How to let your friends know that you're coming to see their show

Gayle and I will be there to applaud for you guys on Friday.  We'll sit in the front row so that you don't miss us. 

And we'll wave at you every so often so you can remember where we're sitting.  

Try not to suck.

love,

Leta

The bisque is recommended

Fenner also spent a few years in Washington, working for the Justice Department, and he shared quite a few meals there with John E. Smith, a lawyer from Atchison, Kansas, not far down the Missouri River from St. Jo, who was then working for Senator Dole and later became the house attorney of an Omaha trucking company.  Fenner still likes to talk to Smith about eating in Washington - the Cuban food at the Omega and the Middle Eastern food at the Calvert Cafe and the chili at Hazel's Texas Chili Parlor.  Fenner believes that Hazels' recipe was so secret that she carried it with her to the grave, although some other Washington eaters believe that it was handed down intact to a man with a tattoo, and still others believe that it was not the sort of recipe anyone would have to guard very closely.*  Fenner's favorite restaurant in the Washington area was the renowned Silver Spring fish house called Crisfield Seafood Restaurant.  He misses practically everything about Crisfield's. 

"They know how to treat children," I heard him say once. 

"They know how to treat oysters," said Morisseau, who did some eating in Washington himself.**

My Dad used to have lunch at Crisfield's pretty often because it was just a few blocks up Georgia Avenue from Hopkins APL where he worked, but I have an even better connection to Trillin's paragraph:  Two of the people who "knew how to treat children" at Crisfield's were Ned and Nancy, my friend Mollie's parents.  Ned ran the raw bar and Nancy ran the cash register and you'll never meet two nicer people.

I got to know them during the years that Mollie and I were housemates and during part of that time Mollie was the day care provider / favorite aunt / playmate for then babies and later toddlers, Charles and Samantha. Mollie's folks are the kids adopted grandparents and even though Ned and Nancy have retired to North Carolina, the families are still close with lots of visiting.  They do know how to treat children.



*Crisfield's is still open in the same location.  Omega closed after a fire.  The Calvert Cafe was renamed Mama Ayesha's in 1994 after its founder Mama Ayesha Abraham, who died in 1993.  It's still be run by her family.  And Hazel's Texas Chili Parlor is also closed but is the gastronomic mother, if not legal entity parent, of chili parlor chain Hard Times.  This article from DC's City Paper tells the fascinating story.

**Alice, Let's Eat by Calvin Trillin.  Page 122 in the 1978 copy of the Vintage Books paperbook I have.

It really comes in handy

I was at the quarterly meeting of my investment club today and our hostess is Orthodox Jewish.  The topic of carrying during the Sabbath ("what about your children?  Can you carry them?") came up and so my friend was explaining that some Jewish communities create what she described as a sort of fence to enclose, say a neighborhood, and make carrying acceptable within that space.

"Oh," I said, "an eruv?"

My friend's jaw dropped and she said "You know that?!"

Her equally stunned husband said "How do you know that?"

"Public radio." 

"Huh," said the husband, "maybe they shouldn't be defunded."

Not green

I once mentioned that as far as I could tell, red is the only color that doesn't have a pastel partner.  One hears people talk about "pale blue" or "soft yellow" or such, but I've never heard anyone talk about "pastel red" because "pastel red" has it's own identity:  pink.

Sure, in some ways that's more a quirk of language, rather than spectrum, but I dunno.  When you make red darker it looks blacker.  When you make pink look darker, it looks ... bluer.

I was, of course, mocked for this and generally kept down by The Man.  And as I'm neither a lighting designer nor a painter,* I don't have the background to make a better argument, so I let it drop.

But ...

But ...

Thanks to Alice, Facebook, and NPR, this little tidbit has fallen into my lap.

I'm probably still wrong, but somehow I feel --- less wrong.

There is no blue food.  There is no pink light.

*Because colors in light and colors in pigment are two separate things.  The former is additive color and the later is subtractive color.**


**A fact I'll be able to retain until just after I post this, of course.

Fair Warning

People from my past find and friend me on Facebook with a certain regularity.*  The farther back they are from the  more I think that the "about me" should be changed from "Leta spends a lot of time in theaters" to the equally accurate but more "full disclosure"-like "If you thought I was nice but weird back then, well, I still am. Sure, I cover the weird better, but time doesn't make us different, just more thoroughly ourselves.  Weird has had quite a while to settle in and get comfy."


