hello there Ruby Tuesday

Up late last night with Tim Cusack, fixing the American theater one glass of whiskey at a time.

Known Tim since the Nada days, early 90s on Ludlow Street, back when audience members would stand outside the theaters down here nervously looking around, clutching their wallets, resisting the impulse to hail a cab and get the hell back to civilization.

Tim worked a lot with Ian Hill and that crew, a great actor, very brave and always interesting to watch.

The Fireball Kid is still smoking, gaining ground every day. So far, she's still on the schedule for the graft tomorrow. Guess we'll know for certain sometime today.

Yesterday's highlight was a long lunch at the Starlite with the charming and beautiful Greg Kotis. She went for the chicken souvlaki. Greg had a grilled cheese so I trumped him with the grilled cheese deluxe.

Bacon with that one, plus the fries.

Show at Dixon Place last night was a lot of fun. We packed them in and went fourth on the bill. Listening to Jeff Jones read the Iliad with Snoop Doggy Dog playing softly in the background was the real treat for me, but all of the other acts were quite solid. Due to some technical weirdness, I ended up playing a major role in my Doll House piece.

Funny how that kind of stuff seems to happen to me a lot.

Paging Dr. Freud... Dr. Freud, please report to corner of Stanton and Ridge...

Congrats to Tracy Letts on winning the big P. I know Tracy a bit, a good man and a hell of an actor in addition to his obvious writing game.

And Erez Ziv wins the big MMMQ prize this morning.

If you like Erez's Skid Row tip, you'll love his theaters. He's the man behind Horse Trade Theater Group, the company that runs The Kraine, the Red Room and Under Saint Mark's Theater, three of the cleanest, best-organized 99 seat spaces downtown. I've got memories and psychic scars from those theaters going back over a decade.

Erez wins the Big Prize for nailing it down at 1685. Next time we're at a bar, E., I will buy you sixteen dollars and eighty-five cents worth of whatever it is you're drinking.

While humming Air on the G String.

Something slightly dirty about that last sentence. Disturbing image in my mind of either Erez or me wearing a G string while the other one hums.

Dr. Freud, we have a Code Blue. Code Blue. Dr. Freud to the East Fourth Street Theater District, stat...

So Letts gets the Pulitzer, but Ziv gets almost twenty bucks of alcohol. I bet Letts is wishing he'd spent more time studying up his music than sitting in his Chicago basement scribbling down dialogue.

You bet.

And we welcome Ann's corgi Lou into the Regime of Properly Named Beings.

Welcome, Lou. No biting, random barking or defecating where you shouldn't ought and you'll be a fine dog at the end of your days.

I'm off to the hospital. They're going to let me operate on a homeless guy that came in last night. I'm a little nervous, but what could be so hard about a heart lung transplant? You just take the one out and put the other in, right?