Three very important things about tonight's final Victor/Victoria dress rehearsal

1. I got the right side of my mustache glued on totally perfect. The left side ended up kinda crooked so I took it off for this picture so I could just show you how well I did on the good side.

2. Our dressing room is a hanger GOLD MINE. Usually when you do a show you have to keep one eye on the conductor and one eye on your backstage hangers because theater people are dirty, barbarous hanger thieves who will throw your costumes on the floor and destroy every carefully organized bow tie and ruffled shirt of your pre-sets in a heartbeat if it means they can get an extra wisp of breeze to dry out their stinky wet clothes between performances. But our dressing room is literally exploding in a bountiful celebration of hangers, which means there are more than enough for everyone, which eliminates the usual petty hanger thievery that's so endemic among people inclined to break into song without warning, which gives everyone more time and more freedom to be jealous and bitter about the solos we didn't get and to maliciously hide each other' props.

3. My rainbow skateboarding Snoopy shirt is totally super-cute.

Wet and distressed

That moment you put on your costume for your show and discover that your sweat on it hasn't compleeeeeetly dried from the night before. Plus then you discover a box behind your costume rack labeled "distressed men's peasant shirts" and you wonder if wearing peasant shirts is what made all those poor men distressed or if the box contains peasant shirts that were made specifically for men who are already distressed. And all that wondering makes YOU distressed but you're wearing a tux shirt so OHMYGODICAN'TGOONNOW.

Sick

What Kathy did was immature and grotesque. But when you've spent the last year-plus doing immature, grotesque things like encouraging your swamp followers to murder your opponents, mocking disabled people, actively fueling a resurgence of white nationalism, wasting billions of dollars on golf trips and your failing third marriage, threatening to imprison your critics, and choking yourself in an impenetrable cloud of lies and treason, your sudden concern for the child you never see is where you should start, at last, to finally show that you even have a capacity for shame.

Oh -- since YOU brought him up, how is Barron doing after seeing naked, sexualized pictures of his mom all over the Internet?

Spellcheck changes covfefe to confederate

Press 1 for English.
Press 2 for Spanish.

Press covfefe for Russian.

Oh, hi! It's Jake.

You probably don't recognize me behind this body mic. I'm also wearing a false mustache (which I just tried to spell as moustache but spellcheck zapped me with the Cattle Prod of Shame, though this is all beside the point) so you may perceive an imperceptible difference in the way I look.

Anyway, I have something to announce that I've been keeping a highly disciplined secret for a couple months now: I'm in a show! And we just tonight completed our penultimate rehearsal, which means we have our final (or "ultimate" as they say in places where they use the word "ultimate") rehearsal tomorrow night ... and then we open our mere four-show run on Thursday. And here's a fun-for-the-whole-family idea: You should come see it! I'd tell you it's about an English woman pretending to be a Polish man pretending to be a French woman but you and I both know that's ridiculous. So here's the insider scoop: It's really about a gay French waiter who works on the side as a gay French choreographer and eventually works his way up the corporate ladder to don a false mustache and become a secretly gay Chicago mobster. The show is called Jake/Jake/Jake and you can find showtime and ticketing info here: Jake/Jake/Jake!

I've found more nuanced insight into multilateral arms diplomacy in my Kleenex

I condone none of this

It's horrific to contemplate. It's repulsive to look at. But it is worldwide news today.

And if you chose to dismiss across-the-country lynchings and burnings of Barack Obama in effigy eight years ago as "free speech," you have disqualified yourself from ANY discussion of Kathy Griffin's reprehensible stunt today.

Victor/Victoria proscenium awesomeness

We have a twinkly-star proscenium. I bet Hamilton doesn't have a twinkly-star proscenium. Or the NFL. The NFL isn't even remotely cool enough to have a twinkly-star proscenium. Victor/Victoria is the reigning, undisputed twinkly-star-proscenium world champion. Hamilton's stupid.

Um ... wow

I just sang "Le Jazz Hot" with these insanely talented pit singers crammed in an acoustically decadent offstage room with a disproportionately brass-heavy orchestra and I'm pretty sure it was one of the most glorious experiences of my life. And I get to do it again every night this week.

Victor/Victoria Wandelprobe!

