Babies Babies Buzz Buzz Buzz!

Whoa. The harsh glare of the laptop screen. The pulsing bars of stray wifi signals. Yep. I'm back.

We spent the weekend up with my brother- and sister-in-law and our new delicious niece -- oh, my, lands, what a nummy little bundle of smiles and chub and coos -- out in the wilds of the Boston suburbs where I weirdly did not get cell service and the wifi was a solid brick wall of encryption and passkeys and possibly elvish riddles and while my brother-in-law offered to find me a network cable I opted to slip my laptop back into my luggage and go back to gnawing on his daughter's face instead.

I was VERY busy, clearly.

Completely entranced by the shiny, newer model of child, Amy completely ignores her knick-knack-destroying toddler in the background.

I am, ahem, just more than a little excited now about having a small squishy person of our own again this fall, although Noah's opinion of his cousin mostly leaned towards total indifference with just a touch of outright disdain. And then this happened...

...and then I died. The end.

I think some more stuff happened , although I fear I've probably already maxed out today's Cute Things My Perfect Child Did Including Behave Absolutely Impeccably On Not One But Two Seven-Hour Train Rides And Informed My Sister-in-Law That She Is Also Not Paid Enough And Had Long Conversations With Mickey Mouse Over The Baby Monitor quotient. So I'll save those for another day. But probably not tomorrow, because...

Ultrasound day! Will I be getting my grubby paws on my niece's adorable wardrobe or will I be that obnoxious person who demands all her hand-me-downs back from other people, or will this baby take an early stand against my exploiting his or her every move on the Internet and keep his or her legs crossed? Oh, the suspense!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Twitch

Psst!

Over here, behind the couch. Shhh! I'm hiding from all the....you know...opinions.

Is it safe to come out yet?

Oh ha, how I kid. All the advice and impromptu product reviews were super helpful...you know...to a point, until my head started spinning and I found myself getting irrationally annoyed when someone would show up and totally bash the product that everybody else seemed to like because they were fucking with my consensus. Don't fuck with my consensus! Or...hmm...that's a really good point you made actually, so maybe I should get out a piece of paper and start making hatch marks in Pro and Con columns for all the different strollers and slings and then my eyeballs started bleeding, the end.

I feel like we have a pretty good handle on the stroller situation and will be sticking with our plan to wait awhile on that purchase -- at the very least to see how the New One takes to babywearing, although...well, if a Phil & Ted's shows up at our local hoity-toity consignment store I will most likely hurl my body at it and start hissing and spitting at all who approach, RAWR, MINE.

Otherwise, total grace, dignity and fiscal restraint. Ahem.

No surprises on the carrier front -- just like every other blog post I have ever read about them, there's no consensus, just some trial-and-error and seeing what works best for you and your particular flavor of baby. We're definitely going with the Ergo, and I am now kicking myself because there was TOTALLY a new-with-tags Ergo on the shelf of the consignment store the last time we were there and I wasn't ready to commit and I called the store and it's long gone and RAWR. NOT MINE.

As for those of you who graciously offered to sell and/or give away certain items, uh...give me a few days to go through the comments again and I shall be contacting you to obtain more information, because AWESOME. Oh! And thanks to everybody who offered the local resources for slings and support groups for people who are too dumb to use slings but like to think they aren't. I will also definitely be checking those out.

But for now, I would like to maybe stop thinking about it all for a few minutes. Whew.

OTHER EXCITING NON-STROLLER UPDATES FROM THE PAST FEW DAYS STROLLER STROLLER SLING MAYA WRAP GAH:

1) After four months of taking my prenatal vitamins, I finally discovered that the "Open at Inside Corner" instructions on the foil packets actually mean ANY inside corner, not just the inside corner that has the little arrow pointing at it. This is terribly exciting, and may have just changed my life completely.

2) Noah will occasionally walk up to you and declare that "I NOT PAID ENOUGH," complete with an exasperated tossing up of his hands. I have no idea what bitter and overtired person first taught him about unfair income disparity in relation to the division of household labor, but I am grateful that she managed to bite her tongue before adding "FOR THIS SHIT" onto the end of that phrase.

3) Yesterday Jason surprised me with tickets to see Ben Folds. He scored them that morning on Craigslist, and people, we were in the fifth row, and honestly he might have just been playing the piano in our living room, if we had a piano in our living room. Which we don't. THE POINT IS I could see his fingers. And the fingers of the nice Wolf Trap sign language interpreters, so I now know the signs for a lot of bad words. Sweet.

