September 02, 2004

Ponies for everyone!

Alright now kids, just one more weekend and this crazy play is over. So you better make it out soon – tell your moms this is the last one for a looooong time. And tell them it’s free. It isn’t but they’re more likely to take you if it doesn’t cost them anything, and by the time they find out they will have already invested the effort, rescheduled dinner and bedtime and all that. They’re not gonna turn around. They’ll be too embarrassed.

Now if you feel bad about this sort of manipulative thing, or like maybe your mom doesn’t have the ten bucks to spare or whatever, I understand. It’s no problem. Send me an e-mail and let me know when you want to come and I’ll leave you a couple of tickets at the box office. I’ll put them under your name, stamped with the letters VIP. All the info you need is over on the left of the screen beneath the words “current production”.

So the play closes this weekend. I’ve managed to avoid any other gigs until – later. And next week we all rest. I’m going to read 956 pages Bill Clinton’s autobiography. I always skip the first page. I used to skip only the first sentence, as a courtesy to the writer really. You see some people agonize over how to start a book, or a poem, or a play, or a song, or a blog entry. There’s a lot of pressure, a lot is riding on that first line. So I figured if word got around that some folks were just skipping over it, it’d ease the tension a little and the writers could just take off naturally without any additional psychological obstacles.

Lately though I’ve been skipping the whole first page, call it a value added service, if you will. That way when I get to the end of the book and I’m still confused I imagine it’s something to do with that first page I skipped rather than the fault the writer. I give em a break, you know? And in the case of Bill's book, geez, it’s not much to lose. There are almost a thousand other pages to read and I know a lot of the story already! After all he’s done for me, I figure I owe it to him to skip a page or two. Maybe I should just skip the whole damn book and take a bath instead. That’ an awful lot of baths though. And he’s not even a real writer. He’s a celebrity. He doesn’t need a break from me. Maybe I’m making this more complex than it needs to be.

This is what happens to people who don't go to bed at a reasonable hour.