matthearn.com

It turns out I’m not as think as I smart I am.

On Saturday, HW was out of town, so I had some free time that I used on lawncare and some cleaning and laundry and things. Around 11:30 I decided I should take a bike ride, and more importantly, I should throw my bike in the truck and cruise over to Old New Castle and have me a look around. So I did so, packing along a camera, my water, all kinds of tasty jaunpiece. I rode south through some kind of park on the bayfront, which smelled strongly of ass, and then back up a little bit, and found a little cut-through over to Route 9, which appeared to have nice wide shoulders that I could ride on without fear of having The Story Of Me concluded via high-speed impact with a jackknifing semi.

So I headed south on Rt. 9, noting some pretty homes, some rather nasty looking junkyards and warehouses, and then came upon a massive park of soccer fields. So I stopped for a bit and watched irate parents yelling at referees, and continued south another 1/4 mile or so, when I came upon the Ommelanden Shooting Range and Hunter Education Center. I’ve wanted to find out more about the place, so I stopped in, took a look around, watched some very poor shotgunners attempting to knock orange clays out of the air. Then I continued back north, and rode the few miles back up into New Castle.

I rode around on the side streets for a little while, and then locked the bike into the bed of my pickup, and took a bunch of pictures (appearing in this space later in the week, depending on my spare time to edit and post them) of the neat old buildings and some of the colonially-dressed peeps wandering around. I also poked my head into Immanuel-on-the-Green Episcopal, but didn’t linger long since I was wearing my bike shorts, and I didn’t think the Lord would approve having my pasty-white thighs so egregiously displayed within His House.

Then I threw the bike back in the pickup, grabbed some McDonald’s, and headed home to finish up my day of doing random homeowner jaunt. Sarah got home around 5pm, and immediately said, “Look at your nose! It’s bright red. What did YOU do today?”

That’s right, I head spent the hours of noon-2pm outside, including approximately an hour of riding my bike without any cloud or tree cover whatsoever, and it had not occurred to me that perhaps I ought to apply some sunscreen. My nose is burnt, my forearms are quite toasted, and most annoyingly, the tops of my thighs are beet red.

The lesson as always: I am an idiot.

Visual evidence of last Thursday’s attic-ladder installation extravaganza!

Here we see me holding the attic ladder in place with my head. Milo is in the attic getting his nail on, um, on. There are two things worth noting about me here:

1. I’m clearly wearing a shirt that is too tight by any reasonable standard. This is to show off my rippitude. Sadly, I am not yet ripped.
2. My ass is normally quite extraordinary, but for some reason my jeans are all clenched up such that I look like a fat woman in stretch pants wandering aimlessly through Walmart in search of the Swiss Roll That Got Away.

The amusing front side, featuring me smiling like an idiot. I did not actually get that shirt in Colorado. I got it at Old Navy. I am a poseur.

Okay, it’s late, and time is short. Here’s the latest amusement:

Attic Ladder Replacement

A multi-step plan.

(It is best if you continue with the help of a good friend, particularly one such as Brian, who has no apparent fear of heights and doesn’t mind if you get blue chalk over his pants.)

First, you must remove the previous attic ladder. The easiest way to do this is . . . who are we kidding here. There’s no easy way to do this. The least difficult (by which we mean the likelihood of mortal wounds is slightly decreased) is to have a your friend climb into the attic and start carefully removing nails via hammer and chisel, while you attempt to support the weight of the ladder so that it doesn’t crash down onto you. You will undoubtedly find that the previous installers had somehow managed to put nails in the most unlikely places, such as behind the ladder springs, and that the final nail will be almost impossible to remove because it’s supporting most of the weight of the ladder. You will also note that much of the pretty moulding around the ladder opening will start to fall off under the weight of the ladder.

