Mmm, even then I still have questions about his commitment. Who sewed that potato sack? Are those ethically sourced beans?

Woot! Balloon-juice will soon be able to rent a car! Congrats on a quarter century!

That's a depressing thought. I feel bad for people who buy into it. The past couple of years I've really been taking stock of how lucky I am to have so many cool folks as friends. Funny how when your life is full of excellent people, becoming rich becomes so much less important.

So... I'm gonna do a lot of stuff that, in the end, isn't going to make a ticky's worth of difference to how things come out. Sounds about right.

There was a thing going around the internet a while back that you can tell the people who read a lot as children from the words that they pronounce wrong. 😂

On first glance I thought this was going to be a statement about folks from Las Vegas who eschew animal products but then I figured it out.

Ah, Gen-Xers. The only generation that became 30 at age 10, and is still 30 at 50 (and, as you said, soon to be 60).

I saw this movie 3 times in the theater. 15-year-old thought LDP was the handsomest. I got to see Los Lobos a couple years ago and screamed like a teenager when they started “La Bamba.”

Me: (reads this post, then, to my teenaged son) Hey, what's the gigachad meme?
Son: I'm trying to figure out where you heard about that.

I then have to explain to him who Olivia Nuzzi is, he demands to see a photo, and then laughs for two minutes straight and declares you are right.

Oh! Did you ever see the send up French and Saunders did of "I Know Him So Well" back when Chess was in its original run on the West End? (I'm assuming it was during the original run since the audience seemed to recognize the set right away)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCRm...

And because they're great pop songs (and they truly are!) a terribly underwritten character still has several of the best songs in the show. Those songs could be sung by any kind of character (or any tormented teenager in her 1977 Chevy Caprice Classic).

Florence's big numbers, in particular, (all of which, I should note, teenage me WAILED along to in my 1977 Chevy Caprice Classic), are essentially, "Oh my God, I'm in such a bad headspace right now" (again, I LOVE those songs, but they don't advance action or say anything new about Florence.)

A good musical theater song advances the action of the show; the songs from Chess are all, "I feel, I feel, I feel" (as a good pop song should be!). The show is constantly stopping and starting forward motion because the songs are stopping it.

The London show was basically the concept album, though, right? There was very little spoken dialogue? I've seen it done as a concert performance and yeah, it's fine. I think it doesn't work once you try to put a book into it because they're pop songs, not musical theater songs.

And yeah, very glad he is still around and seems pretty comfortably settled into middle age.

By coincidence, just this afternoon I showed my 15-year-old SNL's "Prose and Cons" to see if it still held up (the kid is my humor barometer for determining what has held up and what has not). It holds up. He also laughed through several, "Mr Robinson's Neighborhood"s. Murphy was sooooo good.

Oh my gosh, what wonderful news! Yay Goose!