* Which is fantastic.  When it happens, I tend to spend a whole bunch of time just saying "Wow ... [name]. Wow ..." and looking at their profile to see what's new with them.**


** And the very best "from the past" friending I got was a college boy friend.  There was a time when that wouldn't have been possible, so finding out that he no longer disliked me made me very happy indeed. 

Car accident

You know how a new car is new until it gets its first ding in it?  Well, Gracie, my lovely VW Jetta, went from new to not-new this past Saturday night.

I was on my way home from seeing the NVTA one-acts and stopped when I got hit from behind.  And it's actually kind of lucky that I was there because I was the buffer between the BMW that hit me and the Subaru in front of me.  In the Subaru was a married couple with their one-year-old child.  So by "lucky," I don't mean "lucky for Leta" but "lucky for the folks in the Subaru."

They didn't seem to see it that way at the time, of course.  The mother of the one-year-old had enough adrenaline looking for an outlet that it didn't much matter what I was going to say ("Ma'am, I wasn't moving.  That guy hit me!") because she wasn't going to process it.  So she yelled at me for a while about how hitting their car with her child in it WAS NOT ACCEPTABLE.  (I, of course, agree.  Given a choice, I would not have been pushed into their car.  I also understand that scaring a mother about her child will immediately bring out the protective instinct.)

So I'm kinda listening to her and kinda trying to explain that I didn't initiate this event and kinda thinking about how I hit my head on the steering wheel and now my head hurts.  And about how a friend of mine was in a low-speed impact that left her with herniated disks in her neck. And then the guy who hit me starts asking if he can just give me his information which I didn't understand at the time but now assume to mean could he give me his insurance information and then leave.  And I am certainly the sort of accommodating idiot who might have agreed to that except that Subaru Mom then started screaming about how she was going to call the police.  So, actually, I was lucky that she was there, too, I guess.

The nice policeman arrived promptly and started collecting information.  He asked if anyone was hurt and I said that I hit my head and that it hurt.  Clearly, I was lucid* and not bleeding but he called for the EMTs.  Looking back, I wish that I had taken the time while the Subaru Mom was on the phone with the police to put back into my purse everything that fell out of it when it fell off of the seat when the BMW Guy hit me.   Not because my purse was filled with contraband but because I wouldn't get a good look at it again for another 3 hours or so and spent that time worrying about things like my iPod.

The EMT guys put a neck collar on me and strapped me to a back board and loaded me into the ambulance.  There are patches of the whole event that I don't remember very clearly so I don't remember if the police officer or I decided that a trip in the ambulance would be a better option than me driving myself to the hospital.  Obviously, if I had, say, passed out while driving myself to the hospital** we all would have regretted not having me be driven there by the nice EMTs, so whoever suggested the ambulance trip, the other probably agreed pretty promptly.  I did think to ask for my purse and my magazine.  I've been to hospitals.  There's always plenty of time to read ...

I always wondered what it was like to ride in an ambulance and the answer is ... kinda boring.***  I was strapped to the back board and one of the EMT's spent a pretty decent chunk of time making sure that I was really, really strapped to it, which include taping my head down across my forehead so that my head wouldn't jiggle.  They said that I dealt with it better than many other people have. How did I deal with it?  By chatting with the EMTs, of course.  If I can chat through things, I can get through things.  Anyway, I spent the trip looking at the ceiling.

At the hospital I had nice, clear line of priorities.  As each one was dealt with the next one moved into higher prominence.  They were:

1.  I wanted my phone because I had left a message for David and didn't want to not answer if he woke up, got the message, and called. Scaring one's nice boyfriend unnecessarily is bad karma. I called him again later and actually talked to him.  Hmmm.  Did I do that before or after I got to the hospital?  Don't remember.

2.  I wanted to be released from the back board. My scoliosis makes lying on my back uncomfortable after not too long a period of time.  I was released from the back board within a couple of hours.****  It's also hard to read while strapped to a back board, so I read intermittently and filled the rest of the time worrying.

3.  I wanted to use the bathroom.  I wanted this with more and more urgency as time went on but they couldn't let me get up until the neck collar had been removed and they couldn't remove the neck collar until after the X-rays had been read.  I don't know how long it took and I was only in the hospital, really, from about 12:30 AM to about 4:15 AM, so it couldn't have been the two days it felt like, but boy, oh, boy, was I ever glad to be released from the neck collar when it finally happened.

