Victor/Victoriout

Until next time, faithful trench coat that's now been issued to me by three different costumers in three consecutive shows. I'll miss you -- and the telltale wad of Russian-looking prop money that apparently lives forever in the right pocket -- but I'm sure somehow I'll be wearing you again in my next trench-coat-related show.

Only man-boy could turn the London attacks into an opportunistic advertisement for the American gun lobby

Knives and a truck

Every time I think he's hit the absolute moral bottom, he grabs a new shovel. Every time I think he's won the race to be the least presidential, he adds a five-mile sprint past the finish line. Every time I think there's no possible way for his words and actions and impulses and his very thoughts to demonstrate his abject, tone-deaf, non-linear, catastrophic imbecility, he sends a new tweet. Every time he's proven beyond all doubt that he's beholden above country to party, lobby and foreign manipulation, he clumsily confirms a deeper level of his selfish corruption. Every time it's crucial that he's there to do his job, he goes golfing.

Every time he sees an opportunity to exploit other people's tragedy for his own personal or political gain, he all but gleefully makes sure he squeezes out what in his puerile mind is the maximum return on his investment.

Every. Every. Every. Time.

We need to be smart

When man-boy interrupts his 22nd golf game not to console the son he just reported was profoundly traumatized and not to address terrorist attacks overseas but to vaguely declare "we need to be smart," is it meta or just accidental irony?

Mental

Just because you've heard of the word genocide does NOT mean you should use it in any context other than to describe actual genocide. Aside from the fact that "mental genocide" makes no sense, comparing Kathy Griffin holding a plastic head covered in stage blood -- whether or not you agree with or even understand its underlying message -- to the mass slaughter of entire demographic populations makes you beneath levels of contempt you're clearly not remotely equipped to comprehend.

Those tears you cry? They're really mi-ine.

The parking lot is packed but the gym is cavernously, ominously empty

I think the Lat Pulldown Killer (LPK) is offing hapless gym members one by one and shipping their bodies off to China exactly like in Thoroughly Modern Millie but in a gym instead of New York City and with dead people instead of perky coeds and with Carol Channing not playing the piano with her feet.

Sigh.

Remove.
Adjust.
Dust.
Edit.
Organize.

Gravity.

Crap.

THE ECONOMY?

Not the humanity, but the ECONOMY. She's just as clumsy at tweeting blatant, opportunistic lies as her father -- though she's at least honest about her invested interest in the taxes we pay. I'd be offended by her cultural appropriation of the word pride in this context but only the most cretinist self-loathing gays will shout hooray to her bullshit so we'll know which ones to put on the icebergs that are crashing violently off the Antarctic ice shelf.

Excavating my room

The girl on the Lincoln Logs container looks like she's wrapped her hair on a toilet-paper tube and perched it on her head as though that were an acceptable way to spend all eternity building houses that I'm sorry but Lincoln never would have fit in. That's Jake the Drake -- my eponymous investment Beanie Baby -- in the center. I'm holding on to him for a few more years until his value tops $10K and then I'm gonna exit the accord and unload him. Buy low, sell high! I have no recollection of the book on the right but I'm sure it made me gay. Thank goodness I had those manly Lincoln Logs as an antidote.

This is me in ten years

This was hidden away among three generations of surprises in my grandmother's attic when we emptied the house -- which was built by my great-grandfather -- after her death in 1984. We have no idea who these people are, but we assume they're ancestors so I hung this picture on the wall of my first house for seven years because NORWEGIAN GUILT. I have to say, I clearly get my smoldering handsomeness from the woman in the picture because aside from her dated middle part, the resemblance -- not to mention the eternally sunny disposition -- is uncanny. Assuming that even is a woman. And it goes without saying that I get my boxy, poorly drawn hands from the man.

He's reduced his entire communication vocabulary to a catchphrase and an emoji

But at least he spelled stuff right this time.

Selfie therapy

So when there's suddenly a handsome new pharmacist at the drive-through and he sees your tattoo and asks you tons and tons and tons of questions about it even though there's a HUGE line of cars waiting behind you and then he makes what you hope is more-than-just-chatty small talk as he rings up your four prescriptions and then he proceeds to ask you the perfunctory questions about each prescription that you and he both know only get asked when your dosages change which you and he both know they haven't and as he finally puts the bags of your meds in that little drawer that slides out to your car he brings up the tattoo again and you look and he doesn't have a ring but he does have a pretty spectacular smile and wow does he have a cheerful buoyant personality and you think if he just trimmed his beard a little he'd look great in the wedding pictures and he clearly already has all the information he needs to figure out you're bipolar so he'd know what he's getting into and then you're both totally out of things to say short of one of you awkwardly blurting out an invitation to dinner so you have to drive away and you have no reason to hopefully see him for another month, would you go get back in line for the drive-through and throw caution and possibly even dignity to the wind and awkwardly blurt out that invitation to dinner? Because I sat in my car in the parking lot for a while seriously thinking about it.

