Here we are.

Hershey, PA offers an entire town that smells sort of stale and farty, with really nice residents. The shows have been sold out. As I have decided to allow audiences a candid glimpse into my cocoon of tranquility and style, there is more interest in Hairspray and the tour will continue. People have taken to drinking and being loud in the Days Inn of Chocolate. Last night I was even caught in between (not literally, praise Him) a random female couple’s game of Truth or Dare. I was sitting in the hall and I saw a lot of things that are usually kept covered, except when the coin is tossed and they oblige to

The roller coasters across the street are silently focusing my energy on the wind in my hair (see) future that is at stake everytime I get behind the controls of these dangerous weapons called Saxophonus. There is almost a mysteriousness each time I conjure the image of the grinning dozen screeching by. Behold the beauty of the coaster. It is difficult to look away.

There was a dead bug or squid in my Tostitos bag today, but I don’t think I’m going to sue.

Springfield to Hershey

A few more wireless cellphone headsets have appeared on the heads of people around me recently and I’m wondering if those using them think they look cool. They seem to work best as a way for randomly disseminating personal information including likes/dislikes among people in your immediate vicinity. Other than the piano key necktie/G clef pin combo, I can’t think of a more dorky public display than wearing one of these ear-pieces. If only Junior wanted to wear his headgear as much as his new Bluetooth heaset.

On a very tight schedule out of Springfield, MO yesterday, we opted out of a 6 hour airport sit-in in favor of a screening of the story of our times set to David Strathairn’s scowl We are Marshall. It was well acted (unlike the other store of our time, Rounders, which was, well, acted) and featured a few touching scenes (not what it sounds like). I would also say that it has a good script and everybody knew their lines perfectly when it came to the day of the shoot. It was directed by a fellow named McG, which I find obnoxious.

Because we saw this movie, we wound up spending the night in Chicago instead of making it all the way to Hershey. United had put us on flights that actually didn’t connect together, unless we were permitted to walk down the ORD tarmac backwards with our thumbs pointed east. We got rooms at a lovely B+B called Chicago O’hare Hilton and argued with, literally, every person between us and the selection of over 30 pornos the Tvs offered. Of course, the United people were quick to point out that they don’t offer meal vouchers, or single occupancy rooms to travelers on our type of tickets. Round 1 of swearing and hilarious posturing by me and my colleagues. At the baggage claim, we had been told upstairs that our bags would be on the belt, which of course was not true. So the baggage service got a mini-earful from my friend, who through it all, acted just black enough to get brotherly empathy from the mostly minority employees, but not too black to alienate me, who also needed toothbrush. I got a little side game going between a couple baggage workers over whether out HIA bound bags would be released at ORD. There was not too much action left at the terminal, so we walked underground to the hotel.

The Hilton reinforced the double occupancy policy by offering me and my friend one room to share. Round 3 of swearing and manager calling (the whole 1984 USSR wrestling team apparently now lives in Chicago and runs the Hilton). I got out my cellphone and dialed some random numbers and held it to my ear while I said “just give us two f*** rooms,” while pointing to the phone as though I had dialed someone with power. If I had a wireless headset I could have waved the phone around like a light saber and pointed to my earpiece and said the same thing, and would have had maybe more success because this monolithic display would have been captivating. Had I been dealing with a kitten, the flashing blue light would have been an invaluable negotiating point. Chastened, in Russian, and needing a time out, we abandoned the girls at the Hilton for the terminal.

In the now darkened United terminal we hunted for someone with whom to spar, hoping to find someone outside security for times sake. We found someone behind a ticket counter, who was just walking by on his way home. We let this guy off easy, laying down our flush draw when he flopped another Hotel voucher, albeit for another hotel, not in the airport. One of our lot felt he had a bluff left in him and he quietly passed a Wyndham coupon to the same girl, tired of us for sure by now, for a Hilton suite. This was after the crossing guard tried to bitch slap us for getting around her and stepping into the street without her baton raised to alert the night sky that her crosswalk was in use. “I don’t know, what are you there for?” we cleverly replied. They guy who eventually checked me into my suite (cool!) at the hotel said “too bad you’re not doing something like Wicked.” He was kind of a Raine Wilson guy and I imagined that he had the right idea about things. Without swearing, I said, “it’s broadway’s big fat musical comedy hit TM.”

Trying to pay for meals a few hours later (discosure: excellent ravioli) with the vouchers offered us from United and finding that they were actually worth half the face value (cool!), the Swedish waitress who has worked at that bar for 10 years, was deferential and said that she deals with that every night. The more typically hotel-ish manager said the same thing. One of our lot said that he needed a free drink to avoid losing his mind. The manager thought this was a bad reason, but went along with it anyway.