4.  I wanted to know where my glasses were.  Not in my purse.  Not with me.  Hopefully in the car.*****

5.  I wanted someone to be nice to me.  Not "nice to me" in the kind but professionally detached manner of hospital personnel but "nice to me" as in saying "you poor baby!" and expressing outrage on Gracie's behalf.*+5 *+6  So ... using my phone which has a dedicated button for Facebook, I posted a status update.  I knew that by saying that something bad had happened to me that I was possibly stirring up, well, several hundred people, but it was cold in the hospital and I was lonely.  I kept it reasonably low-key and posted this at 4:54 AM while waiting for a cab. Car accidents suck, hospitals are boring, and I'm glad I'm okay. Bruised and headachy but okay.   

Quite a few of my friends are early risers, so the first "you poor baby!" comments came in about 15 minutes later and continued through the next couple of days.  The actual wording of "you poor baby" was "glad you're okay."

On Sunday evening I posted a follow up:  In theory it's the Naprosin that makes me feel better but I know that it's the love and good wishes from so many lovely friends that's the real extra strength pain relief.  I am very lucky to have lots of people who are nice to me.

6.  I wanted the stupid [expletive] cab to show up.  I called the cab at 4:20 AM and got a text at 4:23 saying that it was 3 miles away.  I had to option to text "where" to find out how far away the cab was.

I went outside (where it was slightly less frigid) to wait for the cab.

At 5:02 I sent the "where" text because I was wondering how it could possibly take 40 minutes to cover 3 miles.  I got the reply that the cab was 4 miles away.

At 5:20 I sent the "where" text again and got the same answer.  I went back into hospital and called the cab company.  They sent another cab which arrived at 5:28.

If I hadn't been so tired and shook up, I think I would have started the process earlier.  I don't like Yellow Cab now.  I may never like them again.

7.  I wanted to collect Gracie, see if she was drive-able, go home, go to bed.  The impound lot she was towed to was only a quarter mile from the hospital, so this part was rather easy.  Except for the $343 tow bill.  On the plus side, the driver put my iPod into the glove compartment for me instead of stealing my car charger like the last time that I was towed.  A new iPod Touch would have cost me about ... $300.  Hmmm.

8.  After I got home, I wanted Pekoe not to respond to how stressed out I was by doing the things that he knows annoys the bejeebers out of me.  I was fresh out of bejeebers, so he got evicted from my bedroom until after I'd had some sleep.

Today I am bruised, much less headachy, and very, very grateful that it wasn't worse.


*Or as lucid as I ever appear to be.


** I didn't pass out at any time during the whole event.  Just sayin'.


*** Don't tell my father this.  He is the President of the Ambulance Authority Board in the county where he lives.


**** Or what seemed like a couple of hours.  Boy, time really slows down when you're staring at the ceiling worrying.


***** Yes.  In the car.


*+5 Gracie is the Jetta.


*+6 The rows of asterisks were getting too long.  The next step is exponential notation.

Audrey’s WATCH Award Speech

The WATCH awards were held last night at the the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria.  It was, as always, a very fun evening and I got lots of compliments on my dress*.  Any evening spent with 500 theater people and a bar is going to be a good evening.  I mean, really, how bad could that be?

The ceremony went well and the winners were pleased and the nominees who did not win were gracious (at least in my hearing) and the wait staff was busy bringing more drinks.  As I say, about as usual.

Because I am standing on the stage for the whole thing, I generally don't applaud for winners or speeches.  I smile.  I smile at the top of the evening and I smile all the way through.**  My friend, Chuck, one year complimented me at the end of the evening on how I was still smiling.  "Oh, am I smiling?  How nice."  :-D

But the evening took a memorable turn when my friend, Audrey, won for Featured Actress in a Play.  I was pleased for her for more than one reason:  She's a damn fine actress and she's been through a really rough time.  Taking home a piece of lucite won't make the last year any easier, but I'm very glad she got it.

And when she gave her acceptance speech, which like everything that Audrey writes was honest and funny and smart and likely to give me a lump in my throat,  Audrey accepted her award by giving a tribute to community theater which not only put that lump there but made me teary-eyed as well.  In those few words, she summed up exactly how I feel about this hobby of ours and how I feel about the friends I've made doing it.

So I asked her if I could post it here.  And tough, kind, generous Audrey said of course I could.

Congratulations, Honey!  And no fair making me cry in public.