4) We're going to Boston to visit family tomorrow. I kind of forgot about this, so I have not packed, and we're taking the train, which means I can't just throw a lot of shit in the car and hope for the best. Plus my in-laws are coming to watch the pets and I think my mother-in-law will be painting some rooms? Rooms for certain small people? THE POINT IS they will be here unsupervised until Monday and I need to put away all the dildos and meth labs. So. Uh. Bye!

Swag in Action

I took approximately 40,982 pictures of this bee. I do not like bees. I do not like pictures of bees. But here, look at this picture of this bee, and be grateful that I'm not making you look at all pictures where the bee is a little blurry blob because I WAS VERY OBSESSED WITH THIS BEE FOR SOME REASON.

New-found camera skills aside (I should have increased the shutter speed, since I wanted to capture freeze-frame bee wings because I had it in my head at the time that freeze-frame bee wings were the ultimate in photographic accomplishment), there's a reason I should stay away from "arty" shots and photos of boring things like flowers.

For example, my eye for composition is so keen that when aiming my camera at an entire garden of gorgeous blooms, the only one I managed to keep in focus was the dead and wilted one.

It's a metaphor, man. You wouldn't get it.

What does this button do? Oh.

That one was snapped during our initial demo of all the cameras, when we were all particularly giddy and snap-happy, even though there really wasn't much to take photos of, besides the carpet and the chandeliers and oh look! A chandelier!

Okay, clearly it was time to turn the cameras around on our own dork asses.

Tracey, by the way, performed admirably as the group's go-to photography guinea pig, and at one point had about seven different people aiming a barrage of Cyber-shots and Alpha DSLR cameras at her, ordering her to help them test out their metering modes and the Cyber-shot's creepy robot Smile Shutter function, which allows you TOTALLY PWN your bratty, ungrateful child who only smiles two seconds AFTER you've snapped the picture. Because it waits until your kid actually smiles to actually take the picture. The Sony people claim it's an "algorithm," but you and I know it's actually very small hamsters who will one day arise and enslave us all.

Anyway, Tracey handled the mommyblogger paparazzi admirably, and didn't roll her eyes too badly when I made the obvious LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE joke, since I am very Hip and With It when it comes to the kids today and their YouTubes.

Hey, speaking of high-definition video cameras! And dorks!

DORKS from amalah on Vimeo.

You stay classy, La Jolla.

And...that was my trip to California. While I'm not under any obligation to write about the event or Sony or the swag (HAVE I MENTIONED THE SWAG), hats off to Sony, man. I've had some baaaaaad experiences with accepting even the smallest gift or sample from big corporations -- sample arrives, sample gets boxed back up and shipped back on my own dollar because nooooo, I won't sign away the rights to my child's image for your marketing stock photography library in exchange for a photo printer, THANKS THOUGH -- but I'm really glad I went.

I mean, the whole point of squeezing my increasingly pregnant ass on a cross-country flight was originally just to get some quality Sweetney time <insert some mid-90s Bryan Adams here, in your head, on repeat play FOREVER>, and other than that I was secretly expecting the whole thing to suck and be all kinds of eye-rolly. And then everybody there was so nice and laid-back and I got a massage and fresh strawberries in my room and a giant bed that I took up as many inches as possible with my giant body. Plus Tracey gave me chocolate and this body cream that smells like cupcakes and I got to share a limo with PlainJaneMom (confidential to Erika: do I owe you $400? I'm a little afraid to look, frankly) and talked about my boobs with Jenny and HAVE I SCREAMED At YOU ENOUGH ABOUT APERTURE. AND THE FACT THAT I KNOW WHAT IT IS NOW.

<breathes>

Okay. That's really it about California. And aperture. I'm done now. I promise.

And now for some extremely boring camera talk, for the two of you who might be interested:

My Canon Digital Rebel, for now, probably beats the Sony Alpha, but only because I already own some really excellent lenses for it. Lenses that are just plain better than the one that comes with the Alpha, but hey. We paid a lot for them, they sure as hell better be better. HOWEVER, for someone just moving away from point-and-shoot and learning how to use a DSLR, I think the Sony is MUCH easier to use. I like the menus better, I feel like I can get to the different settings faster, and the adjustable liveview screen just flat-out rocks. (Although I'm so used to looking through the viewfinder on the Canon that I find myself turning it off more often than I thought I would, but that's probably just habit. When I first got the Canon I couldn't BELIEVE I couldn't just hold the camera out in front of me and get a preview of what I was shooting.) I'm very, VERY interested in getting a better lens for the Sony, especially since I don't have to pay extra for image-stabilization (it's built right into the body of the Sony) (image stabilization = the reason your no-flash pictures on a point-and-click camera look all blurry, Ms. 5 PM Alcohol Shakes).