Since this show takes place in Paris I'm pretty sure Wandelprobe is French for OHMYGODIFORGOTMYLINES! But apparently tonight it's actually just the first marriage of orchestra, singing, blocking, choreography, tech and I guess lines if we can remember them. We are freed from the earthly shackles of sets, props and costumes, though we are encouraged to wear some sort of clothing out of propriety. And since we're doing the show in a half-round arena, our pretty freaking fabulous orchestra is wired for sound and hidden in a nearby room ... behind this super-secret door. Where there is sometimes pizza. Which I'm pretty sure is also French for OHMYGODFREEPIZZA. I'm becoming quite the international man of culture in this show.

Victor/Victoria gangster badassery

I'm pretty sure the gun I'm holding shoots bubbles.

I have clematis! Behind me, I mean.

The Iowa speech we're all going to miss:

"I don't understand farm subsidies but I'm going to pretend I do blah blah blah my inauguration crowds were bigger than the entire population of the United States blah blah blah no president in the history of the galaxy has been treated worse than I have blah blah blah beautiful babies and chocolate cake blah blah blah I just got back from Europe where I counted all the way to G7 blah blah blah next question, as long as it's about MEEEEEEEEE. Oh, and blah blah blah."

If. Only.

Just this month, Franklin Graham in a fiery keynote speech at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians -- yes, apparently that's a thing now -- declared without citing figures or sources beyond his own made-upness that "I am sure the number of Christians who are in prison or martyred each year would stagger our mind if we really knew what the total number really was."

Oh, the heartbreak of "if only." And I'm sure the collective singular "our mind" was just a typo in the transcript. Because surely these hapless persecution victims have more than one mind between them.

#TheCognitiveDissonance

Oh, Scott. Scott, Scott, Scott. Bless your heart. I'll try to keep this short so you can get back to showing off your import:

1. The fact that you feel obligated to state that you're not afraid is tacit acknowledgement that we're well past the tipping point where most of your swamp friends are afraid to admit they support Melania's Profound Regret and all thinking people are afraid for reasons that are apparently beyond your understanding.
2. Speaking of understanding, "tacit" means "understood or implied without being stated."
3. Really. One little sticker is more than enough to proclaim to the world your catastrophic lack of judgment. But five little stickers AND an entire bottle of rub-on shoe polish? That just exponentiates your bad judgment about your bad judgment.
4. "Exponentiates" means "raises one quantity to the power of another."
5. Don't worry. Betsy DeVos took that last one off the test. Math is apparently too Satany.
6. Your car photo doesn't show your license plate so I can't discern what state you live in -- gratuitous "of denial" and "of delusion" jokes notwithstanding -- but a perfunctory google search just showed me that obstructing your rear window outside of a varying allowance of a few square inches in each corner is considered dangerous and illegal in all of the state traffic codes I read.
7. STATES' RIGHTS! YEAH!
8. "Perfunctory" means "carried out with a minimum of effort."
9. I apologize. I know I promised to keep this short. But there are so many things profoundly wrong with you.
10. Mazda is a Japanese multinational automaker based in Fuchū, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Four of the five little stickers on your Japan-is-not-America Mazda clearly -- CLEARLY! -- state "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" In all caps! With exclamation points! One has to wonder the level of cognitive dissonance required to put multiple pro-America stickers on an imported car and declare a "love" of "showing off" that car in presumably pro-American "support" of a by clear implication pro-American "president."
11. "Cognitive dissonance" means ... oh, never mind. Betsy won't allow it on the test either. Enjoy your metaphorical obstructed-view drive.
12. "Metaphor" means ... oy ... let's just say it's one fewer than metaphive so you won't have to count so high.

Chesting

Why is it that there are only two people in this gym and we're both using the same equipment to work the same body part? I want to use MY equipment in MY order or I'm going to whine and post gym selfies on my blog.

Oh, wait. I was gonna do that anyway.

Is our president this transparently desperate and petulantly dumb

or is our president this transparently desperate and petulantly dumb?

Zut alors!

If he's importing cars from France, then his rallying cry of American JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! must be a bunch of merde.

Signs of the apocalypse

1. Bitch Kitty does something cute, like pose with her paws out like she's a superhero.
2. Bitch Kitty lets me get close enough to take her picture without hissing and running away.
3. Bitch Kitty even cooperatively looks up at the camera and gives a wan smile for her picture.
4. Melania makes a public appearance in a $51,500 Dolce & Gabbana jacket while her husband can't find money in the national budget for Meals on Wheels.
5. Pickles.

Some assembly required

Call the legitimate press that does legitimate reporting on your legitimate words and actions "fake news" long enough and fake thinkers will treat that dismissive characterization as fact.

