Hello folks and welcome to a now rare non-paper-writing edition of Hasta la Byebye. I'm your host, Turkman, joined by my lovely assistant Turkina (whose sole purpose is to serve as eye-candy so that my ratings go up).

And now to begin...

This past day, the 26th of Februrary in the 2,005th Year of our Lord, saw the second showing of The Beauty Queen of Leenane by 14th Grade Productions (my theatre company). But before I get to that, let me begin the day at approximately 0800, at which time Danielle came to hide in my room per pre-arranged agreement. What agreemet, you ask?

Well, on the 26th, a march advocating greater assistance to countries stricken with AIDS was to take place. Both Danielle and I had signed up to go. What we decided the night before, however, was that neither one of us particularly wanted to go--herself because the march was likely to also be considerably anti-Bush and because she is not a huge fan of marching in the cold; myself because I was a lazy bum that had just finished the first run of his show.

We had a problem, though. You see, the people that got us to commit to the march (and the ones that were the most gung-ho about it from the start) were Danielle's suitemates, who would be disappointed if she didn't go. Wanting to avoid any sort of direct confrontation with them, Danielle and I decided that it would be best if she just scampered up to my room a considerable time before the march was scheduled to start. "But what about Koz, your roommate," you ask? He's out of town. As of Thursday, he went up to New York to visit a friend of his at NYU, leaving me comfortably with the entire room to myself and the ability to invite people over at all hours of the day, including 0800.

The plan went off more or less without a hitch and Danielle was able to avoid her suitemates, who didn't seem to notice that neither she nor I had been present. The day went smoothly after that, consisting of lazily lounging about, making a trek to Safeway (under the Watergate Hotel--crazy stuff), and watching Beauty and the Beast (which is just so damn awesome--we also decided that Danielle was Belle and I was Gaston).

And then it came time to scamper off to the show. So I showered, brushed my teeth, put in my contacts, and rushed off to Lisner Downstage, which is a fancy name for this tiny black box that holds an audience of approximately 60 people. I was ten minutes late for call, yet I was the second one out of about fifteen people to arrive. Alas, that's how things go.

Anyway, the show was to go up at 2000 hours. This happened as planned and the show actually went along quite well. It was unfortunate, however, because I didn't feel like we quite put it out as well as we had on Friday (even though we'd sold out tonight but not on Friday). Part of this was probably because the audience didn't laugh at everything we did like the one on Friday, but I honestly think that we just couldn't get it up as well (which is, actually, partly because the audience didn't laugh as much). I even went ahead and totally butchered my one monologue in the entire play--though no one noticed. In fact, no one seemed to notice that we sucked tonight. Everyone--and I mean everyone--came out and said how kickass the show was. That was a bit confusing to me, but it became a bit clearer as I talked with Finn, my director, later. He said simply that we were such an awesomely cohesive and talented unit, even our off-days look pretty good. It's conceited of me to say, but I think he's right. I mean, I'm a pretty small cog in this rather large machine, but I'm a small cog that does my job well, and when the other work with precision and balance, we all churn out some pretty good shaz even if we're not oiled-up and it hurts like hell to churn it out.

But yeah. So even though the show didn't go great (so says I), the people really liked us. And that made me feel pretty damn good. I mean--after the time I had in my sophomore year of high school, I wasn't sure if I had any real acting talent at all. This show suggests to me that I at least have some modicum if nothing else, and it validates my desperate hopes that I could be a better actor now than I was in high school (where I was piss-poor).

Anyway, that's enough of me patting myself on the back. I'm sure you've grown quite tired of that. And, just for the record, the vast majority of kudos ought to go out to my fellow cast-members and my director. I was a miniscule little cog when put next to these fellows.

So after the show, there was this Casino Night thing at the Mount Vernon Campus (formerly Mount Vernon Seminary). There was a poker tournament there too, which got me really excited, seeing as how I haven't played poker with anyone since I left Texas. The night was filled with all sorts of craziness, much of it not related to poker. This is partly because the poker sucked. Ass.

If there is one thing I've learned from that tournament thing I was in, it was that limits on your betting (that are more stringent than pot-limit) are stupid and shitty. You simply cannot push people out of hands when you really need to. And that sucks. Thankfully I was sitting at a table where everyone sucked, so I won a good bit of money--enough so that at the 0130 stop that the folks running the thing had decided to make, I had the most chips of everyone there, and along with four other people, qualified for a tournament that would be held later. Now, to be honest, I didn't get all of those chips in the most honest way. Quite unfortunate, that. People would just give them to me, you see, as they left our table with boredom. The poor folks at the other table didn't have this advantage, so when the eight people left at both tables combined (six at theirs and two at ours) had to count their chips, the two of us at the happy table easily eclipsed everyone at the other table. I would have felt worse about it if the tournament rules weren't so shitty and if I didn't think that I would have been able to get a spot without the extra cash.

So I'll be finding out about that next tournament shortly. Let's hope I win that one (and whatever booty may come with it). And that's pretty much all she wrote, folks. I'd bore you with more things, but I'm quite tired and need to be sleeping. So cheers to you. And hasta la byebye. (And shake that ass, Turkina.)