My mom/MFM has Parkinson's Disease. Last summer, before we moved from Western Massachusetts to Northeast Ohio (Cleveland Rocks!), she was diagnosed with Parkinson's dementia.

If you can't remember how to spell dementia does that mean you have it? It just took me three times.

She broke her hip on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Eve. Her surgery meant a lot of people didn't get the day off. She was in surgery for five hours and got a unit of blood, then two more the next day because her counts were low. Her whites were fluctuating but she was discharged after two days of no signs of infection. The doctor said no weight on the leg at all for 6-8 weeks, and we'll have a follow-up a couple/three weeks from now.

Now she's in the sub-acute ward of a local rehab center. It's called Menorah Park. Lex asked whether that was where menorahs go to play... in the park. They answer the phone, "Shalom, Menorah Park."

Mom and us --me, my husband, our two young sons-- have been on this journey before so I already knew to ask whether each resident has his/her own TV and phone. You can't assume that they will so I always ask, and they said yes, which is true, but the question I never thought to ask was, "am I going to have to do her laundry." That's a small, hot load, run all by itself and dried on low-knits.

It's also kosher, which means that the only "outside" foods I can bring in are uncut fruits and vegetables: for those, they call in a Moyle.

I called a family care-plan meeting and everyone there --except me and the intern-- started throwing around the words, "private pay." I told them that MFM was a valuable member of our household but she'd only been there for four days so let's not even start to think about going there. Then the nurse manager said, "it's not us who decides, it's Medicare," which is true, yes, but I know that particuarly sub-acute wards have some leeway in what they define as week-to-week progress (which is what Medicare needs to see in order to foot the bill).

Her spirits are good and she's working hard in therapy and I had her happily drinking a diet coke and eating Cheez-Its when I told the nursing station I was leaving. Forgot to grab her laundry (grrr...) but I'm taking Lex there today and then I think he and I will go for ice cream, junior-sized.

Three days later I was able to hand off the jar of MFMs pee to a lab. Let's hope it's still good.

Today, I ran a fool's errand. I had a iffy feeling about it anyway, so I brought the whole family with me. My beloved, kick-assedly talented DH Monstro drove. I sat in the seat where he has to put the van in "P" and then push the button to open my door. I ran all over the Cleveland Clinic campus and experienced conversations with green hoodies, redjackets, and a hospital cop.

MFM (My Favorite Mother) isn't feeling well and I think she has a UTI, but she couldn't give a sample on Friday at the doctor, so she brought the kit home with her (and a hat!) and we did the catch yesterday. That afternoon, I drove to the Cleveland-Clinic-affiliated ancillary surgical center in my city. But it was Saturday, and it was closed.

[The Cleveland Clinic is the #4 in the nation according to the banners hung in all the streets, which are many because it spans 15+ blocks with 3-4 up and down.]

The security guard Saturday said my best bet was Main Campus, so I found the number for Laboratory Client Services and called. "Oh yeah, bring it here," the guy said. "It has a bar code, right?" Yes, it does. [Later, in-person, he disavowed all involvement.] He gave me directions that ultimately included an ambulances-only, no-throughway "street." Monstro and the kids and MFM let me off and I found the red counter after asking just before it came into view.

"And I have a Master's degree!" I told my directional enabler.

The lady behind the red counter looked at it and shook her head. "There's no papers. You have to go to J Building, to Phlebotomy." Further interrogation got her to tell me the building was also called "The Miller Building."

I got back to the van, bag in hand, and told them, "I've never worked so hard to hand off a jar of pee."

We drove up and down. The "Miller Building" is the Miller Pavillion, a double-digit-story, curved glass edifice you expected to see Tom Cruise climbing. Hard to miss. Monstro let me out again and I asked some helper-youths in green hoodies where to go. They pointed me toward the red coats and I marched down a one-person-wide hallway there for that sole purpose.

The red coats tittered at my request. The worker got right on the phone while the trainee ruffled through slip-coated booklet pages. I mumbled something about Stump the Band and the trainee said, "Oh no, she just has to talk to the person who knows whether it's A-10, J4, blah blah." Clearly, she was worthless so I stepped up to blatantly eavesdrop on the phone conversation in progress.

The red-jacket lady, late-40s, coiffed, waved her nails in the air as she consulted with her higher-up, Oz. "OK, so she should go direct to the lab," she said. I interrupted,"if he's going to say the lab on 93rd and Carnegie, I've been there and they wouldn't take it."

A few more worthless minutes and she hung up, but not before saying, "OK, thanks, I'll let her know," which is never ever going to preface news like, "you just won the lottery!" or "that STD scare was a false alarm."

"You know, it's the weekend, and we just have a very light staff," she started.

"Are you saying that there isn't anyone in this building who can test my mother's urine for a UTI?"

She shrugged. "We're just really lightly staffed on the weekend."

OK. Clearly, when I first saw them and said, "third time's a charm!", I jinxed it.

I strode down the hallway for everyone and turned the corner past the hospital cop, who had the stance of Morgan Freeman in last night's Casa de Movie "Gone Baby Gone."

