Oh, hai.

Remember me? I used to write a blog here.

But it's been a busy week. Busy, busy, busy. (Touch the trolley!)

But I have so much to tell!

Broadway! Stage door notes! Celebrities! Small-world encounters on the sidewalk! Bad cabbies! Marathon runners! Stupid concierges! Free hotel rooms! Pictures!

I just don't have time to write about it all just yet. Stay tuned. Please. I promise I'll be back soon.

Things we hope to see in NYC this weekend

Next to Normal

God of Carnage

Bye Bye Birdie or Hair (there are people from my home town in both shows!)

Or any of at least 10 other shows we'll be glad to get last-minute tickets to

The marathon

Some random NYC friends I emailed today with last-minute notice that we'll be there tomorrow and Sunday

Jessie Pavelka (but only because I hope to see him everywhere I go)

Ten things about my dad

1. Like most dads, he really, really wanted a prototypical athlete of a son … and he signed me up for every little league sport known to man and patiently tried to explain to my little could-not-be-less-interested self the rules of all the games. I have a distinct memory of him trying to illustrate the football line of scrimmage to me by drawing Xs and Os and lines in the redwood planks of our backyard picnic table when I was a kid. And when it eventually became clear that I was completely sucky at and completely not interested in team sports but pretty good and really interested in musical theater, he abruptly changed his expectations and started coming to cheer me on in every show and concert I ever did. No questions asked.

2. His colloquialisms and insults rival those of any you’d hear on a well-written sitcom. And I steal his material with reckless abandon to this day (though apparently it’s way better live than in a blog post). I remember laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe the first time he told my little sister—who was not the neatest or most linear of children—that she could screw up a one-woman parade. I can still make the domestic partner giggle by telling him someone is so cheap they wouldn’t pay a nickel to watch Jesus ride a bike. And I’ve even spread the jocular wisecrackery to none other than Dan Savage, who stopped mid-conversation and reached for a pen and paper when I described a fussy woman I know by saying she wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouth full of it.

3. Dad officially hates cats. My mom and the rest of our family officially love cats. So of course Mom and Dad’s cat wants nothing to do with anyone but Dad. And whenever he sits down, he patiently lets her (the cat, not Mom) climb to her favorite position on his chest with her hind paws on his tummy and her head and upper paws on his shoulder as though she were a hideous, cat-butt-shaped broach.

4. He likes to let people think he’s a gruff old curmudgeon, but he’s really little more than a giant bowl of warm Play-Doh in the hands of my niece and nephew. Like the cat, they easily manipulate him to do their bidding, and watching him happily interact with them is the most heartwarming thing you will ever see.

5. I had a 4:00 am paper route from December of 6th grade to December of my senior year in high school. (And I still haven’t caught up on my sleep.) Dad got up with me almost every morning, at the very least making sure I was awake and more often than not to take a chunk of papers and doing the west loop of my route for me.

6. Throughout my entire childhood, either late at night or right before the paper route, Dad and I would snack on milk and those rock-hard store-brand iced oatmeal cookies. To this day, every time I walk by a package of them in a grocery store I have strong and very happy flashbacks to our cookie time together.

7. He instilled in me a lifelong love of peanut butter. And, following his example, I always keep a wide selection of jelly flavors in my refrigerator.

8. His handwriting is an interesting blend of casual scrawl and indifferent masculinity … and it’s not the easiest thing to read. And by the time I’d gotten out of college I discovered my handwriting had become almost exactly like his.

9. On the day he turned 45, I remember sitting in school thinking Holy shit, my dad is 45. That means he’s going to die soon.

10. But he somehow managed to survive 45. And today he turns 70. And though he’s stoically enduring the indignities of macular degeneration and a host of lesser advancing-age infirmities, he’s still an active, happy, loving part of all our lives. And I’m so thrilled that he’s around to cheer on his grandson—who clearly understands what a line of scrimmage is—in his football games and have cookies with his granddaughter and spoil his Mom’s cat … and still sit in the audience of his sensitive, artistic son’s concerts every once in a while.

Happy birthday, Dad!

The Three-Year Itch

Or, technically, the Three-Year Corporate Oral Hygiene Review

I just had my three-year anniversary at my job (thank you all for the gifts and the flowers) and, as one typically does at this career juncture, I checked the expiration date stamped into the crimpy end of the tube of office toothpaste I bought for myself on my very first lunch hour.

