Eine Kleine Salmonella

A very satisfying round of shows at the comedy theater tonight. I can't really think of that many moments of my personal brilliance. Rather, it was a very balanced, excellent ensemble night with everyone shining and making everyone else look good. My throat is raw from yelling whether in triumph or antagonism or gruff, middle-aged character voice or grating, horrifyingly racist Chinese woman voice. It's not at all good for the singing career I'm not pursuing.

The guys who went and performed for the troops overseas brought back trinkets for us. I got a little silver anklet from Turkey. I've never had an anklet before. I was very pleased and immediately put it on. I just had this really positive feeling about the whole night. Every person at the theater seemed to be happy to be there. There is even an unusual warmth towards the door staff and sound guys, who often get the short end of the stick, either because they are trapped behind the scenes or because they are unignorably creepy. We're kind of in the zone, at the moment, it seems. I'm digging that.

And after the show, we went out for late night Chinese and got bad service but reasonably good food, except Krissy, who received a plate of chicken fried rice filled with raw chicken. And I'm not exaggerating. Say nothing else of Chinese restaurateurs, but they can be frighteningly grudging about being asked to take a potentially poisonous entree off the bill. Our waitress seemed to want to charge Krissy half price. I guess because she had eaten some amount of the dish before realizing that all of the chicken was what one might call "seared" but essentially completely raw on the inside. Maybe a micrometer's worth of cooked white part. The rest: pink, clear and bleeding. I made some off-color analogy about finding a turd in your soup but being asked to pay -- obviously not for the turd, which you didn't eat -- but certainly for the soup. I was getting ready to lay down the law with our waitress, but when she brought the bill, she had not charged us for the bacteria-filled rice dish. However, poor Krissy looked dismal. She had picked the restuarant and was obviously jonesing for the fried rice. In the end, I think the free fraction of rice and nearly-living bird meat she ingested were but a paltry substitute for what she had intended and hoped for.

We talked about Eddie Izzard's show and I compared voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger to voting for a bear in a three-piece suit. Well, it really wasn't a direct comparison, and it was more about voters in California possibly being willing to accept any number of disastrous replacements -- circus animals not excluded, and it included an exclamation of, "Well, he CAN ride a unicicyle." But that's neither here nor there.

I can't really point to anything great that I did tonight. I can only announce that I'm glad I had tonight at all. I seek out the sweet-scented, bosomy embrace of an appreciative audience. Which means I'm as needy and whorish as every other performer. I guess that's a truth that needs facing up to.