Cinderella was a rousing success! Those of you that missed it, shame, shame. Quite truly, it was awesome, although if I were to say I wish we could do another show or two, that would be a lie.

And I am not a liar.

Opening night, Thursday, went very well, aside from a slight mistake on my part that resulted in the Prince and Cinderella having to stand around for a moment on stage while I conducted the introduction to the next song. Friday I managed not to screw anything up, but things were still pretty shaky: the actors dropped a lot of lines, and forgot the words to songs on a few occasions, and of course the amusing situation in which the godmother wasn’t able to find the seam in the curtain so she could do her “disappearing” act and ended up wrapping herself in the curtain so that she “couldn’t be seen,” which resulted in much giggling from the audience.

By Saturday all of these situations had been resolved, and we did the final two shows with great perfection, even when the brass section left me a note in my score reading “RANDOM USELESS NOTE ‘D” which makes sense only if you love Homestar Runner on the truly disturbing level that we do.

A big thanks to all the production staff, and the actors, and the crew, and the pit band, particularly my father; having a totally quality pianist definitely held things together. It was also nice to have an actual string section.

A few people have asked me what I plan to do with all my free time, which is a normal question, and which is of course rather foolish, since if they’d give it any thought they’d realized I plan to start sleeping 14 hours a day. Starting right about . . . wait for it . . . now.

(Tomorrow: why Wendy’s is lame.)

So, I’m not sure what the recovery time for a workout is really supposed to be for a beginner. I figured the chances were slim I’d recover enough to have a workout on Wednesday, but it’s now Thursday, and I hurt just as bad as I did Tuesday morning. In fact, a NEW agony has emerged: my right shoulder.

Tuesday morning I had horrible pain in my triceps muscles, and a certain amount of hurt in my pecs. It was fairly manageable. But now my right shoulder has joined the fray and it feels like someone was beating me in my sleep. HW does have a tendency to do that, but she’s out of town at the moment, and the cats aren’t strong enough. (They do more damage with their teeth, claws, and constant insistence that they be petted.)

I’m hoping that in the future I’ll recover more quickly from a workout, as right now I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever be able to move my right arm again. In order that I might continue shedding unsightly wrinkly fat from my hips, I’m considering buying an inexpensive bicycle, probably at Walmart, because I need to lose a sizeable amount of weight very rapidly.

Auditions for the Brandywiners’ production of South Pacific are April 17th, and the part I would like to audition for requires a degree of shirtlessness. So at the audition they want to have all the guys remove their shirts so they might be checked for rippitude. I’m not seeing myself having a lot of that, so I plan to lose as much weight as possible in the next month (luckily, I’m already through the induction part of the Atkins diet, so I should be shedding pounds already) and then invest in an Ab-Abber 3000.

I suppose I could do crunches, but that’s just not how I roll.

Ooh…yeah…that’s it…here comes the random spouts of crap:

• Go here. The first one is pretty good, but definitely listen to the second one. I peed my pants repeatedly. Seriously, man, my ergonomic chair is sopping.
• I was reading the other day where some folks were arguing that the high gas prices we’re currently experiencing indicate that we are in need of a “regime change,” meaning, they think if we take Dubya out of office, gas prices will go back down?

  Um…wha?

  The people that I read saying these things are, almost to a man, the same people that for the past two years have been saying “We only invaded Iraq for the oil!” Well, if that’s true, wouldn’t we actually be experiencing cheaper oil prices? I’m no Alan Turing, but even my moldy brain can spot hypocrisy of that level. (My own hypocrisies are well known, particularly the one in which no one should be permitted to have a driver’s license but me and the few worth individuals I designate, despite the fact that my own driving record is spottier than a leopard.)

  Interestingly enough, many of the same folks say that we shouldn’t drill for oil in “wildlife preserves,” despite the fact that the only thing that makes them “preserved” is some government entity saying so. Were I Lord and Master of All I Survey, I’d just say, “Okay, well, that part’s no longer preserved. Get to drilling. This other part over here, where there isn’t any oil, is now the preserved area. Good times for all.”

  None of this changes the fact that I’m considering selling my truck because I realized it costs me upwards of $2000 a year to fuel it.

• New washing machine = superw00t. Even better was that we were able to maneuver the washer and dryer in the laundry room to a position that makes more sense. When we arrived at the house, the existing washer was positioned in a way that we couldn’t put the dryer next to it without moving the washer out of the way first, so I could have access to the dryer exhaust vent and stuff. We didn’t feel like doing that, so we just slud the dryer in there sort of catty-corner in such a way that you couldn’t actually stand in the room with a basket to unload and reload things.

  When we moved the old washer out, I moved the dryer to the ideal position, and then the new washer slud in right next to it. Bim, bam, boom, as Percy Faith would say. Now there’s all kinds of room to stand in there, and as a benefit, one of the holes that the cats would crawl through to sneak into the laundry room and throw up on things is now blocked off by the dryer. So those little devils are THWARTED.

• I have had my hair trimmed to look like this:
  
  And HW helped me install some highlights last night. (And I wonder why everyone thinks I’m gay.) I look totally hot, although the hair product I’m using today is kinda lame; it makes my hair all wet-looking and greasy, and it doesn’t clump up like Jesse’s does in the photo. I’ll keep working on that, possibly with some hard core Butch wax type stuff I have left over from when I was spiking my jaunpiece up. What I really need is some Brylcreem . . . I’ve got my overhead lifters and four-barrel quads oh yeah . . .
• I wrote a nasty gram to the OpEd page at the News Journal over this whiny tripe. Seems a bunch of people in North Wilmington are in an uproar over noise from planes flying into Philadelphia Airport, which, last I checked is roughly 20 miles north. Given the small amount I know about aircraft flight paths, that puts them over North Wilmington at a height of several thousand feet.