My room featured a wall of windows and a large granite table with six chairs with a row of champagne glasses on a glass buffet and a Murphy-bed that pulled out from the minibar nearby. Motto: “Here’s a meeting you won’t forget, and your young secretary will never remember!”

When we made it to Harrisburg today, the hotel shuttle gave us a little taste of a pissing (not what it sounds like so far) contest PA style. An airport guard came out as I was approaching the shuttle and said “you can’t be picked up here” even though the sign “arrivals” was right above my head. No one listened to her as she squawked something into her radio and we made our way through the great gates into Wonka’s playland itself, the storied town where even the water’s brown, where the country looks for the next big thing in entertainment (as far as poop jokes go) The Great Brown Way.

Our bus, which typically travels at about 70 miles an hour and does not leave the ground, beat us the 1100 miles to the hotel.

I left my camera on the plane, but a United employee who sounds like a perky John Malkovich is dropping it by the hotel on his way home. Yikes.

Springfield, MO

We have now arrived in Missouri where everything is decorated with ice. In anticipation of the arrival of our show this weekend Governor Brad Henry warned “The worst is yet to come.”

The exceedingly nice people of Little Rock apparently loved our show and applauded heartily at the end of most musical numbers, and the conclusion of the show nightly.

Playing sax is lighter work than riding broncs

Our week began and ended with trips from and to the airport on unheated buses from the 80s. (“the heat is included in our low prices, and unavailable”) The drivers wore cowboy hats and the buses smelled rotten. This reminded me of my fanciful days as a guitar tech for the little known yet critically declaimed bar-mitzvah friendly The Cliponties feat. Shaggy Kat. This was when being a musician meant something other than using an apple computer.

The Denver airport is a marvel of tent engineering (tentitechture). The flight in was cool as we crossed the rockies in a CRJ 700. These are becoming my favorite flying machines, offering even more thrills than my brain on nights off in a college town.

The keynote address by Apple, Inc.’s Steve Jobs was enlivening to a large group of internet users this week, we among them. There is a new product called the iPhone that is a computer in your hand, except for the screen and keyboard. Very cool except that the phone is managed by Cingular, which is an unfortunate and wholly useless company that neither sells coffee, nor offers discounts on everyday items.

On Wednesday we secured a rental car and borrow clothing from TJ Maxx to ski at Loveland just west of Denver. It was a perfect 30 degree sunny day of skiing. This is the mountain to ski unless you are tired of taking runs and want to wait in lift lines or traffic on your way to Vail.

“Do you want a water?”
“yeah, but only if it’s smart water. Well, I have to take an antihistamine, so yeah get me any water. It smells like cheese over here. Why is there no Starbucks here?”

That was shouted between two people in line for food at the airport. I don’t know why there is no Starbucks there.

There was a tiny Big Sky flight to Wyoming today on a Beech 1900, a nice looking toy plane flown by two men I was not sure whether to call Elder or Captain. They wear proselytizing outfits to fly the smaller planes, with bland leather jackets without stripes to warn you not to ask them for a bible.

The often short-staffed TSA have collected a huge assortment of liquor from the ski bums in Colorado this week, which they keep on display on a table guarded by the guy who hands out plastic bags. I feel the need always to carry a thing of hotel lotion in my pocket for fun. It has only been found once, and this was because I reached in to pull out change and got it instead. Whoever gave the TSA blue ties, dark blue jackets and light blue epaulets was a middle school teacher nearing retirement.

In the footbridge between terminals at the airport they are playing what sounds like Indian chanting as a way of relaxing me. Were this 120 years ago in the same spot, the same music performed live would not be relaxing.

American Airlines have lost my bag now, and are blaming poor little Frontier airlines who were nice enough to fly us to Little Rock last night on a CRJ700, my favorite. They did however, refuse chip service. The captain asked for chips before they closed the cockpit door, and the cabin attendant obliged with a choice of nachos or sun chips. She then denied that there were chips onboard in flight.

Thanks goodness the buses are high

We wound up tonight in a feud at the Rock Bottom Brewery over whether the pool tables were $8 an hour or free. There was a waitress in the front of the establishment who instisted that the tables in the back were complimentary to bar customers. There was also a strong willed employee in the back who said she would charge us $8 an hour. The debate was “settled” when the waitress from the front handed us the balls (not what it sounds like). Then the waitress from the back added the balls to our tab (what it sounds like, if you were with me before, not what it sounds like otherwise). So we declined the whole scenario because the felt had a couple of holes in it (not what it sounds like) and what not. Luckily there was a place labeled “billiards” down the way. This place, however, had no apparent entrance and featured a gaggle of thugs on the sidewalk who stared our trio down enough that we left the area.