After the ladder crashes down on you, get your friend out of the attic (you do have an 8-foot step ladder, right? You don’t? What the hell is the matter with you? Now your friend is trapped in the attic like a hunchback. Good job, idiot) to help you discard it and mend any injured limbs and contusions. Note that if you are not particularly careful when moving the ladder assembly, the lowest foot-rungs will take any opportunity to fold out and mash you in the jubblies. (Mine are aching considerably as a result.)

While the opening is unblocked by any ladder mechanism, now would be the time to place large objects in the attic, preferably ones you never intend to get back down. Brian and I took the opportunity to remove the particle board flooring installed by some previous occupant, and put three large sheets of 8×4 plywood in the attic to be secured with nails at some later date. In the process of doing this, you will undoubtedly, as we did, get blue chalk (they put it on the edges of the plywood, for some reason) all over your hands and clothes, as well as the walls of your house. Your wife will be thrilled, but not as much as when she notices you also got blue chalk all over the carpeting.

Next, drink a few beers, ’cause the hard part is just coming.

Now is the time to get out the new attic ladder (assuming you bought one; I’m not making any assumptions about the intelligence of my readership, not after the “dude u should totaly rite about that time i peed in a cup and poured it on jimmy remember that omigd i twas awesum” email I got yesterday) and prepare it for installation. If you got a good one, it will come with these handy straps that you use to hold it in place semi-securely while you nail it in. Nail those on as directed. After you’re done, realize that you put them on upside down, carefully remove them, and nail them back on properly.

Next, have your friend climb up into the attic again and hand the ladder up to him. This is nearly impossible to do unless you have biceps such that you can personally curl a half-height Whirlpool freezer, but do the best you can. When you do this, you will realize that the ladder is approximately 25″ wide, and the hole is only about 23″ wide. Worry frantically that you bought the wrong ladder, but then realize that no, the previous installers bought the wrong ladder, and compensated for this by nailing in a bunch of extra pieces of 1″ wood on each side. Carefully remove those pieces of wood. Note: the sound of nails being ripped from wood is louder than you think. I’d recommend you wear ear protection, but I’m not a wuss.

Lift the ladder up to your friend again. As he pulls the ladder into the hole, stand underneath it on the ladder and support it. The easiest way to do this is to simply rest it on your head and stand on the ladder with your arms at your sides. Then alert your friend he should bend the support straps around the joists to hold the ladder in place while you open it. As you do so, the entire apparatus will shift downwards very ominously; this is a signal that you should go back up and hold it in place while your friend nails the support straps to the joists.

Once that’s complete, carefully open the ladder partway and clamber up to help align things. Realize once you’ve done this that you are going to require shims. The ladder-maker will have supplied you with a single piece of plywood, about 6″ on a side, that they will refer to as “shims.” This is comically useless. While your friend sits in the hot attic, wondering if the sweat stain in the crotch of his pants will ever wash out, run downstairs into the garage, grab a bunch of 1/4″ plywood scrap, and run it through your table saw to create shims as needed. (If you lack a table saw, your best bet is to run out into the yard and gnaw the necessary shims out of living tree bark, because apparently you live in the paleolithic era. Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. Urk.) Bring these back upstairs and slide them in place where needed.

Now, support the ladder while your friend nails it in place. (Make sure you have some large, preferably 2-3″ nails of good thickness. You know, we probably should have alerted you at the beginning of these instructions that you would need a bunch of tools and fasteners and things. Our bad.) Once or twice, he will probably “accidentally” bash you in the fingers or head with the hammer. If this happens, weep a little, and thank God he didn’t catch you in the eye with the claw part.

Next, fold the ladder all the way down to check it for obvious deficiences, and to see how much wood you’ll have to cut off the bottom so that it unfolds properly. Don’t actually cut the wood off just yet; you can put that off until the weekend. Shake your friend’s hand, bid him fond adieu, and go get a beer, and an icepack for your nuts.