(Taken with the Cyber-shot in the low-light ISO setting.)

(APERTURE!)

A Businesswoman, a Tibetan Monk & a Mommyblogger Get on an Airplane

The next night I went to bed at 9:22. Party up! Or on, or whatever it is that people who party usually say.

And then the next night was spent watching hours and hours of my life vanish into the time zone map as my very delayed flight home from California turned into an impromptu red-eye (HELPFUL AIRLINE MONITOR: Reason for Aircraft Delay: Aircraft Delayed), during which I really did share a row with a businesswoman and a Tibetan monk, although there is absolutely no punchline to that story, except that the businesswoman was very kind and filled me in on what I'd missed on the in-flight movie during each and every one of my 439 trips to the lavatory, and the monk brought along about 15 chicken snack wraps from McDonald's and you know what? I don't think those things are really designed to be kept in a paper bag for six hours before consuming.

And now I am back on the East Coast, where I remain solidly on West Coast time, going to bed at 3 am and feeding my child breakfast at 11ish and not updating my blog at all, just like all those California bloggers. With their laid-back attitudes and bean sprouts and whatnot.

(Last night I hallucinated that I heard the garbage truck outside at 4 am and shook Jason awake and ordered him to chase after it with our trash and mixed recyclables, which he did not, and my point is, everything coming out of my mouth at this point is a big, steaming, sleep-deprived lie.)

ANYWAY!

I went to California, and all I got was a lousy four metric tons of fancy digital imaging equipment.

We had to move our PILES O' SWAG to the floor because they were substantial enough to mess with the hotel's wifi signal.

I have to admit that I am generally a cranky old bastard when it comes to anything that stinks of Bloggers! We Here At <Corporation Name> Really Get and Dig What You Do PR tactics. (A lot of those PR tactics tend to be something like GIVE US VALUABLE MARKET RESEARCH AND FREE ADVERTISING IN EXCHANGE FOR...UH...THIS T-SHIRT! THAT IS NOT ACTUALLY IN YOUR SIZE! NO? HOW ABOUT ONE OF THOSE SQUEEZY STRESS BALL THINGS?) And I got the sense that several of the other attendees were expecting to be similarly annoyed by the whole thing, but then the boxes of cameras and camcorders and lenses and camera accessories starting piling up and everybody started ripping things open and the air was full of bubble wrap and packing peanuts and we all looked at each other, frantically trying to get unspoken permission from the crowd to OMFG SQUEEEEEEEE????

For some reason, I think the view from my hotel room helped improve my usual curmudgeonly demeanor.

At one point, I returned from my 230,293 trip to the lavatory and noticed that almost everybody had been given silver travel coffee mugs. EXCEPT FOR EVERYBODY AT MY SIDE OF THE TABLE. And our eyes got big and ugly and Bilbo-Baggins-like because WE DIDN'T GET TRAVEL MUGS. WHERE'D EVERYBODY GET THOSE TRAVEL MUGS! GAR! SWAG! MINE! NOW!

(The travel mugs were still in the process of being unpacked and distributed. I did indeed get a travel mug, although it's hard to look at, since the polished metal only seems to reflect the blackness of my soul.)

The best part of the trip, hands down, was the fact that Sony did not just hand us complicated A/V equipment and expect us to like, read the manuals. They also gave us the gift of KNOWLEDGE, by bringing in someone who could explain DSLR cameras and aperture and ISO to us in a way we could understand. Also known as drawings on a chalkboard and makeup analogies. (You know how your makeup looks awesome in the bathroom mirror and then looks like ass outside? THAT'S WHITE BALANCE, LADIES.)

(Me Ra, by the way, will be speaking at BlogHer this summer, so if you're as camera-challenged as I am was, she's TOTALLY worth the price of admission, for real.)

