Well hello, Jackie Schneiter of Farm Bureau!

"I ran across your resume on Monster and your experience fits nicely with what we are looking for at Farm Bureau. I’d like the opportunity to discuss your resume with you further."

Why is my inbox suddenly overflowing with vaguely written, nonchalantly lying emails equating my 30 years' writing experience with a burning desire to sell insurance? And no, Jackie Schneiter of Farm Bureau, you didn't "run across my resume on Monster." I haven't updated my Monster profile since I lived in Chicago so I'm more than certain that Monster's algorithms have suppressed it as inactive and your desperate little search bots had to dig long and hard to find it. If you want me to not make fun of you by your made-up email name and your actual company name on Facebook and on my blog, your first six words to me are not allowed to me to be lies.

But it's lovely that you look forward to hearing from me. Just wait by your computer. I'll get back to you promptly. (Also six words!)

Remember Project Runway? (Is it even still on?)

Remember bad-boy Jeffrey, he of the neck tattoos and tortured-intellectual black wardrobe? I was his doppelgänger (I used that word just so I could use an umlaut) (I added that parenthetical just so I could say umlaut) (I just said parenthetical) at a long-ago Project Runway party on my annual sojourn (guess who just said sojourn?) to some friends' beach house in Rehoboth, DE. 

Remember my 32-inch waist? I don't even remember those vinyl pants. I do remember trying to scrub that temporary tattoo off my neck, though. And I'm pretty sure scrubbing off a real tattoo would be easier. And more pleasant.

Six marriages. Under God.

Learn how to send a whore to the Vatican here

Thrice (so far!)-married serial-adulterer Donald Trump, who just yesterday bellowed "In America we don’t worship government, we worship God!" to thunderous, effusive cheering at his commencement address at Jerry Falwell Jr.'s "faith-based" Liberty University and who today played golf instead of spending Mother's Day with any of the three mothers of his five known children, is appointing the one-time mistress and now third (so far!) wife of fellow serial-adulterer Newt Gingrich as the United States ambassador to the "faith-based" Vatican.

There are more faith-based family values on the bottom of my shoe than in the entirety of that last sentence.

#Same

Thank you to all who sacrifice so much so that we can be free to marry draft dodgers and tax evaders!

The great mothers indeed

Our puerile, inarticulate man-boy president is so beneath contempt that he thinks this meaningless garbage tweet brings value to the country, to "the great mothers out there," to the sentiment of the holiday and/or to his third marriage. 

Judging by the comments on his tweet, his base is so beneath contempt that it agrees with him.

I love it when Bridget hangs her paws off the porch steps

I also love it when I come over to visit and she runs joyously up to me and rolls immediately on her back because TUMMY RUB! I also love it when even if you whisper the word frisbee in a locked room three counties away, she hears you and runs off to find her frisbee from goodness knows where it's been hiding and races back to drop it at your feet and looks expectantly up at you because FRISBEE!

Take note

I'm a five-plus-years-out-of-practice piano player who just two years ago literally paid a guy to take my beloved but long-neglected piano off my hands so I wouldn't have to move it home from Chicago and store it indefinitely here ... and now I'm playing the rehearsal pianist Mr. Braithwaite in Theatre Cedar Rapids' upcoming Billy Elliott. And I told the directors no problem! I can learn the score and play live on stage so I don't have to unbelievably fake it while the orchestra pianist actually plays it for me! But please don't let anything be in sharps! Because sharps are the black jelly beans in the candy bowl of music! And everyone knows it! Even dead people who are decomposing! HA! Get it? Music! Decomposing!

Whew. Never mind.

Anyway! We had our first dance rehearsal tonight for one of the numbers I intend to play in the show and even though I don't have the piano score yet, the vocal score shows it's in C! No sharps! Not even flats! Just pure, well-composed (ahem) C. Plus it literally has "boogie" in the title so it's pretty much guaranteed to be basic three-chord progressions. Which is just one chord more than you need to play "Chopsticks." So I think I'm up for the challenge.

Unfortunately, my last five years of obsessive but admirably diligent thumb-texting do not equal anything resembling a sustained level of piano-playing dexterity. So I'll be supplementing my daily texting training with some rigorous scales and arpeggios for the next few months.

And while I don't think I've played piano on stage in front of anyone in maybe 20 years, I will be now! And I'm treble-y excited about it. Well, I bass-ically am. No, I am. I flat-out am.

I only roll eyes for you

Check out the back of your head here

Yes, Kellyanne. He was rolling his eyes because of your boobs. It had nothing to do with your unyielding full-steam-ahead railroading of your laughably partisan narratives at the expense of all logic or empirical truth. It had nothing to do with your stubborn defense of our indefensible man-boy president. It had nothing to do with your chronic professional victimhood. (Remember that one time you conflated an eye roll over your moronity into a heartless act of sexism? That was classic!) It might have had a little to do with the Woody Woodpecker band uniform you chose to wear to the inauguration, though. 