Most

I just completed my first week in a triple room. I went clothes shopping at REI twice with one of my roommates and this produced the proto hilariousness of our having the same taste, and size, in shoes. I advised him to buy a gore-tex shell and a polartec jacket to replace his black leather jacket as a weather fighting apparatus.

Spokane is a great town and features a nice balance, within the 4 square miles I walked, of the hick and the urbane. There are snow capped mountains nearby, for now, and cozy hills around town on which are situated trashy and ritzy housing apparatuses.

Sharing a room with two other men is not what most people would think, or dream of. It’s exactly the same as sharing with one other person, with the addtion of a person who sits on the floor and hands out $10 bills daily. Sometimes they even hand out $12 bills, which is really special as these don’t exist.

In Spokane’s single delusion of grandeur, they have divided they have the smallest airport in the world to have three concourses. One of the concourses has free coffee, and each has its own version of a newsstand. There are flight lessons going on all the time in between commercial takeoffs and landings, so there are always taildraggers circling the field, the student pilots always in clear viewof the terminal where there proud parents theoretically are reading Glamour in wait for the lessons to end. Of course, they are not lying in wait, that would be illegal, and dishonest.

We just arrived in Denver now and it’s the dreamiest. We were on a CRJ700 and I made it out to the bathroom over my seatmate who was asleep. This was cool I thought, but then I woke her climbing back to my seat and this must have seemed rude, but it was worth a try.

Junk Male

One male in our group here is always making friends on the airplanes and he had occasion to make two friends during our last travel. One was a married norse looking woman with a nose that looked okay from the front, and huge from the side. This woman inexplicably stared and talked for many moments even after her supposed husband came to pick her up at the airport, almost causing a scene. The second woman revealed herself last night after the show. She claimed to have sat across from him on the plane and to have enjoyed the show. I’d like to see the young family I sat next to on the plane with the ten month old baby. Some people would say that it’s a drag sitting next to a baby on a plane but I wasn’t bothered really. In fact, being next to such a patently offensive object as a traveling baby taught me what a joy it is to wear earplugs on a plane. When I took the earplugs out for a little sample of the ambient noise I was visibly shocked (this is when I wish I was on TV, to show my shock to more than the folded tray table in front of me) at how loud the engines are in the cabin.

The plane was well loaded so that we had only one runway option at O’hare, 32L (for Long). I got to listen on the entertainment system provided by United, the only airline to realize how cool it is to listen to the cockpit radio during a flight. Although there was some inense bumping up and down at various times during the flight, I never heard them announce severe turbulence anywhere in the area. They always say “moderate bordering on severe.”

There are many more coffee bars in town than I first thought. I expected that the two-per-bock density was only as many blocks as I had already discovered, but this ratio continues for many blocks in either direction. There is one that I’m excited about that appears to be named some play on the words Namaste and Mocha. What will they now think of.

I’ve learned through the tragedy of murder that lying in wait is a crime. I think they only book you for it if you kill the people for whom you lain waiting, but this is good info to have.

“I'm mesmerized by tigers. Their eyes, their stripes, their constant quest for survival. They almost have a sense of mysteriousness about them. They pull you in and make it difficult to look away. They make you wonder what is behind their gaze. A sense of eerie awe comes over you in their presence. The fear they give you when you pass them is stunning. Behold the beauty of the tiger.” –Britney Spears.

Test Brakes

Now we are in Spokane, WA. This is a really nice small city with river rapids running through the middle of it and a nice concentrated downtown shopping center that seems like European kind of thing because the mall is actually built into older buildings rather than sat in the middle of a parking lot outside of town. I’ve used the bathroom in the theater twice and was both times run in on by a female employee of the theater. I like the attitude. Most people here drive around with studded snow tires on their cars. Since there is no snow, this leads to a collective cat-on-kitchen-floor skid on the wet pavement at each stop light. This is no place to jaywalk; they cannot stop very quickly.

I’ve yet to find espresso that I would call great. This is despite there being coffee shops two per block, which have incidentally seemed routinely under-patronized. One pair (actually two pairs in our filthy musician speak) of coffee girls at a chic looking place charged me only a dollar for espresso because they thought it was not a difficult order. I was tempted to do the old “how about I give you two dollars and you let me make it myself” kind of schtick, but no. There’s a small chain here called Thomas Hammer which is very into the cross marketing and not very into the having-ceramic-cups business. This has been the best espresso so far and they also sell playground balls and sumo dolls with the store logo on it. Cute.

When we stopped in Billings, MT the other day on the airplane (too much luggage, not enough gas) we were within sight of a German kid who I read about. He bought a ticket to Sidney, MT (which is a puddle jump from Billings) instead of Sydney, Australia. He spent Sunday-Wednesday in the Billings airport waiting for money to continue his journey. Now he’s internationally known to those who use the internet as serious business and probably watched us land and take off late Monday night.