Sunday, August 31, 2008

I wish real life was like this

I adore Andrew Bird, and here he is as Dr Strings.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Little nuggets

Had a friend point this out to me. It's the Sunday Paper's awards dealie. Nice little shout out in there for "Indulgences" and for the kid. Just seeing the word 'inexhaustible' near my name makes me tired. I certainly don't feel inexhaustible, particularly during that show where I nursed a cold/flu the whole time, but I'm glad he bought it.

It should be noted that this same reviewer thought an improvised show I did awhile back was scripted, which just shows to go ya that you can't win 'em all. I looked for that review online to see if I could link up to it again but it looks like it's been removed, except for last year's end of the year awards where he took one more pot-shot at the show by saying improvised or rehearsed, it still wasn't funny.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Friday, August 22, 2008

Improv and the curious itch

The two things I’m probably most irrationally frightened of are heights and doing improv. The fear of heights is a pretty easily explainable one: I envision someone throwing me off the side of something high. With improv, it’s the same way. It’s like being thrown over the side of something high. You’re completely out of control and there are no guarantees how you’ll land. And you’re just flapping in the wind. In improv, like say tennis, it’s easy to see who is messing up as well. You can’t ‘blend into the background’ and let the other person pick up all your slack. You can’t ‘fake it.’ And everyone sees this. It’s terrifying.

So I had an offer to do some improv (or ‘prov as I’m sure some douche bag somewhere calls it) next week so I figured I’d scout it out this week. I think the last improv I’d done was October of last year. It’s been a minute and I wasn’t all that good at it then. However, some folks weren’t able to do last night’s show and I was asked to jump in. So I did. It all happened so quickly, like being thrown over the side of a rail.

Well, it went about like you’d expect. I wasn’t very good. And that’s OK, because even if I had a week to prepare myself anyway, it probably would have been the same result. But watching those folks on stage, doing their thing, it made me realize a couple of things:

-Just because your tall doesn’t mean you should play basketball.
People always want tall people to play basketball. Heck, they’re closer to the basket which is half the battle. But it isn’t ALL the battle. See, you need coordination. You need to know the drills. And you need to be able to pass the ball and know when to shoot. Otherwise you’re just some tall asshole on the court. For me, not being afraid on stage is my ‘tall’. Well not being afraid in the sense that I don’t freeze up and gawk at the audience when I’m scared. But that’s not enough. And if you want to see Harlem Globetrotter-esque improv/ball play, go to Dad’s and watch them do the games. It’s awe-inspiring. I was awed to the point where, during both the ‘improv-games’, I completely froze. No response. This leads me to…

-The guys in Billy Bob Thornton’s band hate him.
Why would Billy Bob’s bandmates hate him? I mean, he’s Billy Bob, isn’t he? He’s the meal ticket, for goodness sake. But make no mistake, they fucking hate that dude. And why? Because he’s passing through. He’s ‘dabbling’. He’s dabbling at something that they have dedicated their lives to, and to me, that’s a bit degrading. It’s like saying “That thing you do? That thing you’ve worked so hard to get better at and sacrificed for and studied? Yeah, I just walked through the door and did it.” But the thing is he didn’t ‘do it’. He stumbled his way through it. He faked it. He plays guitar on the weekends while sitting in bed or on the porch while drinking a few beers, but he doesn’t play 80’s metal covers at The Doc or do a set at Smithe’s on open mic night to buy a PA or pay for gas money for the van. He’s just some guy who dreamed of rocking out and doesn’t pay the dues and walks to the front of the class on a sellout tour. And that’s sort of my take on getting up there and doing stuff with real improvisers. It looks and feels uneven and disrespectful. Like that squirrel on water skis.

-This is why musicians smash guitars.
I’ve never heard a musician asked why they smashed their prized guitar. I guess it’s a thing we all assume because they’re ‘rock gods’ and that’s what rock gods do. They were soooo caught up in the moment that they were overcome by emotion and had to smash the guitar. I bet if they were honest, though, they’d say that they were having an off night and tried to fix it, couldn’t, got pissed, and took it out on their guitar. This is the gayest thing you’ll hear me say all day but: As a performer (on stage, in film, on the street corner, etc), you have one instrument. It’s broken into three parts: mind, body, voice, but it’s all stocked in the practice garage we call our bodies. Your mind let’s you think on your feet and envision and create. Your body executes the plans and half-plans. Your voice is an extension of the creation and helps support. Artists are notoriously cruel to their instrument. I’m no exception. I eat like crap, making my body not perform to its peek. I drink, which kills brain cells and makes me dumber, and I very rarely do anything with my voice but sing in the car and order Combo meal #1 at Krystals (with cheese, yum).

