Good morning:



It's like four thirty. i just woke up for no reason and can't sleep. Kind of gross but I could smell my dog's booty ... and even though he's now immortalized in my soul and will shine in my heart as long as it beats, it was still kind of, you know, a little bit gross. I really need to wash my bedding. It's just the type of thing I haven't had the energy to do. But I mean shit, the little guy barfed on my bed on his last day (and the floor, and his bed, and the outside patio...) I should probably move on, huh.



The Tsar show was excellent. It was so cool---before they went on the PA played a scratchy old version of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes"--Jeff wouldn't like this but it was very White Stripes. And yeah they've been doing that for years, since way before the Stripes. Anyway the show was great and real fun and moving and felt important.



I went to a seder last night but had to duck out at eight to see Idol. Debbie and I watch it together every night on the phone. She's in Vegas. And I feel proud of my people: Fantasia, Huff and Jennifer, who dominated. It was Elton John night, and the whole affair really proved two things: 1.) The difficulty of his songs for any average singer, and 2.) the weirdness of them. They're really strange songs, and only a strange person can pull them off---which is why the technically perfect LaToya didn't triumph in the face of "Someone Saved My Life Tonight." A song that bizarre is just far beyond the grasp of any well-adjusted human.



And someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear.

You almost had your hooks in me

Didn't you dear

You nearly had me roped and tied,

Altar bound, hypnotized,

Sweet freedom whispered in my ear

You're a butterfly,

And butterflies are free to fly,

Fly away, high away, bye bye.




The rhyming structure alone is totally high.



It was real tough to see the waitress make a mess of my favorite Elton song, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." As Simon said, surely Sir Elton was in a Vegas hotel room throwing a TV out of a window. It was as if she had never really read the lyrics and had no sense of what the song was about. I mean, granted, I don't think 99 percent of anyone has ever really listened to those lyrics--and the song has a melodic identity all its own. But the lyrics, man...



It's a gay man's song and you've either got to be a gay man or a real deep kind of girl to get it. Like Fantasia. Sigh.



I was so overwhelmed by the weirdness and positivity, as the Spice girls would say, of George Huff's performance, I don't even know what to say. He sang "Take Me To the Pilot," because he is so in love with that one obscure song. He said he wanted to bring that song to everyone in America. And he did! Take me to the pilot of your soul, George.



So anyway, happy Passover and whatnot. I learned that Passover is a time to remember the earthly struggle for freedom, and I learned that in ancient times, the sign of a liberated person was to eat while reclining. Cool.



I think that may still be the sign of a liberated person. I recommend eating in bed while watching Idol.



By the way, did you know we're in Vietnam? I just found out for sure. An article in the L.A. Times on the recent murders and mayhem quoted an unnamed "senior U.S. official," who had this to say about the situation:



"We have more people, more power, more money than them. We will win."



I mean, just in case you were wondering whether we were in Vietnam.



Debbie's mailman just got out of the Air Force. She met him yesterday. She told him about how her dad, a Republican Air Force vet, has decided he'd sooner vote for a ham sandwich than Bush, and the guy said that he and a lot of people in the military feel the same way. I don't have any friends or family in the service but I still feel heavy in my heart. Yesterday was a dark day for America. It was a really bad day.



I have a dear friend who is a de facto apologist for the Bush administration, I think out of an essentially good heart--he needs to believe in human nature and not blame individuals but systems. Anyway, at this point I don't care anymore if Bush is personally bad or just a cog in a wheel--the fact is that four years ago we were not mired in an impossible war of our own invention, and today we are. I really don't feel silly for attending anti-war rallies now. There's a time to stand up. And I believe that if we had known this many people would be dying this much later, most people would have stood up too.



xoxo

Kate

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