So I’m on a 90-minute “town meeting” conference call, right now at about the 30 minute mark. As you might guess, the first 1/3 of the meeting has been less than thrilling. So I figured I’d take the opportunity to update you on a couple things, since I’m sure you can’t sleep at night without wondering about my health and prosperity:

• The left foot is largely healed. It aches a bit if I try to run on it, so I don’t do that, but it doesn’t give me any trouble when I’m biking. I have to be careful when I lift weights, but hopefully it’s healing it up stronger than before. Thanks for all your prayers. Unless you haven’t been praying. In which case you obviously don’t care about me. I hate you.
• Speaking of bike riding, I’ve been really getting into it. I need to find more places to ride, though, that don’t involve 50mph traffic. I’ve done all the exploring in my neighborhood that I can, so now I have to venture out on the major roads near us. Yesterday I was cruising down the shoulder of route 40 at about 15mph, while traffic flew by at about 50mph. Not the best of times.

  I think in future I’m going to start taking the bike to work so I can go out in Newark, where there are more bike-friendly paths and roads, not to mention White Clay Creek State Park. I’m looking forward to flying madly down a hill in that place and erasing portions of my motor control via heavy foliage impact. Let the fun begin!

• I have to stop listening to my friends’ movie recommendations, particularly when they say “Dude, you have to see this, the movie is so YOU.” You may remember a few months ago when I watched “The Big Lebowski” and was greatly disappointed with it, considering the number of people who had told me I would love it. I had the same problem with “Anchorman,” which I watched with HW on Saturday night.

  You know a movie is lame when, about an hour in, I actually pick up an old newspaper sitting near me and scan it absentmindedly. “Anchorman” started out relatively fun, and it definitely had a few good lines (“Hi, I’m Matt Hearn. Drink it up . . . it always goes down smooth.” is now my standard greeting), but it was so over-the-top that it came full circle and started taking itself too seriously, if you can follow me. It was truly disturbing to see. Perhaps that was the point, to show how television news shows are so over-the-top with drama, but it made it pretty painful to watch. I think I’m just getting too old. Now I enjoy films with much more subtle humor, like “Napoleon Dynamite” and anything where somebody gets kicked in the nuts.

  I also like nudity.

So I bought a new suit of clothes yesterday. I’d wanted a new one for a while, since the only other wearable one I have I bought in 2000, and it just felt like it was time to add some variety to my wardrobe. Plus, I’ve lost a little weight, so the old suit is just a size too big. PLUS again, I have a bunch of weddings coming up that I need to be super-fly for so I can hit on hot chicks at the reception Sarah isn’t afraid to be seen with me.

2 Legit 2 Quit

I did some major league shopping before I made my purchase; I went to the mall TWICE this week to try things on, in 5 different stores, and finally settled on a dark Calvin Klein getup with pinstripes. I actually tried the same suit on in a bunch of different stores, trying to find one that carried a flat-front pant, because pleats look absurd on me. (My massive derriere tends to fill out the back, and pull on the front, causing the pleats to separate wildly and just look silly.) Sadly, once I found a flat-front version, I realized that for some reason it looked even WORSE on me than the pleated version, because Calvin had inexplicably designed them to be crazily high-waisted. So either I hiked the pants up to the “no more than 2 inches below the armpits” style pioneered by my father, or I wore them where my waist is, which left the crotch so low it looked like I was wearing Hammer pants. Luckily, the jacket and pants are sold as separates, so I was able to have options. I ended up purchasing the jacket and the pleat-front pants, and hope to have some alterations done on the pants to relieve the pressure in the pooper region.

Some of you are probably saying to yourselves, “Wait. Calvin Klein? That doesn’t seem right. Matt Hearn and designer labels go together like fat kids and chinups.” A few years ago, you’d be right. I probably have ranted and raved in this very space about how I’ll never wear Tommy Hilfiger or Vera Wang or whatever, but here’s the thing: designer clothes are really nice. They fit better, they use better fabrics, they look totally hot. I do draw the line at Ambercrombie and Fitch, though, mainly because going into the store is like going into a rave. The music is loud and thumping, and it’s rather dark, so you can’t actually see the clothes you want to buy. I last about 30 seconds in there before I get angry, drop the jeans or shirt or whatever on the floor, and stomp out. But all in all, I have to say that I now like designer clothing.