In short, I have no guitar to smash when I get frustrated. But I do have my body. So I smashed my metaphysical guitar and wrecked my voice by shouting on stage. Totally didn’t protect my voice. And hey, shouting equals good acting, right? Well, not really. At least not for me. Pointless and reckless.

So will I do it again? Maybe. Probably. I dunno. Once my courage gets up again, maybe. My mutant power is the ability to forget getting humbled and looking foolish, so once that kicks in, who knows, but for the moment, color my ass ‘Soundly Kicked Red’ and I’ll crawl back into my hole for a bit. Until I get cocky again…

I’m totally not a ‘leave it to the pros’ kind of guy. I think you should be free to fail and be innovative and explore new stuff. But there should be a respect for what you’re doing and an appreciation for the folks who have worked hard to be in the spot they’re in and be as good as they are.

(Addendum: Daniel Johnston smashed his guitar once because he thought the devil was playing through his hands and fingers. OK, that’s a good reason to smash your guitar. Paul Simonon, what was your excuse?)

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Wrap up of the last week or so

-There’s a fine line between a cool, exotic tattoo and a trashy cheap looking one. And that fine line is…a fine line. We took a little gambling boat excursion down the brackish waters of…um, somewhere in Savannah and into international waters where a man and a horse can marry in privacy. The bartender was a very pretty young lady who had a giant dragon tattooed across her back. Pretty hot, right? Not really, because it was all smudgy and prison looking. Maybe at one time it wasn’t. Maybe it was crisp and sharp, but time and sun light (I’m guessing) made it look like a Big Foot photo stamped across her back. She was a perfectly nice bartender but I went back to our room that night and had dreams of getting really crappy tattoos through the night.

-I’ve become mildly obsessed with the word ‘vanish’ over the last two days. I go through phases of getting into certain words for little reasons. ‘Vanish’ is pretty great because it has a connotation that I think would be hard to explain beyond the cookie-cutter definition. It’s not really different from ‘disappeared’ or ‘got lost’ in meaning, but the idea with someone ‘disappearing’ is that they can ‘reappear’, and someone who is ‘lost’ can be ‘found’. ‘Vanish’ is a little more sinister though. Vanish is a little more ominous (and maybe this is my own connotation of it but I don’t think so), meaning that someone has gone and it’s not explained and may never be explained. And they may never come back. No one really ‘unvanishes’.

-Someone bombed the Savannah City Hall right down the road from us. Well, I think it actually turned out to be an electrical problem, but apparently there was an explosion and, although no one was hurt, the rumors began to fly about about what had ‘actually happened’. And the next day everyone told the stories of where they were when the explosion went down for an event that we were all there for anyway. I think folks were getting their “I can’t believe it happened to me” story polished up. Anyway, I think everyone was disappointed when it turned out to be some electrical thing.

-Went on a haunted pub crawl. I was pretty jazzed. The wife is a huge ghost story fan and I’m a big fan of beer so we were pretty stoked as our favorite things were in the offering. However, the tour degenerated into a bunch of drunk people all talking at once. The culmination of this was one woman at a pub interrupting the story-dude and yelling how he sucked as a storyteller and she was going to ‘tell some real storiezzz’ and other drunk people yelling for her to shut up. Oh yeah, and some drunk middle-aged lady tickled me. It was madness. Who’dathunk that an organized drinking excursion could go wrong?

-Oh yeah, I also enjoy names of people and I just stumbled onto this one: Acquanett. Someone's first name is Acquanett, or as I'm presuming it's pronounced, Aquanet. I wonder if Acquanett is really good at staying in place. I wonder if she's good for the environment. I wonder what hair product her parents used.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Side Bet

So I made a little promise/challenge to myself that I would try to write 1000 words a day. It's not nearly as difficult as say NaNoWriMo was (which paces out at about 2000 words daily). Anywho, I wrote this yesterday and was kind of tickled by it. I won't bore you with the whole deal but this is an excerpt. The office that she works in has very low lighting that is shifting around the office (think of those streetlight poles that turn on and off to conserve energy).