It was jaw-droppingly awesome for this blogger/influencer/opinion-maker, who prior to this weekend had never taken her fancy camera out of the green box mode, but who now desperately needs like, seven different lenses and a wireless flash and sent her husband the following email from the conference:

HI GUESS WHAT! I KNOW HOW TO WORK OUR CAMERA NOW! I KNOW ABOUT SHUTTER SPEED! AND ISO! AND APPERATURE! APPEARATURE? APPATURE? I DON'T KNOW HOW TO SPELL IT BUT IT'S THE THINGIE THAT CONTROLS THE SIZE OF THE THINGIE THAT LIGHT SHINES THROUGH AND I THINK MY LIFE IS CHANGED FOREVER.

(Yes. I send emails in all caps sometimes. I also call people sometimes just to scream into their voicemail when I am very excited about something.)

(HI GUESS WHAT I AM AT THE MALL AND I GOT THE GREATEST PARKING SPACE IN THE WORLD! I WILL PROBABLY NEVER LEAVE BECAUSE IT'S JUST THAT GREAT! CALL ME BACK, WHORE!)

Did it just get really smelly in here?

So...at some point I do plan to post something other than camera phone photos. You know, maybe some photos with some of the new cameras that really demonstrate just how far I've come as a photographer and as a person. I will. Just as soon as I get over my current bout of hyper-perfectionism ("well, this photo is lovely, but I just didn't really fill the frame with my subject as well as I'd like") and go back to not really caring about whether Noah is really "in focus" or "not covered with yams."

This was the sign on the inside of the bathroom door at the hotel's meeting room. I spent a lot of time looking at it (fetus vs. bladder = rock vs. small defenseless insects), and pondering just what are these "other alcoholic beverages" that are not 1) distilled spirits, 2) beer, 3) coolers, or 4) wine. Cough syrup? Xanaxaritas?

I still have so much to learn about so many things. Including how to get all the pretty photos off of my new cameras, and how to stop staring at the camcorder in bafflement because you don't a tape in it. So how does it record? Where do the videos go? Does it involve some sort of gnome? Does this mean I will be significantly less likely to accidentally record over the birth of my second child like I did with my first? Huh!

It's 11:22 in Newark, at least

You know what is kind of embarrassing? When the hotel maid shows up for the nightly turn-down service and you are already in bed.

Oh right. Bye.

I'm going to California! Today! Right now! The car service is outside honking pointedly.

("CAR SERVICE" will soon be blogger code for "ALL-EXPENSES PAID CORPORATE JUNKET TRIP THING." Mark my words.)

I was unfortunately unable to attend that Johnson & Johnson Camp Baby thing from a few weeks back, and afterwards I felt really left out so when an invite for a smaller shindig came from Sony I basically whined and whined until Jason agreed to take a couple days off from work so I could go listen to Powerpoint presentations and call him every 15 minutes to screech about how pretty my hotel room was and IT'S SO QUIET! NO ONE IS SHRIEKING IN MY EAR ABOUT CLUES AND PAWPRINTS AND SUPER GROVER! PLUS THERE'S FREE SHAMPOO! I AM SMELLING THE FREE SHAMPOO NOW AND YOU KNOW WHAT? THE FREE SHAMPOO SMELLS PRETTY. OK, PUT NOAH ON THE PHONE. I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED ON BLUE'S CLUES.

I will most likely be one of the only sober attendees, so rest assured that I plan to take full advantage of my fellow bloggers' inebriated states. Mercilessly, with full photographic evidence and Sharpie markers. Or perhaps I shall go to bed at 8 pm instead. You just never know! I'm so crazy and unpredictable.

OK! Jesus. The car service has much to learn about how vitally important we mommybloggers are to the global economy, or whatever the fuck it is these corporations think we are. I am sure I will be online again soonish, and hopefully it will be in California, provided I don't screw something up and end up in Newark.

(Sadly, for me, that's a very real possibility I live with every day of my life.)

Tod Tod Tod Tod Tod Toddlerville

Despite the occasional blogging-friendly pratfall, I actually do consider myself a fairly competent adult. I can make it through most days without serious injury, I juggle and meet multiple deadlines on a regular basis and I know how to open and close my stupid asshole stroller.

But there's something about New York that turns in me into a bumbling, fumbling idiot. I get on the wrong train! I trip on the sidewalk! I compulsively over-tip cab drivers! I walk around with the tags from my inside-out underwear sticking out of my pants all day!

This week's trip was no exception.

