The Chronicles Of Jessica

Concerned Citizen

2008-04-25T01:18:48Z

They're lucky I didn't use duct tape and crazy glue. Dear Car Owner and (Presumably) Neighbor: We don’t know one another but I have an enormous favor to ask of you. Would you please, please, PLEASE for the love of God do something about your car alarm. It goes off ALL. THE. TIME. It goes off for no reason whatsosever. It goes off and it goes off and it is so loud, and so annoying, that it makes me want to commit an indecent act. Do you remember a few weeks ago when you came out to your car one morning and it had shaving cream and coffee that had been thrown all over it sometime during the night? That was the lady who lives across the street. Your car alarm went off all night long, and she kept coming out and screaming, and finally sometime around 3 am, she snapped. Yes, it was ugly, but I understood the sentiment. I had already been woken up about 6 times myself by then. I can’t really tell from up here in my apartment what kind of car you have, but it’s obviously not any kind of expensive luxury vehicle. What makes you so paranoid that someone’s going to try to steal it? There are all kinds of really nice cars parked around; I’ve seen Lexus’s, Mercedes, BMW’s. I don’t mean to be insulting but I really don’t think you have anything to be worried about. I actually think you risk more damage being done to your car by someone being driven around the bend by your alarm than the risk of theft. Also it’s obvious that you can’t hear the alarm from wherever you are anyway – I’ve never seen you rushing out to confront the would-be thief when it goes off. My advice to you is to upgrade to a comprehensive insurance policy, get that alarm taken out of your car and just hope for the best. The fact that your tires haven’t been slashed is a testament to the goodness of human nature! Trust in that, and get rid of your car alarm. I’m begging you. The neighborhood is begging you. My husband, who averages 5 hours of sleep a night, is begging you. Sincerely, Unofficial Representative of Capitol Hill Citizens Against Noise Pollution

Corneas + Lasers

2008-04-17T21:36:09Z

Tomorrow I'm going in for my lasik surgery. Paul is driving me there and back, but he does not wish to take advantage of the special viewing room they have for friends and family. Surgeries and lasers - this is not his kind of thing. He doesn't even like the Discovery channel. So if anyone wants to watch the proceedings, speak up now! There's a seat at the table! This is from my friend Jeff at work. Hopefully my surgery will be unremarkable and in no way hilarious.

Get bent, Tax Man

2008-04-15T14:51:54Z

I had to wait in line at the post office for 45 minutes today, just to mail our tax returns. Apparently everyone else in America also waits until the absolute last minute to give Uncle Sam his booty. There was one guy handling a line of about twenty people. In Washington, DC. On April 15th. Gah. Some jobs - it's almost unbelievable there's anyone willing to do them. There's a new baseball stadium that just went up around the corner from us, so the city is being super ultra mega jerks about making sure that no one is parked in the neighborhood that isn't supposed to be. On the one hand I guess I'm supposed to be grateful that they're getting rid of the interlopers so that I (whose car is in full compliance) will still have a place to park. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that people whose job it is to wander around the city and slap big orange stickers on people's cars and have them towed and charge them lots of money and ruin their nice outing to a baseball game - I can't help but feel that those people sort of suck and should get a different job. In college the university would offer these part-time jobs to students writing parking tickets on campus. You never really knew who had these jobs because this was considered the lowest of the low, writing needlessly expensive tickets to other poor college students. We called them The Turncoats. I only found out years after the fact that my friend Dave Delauter had one of these jobs for a while freshman year; such was his deep personal shame that he was afraid to reveal himself for fear of hideous social retribution. It's probably not even a good idea to put that out on the internet, it could still have repercussions to this day. (Dave - if by some twist of Google fate your wife reads this and leaves you: My bad.) The more I think about it, the more I realize that there are entire professions that I can't imagine people being willing to enter into. Proctologist. (That's too easy, I know.) Bikini waxer - worse yet, back waxer. (Shudder.) Reality television show producer. Prison conjugal visit supervisor. Republican political strategist. IRS agent. I wonder how these people get through the day. How hard up must they be for money that they are willing to suffer the slings and arrows of these odious careers? Personally, I like to feel that I'm making a contribution to society, that what I do lifts people up, that.... Shit. I forgot for a second that I'm an actor. We tend to be employed so infrequently, that's a real occupational hazard. Yet I suppose the inherent lesson is that no matter how demoralizing the artists' struggle, we can rest comfortably in the knowledge that at the end of the day, there's only the very slightest chance that we'd be called upon to put a finger or fist into another person's nether regions, or betray the planet or our fellow man. Or find ourselves being chased furiously down the street by an angry tourist screaming, "That's my car!!! I was just about to move it, you bastards!!!!" And that's no small comfort, my friends.