"If one person benefited from the eye-straining conditions of the office it was Mary-Alice Jewel. Not in a work capacity, of course, as everyone’s work seemed to be staggered by the office’s slow strobe and Mary-Alice was no exception. No, Mary-Alice benefited in a physical sense. You see, Mary-Alice wasn’t attractive in the least. She is what old southern women would call ‘homely’ and would say ‘bless her heart’ when matters of physical attractiveness arose. Her face was round and flushed, as though she had been running a great distance even though she had only been sitting at her cubicle looking over the receipts and breathing loudly. Her hair was greasy and waved, hugging the sides of her face like wet seaweed on the sides of a battleship. Her nose had dried bits of skin around it and the flakes would drift down like snowfall when she knuckled it while in deep thought. Lastly, her clothing was frumpy, not flattering in the least and had faded to moppish colors from overwashing with cheap detergent. Her jackets gave her the shape of a weather-beaten fire hydrant. Yes, under sunlight, night light, candle light, street light, club lights, bus lights, grocery store fluorescent lights and library study room lights, she was not pleasing to look at in the least. However, under the yawning glow of a computer monitor in a darkened room (and only there), she was a vision."

I've always been fascinated by what I call 'bar pretty', which is the idea that some people look completely ravishing under bar lights and cigarette smoke and with loud music blaring, and completely unattractive outside of that element. It's like being a solar-powered calculator except low lit bars are the solar power. Anyway, I shifted this idea a tad and made her 'office pretty', under very extenuating circumstances. As I said, it tickled me.

Best,
mm

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Thought of an Olympic nature

While watching the Olympics last night a few things occurred to me. I should state upfront that I don’t care about the Olympics. I know I should, or I guess I should because people say I should, but when I hear touching stories like the little Chinese gymnast who was taken from her family at age 5 to be part of the program and she only sees them once a year and she cried and begged to come home and they said no because she was their ticket out of poverty, well that pretty much summed it up for me. It’s a lot like dog racing except with humans as the dogs. Still, I can sit back and entertain myself with it (my wife loves it so I watch and comment in a positive way). So here’s my thoughts.

-That Phelps dude wins his 10th Gold medal. That’s crazy. More than anyone else. Even my man Carl Lewis. So he wins and then they go to commercial. And it’s a Visa commercial. And Visa congratulates him on his 10th medal. OK, a little odd, but I’m sure they saw it coming. But it’s Morgan Freeman doing the voice. OK, so Morgan Freeman was in a bad accident a week or two ago. Now, I’m 99% positive that they didn’t bug Mister Freeman at the hospital or at home as he was rehabbing to record “Congratulations Michael” in a commercial which means that Visa had the forethought quite some time ago to see that Phelps might, just might, win 10 medals. It takes a little while to make a commercial.

This led me to wonder what else Visa had in the can for Morgan Freeman to say. So that’s what I did the next 10 minutes or so, walked around the house using my Morgan Freeman voice and thinking of ridiculous things that they could be ready to happen so he could say it. Fortunately my wife is tolerant and able to block me out so her Olympic experience was unaffected. “Michael Phelps, congratulations on beating that team of terrorists that were trying to blow up the Olympics with that awesome kick-off the wall you do.” “Visa sadly acknowledges that Michael Phelps was beaten brutally after a team of seal hunters mistook him for a seal. Visa’s thought are with you.” Somewhere, deep in the bowls of Visa is a vault of unused audio goodness. We must find it.

-Watching the women’s gymnasts, I suddenly felt very sad for them. No, not because they have dedicated every waking moment of their lives to a split second that involves them losing because they stepped slightly over a tiny white line. Not because they are going to be completely at a loss when their Olympic careers are over and they have to interact with people who are neither dedicated to one single goal nor really watch the Olympics. No, I pity them because they’ve probably never had a Frito with French onion dip on it. I of course thought this while I ate a Frito with French onion dip on it. And who knows, maybe one day they will eat one and realize that they could have been eating them all along instead of sleeping, eating, smoking cigarettes, and doing gymnastics every waking hour of their youth. Maybe it’s like sour-grapes and I envy them and am a hater. Or maybe it’s like lazy-grapes because I’m a lazy and that looks hard. Or maybe it’s Frito-grapes because Fritos are good.

