I'm In Mourning

I enjoyed a pretty nice day off yesterday, save for the fact that I'd lost my cell phone on Sunday and spent yesterday shopping for and choosing a new one. Man, these things are expensive! I didn't even get one with all the bells & whistles, and still managed to spend $160. That's with tax, of course, but still - I imagine that I fell victim to the in-a-hurry-so-not-shopping-around-as-much-as-I-should syndrome. I just wanted it done.

Ironic, isn't it, that I chose to make my old cell phone the subject of some of my experiments with the ultra zoom lens attachments I bought recently. Maybe the universe was telling me that I needed to get a keepsake photo of it, 'cuz it was about to pass out of my life.

So I have a new cell phone, and I sent a mass e-mail to everyone who was in my phonebook to forward me their information; I even got ambitious and sent the request to people who weren't in my phonebook but who I'd always wanted to put in there. So I'm plugging the information in as it comes back. In the first day I've heard back from 29 people.

Which has turned out to be a bit of a blessing - since suddenly I'm getting updates from people I've not heard from in an age!

So I guess, in the long run, everything happens for a reason; and good can come of just about any bad turn.

I have a few hours to kill before rehearsal, so I hopped my (multiple) busses early and came over to the south side for an early dinner of Caesar Salad at, where else, Tuscany. This place really is my coffee house of choice. It's quiet by comparison to most - they don't really feel obliged to crank the atmospheric music until the bar crowd starts rolling in of an evening.

It's nicely decorated, too - lots of heavy wood and wooden chairs and tables - which seem to me to be rather rare these days.

And, of course, there's the eye candy. Its clientele is a mix of gay and straight people, with an emphasis on the gay, so it seems more evenly distributed (if not exactly true to the mix of the local population!).

Today's obsession is a really cute guy who's spent much of the afternoon sitting here drinking his coffee and going back and forth between reading his news weeklies and writing in his notebook. For once, I happen to be in a position to get a decent photograph of someone I'm obsessing over. I really, really need to get a better camera. Or, I need to get over secretly snapping photos of cute strangers. You may, of course, feel free to keep your opinions to yourself.

Lest you think that the only thing I take photos of is cute boys about whom I obsess, take a look at the cool picture of Crystal, our assistant director on Aristocrats. If she looks familiar to you, you've got a bitch-ass good memory. She worked with me as (I think, if I'm remembering this correctly) one of the stagehands on Father Figures, and there's a picture of her on the Father Figures photo page. This time I caught her on the fire escape stairs outside the City Theater's rehearsal hall; we'd just finished rehearsal and I had to hang around for my dialect coaching appointment with Natalie Baker, and Crystal was waiting to catch her bus - she'd been involved in an hydroplaning accident during the big rains a couple days ago, so her car was out of commission. Here's hoping the repairs aren't too expensive or time-consuming. Anyway, so I'm not just an old letch (lech?), and I can take pictures of things other than cute young boys. Now, of course you could argue that I'm substituting cute young girls for cute young guys, but as I said, you're welcome to keep your opinions to yourself.