Noah and I left DC on Sunday, smack dab in the middle of prime napping time. Even with Union Station's priority boarding for families with young children, we barely found seats in time. I had our suitcase on my back, the diaper bag slung over my torso and I was dragging the stroller by the shoulder strap behind me while I desperately tried to hang onto Noah by his armpits while he howled and the entire world and several Amtrak employees judged but did not help. I shoved him on the train first -- by God, ONE of us would make it to New York -- and begged and panted to him to please please please follow Mama like a big boy.

When we found seats at last Noah was utterly delighted by the whole choo-choo-ness of the experience. For about a minute, which is how long it took him to realize that choo-choos actually involved a lot of SITTING instead of...I don't know...strippers and Cristal.

He screamed. SCREAMED. I heard the nerves of every fellow passenger in the car grate and felt their burning hot hatred as I fumbled to boot up my laptop while frantically begging Noah to hush and promising my endless iTunes supply of Blue's Clues episodes if he would just STFU.

It turned out that only one episode of Blue's Clues had downloaded correctly, for some reason. A 50-minute special called Meet Blue's Baby Brother. Which features 1) Joe and not Steve, 2) live-action puppets, 3) PUP PUP PUP PUP PUP PUP PUPPYVILLLLLLE!

We met Blue's baby brother a lot this week. Noah was completely pacified as long as it on, although his headphones meant he had no real awareness of the volume of his voice (not that that's a real great skill without headphones, durrrr) and would shout ACLOOOOOO!out of nowhere at the top of his lungs. I hate Blue and I hate her baby brother and I hate Puppyville and Alphabet City and all things bright and primary-colored.

He did not nap, obviously. He fell asleep in his stroller in Manhattan, while we waited in line for a taxi.

The whole real point of our trip was to spend time with my nephew Nicky, who is 19 months old. (Nicky's big sister, by the way, is 19 years old, and my brother-in-law is telling that to as many people as he can for the next two days before Nicky turns 20 months old.) So of course the boys ignored each other most of the time.  But whatever. PRESHUS FAMILY MEMORIES. LET ME MAKE THEM FOR YOU.

Since Manhattan apartments are a little on the -- ahem -- snug side, Noah and I stayed in a hotel around the corner, where Noah continued to not sleep. He finally conked out around midnight, but I woke up pretty much every time he moved because I was convinced he would fall off the bed and kept diving for his twitching foot, thinking it was his whole body going off the side, even though he was sprawled out in the dead center of the bed while I clung to about six inches of space off to the side.

I fell out of the goddamn bed around 4 am when I thought a pillow on the floor was my child's lifeless body.

Monday is kind of a blur -- I kept getting my foot tangled up in the diaper bag strap. Noah screamed his head off in a taxi so much that I over-tipped the driver even more than usual. I spilled coffee creamer all over Isabel and could never seem to get the stroller folded and unfolded or through doors and I spent 10 minutes convinced I'd lost a Sephora bag that was sitting two inches from my own ass. Isabel wanted to talk about all sorts of exciting Smackdown-related things and I think I just sat there with my tongue hanging out while Noah played with a pile of sugar.

Then it was back to my sister's place, where Noah napped in the stroller again while I tried to convince her that she should TOTALLY bring her toddler to DC for Christmas. TOTALLY. The train is NOTHING. It's EASY. We're having a GREAT TOTALLY EASY NOTHING TIME.

(I lie! I lie to my FAMILY!)

The boys finally started to acknowledge each other's presence that night, while they ran up and down the hallway outside the apartment. Nicky was not wearing pants. Noah was only in a diaper, which fell off at some point because I bought the large box of size fours, so dammit, that child will wear size fours.

They started chattering to each other -- Noah would hold Nicky's hand and shout GOOOOO! and point in the direction he wanted Nicky to run in, and then they would both run and shriek and laugh and hug and my sister and I laughed hysterically and tears welled up because my GOD, these BOYS. There's an 18-year age difference between my sister and I and more family dysfunction than you can toss a diaper at and yet here we are, with our boys, closer than ever and planning family vacations and I don't think it's a place either of us ever expected to be, but hot damn, it feels great.

My brother-in-law had the camcorder on at the exact moment my sister told us the boys had locked us out of the apartment.

"Huh," we both said.

"Seriously, you guys," my sister repeated, "They locked us out of the apartment."

"Huh," I said again.

I suddenly realized my sister was crying.

"Wait..." I said. The light bulb was starting to flicker a little bit.

My sister and her husband bolted down the stairwell to get a key from the doorman, while it finally occurred to me that yes, we were locked out and the boys were locked IN.

