So on Wednesday night I came home and was going through the mail and there was this thing from AT&T that I had to look at three times in order to figure out whether I was reading it right or not. It was an offer for a free cell phone. A pre-approved offer, that is. Which means that they were willing to give me a plan without my giving them $1000.

Well, I wasn't going to tell them that they had made a serious error, so yesterday I rang them up and they did in fact agree to send me a free phone and a free headset and free overnight shipping and it would all be free free and more free! And I chose the cheapest plan, which gives me 350 daytime minutes and free nights and weekends and free long distance and I am happy as a clam. The only thing is that they couldn't change the address to send the phone to and it's supposed to arrive before I leave for the airport today.

As I have been saying, clearly all of the plankton in the sea must have cell phones now that I'm getting one.

Omar gave me a call in the afternoon to tell me about a one-act play that he was writing for us to do together. He had told me something about it at the party, but not that I was to be in it, and now the plot has changed drastically. It sounds really silly and fun. It's nice to be a muse, even if what I muse people into writing for me is the role of a Russian dyke.

Then he said that he was going to see this thing that Cynthia was doing, sort of this open class for an audience, but not really a performance and he asked me if I wanted to come with. Hmm, would I rather stay at the office, working and slaving over a hot calculator or spend an evening with Omar? Tough choice, certainly, but I somehow chose the latter.

At that point it was around a quarter to six, and I still had plenty to do, including picking up the pictures for Melissa from the colour lab (because what is the point of doing something if not at the last minute?) so I ran out to get them and got back just in time to land smack in the middle of a waste removal problem in Los Angeles. Sigh. So that kept me from getting some things done, but I managed to lower my standards, and I did get everything really important done before running out and grabbing a cab at 7.52p.

The open class thing was fine, some of the performances on display were good, some were nightmarishly awful. Cynthia said afterwards that she would never have invited me, and she knew that I would never have come, but hey, I'd clearly follow Omar off a cliff with a smile on my face, so what's a little bad acting?

They first did this exercise where everyone said their monologues to each other, passing the ball back and forth so to speak. One guy, this round-faced mick, was so good that I knew that he had written his monologue, and I was quite right. There was another guy who was so dreadful, and his monologue was so astoundingly bad that I knew that he had not actually written it but was making it up on the spot, and I was right.

There were some scenes that were so bad that Omar and I grabbed at each other for support. My personal white-knuckle moment was when someone threatened to do a Cary Grant impression (it ended up being just a really poor Cockney accent, which was just as bad), Omar's was a prison play with an all-homeboy cast, and both of ours, in fact probably everyone's in the room, was something so horrendous, that it deserves its own paragraph.

This young man of about 25 and an older woman looking 50 in its one good eye got up and started this scene that sounded vaguely familiar, but we had been talking when it was being introduced, and I had no idea what it was. But it seemed to be a love scene of some sort. Was it that he was twenty years too young or was she twenty years too old? Then she started to speak, "Why do you say that you have kissed the ground I walked on? You should kill me rather. I am so tired. If I could only rest--rest," and I realized, with a growing horror that it was The Seagull, and she was supposed to be, God help us all, Nina.

And dear God, it wasn't just that she was too old and too fat, she also had a whiny voice and couldn't act a bit. It was, frankly, hilarious. I was terrified that I would laugh out loud and it would just be so mean, but I wasn't certain if I could do it. I knew i'd laugh if I looked at Omar, so I carefully averted my eyes, but I couldn't look at the actors either, so I stared very hard at their feet while digging my nails into Omar's hand and trying desperately to keep a neutral expression on my face.

My personal favourite bits were when she said, "Trigorin--I love him pyassionately!" not to mention, "I soon grew trivial and spiritless, and played my parts without meaning. 1 never knew what to do with my hands, and I could not walk properly or control my voice. You cannot imagine the state of mind of one who knows as he goes through a play how terribly badly he is acting." I thought that she should certainly play that speech with a great deal of meaning!

Omar managed to look at Cynthia during this horror, and was amazed at the state of perfection of her poker face, while looking directly at the action. How it didn't burn out her corneas, like looking into an eclipse, I'll never know.

Afterwards, we went to Westway and had the small amount of sustenance that we could manage seeing as how we had no more than $4 each so no-one could help the others out, and Omar started talking about his one-act play again.

He told Cynthia that there were these three people who came in during the show, and she could play one of them, and then I thought and she said, why not have her play all three, if they come in one at a time, and then I thought that Omar and I should kill them rather than win them over, and then the brainstorming began in earnest. And when we were done, we sort of stared at each other and realize how much we had improved the play. Cynthia said afterwards that it was like the writer's room on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The one thing that makes me laugh, is that my character has some complicated Russian name that Omar's character cannot pronounce, so he calls me Waffles. My only problem is that it is not possible to look him in the eye while he's calling me Waffles without howling like a dog. Cynthia says that he is going to have to call me Waffles every single day, maybe twice a day, until we do the play so that I can hear it without laughing.

I thought that if I could keep a straight face during geriatric version of The Seagull, I could keep a straight face through anything, but apparently Waffles is the deal-breaker.

Today's horoscope:
Virgo will find a place for anyone who wants to join. Even if it's your first time here, you're automatically the host. Thanks to you, people are stepping out of their class and gender roles to connect as humans.

One year ago today:
Can we all tell that I am on vacation, when my greatest worry is the fuzziness of my french braids? Peel me a grape.

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Last Updated Sun 22 December 10:01:09 2002