Oy, what a week.  I crammed about three weeks’ worth of work into a single week (including sitting in on a roundtable discussion of five people on Friday where my job was not only to contribute, but also to transcribe the entire conversation — I somehow managed to type almost 4,900 words in an hour and got everything so I don’t even need to go back to the tape in order to write a feature article recapping what was said).  All of that, plus the stupid 150,000-acre wildfire up in Santa Barbara that’s playing hell with my allergies, and I’m in bad shape.  Thankfully, I had actually previously scheduled myself to take a few days off from work this coming week so I have some time to myself.

I spent yesterday down in Irvine at Jack’s Second Show, and they say every arena show needs a drunken buffoon who’s out there making a complete fool of himself.  Well, that dude happened to be sitting in our section — I know, you thought I was about to say that it was me.  Sorry to disappoint, I was sober for the show.  This guy was probably in his 50s, stripped to the waist and looked like one of those guys who would jump into other people’s pictures and thinks he’s still the life of any party any night.  He was only slightly less entertaining than the prostitute who was sitting in the row in front of us, who The Girlfriend™ originally thought was a stripper until I pointed out the fact that if she were actually a stripper, she’d have better rhythm and would be a better dancer.

The prostitute was wearing fiery red lipstick that was smeared around her mouth, which was another reason I noticed that letter in the Parade magazine in today’s Sunday Los Angeles Times (shut up, so what if I read the paper and Parade) — someone wrote in to ask about the letter they wrote to Kyra Sedgwick’s show, The Closer, about her red lipstick and how they hated it and did their letter make a difference since Kyra didn’t seem to be wearing the lipstick anymore.  While the show’s producer answered that viewer letters were the reason why they changed Kyra’s lipstick, I still wonder how bored or boring a person has to be when they not only write into a show about a character’s lipstick, but then write into another magazine to ask if their initial letter was the impetus behind the change.