Today, it's Janet Does the Upper East Side. No, not my long-awaited porn debut. And enough with the emails on that, btw.

Tuesday I went to the 92nd Street Y (that's YMHA, built in the year five thousand-something) to see uber producer Glenn Ballard interview Idina Menzel about their new album. It was really interesting to hear how ideas for songs come to them and how they develop. One song Idina wrote when she was angry at her husband started out all "You Oughta Know"-y, but the label didn't like it. "If a song's got good DNA," Ballard said, "like this one, there are any number of ways to approach it." Then she sang it as it wound up on her album, very slow and mournful. She's kind of spunky and charming. And these adorable theater geek teen girls got to ask her questions after the interview. Her favorite word: captivate. Least favorite: nostril. She was a wedding singer as a teenager, "And I quit and went back a few times. I liked learning a whole bunch of different kinds of music, and I got really good at gibberish singing, because a lot of times I'd forget the words, but you know, it was okay, because nobody's really listening. But then I'd get an attitude because they always want you to do stuff. Like dance, or hold the limbo pole."

Then today I joined the Metropolitan Museum. I spent about an hour in the antiquities area before my dentist appointment. My favorite thing was the caption on an Egyptian artifact, Mask of a Young Person with an Unusual Hairstyle: " . . . no earrings or other jewelry are worn that would make a female gender identification likely, so it seems probable that the mask represents a young man who wears his hair longer in the back." That's fancy museum talk for dude's rockin' a mullet!

Everything went a-ok at the dentist. This is my hygienist, who I found out lives just down at the next subway stop from me, "You've got beautiful teeth, you know that, right? Anyone would know that just from looking in your mouth, or at your x-rays. I'm not saying you look like you're twenty years old, but look at how high your bone mass comes here, you have the mouth of a teenager. I hope you know that's a compliment." Also, she's never been in a Container Store, one of the great category-killers of the world, despite there being one three blocks from their office.

Here's me with some roses I bought. Note the crazy eyes. The rose behind my ear is, of course, a shout out to Niecy Nash.
Doesn't my hair color look good, though? I haven't had anything done to it since last September, but it doesn't look super-grownout. I have another appointment with PaDa, the coloring genius in Minnesota, in May.

I was in the hospital last week, granted, probably a little bit groggy. I walked into a hallway and saw a guy dressed up as Abe Lincoln and thought "Oh, he's probably here to talk to the children's ward about President's Day." Another second passed, then I realized, "No, wait, it was just a Jew." If you're reading this, you probably know all about the hospital, and that I'm home and I'm feeling great.

From some high school girls on the subway, I learned DBA means 'douche-bag alert', and I have two.

First, I was the DB at The Maddening Truth last Friday when my cell phone started playing "Take on Me" by Norwegian supergroup A-Ha. I don't know why I had it on, I almost never do because I'm at the theater or a movie so often. In my slight defense, it was a wrong number. If I got more calls, I'd have better cell phone hygiene.

Second was the guy who sat across the table from me in the library Saturday. He drank and sucked Twizzles despite neither of those things being allowed in the Rose Reading Room.

Last night, a dream come true, I saw Eddie Izzard in concert. He was good, how could he not be?, but not as good as his DVDs, and I was disappointed that he didn't at least wear make-up. But I have at last seen him.

No posts for a while, I had a live visitor to talk to! And boy, did we ever. We also saw Sunday in the Park With George, nowhere near as memorable as last year's Company, but similar in that Patty had a terrible cough both times. I think the technical solutions to George, making the painting happen, and the light show Young George does, are more exciting than the play itself.

Saturday, I saw The Devil's Disciple, a cute, yes, cute, GB Shaw play, which takes place during the American Revolution. Sunday night, I saw a semi-staged reading of Applause! with Christine Ebersole, who frankly looks like she's had work done between Grey Gardens and now. The show is a musical based on "All About Eve" and well, dumb. The songs were all expendable, dramatically. There's one Margo and her boyfriend sing before he goes off to Italy, "Think How It's Gonna Be" that only says that, think. How is it going to be when he gets back? Good? Will you kill each other? And we're asked to believe that Eve Harrington, mastermind, decided that the surest path to her own glory was to befriend a playwright's wife, on the off chance she'd get to meet Margo, and on the off chance that Margo would need an assistant, and on the off chance she could then screw the right men to get her big break? It's possible I just don't like Comden and Green. I thought Wonderful Town was Snoozeville.

If you know who Heidi Montag is and you haven't checked out her apocalyptically bad music video, do so immediately.

So, I went to the opera last Wednesday. I've never been able to stand opera before. High on "Amadeus" love back in the 80s, I tried to watch Don Giovanni on PBS, but I only made it for about five minutes. The foreign languagyness, the slow-mo action, and worst of all, the soprano caterwauling! So I don't know if it's that I just wanted to see something at Carnegie Hall, or that I've matured, or that I'm hungry for material that tackles the Big Themes, but I bought a ticket and really enjoyed the show.

Did I mention it was Jerry Springer: The Opera? It was exactly what it sounds like, and it was awesome. Harvey Keitel was Jerry, and the first act was a regular "sexy secret" show, at the end of which Man in Diapers shot Jerry. Imagine the full operatic chorus singing "What the fuck, what the fuck?!" The second act was Jerry in hell, where Satan brought him to stage a show where he hoped to get an apology from Jesus for casting him out of heaven. The acoustics at Carnegie Hall are great, but the sightline was terrible, I could only see about half of the action, thanks to the melon heads in front of me.

Before that, I had a lovely dinner with my sister, and before that, I found the most fabulous pair of ghetto sweatpants at Century 21. They're brown with 3 inch white stripes down the sides, three stripes around the waist, one gold, one white, and one gold sparkles, the drawstring is a golden shoelace, and there are sequined logos on the front and back. At first it looked like RU and I thought it was some kind of RuPaul clothing, but it's really RW, Roca Wear. They didn't have the tops that I could see, but I'm always warm anyway, so I'll wear them with a wife-beater. I won't look conspicuous in Brooklyn.

Tomorrow I'm having a cocktail with a woman who's in the development office at St. Catherine's, my alma mater. We're meeting in a bar, and although we didn't describe ourselves or agree to wear particular corsages, I'm betting I can spot a Minnesotan across any crowded New York barroom.