Thank yo­­­u for this recognition. Thank you to my talented cast an­d crew, our designers and technicians, and mostly, our fearless director Chris Curtis for giving me the opportunity.

I just need to take a minute here, because this isn’t about me… it’s about us.

A few years ago, my play Fin and Euba premiered in a local one-­act festival. It was later published in an anthology called Best American Short Plays. I used to think that kind of thing only happened to folks like Edward Albee. But sometimes I actually call myself a playwright. And I have community theater to thank for that.

Last year, while I was performing in the show Rabbit Hole, for which I was nominated for tonight, my husband, who has been battling kidney failure for years, went into the hospital and stayed there quite sick for 5 months. He lost his job. And our house went into foreclosure. But I was not alone. Bridget Muehlberger and Erika Imhoof said, “it’s not going down like this.” They, along with every single cast and crew member of Rabbit Hole, along with many, many other volunteers, produced a yard sale and fund­raising effort that saved my house… and my life. I wouldn’t have a home right now if it weren’t for community theater.

Take a minute and look around at your table. Chances are there’s someone in front of you or beside you, who knows your favorite show tune or your mother’s maiden name or where the bodies are buried. Someone you cannot imagine living without… someone you never would have met, or had the chance to love, if it weren’t for community theater.

Community theater is a lot more than just a few crazy actors and techies who stage plays and throw cast parties, admittedly, really great cast parties. No.

Community theater is what we choose to do instead.

Because, let’s face it. It’s cheaper than therapy. More fun than prime time television. And probably more rewarding than that night class at the annex. It’s a home. Community theater, is a really great… warm… life-­giving home.

Thank you.

*That cost $32.  The only thing better than a sale is a clearance sale.  Thank you, Lord and Taylor's!

**One of the reasons why I wear flats. It's much easier to smile if your feet don't hurt.

I'll see you and raise you

Me: I got two paper cuts doing that mailing. I'm going to file for Workers' Comp.
My Boss: Paper cuts, huh? That sounds self-inflicted to me. We'll put you on report.
Me: Fine. I'll see your self-inflicted wound and raise you a hostile work environment.
My boss: Oh, really? Then we can make this a very hostile environment for you.

It's not for nothing that I studied the fine art of Retaliation & Escalation under Brett. But it seems that my Boss may have taken a similar curriculum.

Sometimes I do say the right thing

Which contrasts nicely with so much of the rest of my conversation. Although my friends generally seem to agree that my usually kind intentions often cancel out any infelicitous phrasing.

But every now and then I do say the right thing, which pleases me greatly and which is possibly why my friends are still willing to ask me for advice. Or perhaps they just enjoy the Magic 8 Ball experience of "What Will Leta Say This Time?"

I don't remember if I have "documented" these here before, so stop me if these sound familiar ....*

# One
Some years ago Friend #1 was considering proposing to his girlfriend. We had dinner and he told me this but wondered if it was the right thing to do.

"Absolutely. You should ask her to marry you."
"But I don't have any money."**
"Yeah, but you've never had any money."
"Thanks."
"No, what I mean is that if money, per se, were important to her, she wouldn't be with you now."
"But I can't afford a ring."
"All she will hear when you propose is that you want to spend your life with her. Really. Give her a cigar band now and buy her a real ring in the future."

They got married and have been living happily ever after. And his sister, when she heard this story from him, promptly went upstairs and got their mother's ring from her jewelry box and gave it to him. So no cigar band was required.

# Two
Friend #2 also had a proposal dilemma. He wanted to propose to his girlfriend but as his field might require relocating a few times until he was sufficiently established and her field didn't have as general a possible practice area, he was concerned that marrying him would have a negative effect on her career. Or that they might have to be a long-distance couple. Or, etc.

"Marry her. If you love each other enough, crossing the country for each other is not too much of a problem. If you don't crossing the street is too much effort."
"Really?"
"Absolutely. Deciding to build a life together is what's important. The rest is just logistics."

And they are married and living happily ever after ... ***

#Three
I was standing on the stage at the WATCH awards a week ago and the friend standing next to me was listening to his name get mispronounced. More than once.

"Should I correct it when I get to the mic?" he asked me, sotto very voce.
"Well, [previous MC] mispronounced my name for five years running," I murmured back.
"Okay. I'll let it go."

Yep, sometimes in the midst of the nonsense the Magic 8 Ball gives the right answer.