New Year's Resolution Redux

2008-04-14T21:09:36Z

I haven't had a diet coke in 2 days, 6 hours and 3 minutes. I'm getting that aspartame monkey off my back, people! So far it's been pretty easy but this could just be the honeymoon phase. I'm sure this seems like a very drastic step for me to be taking, but I've been doing some research about the chemicals contained in Diet Coke and it's not encouraging. Check this out: Aspartame/Nutrasweet (aspartylphenylalanine-methyl-ester) breaks down to its poison constituents at 86 degrees (Aspartic Acid 40%, Phenylalanine 50%, and Methanol 10%). Aspartame/Nutrasweet's breakdown products attack the bodies tissues and create Formaldehyde which builds up in the tissues forever. Your stomach is 98.6 degrees! WTF? Formaldehyde? That. Cannot. Be good. There's just no way it's advantageous to be ingesting this stuff. Except that I love it. I love the crack of the can when you open it, I love its fizzy brown just-one-calorie deliciousness. But I'm going to be strong. I want to have a baby someday and when I do I'd prefer that it incubate in a non-formaldehy-drated uterus. I'm trying to stick to this, so I'm accepting suggestions of other stuff to drink. Here are a few choices I've ruled out thus far: Yoo Hoo. The taste is okay, I guess, but the name is really too stupid to make any kind of serious commitment to this beverage. Southern Comfort.This had its chance in college and let me down miserably. VERY miserably. Grapefruit Juice. Makes my face turn inside out. Tea. Meh. What am I, English? I mean I know I was BORN in England but I just can't get into tea. What are you supposed to do with the bag afterward? That's what I've always wondered. Saucers have kind of gone by the wayside in these troubled modern times. Are you supposed to fold it up in a napkin, put it on the table, stick it in your purse - what!? And I never know when to have it, anyway. I know there's a proscribed English 'tea-time' but I could never figure out how to account for the time difference. Iced Tea. Doesn't taste like anything. Makes me have to pee. Water. Get serious. In a recent budget meeting the Fidalgos decided to think seriously about giving up cable television, which would mean I would officially have no vices left. Except red meat. And cheese. And wine and beer. Sigh. It's a slippery place, the wagon. Why else would it be so easy to fall off? (Oh - and magazines. But they don't hurt anything! Except the environment. Forget this entire post.)

What's the buzz?

2008-04-09T16:02:37Z

I'll tell you what's a-happening. The thing is, not much. Although a whole lot of stuff seems to be happening to other people. Check this out: Friends Having Babies: Anne and Johnny Margie and Jim Abby and Ed Friends Getting Married: Anish and Michelle Aaron and Emily Justin and Allyson Jake and Virginia Friends Moving to Phoenix David Loar and Kristen Barner Friends Who Had A Tree Fall On Their Car During Recent Tornado: Julie Smith Friends Getting Out of Prison Eric Schoen (Take it one day at a time, buddy. One day at a time.) In the book "Heartburn" by Nora Ephron, she writes about her marriage to the philanderous Woodward (or Bernstein, I get them mixed up) and she mentions how she could never figure out how to work it so that when you're married things keep happening to you. I kind of know what she means. When I was single a LOT of stuff used to happen on me - of course, most of it wasn't very good, and it usually involved getting stuck with the check; still, I had anecdote fodder for days! Now my anecdotes involve stuff like not having a sink in our bathroom for a month because of a leaky pipe and having to brush my teeth in the tub. Fascinating! Tell us more! Or showing up to the gym for a six a.m. workout and finding that whoever was supposed to open the gym must have overslept. (That was a nasty hang, let me tell you. There's no angrier group of people than folks who've hauled their cookies out of bed in the dark to try and accomplish something as horrible as exerciseonly to find that they can't get into the place where the exercise occurs. Vicious, vicious crowd. I took the opportunity to go back home to make Paul a 'Jess McMuffin' and watch a Seinfeld rerun before work, which, while not cardiovascular, had its own rewards.) I've had a few auditions and a couple of callbacks, lest you think I am just withering on the vine. Also I helped edit Paul's thesis proposal, "George W. Bush - Secret Genius or Total Incompetent Failure and Poopyhead?" I'm caught up on every episode of Biggest Loser (go, Kelly, go!) Annnnnd - I finally found the perfect pair of underwear! It doesn't ride up, it doesn't wedgie, it covers everything it's supposed to! I bought eight pairs in different colors. I think it's going to improve my outlook considerably. Send congratulatory emails care of this website. Ciao for now...

