you know those little workout shorts that girls wear to work out, the ones that say “sassy!” or “USC” on the butt? saw a girl with those at the gym yesterday. hers said “poop deck.”

dude, i got spam from Alan Keyes today:

Good day;

We at Inspira tional Word Publishers are proud

to announce the release of:

“On Eagles Wings-The Fight for Chri stian America”

http://www.amer icasgra ce.com

“Rob Thompson will forever be a great service to his God, nationa and

party”.

-Ambassador Alan Keyes

“Rob Thompson has written a book that must be read by all those who

have a love of Chr ist and American history”.

-David Schippers Majority Counsel Clinton Imp eachment

For a short time only by 1 copy and get the 2nd copy FREE!!!!

Isaiah 40:31

Jennifer,

You are receiving this email because you email is part of an opt in targeted program.

We have provided a convienient remove link if you wish to stop receiving more mails

To unsubscribe from: our list, just follow this link:

Click here to delete yourself from our email list

yeah sure, clicking on that link will take me off your spam list. hey alan keyes, get out of my eudora! and my state! (i registered to vote, i can call it my state now).

oh, and ps – there’s like three typos in your letter. not including the spaces i added to certain key search phrases.

love in the mail: the IKEA 2005 catalogue arrived today, an unanticipated treat. oh IKEA, how you do seduce the nesting instinct in me. i want to crawl into your clean white kitchens and fresh, grass-green living rooms filled with smooshy furniture and mysterious swedish storage possibilities.

not that we’ll have time or money to buy anything from IKEA; i’m about to launch into another year of working 3 part-time jobs (two theatre, the third of the “day job” variety), and andy, besieged by a sudden flood acting and improv offers, has turned down the salaried promotion his cafe offered him. as we move into our late twenties, i admit that the specter of financial solvency, health insurance, IKEA furniture, grows stronger and those “what am i doing with my life?” doubts do come nagging around the edges.

still, we’ve gained something in our first year in chicago: momentum. a lucky few rocket to success in this biz, but most of us labor at it the hard way – one friendship, one job-well-done at a time. and it feels like a slow race between two possibilities: will we make it before we get so tired/poor that we give it up? it’s the elusive definition of “making it” that’s a slippery slope. when do we know we’ve made it? when we’re making a living in the arts? then how do we define a living? in financial terms? when we’re happy? when we finally think we can relax and let down our guard and occasionally pass on an offer because we have faith that another one will come along? when it all stops being so scary?

last weekend was new york, chez lauren and joe, who were marvelous hosts. as i was on vacation, i skipped out on my professional obligation to spend the whole weekend seeing plays, but i do confess to finding a unsuspecting harvard grad with theatrical leanings at a party and talking at him for a good solid hour about the financial problems facing theatre in america. he was very nice and asked just enough polite questions to keep me going ad nauseum. i think he finally escaped on the pretense of needing a cigarette.

the weekend was a blur of excellent thai food (duck curry, mmmm…, not to mention some pad thai that rivals my own), hip art venues (the owner of the future perfect offered to buy my MRI for a project entitled “Resident Evil”), flea markets and impromptu shopping trips, and lots of good conversation (joe claims that entire conversations between lauren & i can be boiled down to: “my cat goes mrrow.” “and then my cat goes mrrow.” “and then my cat goes mrrow.” i’m not disputing his point, tho i fail to see anything wrong with that).

it’s nice to have a girl friend to hang out with again.

some pictures:

the giant bamboo canopy that arched over the gravel courtyard of P.S.1, one of MOMA’s satellite venues. the art was good, but the people-watching was better.

the view of the sky from battery park, where lauren and i were too late to get into the actual concert venue for the lyle lovett concert, but spent an idle afternoon lying in the grass behind the stage.

ms. liberty, from battery park.

the penguin tries to deal with the pressures of life in new york city.

explain this sign:

“vegetarian cookies available here!!!”

finally. i’m so sick of places that only have meat cookies. :)

someone tell me, please, why is it that the bag boys (or girls, or men or women) at the grocery store get so panicked whenever you bring your own canvas grocery sack? then, if they do consent to use said bag, they frantically pack every single item into the same bag (tomatoes on the bottom, naturally) as though the fact that i brought my own bag means that i shun the use of all other grocery sacks? what is so hard about this? and why won’t you just get out of the way and let me bag my own groceries, if this causes so much consternation?

i recall buying groceries for the first time in england and patiently waiting while all the items were scanned, paying for them, and then discovering that my groceries were in a heap in everyone’s way because i was suppose to have been bagging them myself, not to mention which, i was supposed to have brought my own or purchased grocery sacks. i think the clerk took pity on me and gave me a couple of bags to carry things home with, red-faced.

okay, so our anniversary date didn’t turn out to be the most romantic on record – we went rollerblading along the lake, then rented School of Rock and ordered a pizza – but we’re poor, tired, and the sheer novelty of us both having the same evening off was enough. we bought one another flowers, but when we weren’t looking zeke nibbled on them, tipped the wine bottle-vase over, and then barfed the plants back up.

later andy saved me from a giant bathroom spider.

the bathroom ceiling started leaking again late last night. not just drips, but great globs of plaster that came splatting down onto the cracked tile floor. immediately after that zeke began scratching at his chin and howling (he’s got this self-inflicted wound on his chin that won’t heal and necessitates many expensive trips to the vet). i did something rare: i put my head in my hands and left andy to deal with both problems.