Even if it does cost me $320 for a suit.

Also: in case anybody happens to know the owner or manager or something of the Subway in the food court at Christiana Mall, it might be worth alerting them that it might be time to have a chat with whatever employees were working there at about 8:45pm on Tuesday. It does not set a customer’s stomach at ease to watch sketchy people who don’t appear to be employed there wandering in and out of the back room. It’s also not great when a customer hears somebody in the storage room pretending to vomit. Also, when a customer waits for 2 minutes in front of the establishment and no employee ever appears to take his order, that’s kinda off-putting.

Also also: You may notice that the quote that appears atop the page, under the purdy flowers, have random “\” marks throughout. That is because we have gone PHP, baby (woohoo!) and the folks at omnis appear to have screwed up when they set up the admin tools for the website. I have code up there that automatically generates random quotes that I have stored in a mysql database, which is nifty. Unfortunately, to make it look right, there are some PHP variables I have to change, and they have a form in the admin tools to change them, but it doesn’t appear to have any effect. I’ve sent them an email asking them either to fix the tool, or just fix my particular settings manually. Haven’t heard back yet. If there are NOT funny “\” marks in the quote, they’ve fixed it yay.

Are you all right? Your eyes are completely glazed over. That’s weird.

I really have to start writing things down as I think of them. Because I’m pretty sure I had two really quality ideas for posts over the past 24 hours, but I can’t remember any of them. So obviously in this case I’m going to talk about silly crap I may have noticed while walking around, because of course all of that lameness is permanently burned into my brain and needs to be shared.

I went to the gym again yesterday; I’m really starting to enjoy doing so, or at least, I enjoy the thought of having gone, once the deed is done. I certainly don’t enjoy driving out of my way to get there, having to park 1/4 mile away, and walking over. I most DEFINITELY don’t enjoy the actual lifting of heavy objects, because it hurts. A lot. And I don’t enjoy the part where about 24 hours later, I lose the ability to move around. The euphoria of going home and crashing on the couch after a hard workout, however, > *. Not that I’m really seeing any major results. I certainly can move a lot of weight on the ab-abber machine, but there’s still a good 3/4″ of fat over the muscles, so any rippitude developed there remains unseen. Also, my biceps muscles look good for about an hour after the workout, but by the evening they’ve returned to their usual flabby selves.

My ass, as usual, looks outstanding.

I even have a whole workout process, and I document what I do thoroughly. I have a specific order of exercises that maximizes the amount of rest I give a group of muscles before they are exercised again. For example: I don’t do the bench press right after the shoulder press, since both require the triceps muscles. I write down the reps I do per set, and the amount of weight with which I exercise, and all that excellent stuff.

Unfortunately, since I have a specific order to my exercises, I am subject to the exercising whims of the other people in the gym. I work in the faculty/staff gym of the Carpenter Sports Building at UD (I am technically neither faculty nor staff, but my wife is the latter, and nobody’s kicked me out yet because I’m relatively well-behaved, compared to the students), so most of the other exercisers are older, averaging I’d say about 50 years of age, but going as high as 65 or 70, I’d say. The apparent style of workout for these folks (and, to be honest, anybody in any gym) is to sit on one machine and do set after set with lengthy rest periods in between. This of course means that that crazy old man is going to be sitting on the bench press machine, frantically lifting weights approaching 17 pounds as fast as humanly possible for about 30 seconds, followed by a good 7 minutes of rest while his stroke symptoms subside. Repeat. 7 times.

I, meanwhile, have to rearrange my weight-lifting regimen, and usually find myself well into my second set of exercises on all the other machines while I wait for some old fart to finish using the seated row, or the lat pull, or the abdominal machines. (I’m always amused to see some 57 year old guy, about 60 pounds overweight, working his abs at level 0 like he fully expects to step off the thing looking like Eric Nies. GIVE IT UP OLD MAN. GO GET ON A TREADMILL.)