I yet live.

2008-03-12T16:29:30Z

Paul has been kicking my sorry butt as far as blogging is concerned. He left Hillary and rediscovered the internet. And his guitar. He has a bunch of new songs he's put up and his creative juices are flowing. Not to be outdone, I have decided to make more of a concerted effort to write stuff, even if no stuff is really happening worth writing about. Hey, it's never stopped me before! (See previous blog entries.) Truly, this always seems to be the time of year where I just sit and wonder what the hell to do with myself. I've had a few auditions and none of them has turned into anything yet. I have a (wee) standup show on the 20th that I just found out about, but that's hardly what you could call stunning career momentum. I'm 75% of the way through "Jane Eyre", so that's good. I always meant to read it and never have, but now that I'm almost through with it my momentum has slowed. I think it's pretty clear that Jane is not going to have a happy ending here. Mr. Rochester is definitely a fixer-upper, as love interests go. Sure, he's tall dark and handsome and owns his own manor and all, but that's about the extent of his viable boyfriend characteristics. Of course, there's always the election and the current events. Around my house that's what passes for entertainment. Info-tainment. I'm so inundated with the talking heads that I actually had a dream the other night that we took George Stephanopoulous to a birthday party with us. Also I've noticed a mole on Wolf Blitzer that could be pre-cancerous, so I emailed him to give him a heads up on that. Can't be too careful when it comes to melanoma. Anyway, you'd think Paul would be reveling in all this indecision and horse race stuff, but he seems to have reached the place that I sometimes reach when I make homemade macaroni and cheese: He doesn't really want any more but he can't stop himself. Last night of course, we watched the vultures devouring Eliot Spitzer and while we felt relatively sorry for him, we couldn't help also noting that he's also pretty....what was the political term Paul used? Oh yes - Stupid. Powerful women in politics don't seem to get caught up in these sorts of scandals. Either they aren't as obsessed with sex or they know enough not to write personal checks to male prostitutes. I wonder what you write in the memo of a check to a prostitute? "Re: Nooky." Of course Ann Coulter and stupid hags like that are taking this occasion to skewer the wife in this situation and of course, to bring it back to Hillary whenever they can. Then I heard a woman on Bill Maher talking about how she could never vote for Hillary because she was stupid enough to stay will Bill after he got caught cheating. How are the women supposed to win in these situations? If she leaves she's un-Christian, weak, and reactionary. If she stays, she's an idiot and an insult to women everywhere. Eliot Spitzer's wife has the exact same dilemma. What business is it of ours if these women stay or go? Maybe they want to protect their children, or maybe they're too shocked to do anything for a while except mainline Haagen Dazs and watch Top Chef and wonder what went wrong with their marriage. That's what I would do. Anyway - feminism is supposed to be about supporting women's choices, so women need to stop condemning one another for the choices they make, especially when we don't have all the facts. Support, people! That's where it's at. For example, I'm thinking of getting Lasik surgery and I have a consultation next week to see how much it's going to cost. Charles says if i do and then I go up in an airplane, my eyes will explode. Not supportive.

