our lives depended on it, because hypothetically they did.
First things first. To slay a zombie you have to know a zombie. So we learned that zombies, 99.9% of the time, are not created by magic. They're created by a virus called solanum.
Here’s how it works. The virus invades the brain, shuts it down and all other bodily functions and then it uses frontal lobe cells to replicate and then it destroys it. And that’s bad because the frontal lobe is the control panel of your personality. It controls things like memory, emotion, language, judgment. It regulates your emotions to fit societal norms, like curb your desire to eat people. Damage to the frontal lobe makes it hard to assess risk and danger. That’s how come a zombie is still going to try to eat you even if you're swinging a machete at it. The primary motor cortex is there and that’s responsible for voluntary movement, like walking.
So without your frontal lobe, you can’t form simple thoughts, you can’t reason, you can’t move on your own. And they're like zombies walk.
Well, after the mutation, the brain becomes a brand new organ. It’s completely independent of the body but it uses the body like a tool. Like it’s the pilot of the body like Voltron or something. It uses the body to get its one and only desire, which is to eat. That’s why you have to chop a zombie’s head off.
Nobody knows yet what drives a zombie’s instinct to eat so there's no way to control it. You can’t reason with it, therefore you cannot domesticate a zombie. which led to really heartfelt conversations between me and Jayme.
In the beginning of our studies, we both believed fully that we would keep each other when we turned. But after learning the true nature of zombies, how they're just going to keep coming at you and trying to eat you, we changed it to, “Okay. I’m going to keep you if you turn but you have to kill me when I turn,” because we don’t want to cause harm to each other.
But well, well, well into our studies we realized that what we’re really facing here is we might come upon the day when this person who we love and loved us is not that person anymore. They're gone. We had to think about how are we going to let go. It’s crazy.
Zombies don’t have superhuman powers. Sometimes people say that, but they don’t. The brain can only make the body do what it did in living life. For instance, zombies aren’t super fast. A zombie can only go as fast as their leg length allows them, which I used as support in my argument that he's got to kill me because my inseam is 34 inches. So he has to kill me or I'll run him down.
It was super fun. It was really fun doing this but, somewhere along the way, our preparation for living in an undead world actually unwittingly prepared us for living together in the real world. Like when the zombies come they're going to take over and that’s it. How do you live everyday knowing that?
But in the real world, forever is not forever. The end is always coming so you have to learn to live together, stay together just one day at a time. This was really fun and it brought us close together like dance lessons do for some people, except we were going to survive the zombie apocalypse and they were going to dance into the arms of zombies.
Jayme was totally into weapons and war and tactical things. I was into home comforts and downsizing for life on the run. I became the Marie Kondo of zombie apocalypse packing. We packed our zombie bag and we planned our wedding.
We both wanted to get married with our toes on the sand and the sky and the sea as our decorations. And another night on the couch we saw the perfect beach in a Corona commercial. We found that beach and we got married there with sixty-six of our very close friends and family, all of our toes in the sand in front of radiant turquoise water.
Our officiant said, “Do you, Bethany, take Jayme? Do you, Jayme, take Bethany the old-fashioned way?” He spoke into a microphone because the ocean was roaring so loudly and beautifully you couldn’t hear anything. But you still couldn’t hear when Jayme and I said ‘I do’ to each other and no one could hear the last words I said after ‘for all of our lives’. The last words I said which were, “and I promise I will fight the zombies with you until the very end.” Thank you.