-Volleyball. Really? Olympic volleyball? Well, one thing I can say is that those guys will be playing that game forever. Unlike the other sports where there is only a small window to perform your sport at the highest level, you can sit on a beach and play volleyball and drink beer for the duration of your life. I’m from Florida. Believe me, there are guys who are the leather bound edition of themselves who have been hanging on the beach playing volleyball and wake boarding since the 70s. This is a sport with longevity. Is volleyball fun? Yes. Is it Olympic? Um…well, let’s see. Is Ethiopia likely to have a team? Or Latvia? Probably not.

-Speaking of Latvia, what about Latveria? You know, the mythical place that Doctor Doom rules? Can you imagine a bunch of Doom-bots taking the field??? Yes! Of course you know that people would boycott the Olympics in Latveria. Why, because his name is Doctor Doom and he’s a tyrant??? If China can have super-children bouncing and flipping around then Doom can have Doom-bots out there. Pfff, Paul Hamm, you ain’t shit till you beat a Doom-bot and yell, “It’s clobberin’ time.” There, I said it.

-Also, why isn’t gym-kata in the Olympics yet?

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Tuesday wrap-up

-It occurred to me the other day that I was probably close to the halfway point of my life. This is considering that I’ll probably be experiencing some form of dementia in my 60s and 70s, so that pretty much negates that portion of my life, although it may make for a little more fantastical (is that really a word? Spellcheck seems to think so, although it does not think ‘spellcheck’ is a word) life. Anyway, this thought plagued me most of last week. I blame work.

-I watched Tropic Thunder last week and finally saw the new Batman movie this weekend. Both are mighty fine and have given me a small glimpse into having a life. I think they were going to revoke my nerd card if I didn’t go see Batman in the theatre. Fortunately it looked like the staff thought I was probably a guy who had seen it many times so they didn’t jump me.

I actually saw the movie by myself, which is something I rarely do. I went early on Sunday and you know what? People don’t shut up at the matinees either. I thought it would be a quiet, low-key affair but sure enough, some dude and girl chatted through a good portion. Also, the guy asked questions right after a character had just asked the same question. Here’s an example: Office toady tells Morgan Freeman he wants 10 million dollars a year for the rest of his life. Morgan Freeman says, “10 million dollars a year?” followed by, about 5 seconds later the dude two rows back repeating, “10 million dollars a year?” This happened several times. Maybe he was watching the movie with a delay.

This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is why I hate concerts, live theatre, and the movies now. Daddy is getting old.

-Heading to Savannah this weekend. For the sea food, you ask. No. The ghost tours? No. For the fact that you can drink booze out in the streets with getting arrested? Nope. I’m going to rent the movie Savannah Smiles, sit in a hotel room and watch it over and over.

There was a summer where Savannah Smiles was on alllll the time on HBO. Does everyone have a story like that? Where you were a kid and HBO played the same movie over and over and you watched it every time? Man, I don’t know how many times I watched the Incredible Shrinking Woman (starring Lily Tomlin) and Superfuzz (starring no one of note) growing up. Those movies were always on.

-We just had August 8th, 2008 on Friday. Why is this important? Well because it’s 08/08/08. Again, that seems relatively unimportant but, when I was a lad, my grandmother pointed out to me that some particular date (I’ve since forgotten what that date was) was that day and that that configuration of numbers would never happen again in our lifetimes, so now, when I see a date that has some special numerical value, I think that this is the only time this will happen in my lifetime. I think she meant it to be a ‘live life to its fullest’ sentiment but generally it just depresses the shit out of me. Still my grandmother was pretty bad ass so it’s good to think of her, regardless of the circumstances. Remind me to tell you the story about her dropping a wood post on a snake repeatedly to kill it sometime.

-I was supposed to go to auditions for Mojo this weekend. I’m already cast in that mug so I was supposed to read with potential scene partners. I have to admit, it’s very cool to already be cast and come in to read with folks. The pressure is completely off.