My biggest complaint is that you were at some point banned from CNN for all your desperate, belligerent lying and yet there you were again this week, like a recurrent herpes outbreak after a nice long dormancy. Your biggest complaint should be that you blew your big comeback and made a fool out of yourself again right out of the gate and then for good measure you went and whined on Faux News and made it all about YOOOUUU. I'd laugh and say never stop being you, but the fact is I can't stand you. The country was catastrophically imploding on itself just fine without all your pointless screeching and whining (now THAT was sexist!) but you had to ruin it all and get reanimated from the dead or crawl out of your goblin hole (now I'm just making fun of your looks! which is also sexist! but it's still just gonna be all about Anderson's eye-roll for you! because that gets you more cheap attention!) and it's been a couple days since the eye rolled 'round the world and you're STILL clogging my Facebook feed with all your pointlessness. 

For the love of all things good and true, you really need to take a longer break before your next attempted comeback. Go somewhere nice. Treat yourself to some rest and rejuvenation. I hear Bowling Green is lovely this time of year.

Tut-tut

And so we finish all our projects and wrap up another workweek and leave the office for our weekend activities and ... crap.

Because I'm only sort of down with the kids, yo

ChicagoRound: Uptown Broadway Building

I used to live in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, which had a visually delicious building boom in the early 20th century during a period an architect friend of mine once described as being stylistically dominated by "architectural porn." And since I am shamelessly and reverently fluent in architectural showoff terms like bas relief and Moorish pilasters and Juliet balustrades and Gothic spandrels, the neighborhood was a wonderland of happiness for me. 

I discovered early on that I lived relatively close to the Uptown Broadway Building, which was a glorious visual feast of styles and eras and shapes and textures and optical chaos and exquisite balance in one captivating explosion of glazed terra-cotta love that spoke directly to me every time I passed by it or crossed the street to get a better view of it or walked an extra five blocks to a different EL stop just so I could visit it ... and more than once made a special trip just to take pictures of it in different sunlight or dramatic nighttime uplighting. It's one of the many neighborhood gems that regularly brightened my everyday Chicago goings-about, and I'm feeling nostalgic about my old haunts today so I dug through all my old photos and found this and now I just want to go back even more.

Oh, Sweetie. Bless your heart.

1. The way you typed this with your chocolate-cake-covered thumbs, you have your surrogates somehow collectively being a very active president. So yes, you totally have an accuracy problem. Just not where you in your delusional narcissism think it is.

2. It's your surrogates' job to provide accurate information about your administration to the press. Not to hide in bushes. Not to yell at black people. If they don't provide accurate information, they can always use the time-honored "let me get back to you" duck and run, which at least gives everyone the impression that they're taking the time to ask questions and do research to be accurately informed while they're most likely stalling for time to find a way to spin your increasingly delusional and bizarre words and actions into a way to blame big black Barack Obama for your catastrophic failings.

3. Speaking of your catastrophic failings, if your surrogates don't have perfect accuracy, either they're incompetent or you are. Which, again, is Barack Obama's fault. Or Hillary's. Or now Comey's! Your hallucinatory little world is filled with wondrous possibilities.

4. "Lots of things happening" is a conveniently passive way of implying your schedule is just packed with important presidenty things, which in the real world do not involve golfing every weekend at tremendous taxpayer expense, locking up your third failing marriage in a gilded New York tower also at tremendous taxpayer expense, being an appallingly absent parent to all your children except the ones who actively sustain your practices of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and desperately changing your lies about why you fired the Republican-appointed, served-under-four-consecutive-presidents, in-the-middle-of-investigating-you-for-corruption FBI director on the national news and THEN by letter while you knew he was out of town instead of being a big brave professional "businessman" president and doing it in person.

5. "Cancel all press briefings"? Isn't that what a despotic dictator would do? I'll give you a moment to ask your presidential surrogates if anyone knows the word despot.

6. Getting back to point #1, your inability to write an accurate tweet makes your proposal to "hand out written responses" is the exact opposite of "the best thing to do."

7. And while we're on the topic of your tweets, they're getting longer and more punctuationy and more desperately-blame-everyone-else-but-yourselfy by the day. You're not fooling anyone but your arrogance; you are unhinged, flying off the rails, and hopefully literally and very soon slamming your smug face into the side of a mountain in a catastrophic crash of your own psychopathy.