(Those of you who are 57 years of age or more and are insulted that I called you old: stop aging.)

Here are a few of the people I see at the gym at various times when I go:

• The slender, moustachio’d gentleman of about 55 or 60 who is clearly in FAAAR better shape than I am or ever will be. Every time I go to the gym, he is there. He lifts weights for tone and strength, I believe, ’cause I can lift more than he can, but mofo appears to be able to run a mile in about 6.5 minutes, which is roughly twice my current top speed.
• The two little secretaries, both around 60 or so, who come in, sit at a machine EXACTLY as I’m beginning to walk towards it, talk and giggle for a while, do exactly three repetitions of a bench press or bicep curl with almost no weight on the machine, and then leave, their workout complete. Note that I’m not saying they do three repititions on each machine: they do 3 repititions on one machine, selected semi-randomly, and then they leave. And the machine they use is always the machine I need at that particular moment.
• Any number of random middle-aged professors, desperately trying to hold back the grim reaper by damaging their shoulders by sitting at the bench press machine, doing set after set with the worst exercise form I’ve ever seen. I’m no expert, but I think if you’re doing a bench press by shrugging your shoulders up to your ears, holding your breath and letting your eyes roll back into your skull, you’re just asking for serious trauma.
• A bunch of younger UD employees in various shapes and sizes. Some of them are very fit, and some of them are not so much. I’m about average by the standards of others in my age group, which makes me feel nice. Of course, if I go down to the student gym (on weekends the employee gym is closed), I’m a fat slob with horrible hair. Still, a little ego-boosting never hurt. It’s why I watch TV.
• The piece de resistance, a funny little man I like to call Luigi. He’s like a pocket Albert Einstein; same hair, same moustachio, same European looks. This guy, however, is much more entertaining. He always wears green sretch pants, which are tucked into his socks, which are worn under a pair of running shoes that he may have purchased in 1967. He has some kind of purple stretchy device with a small ball, about golf-ball-sized, sown into it, and carries it around like some kind of security blanket. Equally entertainingly, he sits down at a machine, takes a deep breath, and does about 300 repetitions at very low weight, moving the weights only about 2 inches (doing a full range of motion on a given machine moves the weight bars about a foot). It’s not as entertaining to read about as it is to see, trust me. Every time I see him I smile.

I think I go more for the entertainment than the exercise. Which I’m sure you would deduce were you to see me at the moment, gut blubbering over my belt like jello.

The number of people that bought my silly April Fool’s joke, or even ALMOST bought it, was surprising. The list stands at:

• Brian
• Jessica (Who bought it hook, line, and sinker, btw.)
• Brian’s mother Carole
• Daryl, sort of.
• Dave, although he won’t admit it.

To be honest, I have to assume that most of my readership is stoned and/or drunk, so I really shouldn’t have been so surprised, but still. I had not predicted this level of gullibility.

This weekend was a good weekend at the Hearn Household, culinarily. Thursday afternoon after I left the gym, I stopped by the grocery store on the way home. We hadn’t been in roughly 3 weeks, so the only foodstuffs we had left at the house was a half a bag of frozen artichoke hearts, two onions, and some phyllo dough. Now we are, dare I say, FULLY STIZOCKED.

Not that this was without trials. Acme had, of course, only 2 non-express lanes open, so I pulled into the shorter one, behind a Muslim woman (in full burkha and veil) and her three uncontrollable sons. This . . . was a mistake. Her understanding of how grocery stores work in America was severely weak; she had one of those massive red grocery carts that look like cars, and rather than pull it behind her into the lane, she just parked it sideways in front of me and carried items from it to the conveyor belt.

Then, she appeared to be paying with a check.

Then, somehow, foodstamps got involved.

