Finally, an exciting show for four bucks! Dai (Enough) has played in a couple of venues since I've been here, but the premise, the author does monologues as several patrons of a Tel Aviv cafe right before it's bombed, ultimately put it in the "broccoli" category. But in fact, it's funny and thought provoking as well as tragic. Iris Bahr is the author and star.

Last night I was in sweltering lobby of the Public Theater waiting for Church to start. Next to me, a guy was telling his girlfriend a story about when he had to get a copy of his birth certificate when he was 15 and it had the wrong birth date on it, so he showed it to his mother. "Oh, yeah," she said, "I forgot about that." She'd wanted to pack the kid off to kindergarten but he was a month too young, so she doctored up a phony birth certificate for him. As his brother joined in the laughter, she told him he also was younger than he thought. From the moment he said his birthday was different than he thought, I knew where the conversation would go, and I wasn't wrong. "So all your life," the girlfriend said, "you thought you were a Capricorn when you were really an Aquarius!" Most importantly, as Miss Liz (she's in the choir of Church and we rode home together after an unsuccessful search for clearance priced Christmas lights in the weirdly smelly Astor Place K-Mart) said, "How would you know who to get wit?"

I loved "I Am Legend". The opening sequence of Will Smith hunting in a people-free New York City was as exciting as the beginning of any movie I can think of. And don't think this movie was an easy sell for me--I was a big fan of "Omega Man" growing up. Oh, but my single favorite scene was where Will's evacuating his family before the island of Manhattan is quarantined. It's like the evacuation of Saigon down at the seaport (Andy's in there somewhere but I didn't see him) but Will's so important that even his dog gets a place on the helicopter.

Tonight it's Kathleen Turner-directed Crimes of the Heart, which I've never seen before. I hope it's more crimes than heart.