Campaign Widow

2008-01-27T23:02:14Z

I'm back! No, Paul hasn't murdered me and stuffed me into the trunk of a car or anything sinister like that. 2008 has been sort of wildly up and down. You know, like the stock market and Janet Jackson's weight. For one thing, my husband has been averaging about 80 hours of work a week. That's not an exaggeration - eighty hours a week. I've been spending a lot of time by myself, and the consequence of that is that there's not much happening worth writing about. Finally one day a couple of weeks ago I decided to break out of my rut and go to the movies. I went to see Juno (which is freakin' awesome) and while I was there someone stole my purse. Before the movie was even over someone had used my credit card and debit card to buy $50 worth of gas and two $60 metro cards. Obviously, these particular thieves enjoy travel. Then Paul got the flu. Then I got the flu. Then I dropped my cell phone in a snow bank. Then we were having this weird problem where every time we used the microwave we blew the power in the apartment. I started to feel like we were in a very low-budget reality show that was the result of the writer's strike. But like I said, there've been ups, too. A good Samaritan found my driver's license and went to the trouble to actually drive it over to my apartment, which was so, so nice. Then an FBI agent found my cell phone in the snowbank and got that back to me. An FBI agent found my cell phone! That's like having St. Francis of Assisi find your missing cat! Anyway, the new season of Lost starts Thursday, so things will start looking up. I know it sounds boring, but I tend to kind of hunker down in winter, anyway. I don't like to spend any more time than necessary outdoors or my face starts looking rather croissant-like. If you haven't heard from Paul in a while, don't be offended. The campaign makes him sleep on a little cot in the back room where they keep the toner and he only gets two 15 minute meal breaks and three trips to the bathroom.

Cool Yule

2007-12-21T23:41:55Z

This is our first Christmas as a married couple and things are a little slapdash due to the fact that we just moved into this new apartment, along with the inconvenience of Paul's job sucking up all of his life force and the folly of the 25th falling on a Tuesday. Tuesday isn't a good day to have Christmas. If you have it on a Friday that works well because you can take a long weekend or if it falls on the weekend then people who might have to normally work would maybe have it off, but Tuesday is just...it's not working for me. I want to lodge a formal complaint but I'm not sure where to mail it. Anyway, we can't get to New Jersey or to Maine to see our families, which I thought might be sort of sad, but then we found out our friends James and Christine are going to be here in DC too so we invited them over for Christmas dinner. Christine is a pastry chef, people. (She made our wedding cake.) I have a pastry chef coming over for dinner. I may not even bother fixing real food so we can make sure there's adequate room for dessert. I'll just serve some triscuits and water and then we can get down to business. But since we couldn't go to them, our families did the most amazing thing: They sent Christmas to us via UPS. Over the past week we've received the most beautifully wrapped gifts and cards. My Auntie Jan and my Auntie Kathy actually sent boxes a few weeks ago filled with things especially for our Christmas tree. I probably wouldn't have even bothered putting up a tree if they hadn't done that for us; it was really so thoughtful. So today I went over to the garden store and bought one of the robust little table-top trees they still had left and I brought it home and spent the day arranging all these ornaments on it and arranging all the beautiful gifts beneath it. Some of the ornaments were ones I remember from Christmases in Maine when I was a little girl, like a moose made out of a clothespin with little pipe cleaner antlers. I used to love the tree at my grandmother's house; we didn't always have a tree at my mother's house since we traveled every year. And the trees you get in Maine are always so...Christmasy, somehow. Everything in Maine is more Christmasy really. Memere and Pepere used to have these two glazed gingerbread ornaments in the shape of rocking horses for me and my cousin, one said "Jessica" and one said "Tonya". I loved having an ornament on the tree with my name on it. I used to sneak in there when no one was looking and move it to a more prominent position in front and stick Tonya's off toward the back where you couldn't see it that well. Hey - I stopped doing it, like, three years ago. So thank you family! You've made our holiday so, so special. We love you and we'll be thinking of you while we lay on the couch with the buttons on our pants undone, in the grand tradition of Christmases everywhere. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!!!

Moving; Shaking.

