I am supposed to be attending the John Jesurun’s PHILOKTETES benefit thing at the Kitchen. I am bummed because I would have liked Julie Atlas Muz to molest me and call me Vanilla Pudding and make me feel like a real Theater Fag. But I got a call from JackDaniel’s™, a muse of an even more prurient disposition than Julie. This led me to take my second yoga class of the day with Chad at Naga. For those of you, like myself, with a high threshold for pain, I highly recommend it. And now it’s time to get my write on . . . so hide your daughters, liquor, meds and sharp objects . . . Ivan’s cut loose from noose!

My favorite recent story concerning Julio Muz is unto how she just rolled through Salt Lake City with her burlesque cronies. This is not so extraordinary except that they are so uptight in Utah that if it was legal to kill gay people, there would be a run on ammo. What IS extraordinary is that she, the World Famous Bob and Dirty Martini blacked out their teeth before going to the center of town to grin at the Missionaries.

I love you Julio. She is like my cool kissing cousin who never puts out anything but blue balls. I have to say I love John Jesurun as well. (So why am not at the benefit you might ask??? (Come to think of it, why am I always writing when I should be somewhere else . . . Hmmmmm? Don’t answer unless you know me. And YOU don’t know me!)) Anyway, JJ is an OG of the LES. He was doing multimedia at the Pyramid Club with Steve Buscemi when Quentin Tarantino and Chris Kondek where just itches in their respective Daddies’ pants.

I was a literary butt slave/traumaturge on this production of Jesurun’s FAUST that the Builder’s Association cut up and sort of performed. Most people are afraid of hypertext so they mix and match scary material with other stuff. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It doesn’t really matter now because Marsha Norman and Chris Durang teach all the playwrights to behave like their writing was handed to them by Jesus H. Christ. Maybe this was actually the case with Samuel Beckett. Not so with Richard Greenberg. Sorry Dick.

Then John and I kept bumping into each other. The most random was on a TWA flight from New York to Paris. This was two weeks after Flight 800 (also TWA, New York to Paris) mysteriously went down. We were both kind of nervous but it was a much more pre-terrorized world fear . . . more naive, if you will. Anyway, I kind of stiffed him on the cab from the airport. Sorry John. (No wonder playwrights don’t like me. Hey! I was young, I needed the Francs. When I was in rehearsal for Faust, I would offer to get lunch so I could buy hard boiled eggs with the change. I don’t even wanna tell you what I did for the plane ticket 😉 Sheeesh!)

I really started stalking John when I read his spin on PHILOCTETES. For those of you who weren’t raised on obscure Greek Tragedy, it’s the story of one of the Greek Heroes who was abandoned on an island while sailing to Troy. Ten years later, the oracle says the Greeks, in order to win the war, need Philoctetes, or at least his Bow, which was given to him by Hercules for lighting his funeral pyre. Originally written by Sophocles, the play is said to be a metaphor for the artist and society… Society shuns the artist until they need him. (Sound familiar?)

I have two stories about this play . . . both are sad but one is extremely funny at my expense. I can’t tell them now because Betty is illegally parked and I gotta put her in cold storage. Hopefully Jack™ will unblock me from her IM, Mr. Roboto won’t fire me and Michael Deitz will get a friggin’ life. Then I can continue to evade my responsibilities with these electronic epistles . . . Hate you, love your work . . . Love your work, hate you!