What a wonderful day. Some of the components that built a veritable (metaphorical) robot of delight for me today were, in alphabetical order:

Arepas
Auditions (2; we shall see)
Banksy's pet store
'Boogie Knights'
Coffee
Comrades
Dog wearing sunglasses
Old photos
Peter Pan donuts
Presidential kitsch
McCarren Park
Sunshine!
The Talking Band
Three-legged cat
Yoyos


You know I must be going crazy when I count the sun among the GOOD things that happened to me. :)

More noise and fuss.

Something I don't talk about nearly as much as I could: how fucking shitty my apartment is, and how the building is falling down around me, and how angry this makes me. To give credit where it is nominally due, the 'landlord/super/asshole who comes into my apartment without warning, whenever the hell he wants' has fixed some things around here recently. Things that should have been fixed literally years ago.

I just got home to find that our door was playing one of its favorite games: The Don't Unlock Game, followed by a round of The Doorknob is Falling Off! That's the only way I can describe it. I cursed and muttered, kicked the door, finally FINALLY got it open after five minutes of fucking around...only to have the woman across the hall open the door and yell at me. YELL AT ME. IN POLISH. I said "Yeah, sorry, sorry, like you never make any noise" and then slammed my door. I'm really mature, I know, but JESUS CHRIST, YOUR DOG COMES INTO MY KITCHEN AND YOU SMOKE CIGARETTES ON THE STAIRS! Don't yell at me.

This is a rant, and rants get boring, so I'll stop her. Broken door. Irascible me. Hypocritical Polish neighbor. Sometimes I hate this place.

Come on.

I woke up at 4:15 this morning to the sound of screaming. There was a woman outside my building, yelling over and over again :"CALL THE COPS! CALL 911! I'M SERIOUS! CALL 911!" It took me about five minutes to wake up the whole way, put my glasses on, and look out the window, and when I did, I saw a woman staggering down the street, picking stuff up off the sidewalk, crying and heaving. Oh, lord. I didn't know if anything was really wrong with her and I figured that it wouldn't be helpful for me to yell out the window asking if she was ok, so I didn't. She wandered down the street, in the direction of the river...but then this guy, wearing a menacing trenchcoat, I swear to god, turned the corner and started walking right for her. He caught up to her, pushed her, started cursing at her and saying all kinds of awful things...and she was crying and screaming again. So I called the cops. Ten minutes later, a car pulled onto the street and I heard one of the cops asking some girls that were talking on the corner where the fighting couple had gone. I don't know what happened; I sort of can't believe I actually called the cops. None of it was pleasant, that's for sure.

Then I spent about an hour, awake, heart pounding, convinced that there was someone in my apartment who was going to try to kill me. This might have something to do with the terrifying true-life scary stories we were telling backstage at the show last night. Just a thought.

Speaking of the show-- last performance today! And then work, work, work. I'm a busy gal lately and I both really like it and am really bewildered by it. Though last night I had a mini "I've-lived-here-for-a-year" crisis where I decided that I need to quit my job. It wasn't pleasant. I don't know how I feel about it in the light of day.

"I just keep thinking about Joe DiMaggio."

In this month's Vanity Fair, there is an excerpt from Tony Curtis' memoir. The section printed deals exclusively with Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis "fondling her breasts," vivid descriptions of said breasts....etc etc. But! He mentions that Marilyn dated/married a lot of guys who looked like Abe Lincoln: Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio (I don't really see it, but hey, alright), some other dudes I forget...

Then, unrelated, elsewhere in the magazine, there is a picture of Marilyn in a convertible... holding a portrait of Lincoln!

COINCIDENCE!?! Methinks Marilyn and I would have had something to talk about.


Incidentally, my friend Greg moved away recently, and drove cross-county to his new home in Seattle. He's been sending great postcards to our apartment: the first was the Lincoln House in Illinois, and the second was the Lincoln Monument in Wyoming. ALMOST better than what was on the front of that one was Greg's message:

"Let me tell you that there's nothing rootin'-tootin' about I-80 through Wyoming. It's a boring stretch of road. But I saw a big-ass offroading pickup with a bumper sticker: "Salmon: The Other Pink Meat." Almost as memorable as "Snatch a Kiss, or Vice Versa."

Indeed.

Funny funny.

Yesterday, I walked by the uptown Jekyll & Hyde Club, the esteemed, themed restaurant, and there was a family with two young boys standing outside. The bigger boy was coolly surveying the skeletons and gargoyles outside the building, and reported: "I've seen scary. And this is not scary."

I didn't think it was a good idea to tell this six year-old that I had been to J&H mere weeks ago.

I'll mention this a million more times over the next two months, but...

A date has been set for my reading!

Come see (or hear):

We Things That Are Now
by Yours Truly
dir. Craigy Mungavin
Monday, December 8th, 7:30 pm
La Mama Experimental Theatre Club
74 East 4th Street b/w 2nd and Bowery
Free! Free! Free!

And then come party for my birthday afterward.

Happy Anniversary...

...to me! I moved to Williamsburg a year ago today.



Mmm, wow.