2007-12-09T14:45:39Z

We moved into a new apartment just over a week ago, and there are still many things that need to be unpacked. Unfortunately Paul has been enslaved to the democrats so he hasn't had much time to devote to the project (have I mentioned that Paul has a new job working for a presidential candidate? I'm not sure I'm allowed to get into specifics but let me give you a hint - it's the woman!) Moving is hell. I'm sure this is a truth universally agreed upon. There is absolutely nothing about it that is not a huge horrible hassle. How do two people - two actors, no less - accumulate this much stuff between them? We must have had fourteen boxes of books alone. I'm telling you, literacy is overrated. When I left Chicago to move to New York six or seven years ago, I pruned out all but the most sacred books in my collection. (Yearbooks, diaries, and anything by Danielle Steel.) Somehow they multiplied, not unlike Gremlins or dust bunnies and now we have three sets of bookshelves literally sagging under the weight of our collective habit. It's ridiculous, really. We don't need two Complete Works of Shakespeare AND a single edition of each and every play. I suppose the subconscious thinking is that if we ever got divorced we'd each be able to find comfort in the Bard without having to hit the library, but it seems a remote scenario. I have books that I have literally moved thousands of miles back and forth across North America and have never read. "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck, for example. What is it? I have no idea. What is it about, and why haven't I read it yet? If I've gotten this far without it chances are I could go another few decades in blissful ignorance, yet there it is, taking up space on the shelf. I also have a tome entitled "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Overcoming Procrastination" which has also never been read, but at least that makes for a decent punch line if things get dull over cocktails. Anyway, we hired movers to get everything out of the old apartment and into the new one. We've long since outgrown the youthful tradition of bribing our friends with pizza and beer to help us move. We don't have that many friends here and the ones we do have don't like us nearly enough to install us in a third floor walkup. But the movers never came to check out the apartment to see what was in it, or bother to ask what the new apartment was like, so consequently they were horrified to learn that we were on the third floor and that our furniture was not made of rice paper, as they had apparently imagined. I had looked at the apartment for the first and only time so long ago that I'd completely forgotten it was on the third floor, since we looked at several places in the building, and they never asked. Well, they threw a grand-mal hissy fit when they got here and realized how much work it was going to be getting everything up the stairs. My mother (God, if you're reading this - you need to put her on the admission list to Heaven) had driven up from Richmond to help me, which was supposed to mean simply telling me the best place to put the couch and putting down shelf paper in the kitchen. But the movers were frantic, saying they had another job they had booked too close to this one and that we (me and Ma) would have to pitch in to get everything off the truck so they could leave. This presented quite a dilemma. On the one hand, I'm paying these dudes to move our things from point A to point B and I think that if me and my middle-aged mother (sorry, Ma, but I'm constructing a narrative) have to hop in and start hauling stuff off the truck that the arrangement has gone somewhat off the rails. On the other hand, everything we own is in the back of their truck and I kind of, like, need it. Really we had no choice but to pitch in, and I have to say, the money and time I'm putting in faithfully at the gym could obviously be better spent on Popeye's chicken and Quaaludes because after two trips up those stairs my legs were shaking and I was sucking breath like an asthmatic ostrich. It was a nightmare. The guys hated me, they hated our possessions, I was the only one there to take the heat (thanks, anonymous-lady-presidential-candidate) and I almost broke down in tears more than once. And somehow, I still wound up paying them the regular hourly rate because I felt guilty. Guilty! Over the fact that they had to lift heavy things! They are moving men. That is what they do. Now if I'd hired them to clean my teeth and they wound up straining a hamstring under the weight of my micro-suede sofa, that might be a reason to feel guilt, but this should have been considered the normal course of events. Instead it became fraught with tension, guilt and hate. You know, emotions you normally associate only with the holidays. In any case, we're here now, and we plan to raise our children here because obviously we can never move again. If we get rid of the Shakespeare we should at least have room for a bassinet.

