I am 10 months pop-free today

Granted, I’m not over the ambrosial fizziness of bubbly beverages so I’m now living with a three-can-a-day addiction to sparkling water—which is the quién-es-más-macho equivalent of saying I’m living with a three-rainbow-a-day addiction to majestic unicorns—but I’ve successfully broken free from the bonds of pop’s unpronounceable-chemicals elixir soup. And for that I toast myself with my first icy cold can of cherry bubly for the day. ¡Salud! I mean ¡Princess Sparklepony Unicorn!

Shhhhh! I'm catching guys ...

FACT: My 1890s-gentleman-with-an-excruciatingly-precise-side-part hair is still totally on point two hours after the show.

FACT: My fireworks-and-sailboats shirt is objectively sexy and makes me factually catnip to the ladies.

POSSIBLY: And the dudes.

FACT: I’m watching a National Geographic documentary on the recovery of the Costa Concordia.

FACT: Every diver and salvage engineer in the entire Mediterranean is HAWT.

FACT: That’s Mediterranean for HOT.

FACT: If they could only see me through my TV they could see how irresistibly catnippy my on-point hair and fireworks-and-sailboats shirt are.

FACT: The combination is romantically lethal.

FACT: The documentary is really quite fascinating.

FACT: So I’m too busy to date all those hot Mediterraneans.

THEREFORE: Sorry, fellas. Now shhhhhh!

Flashback Friday: Bow Ties And Billowy Pleats Edition

This—THIS!—is what I thought was acceptable attire for setting foot in Washington DC's Kennedy Center to see Tyne Daly in the 1989 revival of Gypsy. (Early non-linear side note: You never forget your first Gypsy. And while I don't l-o-o-o-o-o-v-e the show like other card-carrying-Platinum gays, I still love Tyne Daly as Rose more than any other women I've seen in the role since then. And that includes Patti. Because she's never met a vowel she couldn't chew into a meaty, puddingy, distractingy triphthong.)

Anywho ... THAT OUTFIT ...

Nothing says "I sit down to pee" quite as efficiently as a bow tie. I taught myself to tie a bow tie when I was in high school, while all the other kids were doing more useful things like—oh, I don't know—hanging out with each other and forming meaningful friendships. I thought my little Madras plaid bow tie made me look so throwback-non-conformist hip 'n' cool that I went out and bought a bunch more bow ties in all kinds of colors and patterns. Which makes this plaid one my gateway bow tie. One reason I was so good at tying bow ties was those glasses. Their lenses were so expansively huge—like the much-ballyhooed-about-to-be-launched Hubble telescope!—that I barely had to bend my neck to look down and see what I was doing. And as we all know, efficiency is the DNA of questionable fashion. You can't see it clearly here, but I also had a coordinating Madras plaid watch band. As in a bow-tie-matching watch band made of sweat-absorbing-and-quickly-gross fabric. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! I somehow decided it was totally-probably-sexy-cool to wear it with the watch face ON THE INSIDE OF MY WRIST. Because WHO THE HELL DOES THAT? And let's not overlook those voluminous pleated khakis—not that we could ever tear our eyes away from the uncharted galaxies of animal-balloon space they occupied around my wispy little goblin hips. They were from The Gap, see, and I'd had a bit of an inferiority complex as a younger person that—and I am not making this up—made me feel not cool enough to shop at The Gap. I'd literally walk by it at the then-fancy Westdale Mall and feel awkward and panicked and a little bit resentful. Do not fear: My therapist has been alerted. Anyway, one fateful day I scrounged up the courage to wince timidly into that Gap and find the men's section (which in the gender-bendy '80s wasn't clearly delineated to me as I entered the store) and immediately found these dream pants with all their essential dream details: classic khaki coloring, heavy cotton poplin (a natural fiber! in the '80s! I KNOW!) (also: like every socially awkward fashionista, I knew what poplin was as a young gaylet ... and why it was more laid-back-casual-and-therefore-better than twill) (also: twill is for librarians who aren't allowed to sit with the other librarians at lunch), voluminous pleats, super-dramatic taper, securely tacked ankle-strangling cuffs. TOTAL MEGA COOL-KIDS FASHION. And I'm pretty sure I was wearing my white suede bucks with red fake-rubber soles with them. Because PLEASE BEAT ME UP I'M SUPER '80s GAY.

