Well, dear readers, I must write these here notes in a hurry for she of the Evil Eye, in the usual bad timing department, will be here bright and early and I shall have to leave and go have breakfast somewhere that I don’t really want to have because I should be sleeping in on a stumble-through AND play rehearsal day. This change to Tuesdays has been nothing but a pain in the ASS since it happened and I may just insist it go back to Saturdays, when it was much easier. There, I’ve said it and I’m glad. Meanwhile, the birthday day was fine – I got ten hours of lovely birthday sleep, which I really needed, got up, answered tons of e-mails and began “liking” all the Facebook wishes which, by the end of the evening, reached over 900, and read all your lovely wishes here at haineshisway.com, which warmed the cockles of my heart. Do heart’s really have cockles and are they usually cold so that they have to be warmed? Well, it’s a bastardization of a Latin word for the cockle-like ventricles to the heart, and a cockle itself is heart-shaped, a heart-shaped clam of some sort. I think I need to write a song entitled The Cockles of My Heart immediately. What the HELL am I talking about? Anyway, back to yesterday, pre-cockles – I shaved and showered and then moseyed on over to the Smoke House for a birthday lunch with Marshall Harvey. We both had almost the same exact thing: Filet mignon with Bearnaise, garlic cheese bread, clam chowder, and for our side dish, spinach – his sauteed, mine creamed. It was all very good, and they brought a piece of carrot cake for the birthday on-the-house dessert – we both had two bites and that was that. After that, I came right home, called PayPal to try and get help getting the tap and pay app on my phone only to be told that department had already left for the day. They’re supposed to call today at noon o’clock. I had a nice call from Muse Margaret, and I let her in on the concept of what I think the new book will be, and she really liked it, so that was good. Then I spent most of the evening doing the Facebook “likes”, which I feel is necessary. I had some ice cream with pills two and three later in the evening. The Darling Daughter sent me this rather perfect GIF for the birthday. Hope it works here.
I didn’t really have time to watch anything, and I really wasn’t in the mood for any irritating YouTube videos, so that was pretty much the day and evening and it was just fine by the likes of me.
Today, I’ll be up by eight and out the door by eight-thirty, I’ll breakfast somewhere, then do a few errands and whatnot, then come home. Hopefully, PayPal will call at noon and we can get this app thing on my phone so we can sell whatever books I’ve got and some CDs at the show tomorrow night. I think we’re very light in attendance and that’s going to be a real problem. I’m offering cover comps now to try and get us to a decent number of folks. I don’t really need this stress EVER, so I’m thinking that this will be our last Catalina show and until we find a venue where there is not this awful pressure to fill the jernt, we won’t do any more shows. I would hate for that to be the case, but when the club kind of demands you have over 100 people for the shows, it’s just too stressful, there are too many copycat shows that do this now AT Catalina, just not with our frequency and frankly we aren’t that frequent. Can you even imagine if we were still doing this twelve times a year? The Federal and Vitello’s were fine with sixty or seventy people there, and we always had that because the shows were either the same day and time each month, usually on a weekend, and people knew where we were. We’ll see what happens, but when no one grabs the comps, something is wrong somewhere, part of which is the dreaded Facebook algorithms, which make sure that no one sees those posts until a week later – that’s what happened with our Zoom thing – at least ten people messaged me that they’d have been there but the post about it didn’t show up for a week. I think in the end, Mr. Zuckerberg will rot in hell for what he’s done with Facebook – what he’s allowed, his AI crap, all of it.
Where was I? Oh yes, end of rant. Once I get the app on my phone, then I’ll set up the room for the stumble-through. At three, our surprise singer comes to run her two songs, then Kerry and Anastasia come to run their duet and Anastasia to run her two solos. Then at four-thirty we do the stumble-through and afterwards whatever notes I have will have to be given VERY quickly, as I must then hie myself to the theater to shoot a little promo video for The Altruist, and then we have our evening rehearsal. Due to one cast member having to leave at eight, we’ll start with act two, which is where said cast member has most of her stuff. Then we’ll run act one. After that, I’ll come home.
Wednesday, I will just rest until it’s time for sound check, and then we do or show and I’m praying it will have a decent-size crowd. Thursday, we rehearse, Friday we’re off but of course I have yet another follow-up visit with my eye doctor, which means a drive over the hill and back. And there’s another one with the neurologist a week later. And more in January. Saturday we rehearse from ten to one, off Sunday and Monday, rehearse Tuesday and Wednesday and then off for two weeks.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, I’ll be up by eight and out the door by eight-thirty, breakfast, do errands and whatnot, come home, hopefully talk to PayPal and get the tap and pay app set up, set up the room, rehearse the early birds, do the stumble-through, give quick notes, get to the theater to shoot a promo video, rehearse, and come home. Today’s topic of discussion: When did you first get on Facebook, what were those early days like, and when did you notice it had first become a cesspool of misinformation, Facebook jail, AI bot accounts, seeing things you don’t want to see, and at what point does it become too much? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have had so many wonderful birthday wishes that warmed the cockles of my heart.