Unsolicited Advice

Still can't wrap my head around being invited to this birthday party. There isn't technically a C-suite, as we're a non-profit and everyone answers to the board, but there are executive operating officers, and the guest of honor at the party is top one. It is beyond me why anyone would think I'd be invited to this in the first place. I find it interesting that someone coming in from the outside looked at me in situ  and came to that conclusion. The rest of them are shocked when I demonstrate knowledge of something they had an entire meeting about, four feet from the reception desk where I was working, in a totally empty lobby. I literally have nothing better to do than knit and eavesdrop. Have none of them ever read a Miss Marple  book? On va voir  what will happen when I actually show up to the birthday party. Mr New York Producer-Person will probably be delighted; other people might be confused. The director will probably be mildly surprised. I seem to have inserted...

About a week ago, I crewed a show at the studio theater for a non-profit outfit up from New York. The guys who run it are friends of our executive artistic director, and they come up two or three times a year. I like them; I dealt with them a bunch when I was at the box office, because when you're the most experienced person they have around they hand you all of the EAD's friends, and I have an unofficial standing request to work their shows even when I'm not the only crew who is both in town and not drowning in finals. One of the guys, as it turns out, is laid up with an injury right now, so the other one had to fly solo, on top of performing in the show. I ran into him coming down the stairs as I was going up, and as soon as he saw me he just lit up like, oh, it's you!  How are you are you working are you going to be my box office again! I told him I'd swapped over to doing tech and he asked if I was disappointed that I didn't get to dress up anymore. I...

I went out dancing after work a couple of weeks ago. Apparently I am a person who does that now. I try not to think about it too hard. This is my strategy for pretty much anything that involves the Eccentric. The club our group descended upon does salsa and bachata. Bachata is notorious for making boyfriends angry. This is because it often looks like this . It doesn't have to, but you do get pretty close. A lot of the directionality and rhythm from the lead actually comes through your right knee, so you pretty much have to be in each other's pockets the whole time. Properly executed, bachata combines two of the Eccentric's favorite things in the whole wide world: Showing off, and being used as a giant teddy bear. He is very cuddly. His friend-radius is about five inches, give or take. At one point about two weeks into our acquaintance, he was telling me all about how I'd get a chance to meet his wife when she came to the show that night, while standing practically ...

I have been having some unexpected success in getting other people to acknowledge me as a dancer. Inasmuch as the rest of my life is now falling apart, I've started submitting pieces to shows and festivals, because, you know, gotta do something with myself. Submitting to shows is a lot like applying for scholarships or publishing stories in an anthology. If you can find one that's geared to a specific category that you happen to fit in, it narrows the pool of applicants, and gives you a better shot. I submitted an eye-catching open-air number to a festival I knew was looking for street performers, and I put in a number that was all hand-tricks with a hoop for a show that was looking for pieces confined to a small space. There's a holiday show that I know is geared towards large groups of dancers, and I'm already planning for that. I'm particularly eager to submit to a spring show for works by female choreographers. It's run by a woman I work with, and she ha...

One of the more amusing family stories I sometimes tell is about a relative of mine, a few generations back, who moved in with another man after his wife died. Ooh , everybody goes. Salacious family gossip! Except the little town they moved to was actually Lily Dale Assembly , in upstate New York, which so far as I know is still one of the oldest continually running Spiritualist communes in the United States. Harry and Edward moved up there so that Edward, ex-model and former elder in the Presbyterian church, could start on what I think was his third career as a spirit medium. He channeled the spirit of an Edwardian actress named Lillie Langtry, also known as "the Jersey Rose". At this point, the whole 'shacked up with his boyfriend' thing has become the least interesting part of the story, and people begin to look at me funny. My parents fucked things up in many respects, several of them so egregious that I haven't spoken to them in years, but I want to g...

I've made an interesting discovery: The Eccentric is quite possibly the only person I've ever met who understands jealousy even less than I do. The Eccentric is, as implied by his pseudonym, very  eccentric. Mrs. Eccentric has made the occasional crack about him being from the Land of No Boundaries, but that isn't actually true. A lot of them are just in strange places, such that if you try to go casually lean on one expecting to find it in the usual spot you may end up tipping over and falling into a big confusing void. He is aware that he wants weird things out of life, and negotiates for them very directly, probably because he's realized that this is so beyond the norm that nobody is ever going to give him what he wants unless he tells them what it is. The first thing he made clear when we started talking about dance lessons was that he is VERY married, he was NOT looking to step out on his wife, and he did NOT want me to feel like I was being creeped on. I appre...

I finally caved and bought myself a pair of magic earplugs. I murder earbuds. I spent the years 1999-2016 inclusive destroying pair after pair of earbuds by getting the cord wrapped around something, or the bud caught under a heavy thing in the bottom of my bag, and yanking. I'm moderately fussy about earbuds in the same way I'm moderately fussy about shampoo -- which is to say, not very, but I do need something at least one step above cheap. My very favorite ones were Sony MDR-E9s, which were $10 a pair for a good ten years, and were absolutely everywhere until Sony broke my heart by discontinuing them. I ruined about a pair a month, on average. RIP, all my pretty blue earbuds. I graduated to Bluetooth earbuds when I got tired of knocking headphones off my noggin when practicing with my hoops. I tried braiding the wires (and at one point the actual Sansa Clip MP3 player) into my hair, but there's no way to do that and also keep the pads on or the earbuds in while I...