Note the pro-Trump signs in the background of this photo. Note the almost daily screams of "fake news" on Trump's Twitter account alone regarding the legitimate media's reporting on Trump's words and actions. Note that the American population of racists, KKK members, and people who explicitly or tacitly endorse lynching and other forms of shut-up murder are measurably all in what's left of Trump's base.

Javier Valdez, a reporter covering government corruption and the illegal drug trade, two weeks ago became the fifth such journalist to be murdered execution-style in Mexico in two months.

There are lots of similar legitimate journalists in America infuriating the "fake news" population. There is lots of open enthusiasm from that population over Montana Republican House candidate Greg Gianforte body-slamming a reporter who asked him a question about the Republican healthcare bill just this week. There is overwhelmingly lots of influence -- legally, Constitutionally and culturally -- over this population by the disproportionately powerful American gun lobby.

And these people have access to lots of both literal and metaphorical rope.

Ugh

The physical headache that kept me in bed all day is mostly better. The man-boy headache proudly endures, though. I'm gonna bet he didn't know what NATO stands for or who's in the G7 -- or more importantly, why they are -- until last Monday.

Fun facts about my nephew

1. I've changed his diaper exactly once because for some reason when he was a baby and he needed changing, my mom was all "He POOPED! That's so ADORABLE! Let me change his diaper for him!" and she hogged all the fun.

2. He had a belly laugh that would put a mall full of Santas to shame, and it didn't take much to fire up his hearty laugh machine: tossing him in the air, making a funny face, poking him in the tummy and -- for some reason once he was old enough to talk -- just saying the word "envelope."
3. His head was so round and so bald for so long that I'm pretty sure when he was about five my sister traded him in for a kid with cheekbones and a tube of Rogaine because I totally don't recognize my nephew of today in the pictures of my nephew as a baby.
4. Once he could walk, I bought him some rain boots with feet decorated to look like duck bills and ankles decorated with duck eyes that he wore every chance he got until well after he outgrew them and his toes stuck out of the cracked rubber and the smell coming from them sometimes made him difficult to hug but for some reason I was proud to the point of tears that he loved them because *I* bought them for him.
5. He more than once wore those duck boots with a hard hat and a pair of safety goggles and went into a DEEPLY focused zone as he pretended to edge the lawn with his toy weed whacker. We adults kinda saw this as alarming but mostly saw it as a profoundly funny way to keep him quiet for remarkable lengths of time.
6. He loved fire trucks. FIRE TRUCKS! I bought him a fireman suit with his name on the chest one year for Christmas and I thought we'd have to throw buckets of water on him to calm him down after he opened it.
7. I'm a gay man and I have no innate knowledge about how to raise children -- not that those two are mutually exclusive -- but I had no idea how to incorporate the gay part of my life into his understanding of who I am as he grew up in a world of naturally heterocentrist assumptions. And whether he figured it out gradually or all at once, one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me was totally not caring one way or the other. And one of the second greatest gifts he ever gave me was his enthusiasm about making totally tasteless gay jokes with me as he got older.
8. I'd kinda hoped that as he grew up he'd see me as the cool best-friend/trusted-confidant uncle in whom he could confide the vicissitudes of his teenage angst or from whom he could get private, non-judgmental answers to his questions about girls (or boys, but it ended up being girls), but all I really ended up getting was the friend part. Which I'm totally cool with.
9. Every kid's age is the best age, but I'm firmly in the camp that right now is the BEST best age because it comes with thoughtful conversations and informed opinions about current events and inside jokes that are a few steps above using the word "underpants" and -- and this is my favorite part for some reason -- the exchange of texts filled with inappropriate humor and exponentially inappropriate memes that show I have successfully completed my avuncular mission to thoroughly corrupt the boy.
10. After a whirlwind few months of senior awards ceremonies and final choir concerts and poorly-attended-by-me baseball games -- which cap off a whirlwind 18 years of time-has-flown-by-way-too-fast-for-me-to-savor-each-moment -- my nephew graduates from high school tonight. And I know it's just a milestone in a family of lives filled with milestones, but this milestone carries the weight of signifying the end of his childhood, of his belly laughs, of his duck boots, of his fire trucks, of his joy over eating Mickey Mouse waffles when he visited me in Chicago, of his need for me to pick him up from school, of his influence on me to make sure I live my life in a way that he grows up with a good example to emulate and a proud memory to eventually look back on. We're certainly not done raising him -- and I still have a niece I need to finish corrupting before she graduates -- but right now I'm overflowing with joy and sadness and worry and calm and immeasurable pride that I got to play a part in raising such a kind, intelligent, clever, responsible, conscientious, loving, eminently outstanding young man.

