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.