I sat down outside the door and listened -- I heard the sound of books being yanked off a shelf and I heard the sound of toddler footsteps change pitch as they went from hardwood to linoleum and back again.

I knocked. "Let me in, babies! Don't touch the outlets! Stay out of the kitchen! Don't open the TV cabinet! BUT OPEN THE DOOR TO THE NICE STRANGER IN THE HALLWAY."

I at least got Noah to knock back a couple times before my brother-in-law came careening around the corner with a key. My sister was a wreck; Noah's diaper was falling off again. I was like, "Eh. Are there stairs in there? There are no stairs in there. Amateurs!"

My brother-in-law physically put Noah and I on the train the next day and we met Blue's Baby Brother four more times, because it was the only thing in the world Noah wanted to watch.  Other than a stupid, stupid, STUPID trip to the dining car on the other side of the train that nearly resulted in Noah getting run over by a suitcase and my probably getting arrested for all the armpit holding/dragging/threats-of-leashing I did, the ride home was fine. Jason met us and Noah fell asleep in the elevator in the parking garage.

The end, MY GOD, the end.

The only preshus family memory I remembered to document. Huh. I wonder how that happened.

Uh. What up?

I just got back from New York, where I've been for several days now. Alone. With a toddler.

I don't even know where to begin. The screaming? The train? The 150 pounds of luggage that contained zero pairs of socks? The screaming? The getting locked out of an apartment by two semi-naked toddlers and having to explain how THAT HAPPENED, EXACTLY?

Fine. I'll start with this. More tomorrow, or...you know, ish.

Rockstar Lifestyle from amalah on Vimeo.

And Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Mocking of Me

God, but we are dorks.

So we went back to New York this weekend. So we saw Rent again, for the second time in two months. So what, you wanna fight about it?

We didn't sit quite so near those people this time, although I did get to overhear the charming story of how a Renthead met her boyfriend? In the line? And he was a Renthead? And they've been together ever since? And they've seen the show like, way more times than you? What?  No, he's not here today because he had to work? At the Gap?

I heard this from seven rows away. It's like I have a nerdsense. A very, very hypocritical nerdsense.

"Honey, your boyfriend is gay," I said to no one in particular, my voice serious and bitter from experience with boys with a deep love for musical theater, but then Jason shushed me and correctly pointed out every casting change that's been made since August, based solely on the Who's Who page in his Playbill.

"On second thought, you should probably marry him."

(More bathroom action over at the Fall Shopping Guide, written after 40 minutes of running around the hotel room going, "I need a post! I need a post! Shit!" I talk big talk about working best in a crunch, but I am really so full of crap sometimes.)

Or: An Important Reminder Why I Should Probably Shut Up About Flight of the Conchords Already

So the first thing you need to know about going to see Rent on Broadway is that there is a crazy line before the show. It snakes around the block. It crowds the sidewalk and yes, all those people have tickets.

As I mentioned on Friday, we actually saw Rent before, ages and ages ago. Probably the first cast after the original cast left. It was good. We clapped and I cried and then we got on with our lives. I don't believe there was a line.

As we approached the theater Jason went pale. Jason hates lines. He hates anything remotely resembling a line.

"We have tickets, right?" he asked, "That's just the line for those cheap tickets, right?"

I glanced at my watched and shook my head. "The lottery already happened."

We wandered through the crowd towards Will Call -- past many people fanning themselves with Ticketmaster printouts -- and I tried to figure out what I was missing here. There was no line at Will Call. We all had assigned seats. They never start the show until everybody is seated.

I collected our tickets from Will Call and joined what turned out to be a secondary line out on the sidewalk: the Line For People Who Are Not Waiting In That Goddamned Line.

"Is it like, the Star Wars line?" I asked. "Are people doing it for...fun?"

We stood in a line outside the Uptown Theater in DC once, for the first Star Wars movie. We waited for an hour and a half and Jason was ready to claw his face off, especially after he had the brilliant idea of escaping to Starbucks, only to discover there was also a line there, and he returned coffeeless and kind of wild-eyed and subsequently hated the movie.

"Lines are never fun." Jason said. "There's got to be another reason."

The Goddamned Line started to move, and people at the front of the line started to whoop and cheer, and some of the people in the Line for People Who Are Not Waiting In That Goddamned Line stepped forward and casually assimilated into the Goddamned Line. Nobody protested or complained, and Jason grabbed my arm and we followed suit, even though I cringed and died a little because holy crap, we just cut in line. We could go to jail! Imaginary Authority Figures! Noooo!

