DIRTY ROTTEN OKLAHOMA CITY, OK

"Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" on tour...

(Photo of our SM calling the show in Waco)

OK, well, you can't win them all. Waco - ridiculously cramped space, wild audience. Oklahoma City - space enough to build an ark, mostly mute audience. The crowd is sparse and mostly elderly. There are a few scattered people who guffaw loudly through the show, but overall, they are a tepid crowd at best. Christy is nervous since her big number is basically a five minute extravaganza that takes the piss out of Oklahoma. e.g. "Not a tree or a Jew to block the lovely view", or "..and our leading cause of death is melanoma", these lyrics after she has said things like, "It's all so flat, and peaceful, and flat". As it turns out, this number is the big hit of the show, and Christy gets the big hoots and cheers of the curtain call. The weather channel does not speak highly of our travel plans. Snow, rain, floods, hail and ice are pounding the central plains of America. We stand a slim chance of avoiding it all only if our timing is perfect. Our route from Oklahoma City to Colby, KS, our stop for the night, might just work if we can keep ahead of the storm. We do hit some pretty nasty ice, blowing snow and a closed section of freeway, but we manage to get ahead of the storm and stick pretty close to our schedule. As we travel across the vast plains of Kansas, I let my mind wander as I watch the landscape fly by. You've seen it in countless movies, but the endless, slowly changing terrain takes on a different connotation when you've been watching it flow past your window for 5 months. It suddenly occurs to me that this is a supremely strange existence. I spend the whole day on a bus, watching the plains turn to coast line or mountains or swamp, foraging for anything that resembles actual food in a land of truck stops and indifferent hamlets. At some point in the afternoon, I get off the bus, spend a scant hour or two working out or doing life administration before boarding the bus again to be taken to the venue. Once there, I don clothes that have been worn by many before me in order to speak words that have been spoken by many before me in order to distract the mortals who inhabit the dark on the other side of the orchestra pit. When it's all over, the people in the dark express their appreciation by smacking their hands together and I go back to the hotel and prepare to sleep in order to do it all again the next day. How many people, in their childhood years, while dreaming of being astronauts or doctors consider this strange life as a means of making a living?