Learnings from an early morning Elf the Musical performance for area grade-schoolers:

1. They’re too cool to laugh at Ted Talks jokes.
2. Gay-coworker jokes are totally bougie and last-year to them.
3. It is easy to identify and know to avoid the one mild swear word in the script in the nanosecond between when it’s said and when the kids file it away mentally to repeat ad nauseam on the bus on the way back to school.

Rob (not pictured) and I (not pictured) officially transitioned this morning from spending the summer running our way to being lean and ripped to spending the winter lifting our way to being hunky and swole

And we promise that our massive gainz will not interfere with our ability to have good hair.

When you have no fireplace but you have a long banister and a clever gay who got the spacing counted out correctly on ONLY THE SECOND TRY

Plus when you have a Bitch Kitty WHO PLOPPED HER BITCH ASS RIGHT IN THE PERFECT SPOT JUST AS I WAS LINING UP THE PHOTO.

Since I was doing all the counting and hanging and decorating, I naturally put my stocking closest to the front door so I’ll get the most Sparkle Unicorn Rainbow Dream Kitten Pillow Glitter Sequin Diamond Pudding Smooches(R) Barbies before Santa runs out. Because it’s only fair.

Sometimes a super-fast hat and tap-shoe change between the first big finale and the second big finale doesn’t leave you much time to take a decent selfie

Theater is stupid that way.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO MYSELF!

I’m tired of sucking at ironing no matter how hard I try and of never having a decently ironed shirt when I need one so I’m taking EVERY DRESS SHIRT I OWN PLUS SOME CASUALISH ONES BECAUSE SOMETIMES THOSE ARE MORE APPROPRIATE FOR CERTAIN OCCASIONS and paying to have the entire pile cleaned and medium-starched AND I’LL BE THE SHARPEST LOOKING MAN AT YOUR NEXT FORMAL OR SEMI-FORMAL EVENT.

But please don’t invite me anywhere nice in the next few days because every shirt I own will be at the cleaner’s. Literally.

When you should be asleep but you realize if you don’t haul out all your Christmas crap now it’ll suddenly be Easter and you’ll wonder why the hell you spent $23 on clearance tabletop trees last January

So here are the Stations Of Christmawesomeness, in order:

1. The Enchanted Forest Of Silver Shimmers And Crisp Aspen Whites

2. The Gold Medal Glen

3. Red As A Reindeer’s Freshly Expressed Glands

4. Evergreens And Bluish-Green Wannabes That Maybe Could Be Called Mrs. Peacocks If I Could Get Those Naming Rights

5. The Sad Land Of The One Lonely Blue Reindeer Who Is Probably Dying Of Frostbite Or Something Just As Unsightly

6. Tons Of Fucking Reindeers Because I Can’t Fucking Stop Buying Fucking Reindeers On January Clearance But At Least They’re All In A Metallic-Shimmer Palette And Yes Those Are The Same Paint Chips That Were Stuck To The Bookshelf Last Year Because I Can’t Decide What Shade Of Old-Money-Rich-People-Blue To Paint My Bedroom It’s A Big Decision So Don’t Rush Me Shut Up

Greetings from the bottom of The Terrifyingly Tall Spiral Staircase Of Gruesome But Festively Lit And Probably Involving Glitter Because It *IS* A Theater But It Will Still Be Splatty Death

The staircase—and everyone’s splatty, glittery death—starts on the skull-cracking concrete bowels of the theater and climbs almost two million (which we’ll round to just two for the purposes of this post) stories to the relatively safe safety of the stage-right darkness, where things can probably fall on us from the flylines but at least it’s not US falling on the skull-cracking concrete two million-give-or-take stories below us.

On the plus side, if we DO plummet to our splatty, glittery deaths tonight, we’ll crack our skulls to the peppy jazz stylings of Elf the Musical as it unfolds around us AS I’M RIGHT NOW TYPING THIS POST. So there’s that.

Love, Love, Love

I've been reading Everything was Possible--a fascinating insider account of the creation of Steven Sondheim/Michael Bennett/Hal Prince/Jonathan Tunick's magnum opus Follies--over the last month. And at this very moment I'm listening to the cast album with new eyes (or I guess ears) as I hear the performances of the singers and actors--not to mention the voluptuous orchestrations--I've been learning so much about. It's like I'm loving my mind.