So let's review:

Face-swallowing glasses + perfectly puckered plaid bow tie + inside-out sweaty watch + pleats with their own ZIP codes + legs tapered in the shape of super-pointy ice-cream-cones = man who goes to the theater to see angsty-gay-anthem-filled musicals with his mom. Every time.

HOW TO ADULT:

1. Get an estimate to have the ugly, bubbly rust on your car repaired
2. Contain your flinching instinct when you get the original ballpark number
3. Head from there to get your oil changed
4. Remember to bring your coupon
5. Refrain from awkwardly flirting with the nerdy straight guy with the ugly shoes in the waiting room
6. Refrain from super-embarrassingly giggling and flipping your hair when you talk to the super-cute guy behind the counter
7. Head from there to the gym for the first time in over two months
8. Make up for all that lost time and all those atrophied muscles in one workout*
9. Sign an international supermodel contract*
10. Read the fine print

* delusions may vary

Throwback Thursday: Wachoo

Blerg. I used to get up at 5:00 every weekday to take the train to the Loop and get physically abused by my cruel, brutal trainer at my appallingly expensive gym for an hour before hobbling off to work.

But sometimes I stopped to take pictures of pretty buildings along the way:

Willis Tower peeking between the Federal Reserve Bank Building and the City National Bank and Trust Building. 5:30 am.

Getting all the waiters together for a photo on the Hello, Dolly! Harmonia Gardens staircase has to happen at intermission when the staircase is assembled and we’re all in our waiter uniforms at the same time

But the “getting all the waiters together” part is insanely complicated given the fact that all the other waiters (but not me!) are distracted LSD-vaping kittens chasing hallucinatory laser dots all over the theater (allegedly) and impossible to get all in one place at one time if there isn’t a downbeat involved.

BUT LAST NIGHT I DID IT!

Unfortunately, the stage curtain prevented our photographer from backing up far enough to get the actual staircase in the photo and the intermission lighting left the back rows in increasingly gradient shadows.

BUT I DID IT!

Maybe I’ll try tonight to get everyone lined up for a shot from one side of the staircase à la the Brady Bunch kids (HINT! HINT!). Or maybe I’ll vape LSD with everyone (allegedly) and demonstrate my super-kitten powers at finally catching the elusive red dot instead.

Note to future historians: The second-to-top row of waiters here is standing on the staircase’s official Jake StepTM. We left an engraved bronze plaque on it to mark the location and commemorate the dedication. Please see that our estate keeps it burnished and respectfully lit in perpetuity.

My Hello, Dolly! costumes are pre-set deep in the underbelly of the Iowa Theater Building

They're so deep that we gradually lose melanin from lack of sun exposure and get altitude sickness and nosebleeds every time we ascend (slowly, so as not to get the bends) and emerge back on the stage.

Anywho, each set of costumes is organized in order of how I put them on:

shirt > tie (if applicable) > pants (always applicable) > vest (ditto) > coat (usually applicable) > joyful smile (by contractual obligation)

And then in order of Act I songs:

It Takes a Woman (in earthy, workaday blues) > Put On Your Sunday Clothes (in MEGA AWESOME PINK SEERSUCKER) > Dancing (in a geometric explosion of Vermeer blues) > Before The Parade Passes By (you’ll just have to come see that costume now, won’t you?)

On a nearby concrete plateau that echoes with the trickles of a sub-sub-sub-terranean cistern: assorted hats and bottles of Gatorade.

Because I AM NOTHING IF NOT PREPARED.

