5 July
It is so unbearably hot that I am melting into a puddle of goo. I'll try to finish this before my fingers get too squishy to type.
I spent the day yesterday in the yard, as usual.
I went out there pretty much as soon as I was awake, feeding the phone cord and the cd player out the window, and sat with the computer on my lap, my feet in the pool and the Rhino 70's Box Set on the boombox.
Around 2p Cynthia came out, hands on hips, and said:
"You are very bad!!"
"What?"
"Your mother is on my phone upstairs..."
"O my God! I forgot that it was Sunday!"
You see, I always talk to my Mom at noon on Sunday, but what with this weekend consisting of so very many days, I lost track.
So I ran inside and got the phone, unplugged the line from my computer, and called. We talked for a little while, after I apologized profusely, until a wasp came at me. I started screaming, put down the phone and the computer (restraining myself from throwing them into the air!), extricated myself from my chair (it's kinda hard to leap to your feet from a sling chair), and ran to the other side of the garden.
But the wasp followed me! And I realized that I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with giant pink flowers on, and that's what wasp was after! So I went inside and changed shirts.
By the time I picked up the phone, at least two minutes had passed, with around a minute of it spent screaming, so I wasn't sure what Mom thought.
"Hi, I'm back."
"Wasp?"
She knows me well.
We had a barbecue around 5.30, which meant that at the hottest part of the day I had to go inside and bake a cake!
Gad it was awful. I literally came back outside drenched.
Fortunately, the cake was delicious and everybody loved it, or at least said they did. Had anyone said otherwise I would have smashed it in their face. Crazy with the heat!
I finally went back inside when the sun was down. It was still impossibly hot. I watched VH1 Behind the Music on Weird Al Yankovic, for the second time that day, actually, as I saw half of it in the morning.
The thing with Weird Al is that I was a fan of his long before he hit the rest of the world, when I was in high school and he was around twenty and was a regular on Dr. Demento's show. I used to listen to that show without fail every Sunday night my junior year, the year I spent at Immaculate Heart High in LA rather than Interlochen.
Dr. D used to always play Weird Al's unreleased tapes--that was the year that his song "Yoda" was really big. It was sung to the tune of "Lola" by the Kinks, a song that I actually had never heard when I was sixteen years old!
Anyway, he was just this LA kid doing silly songs, when he broke big I practically fainted, and the fact that he's still doing great stuff almost fifteen years later just goes to show that he shouldn't be underestimated.
The coolest thing, though, is that a member of my Randy Newman group is his ex-girlfriend, and when she told me that and I told her my "used to listen to Dr. D in 1980" story, she told me that she was on the show that year, and that she's probably on the tapes that I made at the time, yelling "Don't forget to stay dee-mented" at the end.
Now that's cool.
He looked very handsome on Behind the Music--he has these big white teeth like luxury condominiums. But the real surprise was Emo Phillips. You know him, don't you? He's a very funny standup who always looked like a crane trying to act human and not doing a very good job of it, all skinny and flailing limbs and big nose and Prince Valiant hairstyle, talking in sort of a yodeling kind of voice.
Well, he's gotten a little older and gained some weight and has a normal haircut, and his hair is about half grey, and I practically fell over, he was so good looking. I was wondering how he hid those movie-star looks for so long! If it wasn't for the voice, I would never have believed it was him.
At one point they were talking about how all of Al's songs are about TV and food and not sex and that he is kind of alone, and Emo said:
"It's rare to find that one special woman that will destroy you slower than any other woman so that by the time that she has sucked out your soul you're seventy or eighty years old and your career is over anyway!"
God, shine this for a box of quarters, I'm going to the movies.
Today's horoscope:
A financial shift is indicated. Contributions from others are less dependable. You must rely more on yourself.
One year ago today:
"But it's not the same--it's not The Shrine!"
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Starry starry night by:
Samantha Marcelo!
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Last Updated Mon 5 July 13:36:09 1999