But instead I came home and took a shamelessly flexy selfie of the tattoo that started the conversation that got me all aflutter because I don't know why because I didn't know what to do. Sigh.

YOU are disturbing

Technically, that photo is neither a mother nor a wife nor a human being. Grammar! And technically, you appear to be a wife in name only. You chose to marry him, you chose to have a child with him, you had over a year of an ugly campaign to understand exactly the level of scrutiny and expectation you'd face if you became his first lady -- which now makes you fair game for all that scrutiny -- and now you have chosen to very publicly not live with your husband-in-name-only at tremendous expense to the public. I agree with you that the photo is disturbing, but don't insult us by playing the wife card in your feigned indignance. And if you're so desperate to hide in your gilded tower out of the public eye, then stop making pointless tweets and giving perfunctory interviews to the media your husband-in-name-only so vehemently attacks. I don't respect you, I don't feel sorry for you and I don't have any interest in the tone-deaf meaninglessness you bring to the public discourse.

Five minutes to places!

The costumes are pre-set, the wigs are freshly styled, the audience chatter is buzzing in on the monitors and the orchestra is warming up -- which is one of my favorite sounds, full of promise and excitement and cacophony that will soon be big brassy beauty -- in the background. I'm so proud and excited to be a part of this show.

I know, I know ... I got crabs at Target ...

I just left Target and these shorts were on clearance for under my $10 bad-decision threshold and I am weak and THEY HAVE ADORABLE LITTLE RED CRABS EMBROIDERED ALL OVER THEM.

I can't get my pants off

Not that I do a mountain of physical activity in our show -- the bulk of my exertion involves moving a few set pieces between scenes and pointing a toy gun at someone for a few seconds -- but I've made it all the way through 8 weeks of rehearsals, including this long production week, unscathed only to throw my back out eating a jalapeño burger at our opening-night cast party tonight. Now I can't even manage to undress for bed so I guess I'll be sleeping in my clothes, struggling occasionally to roll over and cursing the first person to discover the spicy but backbreaking deliciousness of the jalapeño pepper.

But we had almost the most perfect opening night. The audience laughed and clapped enthusiastically from the very first song, and when you know the audience is engaged, the show becomes exponentially more fun to do. I was late on one set-moving cue, though. And our sound person missed a phone ring at a critical moment, but our Norma -- the ridiculous moll played by a consummate comedic actress -- didn't miss a beat, announced that she thought she'd heard the phone ring, and left us all stuck on stage with the Harvey Korman giggles while she went to answer it. It usually takes a lot to crack me up on stage, but this did the job so efficiently and so thoroughly that it took me three or four pages of dialogue to compose myself. Which is what I love the most about live theater: There's no guarantee everything will go right -- from simple sound cues to the collective buy-in from the audience -- and you have to adapt to every situation and make it work with little or no warning. Just try not to get the giggles when you're supposed to be holding someone at plastic gunpoint; at some point you have to make eye contact but making eye contact is the LAST thing you want to do when you're both trying not to laugh.

Do you think holding in a laugh for three or four pages could throw your back out instead of jalapeños? Asking for a friend.

Oh, nothing

Just coming down from the rush of our opening-night standing ovation. It's just me and my mustache and this box of pregnancy pillows all basking in the delicious afterglow together.

How was YOUR night?

Jesus

He actually just took time out of his busy schedule of alienating us from the world in a bubble of unsustainable nationalism to tweet THIS again. It's the barely literate, jingoistic equivalent of a high-five emoji. And it's not entirely clear whether he's desperately trying to convince us or himself.

The big story

In his defense, Twitter gives him only 140 characters, which when you subtract "fefe" is only 136 characters, so he didn't have room to clarify "the big story compared to what" here. The "compared to what" he meant to include is "compared to the tooth fairy amortization schedule relative to Easter bunny gift basket inflation."

The big story NOW, which people who follow current events and abject political failure know, is the rampant corruption, treason, nepotism, voodoo economics 2.0, geopolitical illiteracy and hourly scandal -- along with the clumsy attempts at distraction in a laughable failure to hide it all -- in the swamp of the man-boy administration. Man-boy has suddenly dug up his months-dormant lies about long-ago manufactured Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama scandals because his swamp-people base loves to vilify -- though they don't know that actual word, of course -- their old-favorite political straw men and vague, oversimplified ideas in place of the current political failures and corruptions involving real people and complex or at least nuanced realities.

Plus "the big story" is language used by newspaper editors in 1940s B movies and sensationalists in the alternative-news industry. It perks up the swamp people's muddy ears and alerts them that they're being told what to think again.

We asked for more political transparency in the election, and WE should have done more clarifying because the transparency we're getting is clumsy, desperate, fourth-grade attempts at distraction that the sentient electorate can easily see through.