Since I usually have my gym bag Dopp kit with me, I tend to use my gym toothpaste when I brush my teeth at work. Which is why this tube of toothpaste lasted me a full three years. And while it had always left a gross taste in my mouth, I’d noticed the taste had actually gotten worse in the last few months. But buying a new tube of toothpaste involved all kinds of inconveniences, like walking into a drugstore. Then I noticed that the current tube had expired over a year ago, so I was forced to break down and get a new tube.

But, suddenly realizing I had all the ingredients for a high-traffic blog post (as you can probably tell, I’m always on the lookout for ways to entertain and inform you people in a Pulitzer-worthy fashion … and to pump up my hit count with the tougher, more relevant topics that the kids are buzzing about), before I threw the old tube away I took a side-by-side picture with my camera phone.

And then I wrote bulleted captions. Because that’s what separates the dumb, pointless blog posts from the truly poetic and universally meaningful (and full of kid buzz) ones.
Top tube:
• Astringent-y and painful to use
• Leaves mouth tasting like kitten butt and regret
• Requires frequent applications of breath spray to kill post-brushing funk
• Expired in JN08, whenever that was

Bottom tube:
• Fresh and new, right out of the box
• Label printed crooked but who cares?
• Leaves a fresh, minty aftertaste that really does last
• Totally matches the shirt I’m wearing today

My morning U.N. meeting

Working out at 7 am involves a comforting set of rituals: Packing my lunch and my workout clothes and my work clothes the night before. Setting my alarm for 5:45 and hitting the snooze button only once so I can be up and stuffed full of eggs and toast and out the door by 6:10 in time to catch the bus. And hanging out at my silent United Nations meeting, which convenes every morning at my bus stop with the following cast of international representatives:

The white guy. That’s me. I’m wearing my gym clothes with my stuffed-to-bursting gym bag over my shoulders. And even though it’s pretty dark I’m usually reading something.

The blue-collar black woman. She wears a uniform that says she probably works in a hotel or at a restaurant. And she always looks tired.

The yuppie white girl. She’s always in a suit of some sort with her hair just so and her tennis shoes on and her bag that usually goes with her coat.

The Hispanic woman who’s always in a hurry. She runs—runs!—from the cross-town bus that drops her off right across the street from us and arrives breathless at our bus stop. Even though our bus never arrives until well after she’s joined us and gotten her heart rate back to normal.

The Middle Eastern woman who won’t stand anywhere near us. She wears the head covering that hides her hair and neck and the long flowing outfit that shows only her hands and her shoes. And she stands a good 15 paces away from the rest of us with her head down the whole time. She stands so far away, in fact, that she almost misses the bus some mornings waiting for us to get on before she ventures near the door.

The bus driver. He thinks he’s a gruff old man and he tries to stare forward when we board, but I make a point to say good morning when I get on and to thank him when I get off and I think I’ve finally broken him to the point that he realizes he’s never going to escape from my preternatural morning perkiness.

Who's Bad?

That was the theme of my sister’s Halloween party on Saturday night. In Iowa. Where Iowa Hawkeye worship is a beverage and black and gold are condiments.

We road-tripped to Iowa this weekend for the party with the domestic partner’s cousin and his new wife. And we really struggled to think of a “Who’s Bad?” group costume that would work for one woman and three men. We struggled enough that two days before the party we still hadn’t thought of anything fun.

Until.

My sister emailed us to say that the undefeated (which is a sports term that means “having three Tony awards and a female lead who knows all the words and doesn’t sing flat like Madonna”) Iowa Hawkeyes would be playing the Michigan State Spartans during the party. Which means nobody would be badder than a group of Spartans fans that night. Nobody.

Now, this is funny on three levels: 1) It would be to-the-second timely, unlike the week-old joke of a balloon boy costume; 2) The four of us are sports fans in the way Rush Limbaugh is a sexy hunk of human relevance; and 3) I tend to look wan and pasty in jewel tones like Spartan green.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find Spartans gear in Chicago two days before a Halloween party. Because apparently the entire city is working the same costume idea for the Spartans-Cubs game this Saturday. Perhaps.

But!

I found Spartans green T-shirts on sale ($1.97 each! I must be some kind of god!) at Old Navy. And I printed some Spartans logos from the Internets. And we got some giant green fingers and some face paint and some cheesy football hats at a party store. And I personally own every color of electrical tape known to man. Plus I own green tennis shoes. In three different shades.

