Nut up, America. I was at a show, Streamers, yesterday, and three women next to me were worrying themselves over the smoking of herbal cigarettes onstage. "At first I wondered if it was my perfume," the one next to me said, "I want to know if they've done long-term studies of these things." It makes complete sense that someone who sprays vile scent on herself every day would worry about sitting thirty feet from fake cigarettes for two hours. Fact is, a lot of times they warn you that cigarettes will be lit onstage (I couldn't even smell the ones last night and you know this girl can smell things), or when strobe lights will be used. I should have asked these women if they'd have asked for refunds and not seen the show if there had been notice. When I was a kid, non-smoking relatives slid their best crystal butt-catchers in front of my Winston-addicted mom, it was considered polite and everyone seemed to tolerate the smell of smoke just fine. And not even Mom is dead.

It's Sukkot here in B-town, the Feast of the Huts, when the Chosen erect temporary shacks to cook and eat their food in. Additionally, young Lubivitchers ask you on the street if you're Jewish. (Well, judging from my bus stop, they ask us honkies.) They hold a lemon and what looks like an un-blossomed gladiola. Turns out these are two of the four species, the gladiola-like thing being a lulav, or palm frond, which it didn't look anything like to me. Had I said yes, I'm a Jew, they'd have offered to let me wave the frond in six directions: right, left, forward, backward, up, and down. I learned this from the Internet when I got home, it didn't occur to me to just ask the kids with the lemons.

At To Be or Not to Be (it's approximately as cute as the movie) today, a biddy from the Bronx was chit-chatting with me, about shows she's missed, Young Frankenstein last spring, for example, because she went to Seattle, Washington to visit her friend's daughter who just had her fifth baby girl, and she got hit with jet lag soooo bad, how she won't come to Times Square in the evening no matter how safe they say it is, how she saw Dracula from the front row and women were throwing bras and panties at Frank Langella, they're going to turn the clocks back two days before the election this year, etc. And during the play, she had outbursts like, "Oh, she's beautiful!" and "Oh, my gwaaaad!" throughout. She was wondering about the theater we were in and I pointed out an article in the Playbill about it. "Oh, this man did so much with this theater company, and he died in 1974. That was the year after I graduated high school." So this woman, who said, "it was nice talking to you, dear" as we left the theater, was four years older than I am.

In the lobby of a theater today, an older woman plopped down next to me and started chatting. I was doing a Sudoku puzzle. She told me she can do those puzzles in five minutes. Her husband was sitting on her other side, and she said, "She's wearing almost the same shoes almost as you." He was wearing some kind of Teva with an enhanced sole, I had on Birkenstocks. To recap: So far, she's smarter than I am, and I wear men's shoes. When I pulled my sweater out of my backpack, she said, "Red is my favorite color, too." 'So long, Rain Man,' I thought as I bolted for my seat.

I went to Bryant Park for one of Tom Collichio's salads and called Andy first on the chance that he was working his consulting job and would be up for dinner in Manhattan. It was a great New York moment, we were both in Bryant Park! He was meeting his roommate to do about a dozen things, so we just had a little chat, I ate my salad and went to the library.

Saw Speed-the-Plow yesterday. Elizabeth Moss from "Mad Men" was really good, Jeremy Piven was exactly what you'd expect, and Raul Esparza is just the yummiest thing ever!

"Mr. and Mrs. Janet Hopf" received an interesting solicitation in the mail today, an offer for an informational booklet called Let's Face It Now from Pinelawn, "one of America's loveliest memorial parks". Haven't we skipped the AARP years? But wait, tell me about this Mr. Janet Hopf...

The pic is from the Feast of San Gennaro, the biggest Italien street festival in the country. It was just like the one in "The Godfather, Part II" where Robert di Nero stalks the old godfather and kills him, paving the way to becoming Marlon Brando. With lots of sausage and peppers and cannoli.

Last night I saw a dance performance by Korean break dancers and ballerinas. As always when I watch dancers, I find it hard to believe they have the exact same muscles and joints as I do. This show was about of bunch of break dancers who were bothering three ballerinas in a studio above. The ballerinas come down and serve the b-boys, they dance back, and then it's on. Then there's more dancing and Butters loses a shoe and a bunch of people die.

I was chatting with a guy at What's That Smell? and he said something about bothering people by revealing fake endings to movies to people waiting to go in. "Have you ever tried it? Like say, 'I wasn't expecting that guy to die.' It really drives people nuts." "You could think of more interesting things to say," I said, "Like, 'I didn't know there would be so much full frontal nudity', then see how many adolescent boys you could trick into seeing 'The Women'."

I just found out Creative Loafing, the chain that bought my paper, the Washington City Paper, declared Chapter 11. Apparently they were caught off-guard by the decline in alternative weeklies' readership and advertising bases. I'm going to visit the office Christmas week, but a special hello to my pals there. I wish I was there, and if there's anything I can do, please buzz me.

The $39 glasses work, hurrah! No, it's not some scheme where they put clear lenses in and hope you never notice.

I forgot to relate the second most painful experience I had last Thursday (the first being, remember, All My Sons). On the way home in the subway, I picked up a wad of gum someone had stuck to the side of the car. I put ice on it when I got home, to little avail. Then I googled gum, the getting out of, and two other methods were ultimately successful. (And the slacks I was wearing were brand-new, part of a suit, so I very much wanted to save them.) First, Scotch tape got most of the gum off, it likes to stick to the tape more than fabric. For the last greasy stain, though, I put a piece of brown paper over the stain and ironed it until it was completely gone.

Saw a hilarious show yesterday, What's That Smell?, a spoof of a has-been musical theater composing sensation. To give you a taste, he writes a show about 9/11 called That Goddamned Day, all from his own point of view. "I remember exactly where I was when I heard, I was at the hospital. My friend Pam was getting breast implants that morning." "Pam" has a number where she first feels bad and shallow for doing this while the country was being attacked, but then she realizes that big, fake, American boobs are what we're all about.