Not Every Day

Not even in L.A. is this a common occurence.

Sunday night/Monday morning. 2:17am.

I awaken to the sound of four, very drunk morons, loitering outside my bedroom window. One of these morons is barfing LOUDLY, while his friends say eloquent things like, "Fuck you!" "No, man, fuck you!"

I sigh, hoping they'll take Mr. Drunk-Off-His-Ass home to sleep it off.

A few minutes pass and the barfing noises increase in obnoxiousness and... violence, I suppose is a good word for it. Ick.

Finally, I lean out the window and yell, "Shut the hell up! Some of us have to sleep!"

The ass-munch leader of this band of merry men, looks up at me and says, "Sorry, whore."

I roll my eyes and go back to bed and apparently my admonition works, because 20 seconds later, they're gone.

It's not every day I get called a whore. Ali and I are still laughing about it.

Winnie the Pooh and Banshee Too

So, the runner lights have been broken at The Banshee for a year now. And what are "runner lights?" say the poor theatre-deprived plebs out there. Runner lights are the lights on the edge of the stairs that keep you from falling the 20,000 feet from the nosebleed seats to a horrid and bloody death at center stage. In our case, they save you from falling six inches and slightly bruising your ass. A few months ago, we had a general work call to fix a few of the more pathetic eyesores, one of which was the runners. We pulled out the old ones and decided the best way to fix them would be to take one of those long chain lights, drill a hole in the edge of each step, and thread it up, along the edge, down, up to the next step, and so on. With two chains we could fix them all.

Here's the catch. To thread them back up, we'd have to get under the stairs. Being that the Banshee is a converted tile store and not the Royal Albert Hall, it wasn't built with this kind of maintenance in mind. we decided to bang a hole in the box office, behind the fridge, and from there we could crawl underneath and get the job done. Our boys took great delight in smashing a suitable hole. Suitable for them, because there was no way in hell they could fit through it. With studs on two sides, an electrical outlet on one, and the floor on the last, it could only be made so big.

Now to find a spelunker and bribe them to make friends with the spiders. First was Mary, who (like a lunatic) volunteered. She got in up to her ass and got stuck. She wriggled back out and Sean and Andrew looked for their next victim. You could hear the wheels turning in their overly-enthusiastic minds. It should be someone who caves easily when we talk sweetly to her. Someone like... And their heads turned as one to look at me.

Swell. I kept envisioning Alfred Molina in Raiders of the Lost Ark with all those creepy-ass tarantulas crawling all over him. I kneel down, peer into the Pit of Despair and keep going. I can hear Mary and the boys saying encouraging things from behind, but all I can think about is how cool it is that my boobs are getting stuck. I give myself a drywall mammogram and manage to squeeze them through, but I too am stopped by my hips. (I prefer to say "hips" instead of "fat ass.") Naughty words echoed in my head at this point and probably escaped my lips too, but only my arachnid cohorts could hear me.

And so, I shift into reverse and find the hole to be even smaller going in this direction. And now my shirt is caught on the drywall... and now my bra is stuck on my shirt and the drywall... and I vaguely hear Mary shooing the guys out of the box office and closing the door, so I don't flash all of Magnolia Blvd.

And then it hits me how funny this whole thing is and I start to laugh. I'm stuck on my knees, halfway in a half-assed hole, boobs blowing in the wind, shirt in my armpits, plaster all over me, and a show to run in about an hour and a half. I can just picture the handy-dandy Burbank firemen cutting my topless self out of the wall. Still snorting with laughter, I finally manage to get out of the damned hole and get my girls back under wraps.

Covered in plaster and trying not to snicker, I attempt an evil glare at Sean and Andrew and fail miserably. They know I love this stuff.

Next is Josie's turn and she decides to go in backwards, because if my boobs barely fit, hers DEFINITELY won't. She actually makes it in all the way, but then remembers how claustrophobic she is. Oops. I took some pictures of her head sticking out the wall and Sean and Andrew looking on in concern. In deference to Jos, I won't post them.

After she calms down, she turns around only to find that there's nowhere to go. The studs are too close and there's no way in hell our genius plan will work.

And how did it turn out, you ask?

Well, I got all the plaster out of my hair, changed into a fantastic dress, and ran the show without incident, the hole is now covered by the fridge, I've got two boxes of chain lights in my booth, and the runner lights are still broken. I love the theatre!

Extra credit points to those of you who get the Winnie the Pooh reference in the title.