I fugue otta go shopping today, don't spend till you're Baroque

I'll take my lumps

Max: Why do you have those lumps on your head?

Me: Because I have these lumps on my head.

Max (whispering): Because you’re weird.

“Giblets” is a funny word

I've never really liked "Turkey Lurkey Time"

—mostly because of its toddler-creativity title and Hal David's criminally mind-numbing lyrics. But the gloriously jerky melody and never-gonna-be-boxed-in phrasing are Burt Bacharach at his finest, and I think Michael Bennett defined an encyclopedic choreography vocabulary for the next half-century of show choir competitions in this song alone. Plus I've had a gay-dancer crush on Donna McKechnie—she of the endless legs and beguiling self-awareness and almost poetic extensions—since probably before I was born. Plus HOW THE HELL DO THEY ALL DANCE THIS NUMBER WITHOUT IMPLODING IN CATASTROPHIC EXHAUSTION?

Anyway, it's Thanksgiving, which in some circles means it's Turkey Lurkey Time all day. So please shout the lyrics to anything—ANYTHING!—else to drown out these linguistic burps as you marvel at Donna McKechnie (in red, who first captured my heart as Cassie in A Chorus Line), Baayork Lee (in green, who kinda got shafted when all her great Connie recitative got cut from the original A Chorus Line cast album) and Margo Sappington (in blue, who went on to a life of fame and fortune as the choreographer for the Doonesbury musical) powering through their tipsy steno-pool production number that has absolutely no relevance to the already convoluted, dirty-sexy, nothing-to-do-with-the-holidays story of Promises, Promises.

When all that selfie practice finally pays off: Happy Thanksgiving from all us Norwegians!

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody except Christina

If T stands for Thanksgiving, we’re at T minus 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

MY EYES ARE UP HERE, PEOPLE

Mickey, Goofy and Max the ninja photobomber are ready to make Thanksgiving LIT!

Tomorrow looms ...

LITTLE. SANTA. HATS.

As is the case with many people on psychotropic medications, my bipolar meds have given me a robust case of tardive dyskinesia, a permanent neurological disorder that causes a range of involuntary movements including twitches and wiggles and shakes and grimaces and blinks and OCD things like repetitive face touching.

And I've won the tardive dyskinesia lottery and gotten the full spectrum of these behaviors, with varying degrees of intensity. Some days my knees just shiver. Some days I have epic squinting, face rubbing, rocking and anything else my body can think of to make me super-paranoid I'm irritating the hell out of everyone around me. People often ask me if I'm nervous (which happened once at a job interview I was otherwise rocking, to my eternal mortification) or cold (my veins actually course with reptile blood and I am NEVER cold) when they see me shaking. People have asked me why I'm always on my tiptoes when I sit down (the obvious answer: to help my body shake the living hell out of my legs more annoyingly). People have politely asked me to sit still.

And while these awake behaviors are bad enough, it's the nighttime manifestations of tardive dyskinesia that are killing me. Many, MANY times every EVERY night, I end up on my back with my legs bent and my feet flat and my knees slamming against each other so violently that they wake me up--usually somehow mummified in a tangle of sheets. Or I wake myself by repeatedly running my hands through my hair like I'm a supermodel being all sexy for a shampoo commercial as I ride with the top down along the 101. Or I just rub my face like I'm Lady Macbeth but the damn spots got all over everything and I need to URGENT URGENT WAKE UP AND TELL MACBETH TO ORDER DUNKIN' AND NOT MURDER DUNCAN.

Last night it was the face. Hoo boy, was it the face. And it was so borderline violent that it hurt ... and then it stung like an advanced-degree sunburn when the water hit it in the shower this morning. Which--if you see me today--is why I look like Hobo Santa because my cheeks are ultra-rosy and I'm now on my third day of not shaving and I don't care THAT much about how I'm going to look in the family Thanksgiving photos.

I take Gabatentin three times a day to help control the reason I'm extremely bad at stealing tambourines, but that is a six-paragraph discussion for another day. Key words: opiod epidemic.

Anyway, this post started out as a few sentences about how my face hurt in the shower this morning and then I was going to show you all a photo of the Hershey's Kisses I bought last night THAT LOOK LIKE LITTLE SANTA HATS. Sorry for rambling on like this, but look at the Hershey's Kisses I bought last night THAT LOOK LIKE LITTLE SANTA HATS:

One day until the carnage!