So for less than $10 each, the four of us went from too-cool-for-sports artsy kids to hardcore sports fans for one night. And we were a hit! And we were allowed to live through the night because the Hawkeyes beat the Spartans in a last-second upset (which is a sports term that means “you’re going out there a youngster, but you’re coming back a star!”). So it was a very fun party. Even though I totally looked wan:

ChicagoRound: Essanay Studios

Most people—heck, most Chicagoans—don’t realize it, but Chicago was an important player in the development of America’s motion picture industry. And the Chicago studio that was once home to early film legends like Gloria Swanson, G.M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson and Charlie Chaplin—along with screenwriter-turned-Hollywood-gossip-columnist Louella Parsons—still stands in Chicago’s storied Uptown neighborhood:

Essanay Studios—founded in 1907 as the Peerless Film Manufacturing Company but eventually renamed Essanay after the initials (S and A) of its founders, George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. Anderson—turned out about 2,000 shorts and features between 1907 and 1917.

Its first film, An Awful Skate, or The Hobo on Rollers, was produced in and around its first studio location at 946 Wells Street (now 1300 N. Wells after Chicago changed its street numbering system in 1908). It starred Ben Turpin, who was then the studio janitor, and it cost just a couple hundred dollars to make. But it grossed perhaps as much as $10,000—close to $216,000 in modern dollars—when it was released. Suddenly flush with money and success, Essanay Studios moved to its giant new location—and into its golden age—at 1333-45 W. Argyle St. in 1908.

Chicago’s weather—and it’s always about Chicago’s weather—along with the growing popularity of westerns, also prompted Essanay to open what they called the Essanay-West Studio in Niles, California in 1913.

The Chicago studio produced many of Essanay’s most famous movies, including:
• The first A Christmas Carol (1908)
• The first Jesse James movie, The James Boys of Missouri (1908)
• The first American Sherlock Holmes (1916)
• And some of the world’s first cartoons, including a popular character called Dreamy Dud

Aside from Anderson, Chaplin, Parsons and Swanson, other notable (to some, but I had to look them up) Essanay alumni include Edward Arnold, Wallace Beery, Francis X. Bushman, Lester Cuneo, Helen Dunbar, Ann Little, Tom Mix, George Periolat, Rod La Rocque, Ben Turpin, Virginia Valli and director Allan Dwan.

Chaplin actually lived in Chicago for less than a month and filmed only one notable movie here: His New Job. But his is the most famous name associated with the studio, and it lives on in the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium of St. Augustine College, which occupies the site today.

Esssanay Studios dissolved in 1918, but the building still stands on a leafy residential street. It was designated a Chicago Landmark with this plaque on March 26, 1996:

My sixth marathon!

First of all, this year's Chicago Marathon logo was once again ... weird. This time it was built around the theme of shoe prints, which is neither original nor particularly attractive, and it had the unfortunate sub-theme of being built around images of unattractive runners covered in shoe prints as though they had fallen in the race and the other runners had trampled them into a state of gradient-colored flatness. And you couldn't escape these ugly, trampled, gradient-colored runners anywhere you went in Chicago for a couple weeks before the marathon:

Thankfully, the images did not make it onto the marathon shirts, which, true to tradition, were another kind of ugly altogether. But more on that later.

Because we must respect the chronology of marathon events. So here is part of our crew at the packet pickup the day before the marathon: Peter and I, who committed to run the marathon and actually did it, and Matthew and Taz, who are big quitters. Except Matthew ran me in from miles 21 to 26 so I officially am not making fun of him. And Taz got up early to volunteer at a water station, so she's a marathon saint as well. The event alert system we're standing in front of was set at moderate because the weather was so cold. Which is better than the moderate-to-severe alerts we got last year because of the heat.

The packet pickup is essentially a massive trade show with billions of booths selling everything from running gear and shoes and headphone holder-in-placers to souvenir posters and shirts to registrations for other marathons. And there are tons of cool signs and things you can use as photo ops:

This year there was also a photo-op sign that wasn't quite as marathon-related as one would expect, but I'm never one to not follow directions:

The marathon was cold. So cold, in fact, that our triathlon friends Simon and Russ lent me their running tights the night before. Which was awesome, but in hindsight I probably should have chosen a different pair of shorts to wear over them because my baggy gray-and-red shorts, though built with nicely deep zippered pockets that can hold all the running gels a fella could need for a marathon, look like they're part of a bar mitzvah clown outfit when worn over black leggings:

Then again, this is me we're talking about here: the vanguard of running fashion. And before the marathon was over, cheap knockoffs of my outfit were spotted on runways (ahem) all over Chicago:
(Yes, that big orange PROOF indicates I stole these images from the Marathon photo site. But I intend to buy most of them so it's more like I'm using them through a borrow-to-own program. In any case, I stole them for you people so please don't call the cops. Because you've already looked at the pictures, which is exactly like wearing a dress to a party and then returning it to the store the next day, so you're just as guilty as I am.)