"This whole place," I told him while not breaking stride, "and nobody can help me find out why my mom is sick."

"How, what, what do you mean?"

"I go to the lab, they say come here. I talk to the redcoats and they say go back, or just wait until Monday." During part of this I was facing him, walking backward, not breaking stride (my new boots are great for that, very solid-footed and just high enough). I waved my hand, walked through the double doors, and came back to the van, bag in hand.

"Nobody there can take it," I said. "Time for lunch!" When we got to Melt, I made sure Monstro locked the minivan.

"I wouldn't want anyone to mess with what's in the backseat," I said, helping MFM and her walker over the uneven pavement.

"What, you mean the jar of pee?" she answered, cracking up and we laughed.

I'm going to take it back to my neighborhood's surgery center tomorrow morning. Does pee go bad?

***


"You should have thrown the piss at them," Monstro said while I was writing this before leaving for Rite Aid to buy beer.

Go to the gym. Write on the day days I can't make it to the gym. If I haven't done either by that evening, embroider on my piece for Anne's Wedding-Dress Project.

Yesterday felt like Monday so I'll take Friday today for $200, Alex. Mom awoke confused and achey so I spent 25 minutes getting her a doctor's appointment for 10:00 this morning, and her new agency-based caregiver (we let the other one go; she didn't clean for shit and was always texting and always had Mom buy her lunch when they went out) took her so I could take the boys to Chuck E. Cheese, as promised before Winter Break even began. Both boys resume school next week and I look forward to 6 hours of being without caregive-ees during the end of next week.

Just found out about a ukulele workshop on Feb. 12 that doesn't cost too much money. Going to have to talk with Monstro about it; we are thinking of making a considerable purchase this year and are doing best to watch our dollars. Anyway, I think I could use another workshop. I'd like to take Dave Schwensen's comedy workshop this spring but he's upped the admission to two-hundred bucks and that's steep for me. True, at the end of it you get a video of yourself in front of the iconic "IMROV" logo... I'm hoping they'll start offering amateur nights so I can get back up there. Of course, there's the small issue of writing something new, really honing it. I can't believe I'm saying this but I wish I were back in Western MA for a week -- the day after I left they started like 5 more open-mics every month, some of them weekly, most of them MCd by my Bishop's Lounge buddies.

If this were my didn't-write-it Christmas letter, this paragraph would be about the balance I'm finding in taking care of my mom and family while also achieving success in stand-up comedy. I would like to come up with a program and present it at Rotary Clubs and the Elks, etc. I know I've complained before that the Cleveland open-mic circuit starts too late for my schedule; by bringing comedy and education to the local clubs, I could at least do some lunchtime gigs. I'm much better at lunchtime. Plus, it's not past my bedtime. My dad is involved in a NorCal older-men's group so I'm going to start by talking to him about what types of speakers they have at their monthly lunches.

Anyway, as I said before, MFM isn't feeling well and the boys are home for three more days, so please, say a prayer. The peace of Christ be with you.

Monstro and I had a date night last night so after a Lagunitas IPA draft and three, $3-apiece maki rolls (Hiroshi's Pub has rockin' sushi), we went to the local multiplex to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: the one directed by David Fincher, starring Daniel Craig as Mikael and Rooney Mara as the fictitious-heroine-force-for-our-time Lisbeth Salander. It kinda sucked.

The rest of this will be Not Safe For Work so go click on a picture of my kids to go somewhere nicer.    more »

I did five sun salutations before I ran for 30 minutes today, and both felt pretty darn good. This was the first "good run" I've had in a few weeks; after my fit-test fail I took a couple of weeks off (per the suggestion of "Runner's World," honest). Yesterday I ran about two miles and today I ran just over that, starting at a slow baseline for 10 minutes and then upping either the speed or the incline for 4 minutes, then recovery.

Also, my hypothesis has been confirmed: Clevelanders drive better in the snow than Massachusettsians do.

Also, on the morning of New Year's Eve, I finally got the Ohio plates for my minivan. Now I just have to send back my old ones to MA.

It will surprise none of you to learn that Monstro and I were the hit of the New Year's Eve party we went to with our best friends here in Cleveland. If you're looking for a way to spend New Year's Eve, go to a party that skews old: where you, your sweet baboo, and your two friends will at first only know yourselves and each other, and throughout the evening become acquainted with the other four people at your large, round, white-tableclothed dinner table. Our table was right next to the open bar and I also got to speak with the two bartenders and the policeman, and I got to kind of school him because he totally let me reach for a napkin on the counter within inches of his well-armed holstered-gun hip. (No, that's not code for anything. He had a gun.) Overall, it was like crashing a wedding on a cruise ship.

Even though the music started in the 1930s, the DJ brought us to a promising Shirelles song that would've had my dad spouting, "now *that's* some great music," and finally threw us a "how will this go?" round of Let's Get it Started, for which Monstro, Karen, and I raced to the dance floor to vote with our feet. Someone should've called homicide because we were *killing* it on the dance floor. I'm pretty certain the "wooh!"s from strangers were for us. Well, OK, for me. I tore it up.

