Daily Blague

When you think how often a day passes without my even leaving the eighteenth floor of this building, much less the building itself, my schedule for the day is a hoot.

¶ 9:45: Routine colonoscopy. I'm an "at risk" sort of guy, so checkups are frequent. So far so good. During my first colonoscopy, back in the Eighties, I was so high on Demerol that I had to fight the urge to ask the physician, "Do you like what you do?", a remark that I found screamingly funny. The doctor asked me if I wanted to watch what he was doing on the monitor. I declined. Years later, I lazily opened my eyes in the middle of a procedure, and and there it was, my squeaky-clean interior.

¶ 2 PM: The Odd Couple, with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. How did this happen? We will never really understand how Kathleen, ordering tickets from the office with her gold card, wound up with matinee seats for what promises to be the hit of the season. Except it's not really a hit in the usual sense, because it's already sold out. "Presold." It doesn't matter what anybody thinks about the production, from the producers' point of view. Did I say "producers"? As it happens, Kathleen faces a million deadlines today - of the kind that popped up yesterdday - and really oughtn't to be spending her afternoon on Broadway. I hope that she'll be able to make the third item on the calendar, which is

¶ 6 to 9 PM: A members' preview of Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings. Attentive readers will know that I have already seen this spectacular exhibition, and they will also have inferred that Kathleen hasn't. At 5"1', she needs to see this show, which is spectacular in a quietly intense way, like slow-motion fireworks, in preview.

Crazy, huh?

Vincent van Vincent van Gogh, Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (1888)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Update: the colonoscopy was completely uneventful. Everything's fine. Thanks for the good wishes! If I didn't have to dash off to the theatre, I'd share some pictures with you, and try to describe the effects of Propofol. Difficult to do, because the drug induces conscious oblivion.

Update: The Odd Couple is amazing, and for precisely the reason that Kathleen and I expected it to be: the astonishing fluency, the ballet-quality athleticism, the gift for physical comedy that made The Producers a hit four years ago. Nathan and Lane and Matthew Broderick are unsurpassable comedians, not just because of the great shtick - Mr Lane with the baseball bat, Mr Broderick with the air-freshener - but because they pull you into the sadness of two abandoned husbands. Mr Broderick's Felix Ungar is a lot stranger - a lot stranger - than Tony Randall's was. It's a role as far from his normal work for film as Truman Capote is from Philip Seymour Hoffman's.

We still can't figure out how she wound up with matinée seats.

From the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, it was a short and delightful stroll, mainly along Fiftieth Street, to Kathleen's firm's midtown office, high atop a glorious art-deco building, 570 Lexington Avenue (the GE Building that General Electric actually built). The views are great, but I wasn't carrying a camera. Hoping that Kathleen will be able to come home before going to the Met tonight - she doesn't want to go through security with her backpack - but suspecting that we may indeed meet at the museum, I left Kathleen in a borrowed office rolling up her sleeves and getting ready to put out fires. On the subway, I realized that for the first time in nearly twenty years I was using the subway at both of the same day's rush hours.