Luckily, I was leafing through a US Weekly, or else I might have taken one of her sons hostage (a rather ironic thought, indeed). After a short while, Acme opened the adjacent lane, and I did my usual high-speed checkout; when I left, our veil’d friend was still awaiting some kind of approval for her purchases.

Anyway, now duly stocked, I was able to make my balicious low-carb cheesecake, as mildly modified from a recipe on the back of a bag of Splenda. Here are the steps involved:

• Preheat th’oven to three-fitty.
• Put 5 or 6 whole graham crackers into a food processor and crumb ’em up real grood. Meanwhile, melt 3 tablespoons o’ butter in a bowl. After the graham crackers are suitably crumb’d, add 1/4 cup o’ Splenda in, and the butter, and process it a bit more to mix it up.
• Grab thy trusty 10″ springform pan and spray it with non-stick jaunpiece of some kind, and then spread the crumb/Splenda/delicious butter mixture on the bottom. Congratulations: you have made cheesecake base crust. Set the pan aside.
• Get out four 8-ounce packages of delicious cream cheese (preferably pre-soften’d) and throw all that yumminess in a large-ish bowl. Pour in 1.25 cups o’ Splender. Get out your mixer and start a-mixing until smooth, or until the mixer gives up the ghost because you didn’t soften the cream cheese first, like I did. (Note to self: purchase new mixer.)
• The Splenda recipe calls here to add lime juice and salt, but I don’t like Lime or Lemon items in my sweet desserts, so I’d throw in about a teaspoon of Vanilla and a pinch of salt.
• Add 4 eggs, one at a time, mixing (or hand stirring with great gusto) thoroughly between each egg.
• Pour mixture into your encrusted springform pan, and throw it in the oven for about 50-60 minutes. If you’re smart, you’ll put the pan in some kind of water bath, apparently this keeps the cheesecake from collapsing, although it’s only worked once for me.
• After cake is done, let it cool for about 15 minutes, and throw that punk into your fridge. Welcome to Flavor Country.

I also invented a drink I call the Asperger, which consists of vodka and orange soda. I was hoping to replicate a kind of autistic Mimosa, but mostly it tastes like vodka and orange soda, two flavors that are not meant to be together. I don’t recommend it unless you have nothing else in the house. (I had nothing else in the house.)

April Fools! Oh, MAN, did I get you guys good!

No?

Shut up.

Holy Manboobs of St. Paul, I’m hungry. But before I figure out which of my officemates would be the most succulent and tasty, I wanted to share a few random thoughts:

• You may have noticed I didn’t publish anything yesterday. That’s because I was having technical difficulties, after which I finally gave up and spent the afternoon attempting to adjust the steering alignment in my truck, which is off after I got the airbag worked on in December.

  So, I began by unscrewing the bottom of the casing around the steering column, only to discover that once you get all the screws out, it’s still held in place by part of the dash. So I found two bolts that held the underside of the dash in place, and removed them. The dash was no looser than it had been before.

  So I pulled off the fuse-box cover, and discovered a bunch more bolts, some of which also held on the emergency brake and hood release gadgets. I carefully took those off, hoping that the truck wouldn’t then go rolling backwards down the driveway with me half-in-and-half-out with my head stuck behind the clutch pedal. The panel STILL wouldn’t pop loose, but I realized it was definitely being held somewhere at the top. Then I discovered the panel ABOVE it was only held on with little felt-covered friction-y brackets, so I popped that off, removed 2 additional bolts, and voila, wasn’t any nearer to figuring out where the alignment adjustment occurred.

  So I took the top off the steering column casing, which necessitates popping out the ignition, which turned out to be rather disturbingly easy. (I’m pretty sure I could steal any late model Ford pickup with little more than a power drill. Admittedly, that’s rather specialized information, but still.) Once I got the top casing off, I realized I STILL couldn’t figure out what was going on.