on a happier note, today makes two years that andy and i have been together. since all of my long-term relationships in the past have seemed to peter out somewhere just before the two year mark, i feel as though this were an auspicious sign.

we’ve been treading on the uncomfortable side of the total-mental-breakdown line for a much of the past month; hence the relative silence on slithy tove. but its a compounding problem – the more i put off writing, the more intimidating it is to go back to writing, because there’s things i meant to write about and they just pile up…but really, what’s the point of being intimidated by one’s own blog? so, in place of all the posts i meant to write, a brief summary of the salient moments of the past month:

-waking up at 2am and going to get a drink of water (andy was still out at a late show so i was home alone). while standing at the sink in the dark of my kitchen, i watched someone climb OVER the 10 ft razor wire fence that seals our back porch off from the alley. not certain if i’d dreamed what i’d just seen, i stood paralyzed in the dark of my house, wearing only pjs, as i heard someone climb up the stairs, past our second story porch, and up to the third story porch. thumps and bumps and crashes ensued from upstairs. unwilling to wait and see if he’d break into our dark apartment next, i put on some pants, and ran out the front door and out of my apartment building. to then stand in the pouring rain feeling like a sleepy paranoid jerk without a cell phone with which to call the police. i went into the lobby of the hotel next door, and the very nice night clerk there called our upstairs neighbor to see if she was okay. no answer, even though her lights were blazing, so we called the police. i stood in the rain for another ten minutes till two very burly policewomen arrived and offered to come upstairs with me. embarrassingly, i was most concerned that they’d get upstairs and not find anyone and i’d be the idiot from Rear Window who was always hearing and seeing things. well, as it turns out, someone WAS breaking into the apartment upstairs – it just so happened to be our neighbor’s out of town friend who had gotten separated from her at a bar and wanted to get in out of the rain. the police shook him down for a while but ultimately left him alone. after they left i crept up the back stairs and apologized for calling the cops on him, and he was very nice about the whole thing.

-some buttmunch stole andy’s bike off our back porch by bashing in the wooden railings until the post the bike was chained to broke off. the thief did, however, leave us five pennies in exchange for the bike. andy intends to gamble those five pennies into a new bike at our occasional nickel poker games. it could take a while. for the now the pennies are safely set aside in a plastic baggie on the fridge.

-as many of you who know me already know, i am a clinical emetophobe. that is, i fear vomit in a pathological, compulsive way. so it was two weeks ago that my very worst stage management nightmare came true when i ate a hot turkey sandwich of questionable age and came down with food poisoning and had to barf DURING A SHOW. as in “electrics 243, go. (puke) sound 25B, go (puke).” god, the thought of a job where i can take a sick day seems like an unimaginable luxury. but that’s nothing compared to Alyson, one of the performers in BETTY Rules, who has been performing with pneumonia for the past two weeks, going off stage to cough up a lung and then running back on stage to rock out with her bass guitar. SHE is a rock star (well, i mean that both literally and figuratively).

-i am stupidly pleased with the white lab coat with my name embroidered on it that they gave me at the dentist’s office. unfortunately, it also means that i’ve agreed to work there for another year. a whole ‘nother year of working 3 jobs. i am so TIRED.

-meeting gloria steinem a couple of weeks ago at a benefit show we did for Planned Parenthood. i have a picture of us in matching BETTY t-shirts to prove the event occurred, but i’m not posting it here because the camera revealed my secret double chin.

-not long after the break-in that wasn’t, the bathtub pipes in our upstairs neighbor’s apartment begin to leak and our bathroom ceiling developed a minor waterfall. the walls bulged and slithered, the light fixture filled up with rusty water dripping off the electrical contacts, we lined buckets with towels to drown out the sound of the dripping. it took five days of intermittent dripping to convince the maintenance guy, Manny, that it was NOT because the girl upstairs, Jess, doesn’t use her shower curtain properly, meanwhile we brushed our teeth in the kitchen sink and had to use the toilet by candlelight for fear of an electrical fire. said pipes have now been fixed, and Manny came by and ripped the entire surface of the sheetrock off the wall. he has been less than enthusiastic, however, about finishing the work. on the upside, however, we are now friends with our neighbor – there’s nothing like having someone else’s bathwater dripping on your head to really seal the friendship pact. maybe she will let me borrow her vacuum someday.

-andy and i were looking for a quick bite before going to catch a show at Improv Olympic. we happened upon a cute little cafe in boys town called the Hearty Boys Cafe. the guy at the counter painstakingly prepared our goat cheese and roasted veggie sandwich – which was delicious despite the fact that it took him about 20 minutes to make it. it took so long, in fact, that we were back at the theatre and done with the sandwich before andy said, “wait, did you pay for the sandwich?” “no, didn’t you?” oops. in order to balance out our karma, we went back the next afternoon to pay for the sandwich. the waiter gave me a cookie for being so honest.

of particular note at this evening’s performance of BETTY Rules was the appearance of David Bowie’s band. i was disappointed that they didn’t bring Bowie with them, but apparently he’s kind of a homebody when they’re out on the road.

but visiting celebrities aside, i’m constantly in awe of the power, talent and sheer verve that the members of BETTY possess. if you’re in chicago, or new york, and have the chance to see or meet these cool ladies, take it. there’s not a whole lot of “manage” in my job as a stage manager for BETTY – all i have to do is make sure they’ve got the technical resources they need and then i just get out of their way.