Whore! Hats!

I am making my first-ever visit to the vast Theatre Cedar Rapids costume shop and this is one of the first things I stumbled on in my filled-with-surprise-and-delight exploration of its magical wonderlandness and I could not possibly ever be any happier than I am right now. Except if I were actually wearing a whore hat, of course:

Three days until my Big Birthday Broadway Binge Bash!

My first stop will be VIP seating at a Jimmy Fallon taping, courtesy of an incredibly generous (and connected!) friend. I’ve never even considered attending a TV taping when I visit New York, which just goes to prove that you can still expand your horizons even at the one-foot-in-the-grave age of 50.

#HowToTurn50

What knockers!

This dainty, wedding-ringed hand served as the knocker on the front door of the house where I grew up ... and now where my sister’s family lives. Nobody ever used it because we were wired with that fancy newfangled doorbell technology, but it did serve as an effectively dire warning to potential knockers that we weren’t above using human body parts to decorate our home.

5K time!

The matchy-matchy race shirts and the inflatable start tunnel make it official. And totally macho.

#HowToTurn50

I'm all set for my first race as a 50-year-old!

I already have some serious issues with tomorrow’s race though—namely that it’s not a circular route, and the fact that there’s no shuttle from the finish line back to the starting line is buried in implication instead of stated clearly in the race instructions—but the race is named after the CRANDIC railroad and our gear bags kinda cleverly have big wooden train whistles in them. Presumably so we can use them to call cabs back to our cars.

Anyway, tomorrow’s the first race of my Summer Of Running Away From Being 50. And I’m so excited I could whistle.

#HowToTurn50

Unfortunately, it never goes out

I think Kia really should rethink the practicality of the Automatic Accidental Trunk Opener function on its key fobs.

Also: The AlwaysOnNeverGoesOffFor14YearsAndCountingTM airbag light feature might need revisiting too.

3rd Street skywalk reflected in the windows of the Town Center building. 9:26 pm.

#OldHeadshotDay

Apparently this was a thing yesterday. Which is nice, because I had these taken right after I moved to Chicago for all the auditions I never went on because my job was too life-sucking and now I have an opportunity to use them:

Flashback Friday: Jake Regrets Edition

No words.

Come as you are

I’m not going up a steep and very narrow stairway to rehearsal tonight because this steep and very narrow stairway leads to the third floor and we’re rehearsing on the second floor. Plus we’re not doing a musical.

UFO ABDUCTS HORSE!

I'm a professional fashion writer. Do not try this at home.

Tiers of polka-dot chiffon tulle flutter like wispy cotton-candy nothingness next to Ivanka in an ugly fucking dress. ‬

Possibly-maybe-kinda-but-probably-not-useful words I have stumbled on while researching stuff:

ipseity \ ipˈsēətē \ (n) individual identity, selfhood

OMG

My nefarious plan was to stay in bed all morning, and I would have gotten away with it too ...

Disney + memes + home projects + vile puns

My work here is complete.

Jiffy Louvre must have been taken

You’d think Jiffy Lube would have logos all over its waiting room to get free advertising from bored customers taking waiting-room selfies to ease the tedium of adulting. But it only has acres of plain walls covered in faux stucco, giving us bored adulters no other option but to take selfies documenting the empty-vacuum desperation of our bland, meaningless, faux-stucco lives.

Putting the meh in exhibmeht

There’s a tidy little Edward Hopper exhibit at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art featuring pieces on loan from the Whitney Museum in New York in exchange for the Grant Wood pieces lent from the CRMA for the Whitney’s current Grant Wood exhibit. 

The Hopper exhibit here is perfectly OK, but I much prefer the extant architecture from the Carnegie Library that was repurposed into the CRMA with its gloriously geometric Postmodern addition in the 1980s:

Doing lines and Diet Coke

Wait. That might have come out wrong ...

I may have turned 50 on Wednesday but my car turned 80000 tonight, and that’s MORE

Because giant beer bottle carved out of an old tree, that’s why

Lunch in the Amanas!

Pickled cubes of ham! Cottage cheese with chives! Oven-baked steak! Other foods that have funny German names! Old-timey farmey stuff nailed to the walls! Waitresses who call you Dear! Waddling to the car when you’re stuffed!

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

3.66 miles!

(That frown is supposed to be an accomplished, triumphant smile in my clever accommodation for all this upsidedownness.)

Corn Born and Gorn’ for a rorn

Bitch Kitty bids you all a scowly goodnight

Flashback Friday: Milestone Birthdays Edition

I’m not sure what’s most disturbing about this picture: the bar mitzvah clown smile, the Disney villain eyes, the dinner-plate glasses, the scarecrow neck, the weird-ass way I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist or the pink-on-white shirt that hung on me with all the sex appeal of a Mayan burial gown on an immolated corpse. The girls on my floor (Loser alert! I was living in the Foreign Language House, a co-ed dorm filled with language dorks who stayed in on Friday nights studying verb declensions!) had decorated my door with pink 21s. Probably to match the shirt. Or the homosexuality. I’m not sure where I got the wine, but I am sure I had only a sip of it to celebrate reaching such a milestone age. Because actually drinking a whole glass of alcohol on my 21st birthday would have been something the cool kids would do.