  So I crawled down underneath and laid on my back on the floor, wedged between the seat and the brake pedal, to look up at the steering action. It was then that I noticed the massive bolt on a U-joint that appear to lead through the firewall and into the front-end steering mechanism. So I carefully loosened that up, and tried to twist the steering wheel to straighten it. No dice.

  I crawled back underneath, and wiggled the u-joint a bit, which caused it to completely separate from the steering wheel mechanism. AHA! Based on how things fitted, it was clear that there must be some kind of adjustment WITHIN the steering column. So I set about taking it apart.

  This is where you’re probably hoping to read that I inadvertently set off the airbag and shattered my left arm, but in reality I didn’t get much further because every remaining bolt on the damn steering column used one of those Star-of-David-shaped “Torx” bits, which I do not own. I spent about a half-hour trying to remove some of them with a regular allen wrench, but that didn’t do much but strip a couple of the heads slightly, so I gave up and put everything back together.

  Hours spent working on truck: 2.

  Accomplishments: 0.

  I hate modern automobiles. I’m gonna buy a 67 Impala and drive it until I die.

• So my wife is apparently meeting with some Education minister from Panama today. Seriously. HearnWife and her cohorts at work apparently are the Cat’s Very Own Ass when it comes to their projects, so now they’re getting consulted by other countries. Sure, it’s not Germany, or the United Kingdom, or even Kamchatka (geography as I know it is shaped by my knowledge of the RISK boardgame), but it’s still pretty damned cool, if you were to ask me, which of course you didn’t, so let’s just move on.

  All I know is that she dolled herself up for the occasion, and it got me a little chubby. Just so you are aware.

• Some of you are wondering why I went with a particularly effeminate design for the ol’ website this week. Come on, people, it’s frickin’ Spring! SPRING! Spring means flowers and totally righteous spring-y colors! Although I have to admit that the orange in the <BODY> background is a little Halloweenish. Perhaps I’ll have to lighten that up.

  Anyway, I’d had the “Eagles” theme up for a month, and it was starting to look like I was in mourning. So it had to go. You’ll probably remember I did a pretty righteous Spring theme last year, although of course it’s long gone since Blogger basically forces me to make all the archives look like the mainpage if I want anything to work properly. Argh, says I.

I’m hoping to start working on some kind of short sci-fi story tonight; depending on how inspired I am, you might get to see that tomorrow. If not, I’m sure I’ll manage to come up with some kind of boring drivel that I can post so Dave V. stops IMing me with “What, nothing to write today? Whatever will we do?!?” So look for either really poor fiction tomorrow, or really poor humor. It might even be both!

I think I’m beginning to understand why it is that most American musical theatre written after about 1960 completely turns me off. Pop music in the 1950s ruined it for everybody.

Let me backtrack a bit. Last summer, when I did Brigadoon, I remembered how much I enjoyed performing in musicals. I hadn’t done it in many years, mainly because (as I revealed to everyone) the last one I had done was Grease, which is, in case you weren’t aware of it, the worst piece of dreck ever to hit a Broadway mainstage. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I hate the original production, I hate the movie, I hate the soundtrack, there’s honestly not one thing about it I can stand. Most of all, I hate the fact that the rest of the world seems to adore it, such that every year or so some local theater performs it, and invariably a friend of mine is cast in it, so I have to go see it again. And I sit there, and stare at the stage (which is invariably pink walls in every scene, with black checkerboard floors, as if every business and home in the continental United States closed down and became a friggin’ sock hop on the weekend), and hate.

There are two basic reasons why my anger on this subject is so strong:

• The “plot”. Here’s a basic outline, leaving out some of the more pointless stuff (of which there’s a lot): New girl moves to town, sees the boy she met over the summer. He turns out to be a jerk when he’s around his friends and spurns her. His friend buys a car. She makes friends with the local bad girls, who invite her over. One of them reveals she’s quitting school to go to beauty school.

  The friend with the car starts nailing the baddest of the girls. The girl in beauty school discovers she has as much beauty-creating skill as a gerbil. Jesus comes down from heaven and sings a song to her about going back to high school. She crucifies him.