8. I loathe you.

9. I loathe everyone who voted for and still defiantly supports you.

10. I loathe you.

It's a sunshine day

Mega-pumpy arm workout at the gym. Extended "Life in a Northern Town" dance remix on the sound system. Extended I-don't-care-who's-looking happy dance between sets. Super-cool new sneaks to wear all day. Also a Mickey Mouse T-Shirt. M-I-C! K-E-Y! M-O-U-S-ESHIRT!

Today's gonna have to work awfully hard not to be awesome.

Flashback Friday: Flaming Friars Edition

I played a firefighter and a cheesy dancing monk, as one does, in an original musical about blossoming gay romance in a monastery, which just took me four attempts to spell with zero help from autocorrect, in my last show with always-delightfully-inventive Chicago Gay Men's Chorus eight years ago. I can't find an archive of shows on the CGMC site to confirm the name, but I believe it was called Bad Habits. Or maybe Betcha Can't Spell Monastery on the First Try. If I remember correctly, my firefighter character showed up at the end of the show for a false alarm, but otherwise a good name might have been Putting Out the Friars. Or, given the budding-gay-romance theme, it could have been shortened to just Outing the Friars. The show included a brilliant repurposing of the impossible-to-memorize-because-it-used-every-rhyming-word-in-Latin "Amor volat undique" from Carl Orff's epic cantata Carmina Burana, so we could have called our show Carmina Burnana. Or Carmina Banana since we'd already broken the calling-ourselves-fruits barrier with an earlier production titled Low-Hanging Fruit. In any case, the moral of this story is I wish CGMC had a more thorough archive of show titles on its site -- or at least the mobile version of its site -- so I wouldn't have to embarrass myself like this struggling to remember the name of a show I did eight -- which autocorrect just changed to "right" so WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, AUTOCORRECT? YOU WANNA TAKE THIS OUTSIDE? BECAUSE I GUARANTEE YOU DON'T WANNA TAKE THIS OUTSIDE -- years ago about monks and firefighters in a place I still need to learn how to spell. Ooo! What about Love Amonk Friends? Or Monktown Abbey? Or Going Robe? Or Monk Rock? Or Monk'd? Or Friar Knowledge? Or if my part had been bigger and I'd maybe have had the romance with one of the gay monks -- both of whom I remember as being totally cute -- we could have called it Friarfighter. But that sounds more like the exact opposite of romance -- kinda like MME [for Monk Madness Entertainment] Smackdown! -- so maybe not. Wait! Monkey Business! That would have been totally awesome! So would Hey, Hey, we're the Monkees, but I think that had already been taken by some other monastery (there's that word again, still with no help from autocorrect, but this time it took me only two tries so my retention skills are improving) act. No! Wait! I've got it! Monky Town! MONK. Y. TOWN. Ha! They really don't pay me enough for my brilliance on Facebook. I need to open a GoMonkMe page on here to make my remuneration commonksurate with my talents. Because, as you just KNEW this was coming so you have no one to blame but yourselves for reading this last sentence, Monky Makes the World Go 'Round.

"Laughing up their sleeves"? Genius!

Are you gonna make that happen like that time you invented "priming the pump" and "Pocahontas" too? Because those totally caught on. You are are truly a scholar, a scientist, a historian and an esteemed inventor of using the words. You're like a worder or something. And ain't nobody laughing up their sleeves (if I may quote the words of a clever man) at YOU. No sir!

He hid. In the bushes. Sean Spicer. An adult. HID IN THE BUSHES.

I thought this was an Onion headline the first time I scrolled past it on here. But Sean Spicer, the United States White House Press Secretary, ACTUALLY HID IN THE WHITE HOUSE BUSHES TO AVOID DOING HIS JOB OF ANSWERING QUESTIONS FROM THE PRESS ABOUT THE ABRUPT FIRING OF THE FBI DIRECTOR BY THE PRESIDENT HE WAS INVESTIGATING.

Sean Spicer hid in the bushes. Like a four-year-old. Or a cartoon chicken. To avoid doing his job for the president who hired him. The president who didn't fire him for his childish, nationally embarrassing dereliction of duties.

Are you appalled yet, Trump voters? Because I am. By all of you.

And I invented Post-Its!

"You understand the expression 'prime the pump'? ... I just … I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It's what you have to do."
-- Our narcissistically delusional man-boy president explaining to The Economist -- which he clearly knows nothing about -- how he "came up with" an economic concept -- which he clearly knows nothing about -- that has been used by our government -- which he clearly knows nothing about -- since 14 years before he was born

Today in Stupid

Stupid #1: I forgot to pack a towel for the gym this morning.

Stupid #2: I tried to dry off after my shower using the emergency backup T-shirt I keep in my gym bag.

Stupid #3: After catastrophically failing at that and after I somehow managed to pull my clothes onto my still-wet body, I discovered I'd long ago also packed an emergency backup towel in my gym bag.

#DUH