Rookie Year

2007-11-10T16:32:43Z

There's kind of a learning curve that comes with this being married, I'm finding. I went yesterday to pick out a shirt for Paul to wear with this suit because he has this work function tonight that he has to dress up for, and between work and class he didn't really have time to go. Now you would think Paul has some experience dressing himself but actually, not so much. He knows what kind of jeans fit him and which brand of cotton tee tends to chafe but apart from that, nothing. And the world of men's clothing is a complete mystery to me, although I'm finding that it actually makes a lot of sense compared to the way they size womens clothes. I went to the shirt department and I was pretty sure that Paul wore a 16, though I didn't know what sixteen referred to. I don't know what my size refers to either. I know the number gets bigger in proportion to how much fried chicken I ingest, but I don't know that the size number has any relationship to any specific measurement on my bod. But there were these other numbers after the 16; 32/33, 34/35 and so on. I thought maybe those were the pesky European sizes they print on clothes sometimes. I can't even begin to wrap my mind around those. If I ever found myself naked in Europe, I would be so screwed. (Heh!) I called Paul on the cell phone and he didn't know what those numbers were either. Given the fact that there is no such thing as a saleslady in stores anymore, and I had no access to the internet, I had to ask this guy browsing around in menswear if he knew what those numbers referred to. I didn't know if this was really versed in men's fashions or not; he was wearing one of those black leather Harley Davidson jackets and he had a white handlebar mustache which kind of said "casual male" as opposed to GQ. But, I figure motorcycle guys have to get dressed up once in a while, right? They probably have functions of some kind, honoring the guy who drove the motorcycle the fastest or the guy who broke the most bones or something. Anyway he told me that those mysterious digits refer to the sleeve length. This didn't really help me either, because I don't know how long Paul's arms are. I tried figuring it out by applying some practical theory (like, when he hugs me his arms seem to go all the way around my chest with some overlap, and I wear a 36C bra....) but that didn't get me too far. Then I remembered this friend I used to have who carried this little laminated card in her wallet with all of her husband's sizes on it for when she went out shopping. She never had to call him up to ask him, it was all just printed on that card. That card really seemed to me to be the epitome of adult wifehood. I remembered thinking that once I got married I would employ a similar method and that it would really confer on me the sort of partner status that I'd always been looking for. I think the fact that it was laminated was what really impressed me, actually. There's such a finality to lamination, it's very definitive. Anyway they ended up getting divorced so I guess you never can tell. Maybe they should have laminated the marriage certificate. Well I made a wild stab at the sleeve length and everything turned out okay. I'm thinking maybe I should pick up some kind of style manual or something so I can figure out more of these things in advance. I admit to a certain amount of trepidation; I mean it took me this long just to figure out how to dress my own damn self, Paul could be looking like he's wearing his Dad's clothes as a Halloween costume for years before I get a bead on this. And if anyone knows what's up with cuff links, please advise.

Chronicles Mailbag

2007-11-07T21:03:08Z

Reader Rene asks, "Jessica - tell us about what is life like back in the theatre!!!?" Well, Rene, I have to say that life in the theatre in DC could not possibly be more different than life at the Blackfriar's Playhouse. Apart from the fact that we get up and do a play on a stage in front of an audience, there are virtually no similarities. I'd say the main difference is the play itself. With Shakespeare, you don't get much in the way of rewrites, seeing as the playwright has been dead for some time. On this project, the writer was there with us for most of the process, and she was revising or editing out portions of the play the entire time. So it was a good idea not to get too attached to any particular line or scene one day because you might end up mourning it by the next afternoon. Also if you mess it up she would tend to, like, notice. So there's that. Another change is that in other theatres besides the Blackfriars, they tend to have lights and sound and pre-recorded music and other technical aspects. This play is partially about making a documentary so there's also video projection, some of which is actually being shot live while we're on stage. This meant that we had almost two solid weeks of what actors will lovingly recognize as "tech", time for actors to stand around on stage under the lights and enter the scene, and re-enter the scene, and do stuff, and do the stuff over, and then start cracking jokes while we're supposed to be standing there silently and getting chastised by the stage manager. (I excel at that last one.) The audiences seem like they are enjoying the show, for the most part, but since they're sitting in the dark it's hard to say for sure. We got a kind of so-so notice in the Post yesterday; they didn't love it but they didn't hate it. And of course this job is, by American Shakespeare Center standards, incredibly short. I started rehearsals October 2nd and I will be completely finished with the whole shebang by December 2nd. Two months! Two months in Staunton is nothing; I would barely have any red wine stains on my clothes at such an early juncture. So I'm already having to try and figure out what to do after this gig is over, which will conveniently coincide with (drumroll please) our next move! I move once a year now because it's so much fun! Actually we found a convenient place on Capitol Hill that I think is going to be perfect for us, much quieter and hopefully without the people-breaking-into-the-building thing. Thanks for your question, Rene! And keep the queries coming, readers. I have some household tips if those interest anyone. Tomorrow I'm getting started on changing my last name. My plan is to keep Dunton for professional/actor purposes and with the union, and take Fidalgo as my married name so that Paul and I can present a unified front in case we ever get audited or anything. The red tape involved should keep me tied up until well past the New Year, so Merry Christmas in advance.

