October 20 – Day 44: Your 2018 National League Champion Los Angeles Dodgers


Yeah, I know it has nothing to do with my trip, but I gotta crow right now, while I can.

 108 wins? We won 107 last year, and

we know how that turned out ...

It’s been an odd day. I still don’t feel great, and am starting to feel a little throat congestion that I hope doesn’t get worse with a matinee on Sunday. (If it does, I have a “foolproof” cure that sounds awful, but to which I may have to revert.) Regardless, the day started by my waking up just before I needed to (in spite of not having set the alarm), and finding an email from John asking if he could change the linen today. I replied that I had a two-show day and would be gone from noon to 10:30, so anytime in there was fine. (When I came home, everything was done, though he’d lowered the shade and had the TV tuned to TCM with the sound blasting.)

I had breakfast and pre-ordered a hot tea at Starbucks to pick up on my way to the train. Surprisingly, it was ready when I got there, so I didn’t waste any time. Not that that stopped me from just missing the 6, but there was another train just a couple of minutes later, so I was fine.

Uneventful trip to the theatre. When I arrived, there was no one from the show there, and the dressing room was locked (I’ve never gotten the combination for the door), so I sat on the staircase and waited a couple of minutes until Elizabeth arrived (I scared her as she was coming down the steps) and let me in. Trish showed up next, and everyone else started to filter in eventually. No one seemed especially motivated, but we all were prepared to do the damn thing.

It turned out to be a pretty good show. YAQA, but they seemed involved (except for the person who kept coughing—Eric wanted to give him a lozenge—one old guy wearing a white baseball cap in the second row who spent a good portion of the show asleep). We’re still finding and trying new stuff and, now that our pace is up, one of the few benefits of a non-responsive audience is that the show just flies by. We’ve cut something like five minutes off the running time. Granted, there is the danger of confusing some people with the overwhelming amount of information, but you can’t have everything, one supposes. We did get a one-person standing O, though.

Normally, after a show, I duck my head in the shower to wash the goo out of my hair, but decided to forego it today since I figured I would just be putting it back in in a couple of hours. Trish, GG, and I headed for the diner we hit last Saturday, and I tried to repeat my own order, but the guy who took my order forgot the English muffin, which was just as well. When we were there last week, I distressed that the big TV in the back was tuned to Fox News. It wasn’t today, but the guy in the booth in back of us was grousing about immigrants and Elizabeth Warren to the order-taker, who seemed to be agreeing with him.

Despite just having had chicken soup to ward off whatever this is that’s ailing me, I decided I could use some hot tea, too, so I ordered a cup from the Starbucks on 58th. When I got there, the order had gotten lost (though I could see the cups over by the tea). If an order isn’t near the coffee-making station, it might as well not exist. I eventually got it and went to the theatre.

I thought about maybe napping a bit, but (as explained before) there’s nowhere good in the place to do that, so it was back to the dressing room. There was more than an hour to curtain, but I figured what the hell, and redid my hair and got into costume. Lots of talk, lots of jokes, everyone kind of sucking it up for the second show of the day.

That show went very well. I don’t know if we were just warmed up or what, but the audience was responsive (six or eight people stood), and it felt really good out there. Things were working nicely, and there’s not a better feeling in a show when that happens. In Act Two, though, we had an incident. I play a prison guard who is a survivor of Auschwitz. I have a pretty serious speech about being a Sonderkommando (“We were the prisoners who were to shepherd the condemned prisoners to the gas chamber and then lug the bodies out”). I’m in the middle of it, and I hear a clunk. A woman in the front row had dropped her bottle of water, and it must have rolled right to my feet. GG got up in the middle of my speech, retrieved the bottle, and put it somewhere around his table on the upstage platform. I heard the woman asked for the bottle back after the show.

 Public Enemy Number One.

I spent a good portion of the evening distracted by the Dodger/Brewer game, Game Seven of the National League Championship Series (meaning, whoever won was going to the World Series). I didn’t miss anything, but would go downstairs as often as I could to follow events. The Brewers took an early lead, but my boys came back and were leading 2-1 when I left the building.

I went down to the subway, but the 6 wasn’t running because of an injured passenger uptown somewhere, the 5 doesn’t stop anywhere I wanted to go, and the 4 was about 15 minutes away, so just as I was deciding to go downstairs and take the R or W to 8th Street, Yasiel Puig hit a three-run homer to seal the Dodger victory. I celebrated by calling Pidge, and just as I got downstairs, the R arrived, and I was off. One of the frustrating things about following a baseball game in the subway is that I have service only in the stations, so I’ll get 30 seconds of play-by-play, then a couple of minutes of a frozen screen, then more play-by-play.

I thought briefly of getting some pizza for supper, but decided to give Sunny and Annie’s a second, non-zinc-flavored chance, and ordered a turkey-and-cheddar hero that was actually pretty good. I’ve had better, but it was fresh and tasty, so that’s all I can ask for.

I came home to eat it while watching the Dodgers clinch the victory and the postgame coverage, then started in on this entry, somehow turning a day full of nothing, really, into more than 1,000 words. What it all means, I'm not sure, other than I'll have another week of tracking baseball games while in a show and coming home to late telecasts.

Bring on the Sawx!

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