doubting thom

Yesterday provided an interesting dose of sturm und drang, as the skies opened up dramatically for the second day in a row. Whereas Tuesday the storm–hurricane-dark skies, searingly bright lightning bolts and near-instantaneous thunder, and fierce winds–already had passed an hour before the show began, last night the skies opened up mere moments before Ben Folds took the stage, sheets of impenetrable rain causing the fabric tarp sides of the pavilion’s cover to shed waterfalls. The thunder of the quickly passing storm rivalled Folds’s athletic pounding of the leftmost quarter of the piano keyboard, while the lightning flashes provided a counterpoint to the subdued stage lighting during his opening act. Neither Folds nor Tori Amos, for whom he opened, disappointed last night, proving more than equal to the awesome intensity of the storm.

The night ended with another interesting and dramatic encounter. A lack of sufficient planning on my part had left me standing on 14th Street at midnight, nearly certain that I’d missed the last subway train back to Virginia. The walk to the Metro station, however, just in case there were still one more train, added a surreal highlighting to the evening that I wouldn’t have missed, no matter how tired, cranky and with an uncomfortably full bladder. As I passed the intersection with Vermont Avenue, I was presented with the unexpected sight of a practically naked prostitute (the prostitute herself was hardly unexpected on 14th Street, obviously, but her state of planned and stunningly executed deshabille was). As I approached her, she stood looking away from me. From the rear, her dark ebony skin was barely visible in the streetlight, at first apparently stark naked save the heels, but then a reflected beam of light caught the presence of the slimmest of cord separating her buttocks and continuing in a “Y” to her shoulders and over. Perched on her three-inch heels, stockstill in the shadows, she looked like some sculptural homage to a Nubian goddess.

Last night’s performance of Thoroughly Modern Millie was a wonderful treat. The performance really would have been enjoyable from anywhere in the pavilion at Wolf Trap–though given the intense storms that raged through the area just a couple of hours prior to curtain, I wouldn’t have wanted lawn seats last night–but the front row seats made it even better. And sharing the experience with Jeff was not only the icing on the cake, it was the marzipan hearts on top and the Ch

I almost titled this entry “Psycho Kitty, qu’est-ce que c’est?”, since my sister almost always refers to Alex only as “Psycho Kitty.” She gave him this nickname the first time she visited overnight, based on his scratching my nephew, attacking her foot during the night and the scars she’d seen me sporting. To be fair to Alex, that visit was an unusual one, and I found it stressful myself; used to living alone with me, having to deal with at most one or two friends over for dinner or, all to infrequently, a single overnight male visitor, Alex had to deal with my family descending upon me in the form of my sister, two of her three children, my cousin, and a second cousin who acts more childish than either of my nephews. The house was crowded, the three boys kept teasing Alex, and my sister was sleeping on the floor with her naked toes uncovered, just about in the exact spot where Alex usually plays with his toys.

To be sure, though, Alex does have some bizarre facets to his behavior and personality. For instance, he gets very unhappy when I’m on the telephone and after some period of time will go into an ears down pose, begin a low yowling, and leap up to rake my legs with his claws. A similar behavior occurs if he feels I’ve been playing computer games or web surfing too long, and not paying enough attention to him. And while he usually lies next to me, or just on the floor at my feet, or on the back of the futon when I’m watching TV, sometimes, for no apparent reason I’ve yet fathomed, he’ll saunter down the back until he reaches me and then just reach out his paw, claws lightly extended, and slap me in the head.

He also has developed a behavior I find vaguely unsettling on the rare occasions that he jumps into my lap. Rarely a lap cat–he likes to lie or sit next to me, or be very near me, but rarely wants to sit right on me–he sometimes makes an exception when I’m seated at the computer. When he was younger, he would do the typical feline routine of kneading for a short time, then settling down. And he still does that when he’s sitting or lying on a cushion, pillow or similar. But something seems to have short-circuited with his kneading behavior when he sits on my lap, and he gets caught in a bizarre little loop, a sort of tic that starts to feel uncomfortable–not just because he kneads with his claws out, but because it feels almost like it has a sexual component to it. He’ll knead my lap for a few seconds, start to recline, but then his rear will suddenly twitch and a shudder will run through his body, and he begins all over again. This can continue for a very long time until I can either force him into a reclining position long enough for him to settle down, or I get so creeped out that I urge him off my lap onto the floor.