At this point I was still beyond baffled about The Line, because seriously, what's the point of getting someplace all early to stake out a spot in line if you aren't even going to defend that spot in line?  Start a fight! Roll your eyes! Register a disgruntled HEY! Something!

But I decided that maaaaaybe it was time to Let It Go. Just a little bit, anyway.

I should back up and mention that the primary reason we decided to see Rent again was the return of two of the original cast members, and because I was able to get us third-row seats. They were too far over to the right side of the stage to be considered awesome, but still. Third row! We could actually see faces! We might get sweat on!

Sigh.

Ok. So the first two center rows of the orchestra section are sold for $20 right before the show in a lottery system. I knew about this, but never had the patience or the copious free weekends in New York to participate. And then -- this I did not know -- other unsold and "undesirable" seats get sold at a deep discount to anybody who didn't win a $20 seat. The majority of these undesirable seats are the close-in rows at the far ends of the theater. Next to our seats. Since we were total suckers to pay full price. Suckers! N00BS! Yuppie scum!

Whatever, I liked our seats. Some of the blocking on-stage meant we spent some scenes staring at people's backs, but hey, I can watch the movie at home. I came to see Mimi's ass in close-up and to see if she wears Spanx underneath those blue pants. (Negative. Hot damn!)

The problem with our seats were all the people sitting right around our seats. We were smack-dab in the middle of the crazy fanatic section. The woman next to me had seen the show 350 times. A few of them were planning to enter the lottery again that night. The girl behind me was breathlessly and EXTREMELY LOUDLY explaining every possible obstructed view we might encounter to two "virgins" behind her.

"WE'RE GOING TO MISS MIMI'S ENTRANCE BECAUSE SHE COMES IN RIGHT HERE BUT DON'T WORRY SHE COMES RIGHT UP TO THAT MICROPHONE LIKE TWO SECONDS LATER BUT WE WILL MISS IT RIGHT WHEN SHE WALKS ONSTAGE FOR THOSE TWO SECONDS BUT HEEEEE WE'LL GET A GREAT VIEW OF ROGER'S ASS YOU WILL KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT WHEN YOU SEE IT HEEEEEEE I WANT TO HAVE HIS BABIES."

At this, the woman next to me piped up that his wife might object to that, and then the entire group started chiming in about how beeeeeeautiful his wife was and she's soooooo sweeeeeet, what, you never met her? Oh, I met her. She's sooooo nice.

There's always something a little cringe-worthy about witnessing unabashed fandom like that -- when it's like listening to a toddler explain their favorite episode of Elmo's World but you know, coming from a fairly grown-up person. I was once completely obsessed with Les Miserables, but I was 12. And believed that only Eponine really understood me, what with that fucking popular rich girl Cosette stealing her crush and all.

At one point they all quibbled over who had fewer straight friends.

Anyway, the show finally started (one girl said it always starts about 10 minutes late, but was quickly corrected by someone else who said no, seven minutes late), and the girl behind me promptly burst into tears. She cried through most of the first act, and then screeched out I LOVE YOU!!!to Anth0ny when he stepped close to our seats to deliver a line. Anytime Anth0ny or Ad@am did anything, half the audience erupted into ear-splitting screams. It was bedlam. They were rock stars. They were the Beatles.  (The poor girl from  American Idol was all, "Fuck, man, I bet Frenchie Davis didn't get upstaged like this.)

The thing is, they were amazing. If you haven't seen the show...oh man. RUN. DON'T WALK. Particularly if you can see the current cast. I cried through most of the second act -- not the blubbery omg squee sobs of the girl behind me, but just a sort of constant leaking from my eyeballs that I could not control. I noticed the one other guy in our section wiping his eyes several times.  Jason turned to me after a couple songs and simply mouthed the word "WOW."

In the end, though, we were the only ones sniffling. The fans around us were too preoccupied with getting the standing ovation started (standing up before the final notes of the show were even over) and then hightailing it outside to wait for autographs. And I wondered how effective the show could possibly be after 25, 50 or 350 times. At what point do you stop seeing the story and hearing the songs and start only seeing the tiny mistakes in timing and hearing the missed notes?

Maybe never? Or maybe around the same time you find yourself arguing over whether John or Frank or Harry was the better conductor with somebody during intermission?

I think twice is enough for me, though.