Washington Post article on "Current Nobody"

2007-11-05T20:54:56Z

Here's a link to the article.... I've been too busy actually getting the show open to write much, but here's an interesting article (not a review) about the show. If you scroll down a little you can see a picture. I'm the one in the middle holding the boom mic. I hate props. Last night was the official opening so if we get a good notice I'll post it! If someone is a doody-head and writes mean things about our show then, um, not so much. For my next blog I'm introducing a new feature - The Chronicles Mailbag! Reader Rene asks: "Jessica - what is life like now that you're back in the theatre?" I'll have the answer for you in my next installment, Rene; try to contain your suspense.

Comedy, standing up.

2007-10-15T17:10:00Z

My husband (!) uploaded this video of my last standup show to YouTube. It was shot by an awesome local comic and videographer named Shahryar Rivzi. He also sent me a second copy of the dvd after we inexplicably lost the first copy somewhere in New Jersey, which was swell of him. If you're local and you want to contact Sharyar (pronounced Shah-ree-are) to make a dvd of your audition or anything else, his stand up website is R1i.com and his creative solutions website (what he does all his videography etc. under) is R1C.com. So you can check out either of those websites, or drop him a line at his first name at either of the domains. Kay? K. We had a lot of fun the night this was shot; it was a really great lineup and our friends Jordan and Michele were able to get a babysitter for a night out drinking away from their twins for the first time in a loooooong time, so we got to hang with them. I hope you know that I am very self-conscious about having this video of myself out on the internet (have you HEARD some of the freaks on YouTube??!!?) but for you people, I give and I give. And Auntie Jan, if you need instructions on how to use the video, call Claude; he's standing by.)

What about the Benjamins?

2007-09-28T16:34:03Z

Paul and I are going up to New Jersey this weekend so I can meet his grandparents and spend some more time with my new family members. I decided it would be nice to bring them a framed photo of us from the wedding, since they weren't able to be there, so I took a photo over to a local lab and had them do three 5 x 7's. They turned out terribly; we both look totally blurry and I have these red blotches all over my neck. And it cost me $9! I don't know why the guy didn't tell me that the resolution of the file wasn't good enough to support a 5 x 7 enlargement, but he didn't, and this is one of those situations where I'm not really sure I'm in a position to demand a refund. It's not exactly his fault, but it's not exactly cool, either. It's got me thinking about other times that money has just been completely and utterly wasted, which is a depressing line of thought if you have no sense of humor about yourself (fortunately, mine is quite healthy.) Following, my top five. 1. Sculptured Nails. I got these when I was just out of college. I have always had bad nails and I thought it would be so much fun to be able to have these long polished nails with which I could gesture grandly. I guess I had them about a year, and you have to get them "filled in" every week or so which costs about $20, so I probably sunk several hundred dollars into that enterprise. Which would be okay if I didn't look back on pictures of myself and decide that I looked like Cruella Deville with these fake talons tacked onto the tips of my fingers. 2. Home Leg Waxing Kit, seen on infomercial. The wax didn't take the hair off my legs; I was lucky I had any skin left in the end, as a matter of fact. 3. AOL. AOL drives me up the wall, it's so Internet for Dummies. You can almost always get the same or better service for less, and they suck you in like a cult and won't let you out again no matter what you do. I kept calling to try and get it cancelled and they kept saying, "Well why don't we just give you another month free, see if you change your mind." That's like offering me a month of free celery: I don't want it, I'm not going to use it and eventually it will turn against you because I'll tell everyone I know that you're a stupid celery-pusher who can't take no for an answer and will never leave me alone. 4. Cello and cello lessons. I took the cello up for the second time in Chicago after about a 12 year hiatus. I used to play in the school orchestra in middle school and I wasn't very good then, either. I quit because at the end of the year we had our big concert and the girls were required to wear a skirt. When I questioned the wisdom of wearing a skirt while playing the cello, this know-it-all dude who played viola told me in front of the whole class, "Wear thick underwear!" In retrospect it's not a bad line but hey, I was 13. I'm sure I thought the advancing maturity of my years would improve my abilities. It didn't. And it was a pain in the ass to take on the subway. 5. Beeper. I got this beeper when I had my first agent, because they had to be able to get in touch with me at all times. (Pfft.) I couldn't afford a cell phone at the time, but as I look back on it now, smoke signals would have been a more effective method of communicating. You could leave a voicemail on the service but only up to 30 seconds and there was no way to save the message so if you missed any information you were just out of luck. Plus you had to make a call to retrieve the message or to call back anyone who beeped you, so I was always running around trying to get change and find a payphone. Thus making it a waste of time AND money! Brilliant.

