Green

There are three newsworthy things that threw me recently: that it was 80 degrees outside one day and sweater cold the next, that the Vatican pretended to be poor long enough to announce its plan to raise 25 million dollars to send the Pope to Germany for his apostolic trip and that my plant was dying a slow death from having been fried by the direct sunlight.

Krisha and I are still baffled over the Pope situation - and our coffee conversation about it happened before the lecture fiasco (a clear indication of what happens when horny academic prowess lusts for common sense). We did the math, even factored the cost of maybe building a plane to fly the Pope to Germany with all his security, hotels, etc. We still couldn't come up with 25 million dollars and can't understand what the Vatican plans to sell as church paraphernalia to make the money. Disney does Mickey Mouse toys and whatnot. I don't know if Bible bookmarks work the same way. I digress.

The thing is, I was still a little hurt when Krisha, who is staying with me for a while and plays Squeak in the show, promised me that the sunlight was killing my plant. She relocated it for me to save its life but that didn't stop me from running around the botanical garden in Home Depot looking for other ideas. We managed to find this small potato shrub-looking plant with leaves that sprout out like a Tahitian jeri-curl. It's so cute and we loved it. We looked all over for appropriate bowls and found one a beige one with a thick burgundy trim around the mouth, which was open as if peeled out from the center. We put the plant in the bowl. With no further ado we decided the whole look was atrocious. I hunted out different varieties of tall plants and thought it might be prudent to just replace the dying one altogether with a new floor-sitting friend.

Much to my chagrin we could find no bowls large enough in diameter to fit the green generic containers all the plants came in.

"Does this mean we'd have to repot the plant?"

"Yes," she said.

"Or take it home the way it is and buy the bowl later?"

"Yes."

We looked at each other for a millisecond and with no further discussion walked away from the horticulture section of Home Depot. We fell out laughing before we could exit the building because two things were clear: both of us are too bourgie to look at the green makeshift potter for any length of time, and neither of us is willing to go through the trouble of repotting a plant when for us (whose thumbs have no kelly, lime, chartreuse or other variation of green anywhere) the whole point of the potter is to conceal the potter and match the decor of the apartment. We couldn't even get into the priority of having a plant for cosmetic reasons over zen-like ones:

"Krisha should I talk to the plant? I hear it will live longer?"

"You can barely water the plant!"

I was out done, especially since New York is replete with plants that are designed to survive with little sunlight and little water.

Thus concluded our shopping experience at Home Depot, a place that reminded us today why we are able to survive CNN world report every day.

Singing

The show had become a struggle in not slipping from my normal rank of weakest link to errant mic-offensive noise-maker. At times, during notes that Ms. Twine wants us to sustain, my voice would just drop off completely and then come back when it felt like it to the note I was determined to make happen. The morse code singing had gone on for two weeks before I finally decided that I needed to see someone; my colleagues helped usher me to an Ear/Nose/Throat specialist after the walk-in clinic physician could offer me nothing more than a prescription.

So off I went to see a doctor not too far from the theater. He interviewed me about my experience with this problem and began his quest for solutions by probing my mouth. He then felt around my throat and made a sound of nice surprise.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“I was just noticing your larynx is in exactly the correct position it’s supposed to be in. You have very good vocal technique.”

I snickered aloud, but in my head I was in a full out guffaw. He must have been kidding. But then I found out later he was serious. After taking pictures of my throat by holding my tongue and asking me to sing the “ee” vowel sound (it’s impossible but the effort makes the chords easier to see in action), he explained that my vocal chords were so swollen that the edges would not connect to make higher notes happen.

I asked him how this came about, what particularly caused this.

“Oh it’s probably just fatigue from years and years of singing.”

When I got to work I couldn’t wait to tell everyone, especially the singers, that according to an expert I have flawless vocal technique. A few of them asked me for this doctor’s name and number so that they could be sure not to go to him. I could only laugh…especially since several folks in the building have been sneaking to the keyboardist and assistant musical director to get vocal privates after hearing how much Stephanie and I have improved. As I told Doug, “I’m the advertisement.” Of course, to punctuate my truth, I then sang a very loud Q-sharp…

Cleaning

There was an article in a recent Daily News, one of the City’s many yellow journalism papers that digests so well with a bodega cup of tea. It had a full scale story on Brooke Astor, the 90 year old philanthropist whose last husband (Vincent Astor) had enough money for her to give away millions and still have take care of her medical needs. Except the scandal is that Brooke’s son in his seventies is mistreating her and being stingy with her money in an effort to maintain his wife in her fifties, denying Brooke a 24-hour nurse, swapping her fresh expensive floral arrangements with $10 bouquets from somewhere down the block, giving her generic medication instead of name-brand, and disallowing frequent visits to her sprawling mansion in the Hamptons. We can’t really call this “abuse” proper, but she’s that type of old white woman, you know?

My friends here in New York think I’m turning into her.

“You know, Jamal,” Brian insisted, “you’re becoming an old white woman. The fact that you told the service guy, ‘I didn’t ask you that’ says it all.” Brian was referring to the day I told the guys from the building management complex to install the second air conditioner in Dana's room while they were at it and my response upon hearing that it would cost an additional $125.

When I marched into Chi-Chiz with a Roomba, the electronic circular scooter that dusts the entire floor with the touch of a button and an overnight battery charge, my friends there balked at the price. “You spent $300 on this?”

“Sometimes my time is more valuable than my money,” I said. “This saves time I would ordinarily be sweeping.”

In my case, my time is almost always more valuable than my money. But Alaric just stared at me blankly as my other bid whist compatriot, Roddy, laughed into his cards.

“I mean I was going to hire a maid but I until then…”

“A maid?” Alaric asked, astonished.

“You know, just one of those cleaning ladies for hire that you can get to come in and clean your house for about fifty bucks and it only takes about two hours at most.”

“I will hurt you if you hire a maid! That’s absurd. I will clean your house for you before I let you hire a maid.”

“You will?” I asked. Was it really this deep?

“I’m not going to let you hire a maid, Jamal,” he said. “I won’t stand for it.”

Dana concurred.

“Whatever, that’s crazy. I’ll clean your house.”

“Okay fine.”

I’m still not taking my Roomba back…