*My having told them to you in person several times doesn't count.
**We were young and poor back then. We're middle-aged and poor now. Me because I am completely incompetent financially, him because this is a rotten economy.
***As you can see, I think that people in love should get married. "This is true love - you think this happens every day?" says it well. So, more darkly, does "You truly love each other and so you might have been truly happy. Not one couple in a century has that chance, no matter what the story books say." both from The Princess Bride

Time in a bottle

"Pamwriter" left this as a comment at the end of a nice essay on downsizing from the Tucson Citizen. It's definitely even more of a challenge to get rid of stuff when the "stuff" has sentimental attachment.

So this is really for the several friends who have lost loved ones recently and will be faced with sorting their possessions into "what to keep, what to throw, and what to give away."

A friend of mine recently said ‘You CAN keep time in a bottle’. She has decided that a small collection of bottles as keep-sakes is better than the tons of keep-sakes themselves. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘we’re keeping the memories.’ So what she’s doing is to write small notes and put them in the bottles that she has categorically labeled – maybe one is ‘mom’ and one is ‘dad’ and one is ‘first husband’ etc. I’m thinking about this as I sift through ‘my stuff’. I also have started to watch the ‘Hoarders’ – I watch then I get up and clean a closet. I’m in touch with the emotional attachment to the stuff and letting go. I’d put the cookie maker* (I had one too) into the pile to go to the hospital shop and let those folks decide which of their piles to put it in.

*The item that essay author Lydia Brewer used as her jumping-off to muse about de-accessioning.

Exactly what I would have said

My next theater project is a show called The Laramie Project about the murder of Matthew Shepard. I'll be playing Officer Reggie Fluty, the first responder on the scene. Providence company member Beth is playing Marge Murray, Reggie's mother. Beth is only a few years older than I am,* so last night at a play reading I was chatting with her husband, David**, and we had the following exchange:

Me: So how many times do you think I can call Beth "Mom" before she just slaps me?

David: I dunno. Try it and see.

*This happens in theater (and in the movies) all the time. Sometimes we play the parents of people who are older than we are. It not how old you are - it's how old you can play.

**Yes, of course, he is named David. Of course.

A nice compromise

I was a Girl Scout. My elementary school was somewhat haphazard about sponsoring scout troops, so I was involved in scouting about every other year. But I absorbed a fair bit about lanyards and uniforms and campfire songs. And I sold cookies. Back in the old days we went door-to-door because, as my mother put it, "I'm not taking any cookie order forms to work. This is your project and you are responsible for it." So I went door-to-door taking orders and a few weeks later I went door-to-door with my little red wagon (truly) and delivered the goods.

Girl Scouts no longer go door-to-door because it's just not safe. It probably wasn't safe back when I did it, but we didn't know that. Instead the order form appears at the office. And Celiac Disease or no, as a former Girl Scout, I am morally obligated to pay those cookies forward.

Luckily for me, my very good friend, the Gleeful Gecko, believes in the Girl Scouts and their cookies. And has a birthday coming up. In a division of labor that works for both of us, I will buy the cookies and he will consume them.

It's rather a pity that I can't deal with all of my moral obligations as easily.

How to fill your e-mail inbox*

1. Click the "like" button on Facebook for a friend's picture of their cute children.

Ta-da! You're done! Sit back and watch the e-mails roll in!


*I was going to call this post "How to Get More Interesting Mail" in honor of the Direct Marketing Association's booklet for people who wish to receive more rather than less junk mail. But Facebook comments aren't junk mail - they're the conversation.

Table for Two

On Friday night I was supposed to meet Dave, a theater friend, for dinner at Fajita Coast. He was scheduled to see The Goat at Silver Spring and I was planning to see The Merry Wives of Windsor at my high school, a block away.

I was running a little late and my friend Laura, one of the cast members for The Goat hit little enough traffic that she decided to have a sit down rather than carry out dinner. So she went to Fajita Coast ....

(This is where that wavy screen that they had back in the old days on sit-coms to denote a flashback kicks in.)

Dave walks in a sees Laura sitting at a table. He and I see each other rarely enough that she fit his mental description for me*, so he plunked down at the table with her and said jocularly "I'll just sit here until you get a better offer. "

"I'm sorry?!"

"Augh! You're not Leta!"

"No, but I know Leta."

So when I arrived a few minutes later, they were still sharing a table, happily chatting away.

If they become friends, they'll have one of the better "meet cute" stories I can think of.


