So yesterday I glanced at Monty, and thought he was half-winking at me. I knew what that meant, so I picked him up and felt his face, and it was in fact starting to puff up again. And just when the fur was starting to grow back again!

All during the day, whenever I would see him it was visibly larger, it was just Jiffy Popping up like nobody's business. I knew that I was going to have to pop it and that would really piss him off, but I decided to wait until today, because the bigger it is, the tighter it is and the easier it pops when a hot compress is applied.

I got off the hook, though, because in the evening he was sitting out in the middle of the room, rubbed his face with his paw, and I ducked from the shower of blood and puss that flew everywhere. Sorry about that, if you were eating. Anyway, I grabbed him and washed his face, much to his dismay, and after rehearsal, I went to the store in the middle of the night to get some Bacitracin, as recommended by Mary Ellen after the last time this happened.

So I picked some up, along with some chicken cordon bleu and Pepsi (the staples), got home, opened the box, and found what was in fact a tube, but said tube was completely uncontaminated by Bacitracin. Yep, an absolutely empty tube. I went back today and exchanged it, buying a lottery ticket for $95 million as well.

Now, I am as cynical about the lottery as it is possible to get, I often quote Fran Lebowitz, who said that you odds of winning the lottery are about equal whether you buy a ticket or not. To me it's as nonsensical as any other kind of gambling, but once in a long while I'll spend a buck, because the one thing that I do believe about the lottery is that it's the tickets with the good stories attached that win.

"I had to get some antibiotic ointment for the cat, but the tube that I bought was empty, so when I went back to exchange it, I happened to see that the Lotto pot was really big, so I thought what the heck, and bought one ticket. So if it wasn't for my cat's puffy face and the shoddy tube-filling processes of the store-brand Bacitracin, I wouldn't be $95 million dollars richer today!"

So we had our first rehearsal with Geoff, who replaced Omar, and who will be good, I think. He has a really good quality for the role, though I still wish that Omar hadn't dropped out. When you know each other really well and have worked together before and know each other's rhythms, it just makes it faster and easier.

Then we did Act 2 and I was able to prove that I am in fact off-book for most of that act. Since Philip is actually off-book for the entire show and Fran has made great inroads himself, nobody was wildly impressed at my twenty half-learned pages. No, more than half-learned, I did pretty well, actually.

After that, we ran Act 4, which was interesting, since it was the first time we had done it since Omar and I had our big thing last week, and I didn't realize exactly how much it feeds into that particular act. Wow. I mean, I have no expectations that our story will end quite so tragically, but there are some astonishing parallels.

Then Philip went home and we took a dinner and boxing break, and some hours later Fran and I read the remaining part of Act 3 that we had yet to work on, just in time for us to get through the entire show for the first time today. I don't know why I keep on being surprised that this show is a bear, but my God, I don't see how anyone could do it in a long run, it's so draining.

I talked to a friend on the phone yesterday who is going through some of the same things that Omar is going through, so it all sounded very familiar and I felt that I had useful things to say at the tip of my fingers, the most clear one being that he had to heal himself and that he couldn't expect to be in a healthy relationship with this self-hatred inside of him and he said, "Wait a minute! I thought that the woman was supposed to heal you, that the man has all of the sadness and the darkness and he was supposed to meet the woman and she would make everything okay!" and I said, "Okay, I'm beginning to see the problem here..."

Of course he was joking, but that really hit home for me because that is actually my problem--I think that I am the woman and I am supposed to heal the man, and I have to remind myself that I cannot do that, and not to feel guilty when I can't, because ultimately the man has to heal himself. I think I can help, I hope I can help, but it's not in my power, not really.

I emailed that quote to Omar, and then later in the evening he called me and we spoke for the first time in a week and a half, and we discussed the whole woman healing thing, and he said that that is actually one of his problems, that he believes that that is true, when he is in a relationship with a woman, he thinks she can heal him.

O dear, that's dangerous, we both have a belief that clicks together, a belief that cannot be true, but I can see how it will be easy for the broken part of him to turn to the healing part of me. I mean, this is deeply ingrained with me, when I saw Psycho at the age of eleven, I thought, "If I were in this movie, Norman wouldn't kill me, because I would understand him and I would fix him and make him well!"

It was wonderful talking to him at last. He sounded good, really quite healthy, it filled me with joy. Afterwards, when Fran and I sat down to do Act 3 I said, "I can't do it anymore, not after having a conversation with Omar where he was happy and sane!"

Lenten entries missed:

Kate proved herself to be a dryad, got a job at long last, saw Richard Belzer live and didn't fall over dead, and gave me a great review!

Today's horoscope:
Your social life is carefully orchestrated. You remember faces, names and dates. It's the easiest thing in the world to get everyone on the same wavelength and put them to work for a common purpose.

One year ago today:
"If I were a meaner person," Kate said, "I'd say let's go back in and say that you weren't there again, but you had called and left a message saying that she could take her own damn pictures, but I don't think she could take it!"

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