As Jeff has noted, he and I are going to see Thoroughly Modern Millie next Tuesday night at Wolf Trap. While I’ve been listening to his CD of the score, I wasn’t familiar with the book so I went to the Modern Millie Tour website to see if there might be such background material.

And I came across their Study Guide for use with students. Rather than the Adobe Acrobat format I’m used to seeing for online documents, I was surprised to see that the study guide requires, instead, the “Adobe AcroBRAT Reader” (emphasis mine). They certainly know their schoolage audience.

Off and on over the past few years I’ve maintained profiles (read, personal ads) on Match.com and Planet Out. And, in fact, my ex Terry and I, who were together over a year, met via our Planet Out profiles, so I had at least one success. Earlier this month, though, I cancelled both accounts–trying to save money where it seems especially wasteful, and I’m now off the market and hopeful–but they remain active through the end of this paid month.

Three times a week, Match.com sends me a list of ten profiles that it thinks I should check out. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine–fellow resident of my condo building, fellow squaredancer, and erstwhile fuck buddy (he is, after all, the gay sex equivalent of Kevin Bacon, Arlington’s own version of Brian Kinney)–appeared in the number one spot. In today’s email, that top spot was filled by Gene, from Just As I Thought.

Oddly, a clock radio just started doing its insistent beep, beep, beep… alarm in the program assistant’s cubicle just next to my office. No one else is in the office at the moment–she had gone upstairs to do some errands–so I walked over and hit the snooze button, and then found the switch to turn the alarm off completely. What made this particularly odd–besides the strangeness of an alarm clock going off at 10 a.m. in the office–was that it had that generic clock radio alarm sound, so it sounded like my own clock radio at home. And for several moments I just sat there, my heart starting to beat faster, with a bizarre and uncomfortable feeling that my morning had been only a dream of already having awakened, showered, shaved, dropped Jeff off at the subway, driven to work, finished a report, and engaged in conversations with my co-workers, and that I was about to wake up to find that I still had my morning ablutions and the full workday ahead of me; I already was a little sleep-deprived this morning, which made hearing this unexpected yet very familiar alarm sound even more surreal.

A quarter-hour later, I still feel vaguely unsettled, like I’m potentially trapped inside a recursive series of dreams from which I’ll never fully awaken, or like I’ve just had an uncertain peripheral glimpse of the green alphanumeric characters making up the world my consciousness really inhabits.

Fortunately, I have some stress-reduction plans for this weekend (at least I hope the weekend will be less rather than more stressful). Jeff and I are driving down tonight to stay with my friends Sheldon and Lisa in Yorktown, and then going tomorrow morning to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, where we’ll spend the day riding rollercoasters, watching cheesy shows featuring earnest college theater and music majors, and drinking beer. It’s not the European vacation I’d prefer, but it’s a fun cartoon facsimile.

As I was writing this, I started remembering my family’s annual visits to Busch Gardens back in its earliest days, when I was in high school. I would invariably develop a crush on one or more of the cute male performers in the musical shows–I especially remember one called “Kaleidoscope”–as would my cousin and closest friend, Allyson, and the two of us would watch the show over and over. Between performances we’d stand outside near the stage door to get glimpses of the performers as they left and entered the theater.

With my ABBA records, my Cabbage Patch Kid I named Breandan Kieran, and my behavior as a Busch Gardens performer groupie, I was only a Tiger Beat subscription away from being a teenage girl (and in addition to an older cousin’s hidden stash of Playgirl I thrillingly discovered, spurring frequent excuses to go visit her house, I occasionally snuck peeks at my sister’s teen magazines; I remember still the picture of the Bay City Rollers dressed only in long mufflers). But now I’m all grown up… so I have Internet porn and Queer Eye…, and just lust after a new generation of sexy male actors and singers. Plus