I don't want fries with that.

2007-09-26T18:54:19Z

I went down to McDonalds to get a hazelnut iced coffee for a harried coworker, and I may never recover from the experience. A downtown McDonalds at noon is just chaos; it must be like the old Russian breadlines used to be. There were just these teeming hordes of unwashed masses scrambling around in there trying to get their cholest-on, and all this screeching in different languages. My blood pressure went up just thinking about working there. Seriously, that is a bad, bad job to have. I have nothing but sympathy for people who can't get a better job doing something else, but you have to figure almost ANY job would be better. The only thing I can think that would be worse is maybe cleaning toilets like at the Port Authority. Even picking up garbage would be a better job; they have a union and health benefits! No free food, I don't imagine, but you could probably take home any of the more attractive refuse that caught your eye. That's how most actors furnish their apartments, if I'm not mistaken. Actually in our neighborhood no matter what you put on the street, someone will take it before the trash collectors come around. I can't imagine who would have a use for any of this stuff. When our microwave went gently into that good night, we stuck it out by the garbage cans to be hauled off but within an hour some passerby had just taken it. The thing was totally fried, there was no way it would ever work again. Surely the fact that it was sitting forlornly out on the sidewalk would alert you to that? Plus it weighed about forty pounds, so I don't really see that you could carry it too far unless you were one of those Ironman fellows, or maybe James Keegan. Is someone hauling this thing all the way home, only to plug it in and are they then actually surprised that no micros or waves are forthcoming? I wonder. Our concerts last weekend were ever so much fun. First up was Thomas Dolby, which some hardcore trivia whizzes (and ASC 2006 Season vets) might recognize as the artist who did "She Blinded Me With Science" sometime in the 80's. That was actually never one of my favorites, although I loved the acoustic cover of it in the preshow for Tempest. Now he does all kinds of...well - I'm not sure what the best way to describe it is. He has a computer and a bunch of equipment and he kind of builds these beats and songs on stage. It's kind of like Max Headroom meets Moby. Paul, naturally, was beside himself with excitement, and it was pretty cool. We had great seats, too, and it was a small venue so we could see everything really well. Sunday was the total opposite experience; it was the Genesis reunion tour at the Verizon center. We were definitely on the low end of the age range there; most of the songs they played had been written before we were even born. We could only afford seats up top, and by up top I mean as far up as the seats went. "Nosebleed section" would be a generous description; they actually had a couple of oxygen tents set up in the aisle. But that was a great show, too. Sitting that far up isn't as much of a detriment as it used to be because everything gets projected onto video screens now, so you don't feel like you're watching specks wriggle around on stage. But the one thing we did miss out on was getting captured by the audience cam and projected onto the jumbo-tron. I absolutely love that, and I don't know what it is about it, but it's so hilarious when they do that. I've seen it at Sea World, too, except there they put funny captions and thought bubbles on people. But the cam will kind of pan around and land on a group of people, they're kind of swaying and doing the white man's overbite - and then they realize they're on the jumbo-tron and they wave and jump up and down and are so excited. A few people showed their boobs, which is one of those things that there is a certain window of time for, and let us just say that for me, that window is closed. It's also been painted over like in those old apartment buildings where they send in the super with a triple gallon bucket of industrial high gloss to just hose the whole place down after the previous tenants left. What? Anyway, good times. We have no proof of these excursions, because flash photography is not allowed (yeah, like Phil Collins is going to be disturbed by the glare of a Canon Powershot from my seat in Siberia) but also because the tshirts were $40. We don't have that many policies yet, being a new married couple, but we now have one against the forty dollar tshirt. And the seven dollar beer, and the 5 dollar pretzel. And showing your boobs on the jumbotron. Edit: Paul says he might be flexible on that last one.