Fun fact:

Hello, Dolly! was originally called Hello, Guy Just Over Dolly's Right Shoulder Who's Smiling Handsomely If I Do Say So Myself But Unfortunately Cut Off At The Edge Of This Photo! But Dolly got that crown of feathers and suddenly the show was all about HER.

Shirts I have found while excavating:

• Social Climbers team T-shirt for the BEST-NAMED *EVER* Hustle up the Hancock stair-climbing team
• (motto: We like it on top)
• AIDS Marathon team tank top that I personalized with GO JAKE GO
• (Putting GO JAKE GO on the front of your marathon shirt is like giving a handy script to 26.2 miles of people who are ready and willing to cheer you on at the tops of their lungs)
• The back of the T-shirt I wore for my first marathon
• (Putting MY FIRST MARATHON on the back of your first marathon shirt guarantees 26.2 miles of back slaps and atta-boys from every runner who passes you)
• The GO JAKE GO T-shirt I wore for many subsequent Chicago Marathons
• The GO JAKE GO T-shirt I wore for the New York Marathon
• (New Yorkers always wear black)
• (Because they’re all artists and tortured intellectuals who snap when they hear poetry)
• My Pigman Triathlon T-shirt
• (The pig head used to glow in the dark)
• My Forever Plaid T-shirt
• (That’s me on the bottom)
• (Notice it doesn’t say GO JAKE GO)
• (Because the character I played was named Smudge)
• (But that’s the only reason)

Vocabulary quiz

My cute little hexagonal-column knickknack pedestals arrived today and I organized them in artful clusters on my knickknack shelf and then carefully displayed my carefully curated running and theater and Disney knickknacks on them and how many times can I say knickknacks in one sentence?

OR:

My cute little hexagonal-column objets d’art pedestals arrived today and I organized them in artful clusters on my objets d’art shelf and then carefully displayed my carefully curated running and theater and Disney objets d’art on them and how many times can I say objets d’art in one sentence?

Monday errands

1. When I make a friendly, chatty Jake JokeTM to you, Mr. Menards Return Desk Guy, in the course of our business transaction, it is customary that you actually NOT look at me as though I had just punched my arm down your throat, grabbed your vestigial tail and yanked you inside out. The Bare Minimum Of Customer Service Handbook CLEARLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY STATES that you owe me a wan smile of acknowledgement.

2. Dear extremely handsome guy behind the Menards paint counter: In your obstinate refusal to make eye contact with ANY customers, you missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have me ask you to show me your caulk.

3. I got a haircut that is both au courant and Hello, Dolly! period-appropriate.

4. If you’re missing your pastel ear plugs, they’re by the cart return in the west-side Menards parking lot.

Another show finished. Another audience delighted. Another standing ovation savored.

I had a voice lesson scheduled for right after today’s matinee, which somehow seemed like a brilliant idea a month ago when I scheduled everything. But my voice teacher and I just very wisely realized it was, in fact, a terrible idea. So I went right home, coincidentally as the 91.7 fm classical station played the “Goin’ Home” themes from Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Which was coincidentally written in Iowa. And which was also coincidentally written in 1893, which is roughly the time in which Hello, Dolly! takes place. Which is all pretty cool.

Goodnight, Jakey

When you turn down two invitations to post-performance get-togethers because you’re exhausted and in dire need to sleep but you grab an ice-cold sparkling water when you get home and turn on your Roku YouTube channel just to unwind for a few minutes and then you get sucked into a vortex of Vox education videos and Dancing Through My Broadway Résumé profiles and now it’s freaking 4:00 am and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MY SENSE OF GOOD JUDGEMENT but through it all your show hair has stayed faithfully on point.

Fun fact:

The success of Hello, Dolly! catapulted Carol Channing into an illustrious Broadway career that lasted into the 1970s, culminating in her eponymous one-woman hardscrabble-but-hopeful-dancer docu-sical that won her 17 Tony Awards.

In related news, WE OPEN THIS FRIDAY!