FYI, for auditions, a lot of people get dolled up. I have, in the past, gotten spiffed up for auditions, but then I realized it makes me feel unnatural and I don’t read very well because of it. So I’ll clean up a bit and then dress comfortably nice. However, some folks dress UP. A lot of actresses (inexperienced ones mostly) wear really tight clothes and low cut tops. This is funny to me as a lot of directors are female or are gay males (not all, to be fair) so why the director would want to see their boobies is a bit beyond me. Anyway, in the few times I’ve been pre-cast (which is funny in itself and many industry folks hate that term, ‘pre-cast’, more on that some other time), I show up like a complete slob. I look like I’m on a bender and I just showed up at the theatre by coincidence. I don’t know why I do this. I guess because I can. It makes me feel good. Anyway, the auditions were canceled so I sat home like a slob instead and made sloppy joes. I did read some scenes with the dogs, though, and put them in low-cut tops just for authenticity.

-Went to a meeting for the wrestling school this weekend too. I love hanging with wrestlers and would-be wrestlers. It’s like living in a comic book. We’re all chatting seriously about masks and where a good place to get spandex is and it’s just awesome. We started looking at tentative blast-off dates for the fed(eration) and hopefully that will start rolling soon. Daddy misses the wrestling like the deserts miss the rain and the desserts miss the chopped nuts.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

An experiment...



In my never ending quest to try to make something out of the crappy tools at my disposal, I've created this little video. It's actually my rough attempt at something a little more ambitious, but I just wanted to see what Windows Movie Maker had under the hood when mixed with my favorite MS Paint. I had intentions of recording my own dialogue but a sad drawback of Movie Maker is that it only has one audio track. In a way, I kind of like the 1920's style of the dialogue cards. It's crapp-ily charming, which is the name I'll probably call my memoirs one day (Crappily Charming, the mmyers story). I think I've thought of a way around that little audio speedbump, but anywho, this is what I made this weekend.

I played with a lot of different music but then settled on this nifty little track by Satie. Gymnopedies No.1 seemed a little bit too much of a bummer and if you've watched the video already you know it's a bummer enough. Gymno No. 2 (my favorite of the set) is a little jauntier and fit well with my little story about love. Sad, sad love. I played with some Django Reinhardt and the Mills Brothers but always came back to Satie.

Anywho, hope you enjoy it and here's to more experimenting.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Pete Rose by any other name...

I really have a lot of respect for people with complicated names. When you think about it, how much of their lives must be spent correcting people on the correct pronunciation of their names? Probably a lot. And people with complicated names seem to relish the correction process. “Actually my name is pronounced Ash-LUND, not Ash-LAND.” These are most likely the same people that enjoy correcting people’s grammatical errors as well, using the same ‘lean in-just between you and me” technique with the tone of “I just don’t want you to look stupid”. Oh yes, they’re very thoughtful people.

I sat in front of a kid who’s last name was Nassef (pronounced Nas-iF) from middle school through high school. On the first day of school every year, the teacher would butcher his name, and often for the rest of the year. It got to be where other people would correct the teacher before he could, just to get in on the fun. I really think the teachers eventually broke his spirit. I mean, at what point do you just stop caring and say, “You know, when she calls Nays-Sef, I’m just going to answer to it.” To his credit, he was not nearly as douchey about it as he could have been. I guess the thrill wears off eventually.

Still, I envy the instant superiority one receives from correcting someone at the beginning of a conversation, especially on the first introduction to them. I’ve never had that thrill. Nothing too complex about my first name, although I am called ‘Mike’ by more coworkers and casual acquaintances than I’d care to admit.

So with this in mind, I give you my nominees for complicated names I wish I had.

Marquess of Frankenberry-
This one has all sorts of landmines set for potential people who will meet me. One, there’s the Marquess of Queensberry, the guy who invented the rules for boxing in the 1800s. Two, there are those who would call me “Marcus of Frankenberry”, which is incorrect and I will relish telling them so, “It’s not Mar-Cus, it’s Marquess.” Then there are the people who will want to call me Marquess of Crunchberry or Smurfberry or some other cereal of their chosing. But you see, it isn’t their chosing, it is mine, and the cereal is Frankenberry…or maybe Booberry. I haven’t decided.

Magneto-
Some will call me Mag-net-oh, some Mag-Neat-o. Still, they will all be wrong. It will be Majnuto, all one word without clear syllables. Also, I imagine people having problems remembering which X-Men villain I’m named after, so that will allow for more corrections. Introductions like, “Have you met Mr. Juggernaut?” or “Sarah, this is that guy from work I told you about, Unus the Untouchable.” Then I will be forced to beat them up, using Marquess of Frankenberry rules, of course.