Dare to have dreams. And strive to achieve them.

The dawn of a golden age of atheism

Ah, America's modern-day Kennedys: dynamic thinkers and style icons brimming with youthful idealism and the courtly-but-joyful appearance of domestic marital bliss. Melania keeps the world fashion dialogue in a perpetual state of abuzzment with her signature freshness and coy irony; she wears Armani to a soup kitchen and then the Old Navy Dowager CollectionTM to the Vatican. I think I could totally date her stylist. Ivanka gets points for versatility; her outfit goes effortlessly from afternoon beatings at her Amish sweatshop to a hamster funeral to the Vatican to her nut job (oops -- NIGHT job) as a chimney sweep, and then that corpse sneeze of a veil doubles smartly as a hairnet for her morning shift at the cafeteria in one of Jared's tenements. Donald -- impish, spirited Donald -- would show up to his own funeral (wouldn't THAT be fun?) looking this rakish and disheveled in a tie as crooked as his integrity, a (Saudi? the picture is too small to see for sure) flag pin, workingman's hands bruised from tireless hours perfecting his stroke (and not, as those poorly shot videos seem to imply, from being playfully swatted away by his third (and counting!) wife's bediamonded hands), and a grin as out of place as a shipment of pro-American-jobs hats made in China. We are truly in a golden age that spans the continents from the hotel rooms of Russia to the gilded towers of New York, and this royal family brings a level personal, human connection to everyone rich or poor or especially poorer like no one has ever seen.

So come on in

Among other characters, I play a bartender named Gregor in the Revival Theatre Company's Victor/Victoria. This my little gay wicker bar covered with most of my barwear, which I pretend to fill and serve and retrieve and wash and re-serve to pretty much half of the cast before the opening number is over. Don't tell my parents, but I'm pretty sure I do more dishes in one song in the show than I do in a whole month at home.

There is nothing sacred about you

You say stuff just to say stuff, don't you? You make meaningless, grandiloquent statements that you hope sound presidential and that you also hope nobody notices belie the lies and impulsivities of your actions. You are an inconsequential accident of evolution and education who by the nonsensical vicissitudes of sociopolitics have risen to a level of prominence and power that is thankfully tempered by your gross ineptitude at life. You are an embarrassment and a horror to all that is decent and educated and true in the collected populations of the planet you'd willingly destroy for your own gain if you could only summon the coherency to figure out how. And you blithely insist on proving it day after day, lie after lie, tweet after tweet.

Keeping up the scent of appearances

Happiness is discovering that the person before you in the gym shower left a bottle of body wash there and you borrow some and instead of the usual Uninterrupted Stream scent of your own soap you get to spend the day smelling like Hyacinth Bouquet. Or something.

The sun's out. The skies look to be clear. It might as well not be winter anymore.

Survey says ...

A Hughe compliment

So tonight after my nephew's concert, one of the cool kids -- who ended up being the son of one of my high-school friends -- ran up to me and called me Wolverine. Which is better than running up to me to call me a hearse, I guess. I used to get called Wolverine a lot, and though I still don't see it, I will never turn down a date with Hugh Jackman. I mean a comparison to him. I will never turn down A COMPARISON TO Hugh Jackman. (Call me!)

Oh, Alma Mater Washington ...

For over 50 years -- which, according to some sources, is longer than I've been alive -- the choirs of the Washington High School vocal department have assembled for a combined final concert each May that celebrates the year in music, highlights the best of the school-year repertoire and sends the departing seniors out into the world with one triumphant final evening of singing. Literally. At the end of the concert, the alumni join the existing choirs for the time-honored "Warrior Chant" and then the concert closes with the gorgeous "Alma Mater" where -- after the lyric "our classmates will be gone" -- the seniors depart from the choir on the third verse, walk down the aisle AND LITERALLY LEAVE US. It was cool and exciting when I was a senior. But tonight my nephew will be doing it and it's not funny anymore.

It. Will. Be. Heart-wrenching.

I don't cry much. As in ever. I don't cry ever. But I am right now. And the concert hasn't even started.

This is gonna be rough.

Tired! Eva? Tired?

Orb backward is bro

Everything's just wonderful!

Didja do anything productive with the students, Melania? Share knowledge? Celebrate cultures? Offer tips on contouring or gold-digging? Or was it just all about you having a wonderful time?