Mom and Dad and their 50-year-old on his very happy birthday

#HowToTurn50

Cake I like

When your 50 and your a writer and you’re mom was an English teacher, she of course orders you a chalkboard birthday cake framed in homonyms and conjugations:

When your April birthday is in the middle of winter, your mom of course makes both tulip cookies and snowman cookies:

My mom—along with the rest of my family—totally gets me.

#HowToTurn50

This birthday party at work is LIT

#HowToTurn50

I'm 50!

I like to kick, stretch and kick! I'm 50! Fifty years old!

#HowToTurn50

And so it’s here: the last night of my 40s

I feel like that ominous, grainy photo of the Titanic sailing away from the White Star Dock in Southampton that’s always accompanied by a caption saying something about it being the last time the ship would ever see land. I was born at 6:30 am, so when I close my eyes tonight it will be the last time I see my bedroom as a 49-year-old because by the time I wake up I’ll be 50.

Turning 50 is bugging me WAY beyond the expected complaints of a certain age milestone making someone feel old. I know I’m not the only person to turn 50 or to feel profoundly older because of it ... and I’m certainly not the first person to complain about it. But 50 brings with it a mathematical sense of mortality that even 49 didn’t: I’m well over halfway done living my life. But I don’t feel like I’ve even STARTED living it by most measures. There’s so much about living that I worry I haven’t even started thinking about, much less doing ... even though I’ve consciously and purposefully been living by the motto “someday just began”—meaning someday is here, so stop putting things off (like tattooing “someday just began” inside your arm where you can easily see it) until some far-off-procrastination someday—for well over two decades.

So in that spirit—and flying in the face of the defeated spirit of the 50-year-old man I desperately don’t want to be—I’ve mapped out a pretty rigorous Summer Of Running Away From Being 50 that includes multiple vacations to favorite destinations including New York City and Washington, D.C., and multiple races including two half marathons, the second of which winds through the parks of my beloved Walt Disney World in November.

So tomorrow’s my new someday. The beginning of my sixth decade. The dawn of my summer-long celebration of that milestone. The onyourmarksgetsetGO! of my sprint toward everything that awaits me between here and 60.

And the moment I wake up tomorrow, it’s only just begun.

#HowToTurn50

I’m finally getting caught up on weeks of unfolded laundry and WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM, SOCK-EATING DRYER?

Your jealousy is the ugly stepsister

We have a refrigerator at work filled with icy cold pop and an honor-system piggy bank (that’s shaped like an actual pig!) on top for us to pay a quarter every time we take a pop. Naturally, I brought every quarter I could scrounge out of random couch cushions and pay phones to work and stacked them so precariously on my desk that they became a safety hazard and five OSHA violations. So I searched through our storage room at home for a handsome, tasteful demitasse or votive that I could possibly repurpose as a quarter caddy (coffer? cradle? cauldron? kettle? so many alliterative options!) ... and instead I FOUND A WHOLE BAG OF ASSORTED DISNEY PRINCESS PARTY CUPS, the Cinderellaiest of which I—as people do—arranged on my desk with a Diet Coke can and an artful jumble of quarters for this celebratory photo:

My new iPhone X is finally up and running!

Except it uses face recognition technology, which freaks me out. So I’m not taking any chances.

It looks like somebody we all know just all-but-impulse-purchased a new iPhone X

It's--as per my usual sleek, masculine aesthetic--black. Which Apple calls space gray. Because why burden yourself with the efficiencies of accurate nomenclature when WHAT THE HELL IS SPACE GRAY, APPLE? C’MON. Anyway, I eagerly await having the ability to watch an entire commercial without my battery dying. Plus WIRELESS CHARGING, PEOPLE.

We interrupt your daily shitstorm to bring you this ...

Face Swap is truly the technology of our time

Axe me why I smell so fine today

Somebody left this in the gym shower so now I smell like a feral man-beast and LADIES, PLEASE. THERE IS ENOUGH OF ME TO GO AROUND.

Hello, ESPN First Take anchorman Max Kellerman

I can see you staring at me every morning from the TV at my gym and probably so can everyone else it’s embarrassing so just give me your address and any codes a person would hypothetically need to get into your building and I’ll send you my phone number thanks.

Operation Desert Stormy

And the crowd goes wild!

Well, then. I somehow just ran more than a 5K for my first training run of the summer without stopping—even all the stoplights synched with me, which won’t happen again in this or any other lifetime—in a not-too-shabby-but-still-not-bragworthy 12:01 pace. (My fastest marathon was a 9:14 pace—I never did manage to hit the 9:00 pace I needed to reach the holy grail of a sub-4:00 marathon—so I seem to be a wee bit off my game for a dinky little 5K.) 

I’m sure I will be hobbling beyond the point of therapy for the next few days, but the distance—and the endurance—I somehow pulled out of my magic butt just now holds the promise of a fun, productive Summer Of Running Away From Being 50. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to crawl to the shower.

#HowToTurn50

And we're off!

I'm heading out on my first training run—with my new Garmin GPS watch!—of my Summer Of Running Away From Being 50! May the IT band gods guide me steadfastly along my journey.

#HowToTurn50

Phonetic thpellingth of lithped lineth are thtumbling blockth in cold readth

Other than that, tonight’s first Fuddy Meers read-through went fantathtically well. This show is psycho levels of funny. And funny levels of psycho. Don’t mith it!

Our first read-through!