I’m one screw short of a tap shoe

Seriously! I lost a screw off one of my taps last night about halfway through class, and I spent the rest of the class looking all befuddled because I was so worried my tap would fly off and sever someone’s artery. My befuddlement had nothing to do with the fact that I was way out of practice and the class was more than a little bit over my head. Ahem.

But it was still a blast! The teacher comes from an urban/street tap tradition that’s all about percussiveness and unconventional rhythms—as opposed to the gay-ass tap tradition I’m used to that’s all about time steps and mugging for the audience. And like all awesome teachers, he hates symmetry. So all the combinations we learned last night went out of their way to avoid collapsing into predictable eight-beat phrases. Everybody wins!

Miraculously, I also found my screw after class. And I’m not talking about the muscley ballet boy I saw in the hallway who did an adorably indiscreet job of asking the receptionist what she knew about me. No—I literally found my tiny little tap-shoe screw in the giant room where we’d been paradiddling for 90 minutes, which will totally save me the headache of driving all over the city to find a replacement. And this weekend I’m gluing all the screws into my taps. Because this class is too fun for me to be screwing around with my hardware. (Get it? I said screwing! It’s funny because it’s … oh, never mind.)

In More Evidence I’m A Screw Short News, I’ve been bringing my little tube of Polysporin® to work with me so I can periodically disappear into the bathroom and re-dress the stab wound in the back of my head. So yesterday I discreetly excused myself from my desk, discreetly waited for everyone to leave the sink area in our shared bathroom, discreetly mopped up the dried blood flecks and old Polysporin® from my hair, discreetly reached into my pocket to grab my tube of Polysporin® (which is not a metaphor for anything) … and discovered I’d actually spent the day carrying around a little travel tube of toothpaste.

Now, minty fresh stab wounds are a noble goal in some medical practices, but at this point in my recovery I’m more worried about cleanliness and basic healing. Fortunately, there’s a drug store on every corner in the Loop, so I was still able to get my wound all cleaned up and slathered in a nourishing, protective layer of goo.

And—not that I was concerned—the lab results came back on the cyst they hacked out of me and it was benign. But as I understand it, analyzing a pilar cyst in a lab is more an exercise in CYA than a harbinger of potential medical catastrophe. The only time you should actually worry is when you lose the ability to tell the difference between Crest® and Polysporin®.