Ya know, your man-boy husband does the same thing in his tweets: He always reports that he has "good meetings" with people as though that were newsworthy or valuable information to share with the public. He never reports topics discussed, commonalities found, diplomacies achieved ... just the relentless goodness of every meeting he has. It's like neither of you has critical thinking skills, the ability to interpret experiences or shape narratives, a useful education, or even shame over the fact that of all the things that happen in your glamorous, influential, tireless-public-servant lives, all you can ever seem to come up with when you decide Hey! I should put this on Twitter! is that your meetings were good ... or to your great fortune today, wonderful.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were both pointless, uneducated, narcissistic, tone-deaf hypocrites who suck the blood of taxpayers and sleep on beds of dead children. But we all know that's not true. As you told us in your tweet today, all you do with children is have a wonderful time with them. And that's just wonderful!

Man-boy is like Hallmark

He has a cherished old tweet for every occasion.

"Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will reportedly pledge $100 million toward a fund for women entrepreneurs that was built by Ivanka Trump."
--The Hill, May 21, 2017

Remember when President Obama was VILIFIED for:

• Arugula
• Flag pin
• Tan suit
• Mustard
• Chewing gum
• Private schools
• Healthy eating initiatives
• Michelle's bare arms
• Being black
• Oops! Did I just say being black?
• Overcoming a proudly obstructionist Congress to provide affordable healthcare for millions of Americans
• Being black

And by "meaningful" you mean "meaningless"

Your dad literally tried to ban an entire religion from our country. To refresh your selective, delusional, self-serving memory, he demanded "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." Which is the exact OPPOSITE of "promotion of religious tolerance globally."

Either your entire family is stupid or you all desperately hope that what's left of your moral and intellectual swamp of a base is.

Don't come back from your trip, Ivanka. Any of you. You're not good enough to call yourselves Americans.

Every Kollusion Begins With Kushner

#KickYouAllInTheNutsJob

You know how sometimes you park somewhere and you get trapped in your car listening to a song you love?

I'm trapped in my car right now listening to NPR list this week's day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour lies, machinations and appalling scandals that spilled out of the man-boy administration and its expanding, fetid orbit. It's exhausting. And infuriating. And I feel like I need to know what our country is up against so I can't stop listening.

You know what I like to do? Hate you.

"My big foreign trip"? "That's what I like to do"? You're a president, not a foreign-exchange student to Mexican finger-painting school.

My most fervent wishes:

1. You crash and burn HARD and FAST in the searing fire of your million delusionally arrogant lies before you do any lasting or permanent damage to our country.

2. You continue to humiliate yourself and your party to the cataclysmic end of your crash-and-burn through the willful ignorance, laughable ineptitude and unhinged, desperate ranting you insist on calculatedly broadcasting for all searchable eternity on social media and self-satisfiedly trumpeting every time you try to fake your way through a coherent sentence in front of the legitimate media you whine so pathetically about but even you know you'd die without.

3. You clumsily try -- and fail before you even start so nobody gets hurt -- to grab one last pussy on your way down so your trifecta of political, social and sexual humiliation is complete.

4. You somehow achieve a level of self-aware sentience that lets you finally realize that the entire world is laughing at you.

5. Once you fully comprehend the consequences of your catastrophic failings as a human being, you finally get the councelling you so desperately need. And that your insurance covers it.

Victor/Victoria's IN DA HOUSE!

Sigh.

I miss the days when the media knew how to turn a president into a legitimate national embarrassment and a scandal knew how to be a SCANDAL.

Roger Ailes, 1940 - 2017

Plus you whine a lot

Expressing ourselves

Apparently there was some kind of tornado-y thing outside tonight. I was up a steep and very narrow stairway tapping so I missed it. But everyone at rehearsal tonight did tap up a -- and I apologize in advance for this -- storm.

Happy Syttende Mai!

[break it down: sytten = seventeen, de = of, Mai = May]

As I'm sure the endless media coverage has made you thoroughly aware, today is Norwegian Constitution Day -- celebrating the 1814 Constituent Assembly at Eidsvold where we signed our new Constitution and began our quest for independence after 400 years under the oppressive reign of the (not so great, it would seem) Danes. (We joined into an unholy union on this day with Sweden and didn't gain our full independence until 1905, but that's a whole different fjord to climb.)

So anyway, I thank all of you for wearing red and blue today to help me honor my heritage. There's leftover Christmas lutefisk in the freezer. Help yourself!

Classified dismissed

Pieces of shit

You know how you eventually reach a point of moral and intellectual disgust where you stop caring who your outrage offends?

That was yesterday.

The Leakers would be a great name for a Trump cover-up band

These tweets aged well