I have no decent photos of me in miles 0 through 17, which were thankfully really easy and enjoyable to run. Especially because I had disposable layers of clothing I threw away or handed to random domestic partners I encountered along the race route as my body got warmer. So you'll have to imagine this picture is me at mile 2 or so, with a white hoodie, a white throw-away jacket, black gloves and a black hat:

Here I am at mile 5, after I've thrown away the disposable jacket and the hat but I still have on the hoodie and the gloves that I have not told you you can stop imagining yet:

Here I'm going to ask you to imagine that this lifesize cutout of me is actually me. Which will be easy to do because it looks exactly like a lifesize cutout of me. It's wearing the hoodie I managed to hand off to some random domestic partner at mile 7 as he and Matthew and Craig and James met us on their intrepid journey to cheer Pete and me to victory. That's the official marathon shirt that the imaginary me is wearing, by the way. I don't mind the logo on the front, but the color is the kind of turquoise that even a Native American would have reservations (ahem) about wearing:

OK. You can stop imagining now. Here I am around mile 18 (for real!), when the pain started to set in. Ironically, it wasn't the foot pain that had threatened to keep me out of the marathon altogether a week before the race. It was just the all-over, why-am-I-doing-this pain that usually hits me right around mile 18. Plus my head cold had clearly taken up residence in my lungs by this point and I'd begun worrying that if I started to cough I may never be able to stop:

So this is what I look like running in pain. Fashion pain:
Thankfully, Matthew the marathon dropper-outer met me at mile 21 and ran me through the pain all the way to mile 26:

From the Department of Really Not That Interesting Two-Camera Perspectives: Matthew (who brought his camera with him so I could have stand-in pictures for miles 0 through 21) took this picture of me running under a bridge covered with marathon photographers:

Here's what my fellow runners and I looked like from the photographers' perspective:

Neat, huh?

I don't know where this picture was taken, but since official marathon photos are more expensive than a child-molestation payout and priest-relocation fees combined, I most certainly didn't stick my tongue out at a marathon photographer on purpose. It was so cold at the beginning of the run that our Gatorade felt syrupy on our lips and our running gels had taken on the consistency of week-old Play-Doh, so I imagine I'm sticking my tongue out here trying to get the sticky Gatorade/gel goo off my lips:

In any case, neither cold nor foot injury nor fashion humiliation nor sticky lips nor lungs full of snot could stop me from finishing the marathon. And I even managed to stay under my new, revised, slow-old-guy 5:00 finishing time goal, but just by seconds:
(For those of you unfamiliar with the way giant races are timed, my 7:40:14 start time tells you how long it took me to get across the start line in the crowd of runners. I have no idea why they do time splits in 5K increments since exactly nobody knows (without cheating) how many miles equals, say, a 35K, but you can see I was sticking pretty well to 31-32-minute 5Ks until I hit my wall o' pain somewhere around the 30K mark. And I love knowing that exactly 25,201 people crossed the finish line faster than I did.)

So once you cross the finish line and get your medal and get your timing chip sawed off your shoe, you can stop for all the free bananas and water and cookies and bagles and beer (!) you want in the finisher's area ... plus you can pose for one final official photo:

And once you hobble your way out of the finishers' area, if you're lucky your fabulous domestic partner will be waiting for you right at the exit. And even though you feel like death and smell like week-old death, he will give you a big wonderful hug that will make you feel even more proud of the things you've accomplished in your life:

I also took a final victory pose with Matthew, who had left me at mile 26 so I could run the final .2 miles all by myself to the finish line:

And I finally met my ugly-shirted doppelgänger in person and felt obligated to pose with him since he'd spent the day cheering me on all along the marathon route:

At the finisher's party, where my body suddenly realized holy shit I'm not running anymore so I should probably stop pretending it's not freezing outside I put my white hoodie back on and posed with Pete and our fabulous signs that Matthew made for us:

And then all the boys from our running group who actually ran the marathon posed for one last photo op, discreetly keeping our eyes from the fashion freak show going on under my shorts:

And then! The day after the marathon—after a very lengthy soak in our Jacuzzi tub—I commenced enjoying my sweet, sweet marathon reward. In alphabetical order:

The marathon photos are in!

The marathon blog post, though, will have to wait until this weekend.