Whitey McAssBeater-
Ah, who am I kidding. EVERYBODY would remember that name. Heck, you’d find excuses to say my name if it was Whitey McAssBeater. And you wouldn’t just call me Whitey, either, you’d say the WHOLE name. I’ve met two guys with the name or nickname (I never asked which) Whitey and both worked on cars and were awesome. Of course I’d probably get sick of hearing it pretty quickly as people would be saying it all the time.

Uni, the last unicorn-
Again, this probably wouldn’t require a lot of correction (well, maybe Une-nee versus You-nee, but that’s about it), but I think it might let people reflect a moment on God’s little retarded horse, the unicorn, and how we killed them all off for their delicious meat and aphrodisiac qualities attributed to their horn.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Hand jive

Looking at my gouged hand, it suddenly occured to me that the palm reading layout of my hand had been altered. Having no background in palm reading, I didn't know what any of those lines on my hand meant, so I went to that bastion of learning, the internet, and now I know everything. Thank you Wikipedia and that weird guy with the hand fetish site.

As it turns out, my fame line has been drastically extended, so whereas before I was only destined to have a minor amount of fame, now I'm destined for a lot more minor fame. I'm guessing that fame is not going to come as a hand model as I will probably have a scar. Unless hand models with scars because vogue. Heck, maybe I'll be the person who starts that and that will be my fame. What about a Shane Company commercial where it shows a woman with a scarred hand and the tag is, "Your heart and hands may be flawed but our diamonds aren't."
So then I thought, well heck, if spikes on a fence can alter my future this much, maybe it's better to take a more proactive approach to my future, so with the help of my office box cutter, I'm now destined to be really rich, marry 30 beautiful women, and possibly die from blood loss. Science rules!

Friday, August 1, 2008

Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away...

So yesterday I got home from work, got out of my car and walked to my mailbox. Beside my neighbor's mailbox, I noticed, was a crazed looking dog, all wet and intense. Well, I'm a dog guy. I've got 3 of my own. I know that dogs wig out when you wig out, so I remained non-wigged and reached for my mail. However, I noticed that that movement pushed the dog into first a smile and then a snarl, then that weird rippling lip snarl that angry dogs like to do.

As I mentioned, I have my own dogs and although I know most dogs are fairly good intentioned, I also know that a scared/pissed dog is bad juju. Then I noticed that he had a friend. As luck would have it, his friend was pissed too. Some sort of bad mailbox history for those guys. Fight or flight kicked in. It's very misleading when they say fight or flight, because it leads one to think that maybe they be able to fly, which I wasn't, so I ran. My pal Yoshi and I will reenact this scene for your viewing pleasure.


So I huffed it out, jumping the fence into my yard. Now our fence has tines on top of it (Good Tines, ain't we lucky we got 'em) but I was not lucky because they ripped my hands to shreds and tore my favorite work pants. The gray ones? You know 'em? Well, they were cool.

And the dogs stood at the fence and barked and snarled. Scary.





Anyway, my neighbor shows up a little bit later and it turns out it was his dogs. I didn't recognize them because they were wet and crazed and I was attempting to keep feces inside my body. My wife recounted the story to him as I stood there with a stunned look. Anyway, he was unimpressed, saying he wasn't sure how they were getting out. I guess I should have told the story myself and used my bloody hands as emphasis.

The wife bandages my hands and then I'm off to the theatre.

So while at the theatre and doing a show, we're in a blackout and I'm laying on a couch. The two guys who I'm doing the scene with are jokesters and I can feel one of the tickling my hand in the dark. I flutter my hand to get them to stop but they're commited. So when the lights come up, there's a fucking cockroach on my hand. Not cool. Now I know my wife has an insane fear of this little creature so Jazz legend Max Roach and I will perform the reenactment instead.


Scary, right? What if he hits me with a drumstick? Ooh, but what if he has an ice cream Drumstick? You can see how I would be torn, right?

So the audience gasped and I tried to think of something witty to say but I had nothing. It was all I could do to continue the scene and not wig out. And I watched the little critter scurry away under the audience.

So apparently I'm some sort of poor man's Dr Doolittle now.

I wish I had a payoff to these stories but I don't. Sufficed to say, it's probably better not to stand close to me when animals are around for the next little while.

Two new characters

This comic goes out to Cesar for suggesting Cthulhu, my wife for suggesting introducing Violet, and the poor, poor girl who sits besides me who has to live out Violet's existence and gives me material unknowingly.