It's "whom"

There is a moment near the end of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?--Edward Albee's 2002 play exploring the outer limits of love, fidelity, morality and tolerance--where the emotional crisis at the center of the narrative boils over into such catastrophic levels of heartache and rage and such Greek-tragedy levels of destruction and retribution that the first time I saw it--and the second time and the third time and the fourth time--the audience collectively gasped to the point of almost screaming and then sat rigidly and almost palpably silent until well after the final stage light had extinguished and the last emotionally drained actor had silently moved into position for the company bow.

It's one of my two favorite--if there even exists a favorite-not favorite continuum of cataclysmic emotional destruction--moments in modern theater ... the other being the last three seconds of David Mamet's Oleanna before the stage becomes abruptly, dreadfully dark.

Though he's largely a genre unto himself, it's difficult to pigeonhole Edward Albee as a playwright. He wrote or adapted about 30 works that embodied movements like Theatre of the Absurd and brought popular works of fiction like The Ballad of the Sad Café and Breakfast at Tiffany's to the stage and screen.

My favorite Albee works--Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (embodied in this photo by the incomparable Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor playing the American-experiment patriarch and matriarch George and Martha [whom the script deliciously describes as "large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger"]), The Play About the Baby and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?--all share the format of four characters on stage and one character who may or may not exist offstage. It's an intriguing conceit, and one that keeps bringing me back to these three plays for my own contemplation. In an odd double standard, though, I can't stand reading them; the characters for me seem to be clumsy and dry with no meaningful depth on the page but they grant a glorious latitude for actors to make fascinating choices as they flesh them out.

Today is the third anniversary of Edward Albee's death. I'm not one to be sad when famous people I've never met pass away--and having seen only six of his works (that I can remember) I'm certainly no slavish Albee devotee--but I'm profoundly thankful for the emotional roller coasters he's put me on over the years ... and for the body of work he's left that I can continue to explore in my own way in my own time. I have a couple favorite quotes I'd love to mention here in closing, but they're all potential spoilers. So I'll just lift a glass of bergen to his memory.

Left to right:

My small, medium and large calf (née knee) compression sleeves are washed and drip-dried in my deluxe-soothing-grey-with-an-ey-like-fancy-Europeans-spell-it-spa-like bathroom and ready for the sweaty onslaught of Hello, Dolly! production week.

My gastrocnemius strain won’t stand a chance.

Wandelprobe (noun)

1. A choreographed rehearsal that merges orchestra, vocals and sometimes body microphones for the first time in the production of a musical; 2. A vaguely naughty-sounding German word that though it may initially seem like it, it doesn't really lend itself to clever sexual innuendo and don't even think you're going to come up with the elusive and brilliantly definitive "probe" joke because millions of very talented and clever and profoundly disturbed actors and singers before you have exhausted every last possibility a thousand times over; 3. THE COOLEST REHEARSAL OF EVERY SHOW OF YOUR LIFE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE; 4. I'm wearing my fake-lifeguard shirt today to make all the bikini models hurl themselves prostrate at my sandy, well-tanned feet; 5. That has nothing to do with Wandelprobe but I didn't have any other place to fit it in today.

All. The. Masculinity.

Red is dead.
Blue is through.
Green's obscene.
Brown’s taboo.
And there is not the slightest excuse
For plum or puce—or chartreuse.
Think pink!

I GET TO WEAR A PINK SEERSUCKER SUIT IN HELLO, DOLLY!

Urgent Public Service Announcement:

There are two Jakes in Hello, Dolly! Choose the one for whom you applaud carefully.

One corner of the bedroom is DONE! Maybe.

1. When you coincidentally buy pieces of décor that look like they were made to go exactly together, it is pre-ordained by a mountain of cruel, angry gods that THEY WILL NEVER LINE UP.
2. If you buy something with patterned cutouts laid over mirror, get used to living with clouds of oily smudges or learn to decorate for distraction.
3. When you discover the evidence of a lifetime predilection for buying Francophile wall hangings and Eiffel Tower objets d’art, group them proudly and enjoy them over les casse-croûte of French toast and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
4. Yes, that is Prince Albert in a can.