  Wait a second, I’m getting off track here.

  The bad girl tells the guy with the car that she might be pregnant, and it’s probably not his. He is sad. The main boy and the main girl are still having issues ’cause she won’t give up the punani and he’s dirty.

  All this turmoil builds until the final scene, in which:

  • The main girl turns into a slut, and presumably gives up her virginity to the main guy.
  • The baddest girl turns out to not be pregnant.
  • The beauty school dropout starts a cult in Oklahoma and is killed when she sets off a nuclear device near Tulsa.

  It just makes me insane that they spend over 2 hours building up all this pressure on the characters, and then BOOM everything’s fixed and they sing. Hate. It.

• The “music”. Why do we revere the music of the 50s? So much of it is painfully bad. My ears start to drip blood when I hear a lot of it. In the 40s we had swing music, much of which was brilliant and jazzy and fun, and inspired dance moves that required the athleticism of a starting point guard for the Pistons; in the 60s we had Motown and Rock and Roll and the Beatles and Joni Mitchell and lyrics from Bob Dylan that won’t be topped in 500 years unless John Mayer gets particularly insightful. In between, we had horn-rimmed white dorks from Minnesota playing songs with 3 chords, screeching horrific falsetto death rattles, and crashing airplanes left and right. Worse, some idiot wrote an entire musical just to relive that decade. And if I meet that man, I will stab him in the neck.

I think most of what I don’t like about musicals today is a direct result of Grease’s immense popularity. The shoddy music ripped off from top 40 radio, the lame plot ideas, the bad writing; everything’s gotten sloppy because playwrights and composers realized that all you have to do is throw some hack dialogue together with a big dance number with some poor idiot screaming notes that make her vocal chords spray blood into the first three rows, and the audience will eat it up.

Another problem is that the quality of the singing seems to have gone WAY down. Right now I’m listening to the original “Off-Off-Broadway” cast recording of “Godspell,” and I’m not enjoying it terribly, although it’s not the fault of the composer, whoever he or she might be. The recording I have features singers that are simply God-awful. Seriously, it’s like they hired homeless people to record this album. And it doesn’t make sense because I personally know a half-dozen or more singers with incredibly strong voices.

Here’s the thing. When you’re hiring performers, you want to get the best actors and singers and dancers that money can buy. Unfortunately, I think that casting directors tend to focus on acting, to the detriment of singing. And this is not a smart idea, because while I can tell the difference between a grade-A actor and a grade-B actor, once I get into the story I won’t notice. (Example: “Napoleon Dynamite” did not feature actors of the caliber of Steve Buscemi and Al Pacino, but it didn’t detract from the overall hilariousness of the film.) I can tell the difference between a grade-A singer and a grade-B singer before they finish their first measure, and I think most people can as well. The people on this recording of Godspell are approximately Grade-D singers. And I have no idea if they’re quality actors, because you never see or hear that part. I wouldn’t have even issued an “original cast” recording, I’d’ve just hired professionals to lay down the tracks.

Still, there’s hope for Broadway, I think. Back in February HearnWife and I and some family folks went to see “Wicked,” which I believe I described at the time as “OH MY GOD THAT WAS SO AWESOME I THINK I JUST POOP’D MY PANTS,” which still holds true. The score is a delicious mix of classical and popular styles (the pit orchestra was a true ORCHESTRA, and yet it still had guitars and drums and all the fun stuff that audiences today dig), the melodies were fantabulous, the lyrics and book just right, the acting was righteous, and best of all they found two leading ladies with some SERIOUS pipes. Elphaba in particular could absotively WAIL. I haven’t bought the soundtrack yet, but it’s on my list.

So clearly it’s possible to find writers who can really come up with quality shows, and the performers exist to make them memorable. Let’s keep it up, Broadway, and prevent the musical theatre scene from becoming like Hollywood: the occasional gem lost in a sea of horrific pap.