When I got home on Wednesday night, my building manager, this super-cute Bavarian lady, was out front, standing next to two police cars. "You missed all the excitement," she said, or at least that's what I think she said. Her accent is prohibitively thick -- I used to say "I'm sorry?" and "Pardon?" a lot until I finally realized that repetition doesn't seem to help all that much. So now I mostly stick to nodding and smiling.

"You know Rose Marie?" I do, she lives on my floor, so I nodded and smiled extra vigorously. "Well she left her electric kettle on, and the handle, it melted, and there was smoke, and [something-something about the fire department] and then Freddy, you know Freddy?" I don't know Freddy, so I went with a more subdued smile/nod. "He's with the drinking problem. He's asleep sometimes? In front of the building? Well he wouldn't answer the door, so we called the police then, and now they're up there and he has [something that sounds like "his head stuck under a chair"], and he won't leave, so then they called the ambulance. I'm waiting to let them in, here." "Wow," I said, "well, let me know if I can do anything to, ah, help. With that." And I leapt onto the elevator.

It was a night of near misses. At Bimbo's earlier in the evening, I was in the bathroom when the surly bar maid dropped a drink on a lady near us, who screamed, which the waitress responded to with an arched eyebrow and a dismissive, "I meant to do it." I also managed to miss (I was distracted by the random stickiness I'd just noticed on my forearm, maybe?) everyone in the band turning their backs to the audience and getting down into a "class photo" huddle as the drummer took their picture. Which sounded awfully cute!

Cornelius as a whole was mighty fine this time around. The new movies were neat, especially the sauntering pair of fingers walking through a black and white landscape (which I don't remember from the last tour, I don't think). And the screen that the band played behind for the first number was righteous -- all you could see was Cornelius-as-shadow-puppet, and when he pointed his fingers, words (projected onto the screen in highly rehearsed concert with his movements) seemed to shoot out, all wizardly. There were some repeats from the last two shows (the same Elvis luau movie, that same countdown movie, the same sample-machines set loose into the audience), which made me a little blue. But really, I see movies again and again, so I don't know why I expect each rock tour to be 100% new and different. Especially when it's impossible to absorb all the craziness in the first viewing. At least that's how I came to terms with it.

One thing I didn't manage to miss that night was the pleated-front meanman, who sat at a table four inches from us at dinner and exchanged screams at the tippy top of his lungs with his nine identical table mates (it was like looking at a mirror maze, I swear). They were so brain-splittingly loud, we (Wendy, Nadav, Matt, and I ... Kristin and Frew didn't come onto the scene until later) couldn't hear each other. Like at all.

Now, I'm not the quietest of eaters (in fact, my lady friends and I were once asked to pipe down ourselves, though that was at Millennium, and everyone knows how sensitive vegans are to noise ... and butter), but the volume they were kicking up was sanity-threatening. So our hero, Wendy, asked the hostess to move us to a different table. She readily agreed, and then leaned over to the offending table and yelled, "If I have to ask you to lower your volume one more time, you're going to have to leave," which was pretty gratifying. Unfortunately, it also meant that when we stood up to move, the meanman knew we were the ones who'd done the complaining. So he yelled, directly at me, "I wouldn't have thought it would be so easy to offend bicycle messengers."

I ogled him for a second, then pointed at myself. "Who, me?" He said, "I'm sorry, I saw your tattoo and just assumed ..." I stood there for a second, confused. I mean, I could tell the exchange was meant to be insulting, but since the bicycle messenger lifestyle is far more preferable to whatever path-well-traveled-by approach my accuser represented, it was difficult to come up with the proper response. But because I waited too long, I missed my come-back window. Just like with the tee-shirt perv! So all I could do was smile and wave and sit down to eat fistfuls of spaghetti with meat sauce.

Of course in the days since then, I've managed to come up with some much more appropriate responses. So, if you're reading this, meanman, here's what I meant to say to you on Wednesday:

-- "Bike messenger? I've got a message for you!" [grab my crotch meaningfully], or
-- "Oh, Junior. It's spanking machine time!" [grab my crotch meaningfully], or
-- "This isn't about you and me, is it? Do you need a hug?" [grab his crotch meaningfully]

Take that! And that! And this.

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)