  My letter basically said, “Stop being whiny punks or I’ll drive to your house and give you something to REALLY cry about.” That’s not a verbatim quote, but I’m hoping I still get published in tomorrow’s paper. It might even be enough to convince me to buy one, although probably not.

Sorry to disappear for 3 days last week, but I’m sure you know by know that I am about neither quantity OR quality. Things were really hitting the proverbial fan at work last week, even considering the fact that I got out of work early on Thursday and worked from home on Friday. The bigwigs were having a monstrous meeting today for which they needed information, so we’ve spent roughly three weeks gathering it, and last week was a fire drill while we tied up loose ends (not that the hem isn’t still fraying just a bit).

ANYWEG. Here are the various updates in our lives:

• My foot: still aches a bit, but functions reasonably normally for walking. I twinged it a bit at church yesterday, so I’m back to limping a bit today, but it’s not bad.
• Cinderella: really coming along. Since school let out early last Thursday, I didn’t get to rehearse with the pit band, which was VERY annoying, but we’ve gotten through most everything at least once. I should be able to spend the next couple rehearsals fine tuning various jaunpiece. The chorus has known most of their parts for weeks now, since there ain’t much to learn. The soloists sound great too. Oughta be a hell of good show.
• Annoying Item: the last few weeks we’d been planning to meet some friends on Saturday night to see Cabaret at the New Candlelight Dinner Theatre up in Arden. However due to some issues, we weren’t sure if we were going to be in town until the last minute, so we couldn’t order tickets until last week; we called, and they were sold out. We tried to pull some strings via friends of a friend, but to no avail. So we said oh well darn, and on Saturday made plans for dinner with Kyle (of Kyle’s New Girlfriend fame) and Kristy and some other friends. While we were enjoying dinner? Our friend calls. Two seats opened up.

  Dammit.

• Inspired by Jeff Kay, we were hoping that we might rip out our carpeting and put in nice wood flooring, or, even better, find EXISTING hardwood floors underneath. So just now, after I got home from work (short day due to blizzard conditions), we handled some stuff, and I went into my bedroom closet with a pair of pliers.

  I am so happy I may have to do the Humpty Dance.

  Beautiful oak hardwood underneath our hideous carpeting. It won’t even need much work; it’s in gorgeous condition, probably won’t need sanding or anything, maybe a coat of polyurethane and some wax. We are so excited we can barely keep ourselves from peeing.

  Now, to figure out how to move the piano so I can get the carpet out from underneath it . . .

Sorry for the late post today, and the rather high possibility of no post at all tomorrow. Things at work are pretty hectic, so I haven’t had a lot of time to do all the brain-storming and research that goes into each word I write. (For example, today’s post was written only after a staff of 14 people spent about 3 solid days apiece looking up Jack Parr’s middle name, only to be told that I didn’t need it after all. They all quit. My help never lasts long.)

Anyway, I’ve decided I should be on TV. I mean, honestly, how can I NOT be on TV at this point. I’m hilarious! Ask anybody! I haven’t entirely decided on a format, but I figure it’ll be a cross between a regular talk show, and “Chappelle’s Show.” Funny sketches involving making fun of African Americans when they get slave reparations, that kind of thing, but occasional interviews with Jon Stewart and Charo.

Here are some of my [brilliant] ideas so far:

• Sidekick. I’d definitely have a totally awesome sidekick. Way better than Ed McMahon. What the hell was that, anyway? Did he have any redeeming qualities other than the ability to agree with everything Johnny said? I’d prefer a show where the chemistry of the players involved was better than that of the Bush administration, thanks.

  I’m thinking along the lines of Jon Stewart or my sister, Liz. Jon’s funny; Liz has a big rack. Jon might try to steal the show, and then I’d have to hide his body in the desert, so we can’t have that.

• The best in comedy. What I will do, is hire away all the current SNL writers. Then, I will shoot them all in the face and hire people that are funny, like Al Franken. Liberal radio channel . . . har! That was hilarious.
• I imagine I’ll have to have a live studio audience, which will be great ’cause I’ll just make sure they’re all drunk or stoned or both. I’ll get HUGE laughs for anything from farting to periodically showing pictures of what Bob Marley might have looked like at age 50 if he went bald. And if the crowd starts to turn on me, I have Liz flash a nipple. It’ll be great. So long as I personally don’t have actually see
  my sister’s nipple, ’cause that’s just NASTY. I definitely just threw up in
  my mouth.
• Once a week, I will take a day off and let a monkey host an episode. That’ll be AWESOME.
• Speaking of drinking, I’ll definitely make sure all the guests are loaded. Unless of course they are alcoholics. Then they get all the methamphetamines they can take.
• Periodic dance breaks, a la Ellen DeGeneres, will be encouraged. Metal stripper poles will be provided for this purpose.
• The guest list would be an absolute who’s-who of modern pop culture:
  • Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (musical performance)
  • Ian Ziering
  • Pat Sajak (and Vanna, if she’s willing to dance on the pole)
  • Urkel

I can’t imagine some major media outlet isn’t falling all over itself to pick this idea up. C’mon, people! Me! Liz’s breast! Urkel! A MONKEY!

Anyway, there may be an update tomorrow, or it might not happen until Wednesday. WE SHALL SEE.