* And I quote - thin and brown haired. Delusional. Flattering, but delusional.

I'm not sure I was exaggerating either

David and I were invited to a gala fundraiser recently. The kind held in Expensive Locations with Open Bars and Important Dignitaries. We would be one of three couples at a table for several couples. I don't have an official link to the organization but the very good friend who invited us does and it is a Very Worthy Organization indeed. I was honored to drink their booze, consume their food, and applaud their Dignitaries.

David is less likely to enjoy these sorts of events than I am, but he is a) a very nice man and b) also fond of the friend who invited us, so he agreed to attend.* But he's a pretty sharp cookie and observed that he thinks the major reason I accepted with such alacrity was the company we would be keeping more than anything else.

"This is just social for you, isn't it?"**

"Well, sure it is. Oh, Honey, as long as we are invited by such good folks, I'd accept an invitation to run through a hail of bullets."


* He may have had other motives, I don't know. I shall not speculate here.

** Usually the correct assumption.

Like Sarah Chalke. Or Dick Sergeant. Or Brian Forster

Andy: You look different. Why do you look different?
Me: I dunno. Maybe because I'm being played by another actress?
Andy: That's very meta of you, but no.

She's known me a while

One of the positive things about having lunch with a friend who is taking pain killers and is a rather stresssed is that you can have exchanges like this:

Her: I've had too many people die lately so be careful.
Me: Be careful? Oh! You mean, like, crossing the street and stuff. For a minute I thought you meant "be careful not to say anything stupid and that ..."
Her: Oh yeah, that's a total crapshoot with you.

It's so nice to be understood.

Notes

"At the end of every rehearsal, we have what are called "notes." If they're not about you, they're boring but if they are about you, they're important."

Amy, giving the best summary I've ever heard for the last few minutes of rehearsal.

She is directing her second show which has a large cast, 90% of which are children, many under age 6, most doing their first show. She is my hero.

It pays to have smart assy friends

Because then you don't get in trouble for saying stuff like I did yesterday. I would probably never say anything so snarky to my very nice and not Smart Assy Friends.

Smart Assy Friend: So how's your Mom doing?*
Me: Oh, pretty well. She was pretty incoherent there for a while but she's recovering nicely.
SAF: Yeah, I spent some of the weekend incoherent, too.
Me: Yes, but with my mother, we can tell the difference.


*Mom spent a few days in the hospital with the UTI. Between the infection and the dehydration, she was not very lucid for a couple of days, scaring the bejeebers out of me. Yay both for anti-biotics and Mom's dislike of superbug-creating anti-bacterial everything.

Haaave you met Ted?

It is a cheery myth among my friends that I know everyone. One time I was presenting an award at Silver Spring Stage's annual awards party and Michael introduced me by saying that I needed no introduction as I know everyone. I got to the mike and something like, "Not quite. There are eight or so of you here that I haven't met. Please see my on your way out."

So tonight after the Nats game*, David and I decided to take the Circulator bus back to Union Station instead of fighting the crowds getting on the green line. David waved his wallet (which contains his SmarTrip card) over the reader on the bus and then I began explaining to the bus driver that I didn't have mine with me.

"Throw her off the bus!" commanded a voice from the front. The driver laughed and waved me back and David and I went and sat with theater-friend Blake (for the commanding voice was his), who was on the bus and who had been at the game. How nice to run into someone we knew!

We were chit-chatting waiting for the bus to get underway and someone near by took a closer look at me. "Leta?" It was Brick, one of my Markland friends, who I haven't seen in probably ten years or more. So that was nice, too!**

David watching me begin to ping-pong a conversation between these people from the disparate parts of my life and asked me if there was anyone on the bus I didn't know.

"Yes," I said, pointing to the nearest stranger. "Him." I stuck out my hand, "Hi, I'm Leta."

"Brian." He smiled and shook my hand.

So that's one more down and only 5 billion and some to go before I actually do know everyone.


*Pirates 8, Nats 5 in ten innings. Alas.
**Actual tally for the evening: Lauren from work was at the game but wasn't there with us, I saw her near the consessions; Jacki and Evan were at the game and I got to say "hi" to them during the 6th inning; Blake and Brick (and Brian) were on the bus; Blake introduced me to his friend Ashley and her friend while we were underway; and Rich and Peggy were on the Metro. Brett is going to be surprised to read this, but I didn't see anyone from my high school all evening.