The surprising buzzkill of the night was Adele's "Rollin' in the Deep" (also the dog of her Royal Albert Hall live recording, because she got all stuffed up during her first encore, "Someone Like You"). RitD simply didn't keep it going on the dance floor, because although it thumps pretty hard, the tempo is not as quick as you think it is. If it got sped up, that would be an amazing song <-- my overall philosophy on improving The [American] Songbook.

The hotel down the road offered a free shuttle as well as a free make-up shuttle when we missed the one we had the reservation with, because the digital clock in our room was 10 minutes slow, which you know the guy who had the room before us did just to mess with us; thanks, buddy.

I also invented another new drink last night. Instead of my Virgin's Blush (tonic water and the merest drizzle of Chambord), this new one doesn't have a name yet; I like "jaundiced zombie" for its irony, because it's a light, rehydrating cocktail that settles one's overextended tummy right quick. Next time you're in need of something low-alcohol, fresh, and stomach-settling, try tonic water mixed with a 1/3 shot of Grand Marnier. Tonic water has a lot of sugar so if you're watching that, try it with Schweppes' diet tonic water, the only one worth mixing with quality booze that I know of. How about you?

With either tonic, it's delicious --fizzy bitter orange-- but if your bartender's Polish and wearing a patchworked vest of Crown Royale bags? He'll look at you funny.

It's worth it. *Best* of all, though, was that we had an OVERNIGHT SITTER (cue angelsong) and didn't come home until noon, well, 12:02 on New Year's Day. And, because it's Sunday, we'll all still get to watch the Tournament of Roses Parade tomorrow morning on HGTV, where it will I believe be broadcast commercial-free.

Happy New Year and best wishes for 2012 from all of us here at Motormouth, who love you very much.

Mom's health aide arrived 20 minutes late. "Are you OK?" I asked. "I feel like I might be coming down with something," she said, "but I hate calling in." I sent her home. Now, my house is cleaner than it would have been if she'd been here for 5 hours, so I'll take that.

I'm having coffee tomorrow morning with the woman who spearheaded Cleveland's Parkinson's Disease fundraiser, and I'm really looking forward to it.

I may also be within three steps of getting Ohio plates on my car, but I don't want to jinx it by saying anything.

Finally got my Lohan cover-issue of Playboy and I've got to give it to Lindsay, her boobs totally point in the same direction. Too bad her eyes don't.

Sorry for the bummer post left below for the holiday season. That was the day that I took my three-month fitness evaluation and learned that after attending the gym 40 times from Sept. 11 to Dec. 8th, I was actually two-percent fatter. I am the only person I know who goes to the gym "like a machine" (other people's words, not mine) and gets fatter for the effort. For real. I can run three miles in 36:30 and five miles in less time than it used to take me to run four, and I'm fatter.

All-in-all I guess things are going OK, with just enough annoyances to keep me from becoming too proud of myself. The Master Theorem is going on hiatus and I'm bummed, bummed, bummed, as it was a once-a-week assurance that I would use my brain for something. There's something very... turgid about answering The World's Most Obvious Questions day after day, hour after hour, sometimes minute after minute (BK's a repeat-requester, the one who asks me to do something while I'm doing that very something). I sent M, TMT's master of the game, a pathetic thank-you note that he probably found hilarious, because more and more I'm learning how funny my pathos is to other people, and as I believe that comedy exists to help to alleviate our --inherently human-- fear of death, there's something rather apropos about the whole thing.

The good news is that even though we weren't there for Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, we have found a church, and the people are friendly and welcoming and we're enjoying the effort we put in. So far I've made salad and garlic bread for our shelter-ees one night and also brought a plate of our homemade cookies for their finger-food festival fellowship hour (that feels like it should be in capitals but I'm not going to change it). As I handed over the cookies the lady accepting them said, "Lynn, you get to take a bye for a week," inferring an as-needed basis. Nice.

For those seeking closure on a few things I've written about:

1) "Hey Lynn, what happened with the guy who gave you your first kiss and then went on to commit your hometown's first murder in nearly 20 years?" [Ed. note: tragic photo accompanies article and the whole story's' a total bummer, which contributed to my downwardness before Christmas.]

2) "Played any ukulele lately?" (yeah, and the picture makes me look like a chinny dork, but also captions me with the wrong name, so it's fine.) My book is on the right.

Anyway, it's nearly the new year, and it's time for new heights and new goals and new things that not only let-but-encourage me to use my brain. Coming soon!

Some days are for running hard at the gym; other days are for crying in the changing room. Today was the latter.

Sorry for the lack of a birthday post prior to this. It was indeed an incredible day. Monstro bought me a spectacular piece of jewelry, I had two tequila shots at our family's Mexican lunch (one was free and came with a song and a sombrero. Olé!), and then Monstro, the boys, MFM (My Favorite Mother for those of you keeping track) and I went to the opening-day premiere of "The Muppets." Words cannot express how much of an impact the Muppets had on my formative years, so for their new movie to premiere on my 40th birthday was kismet. After the movie we went home and then once the sitters arrived, Monstro took me to dinner at our new favorite restaurant, where the owner gave me the sweet-potato-pecan pie he was going to have on his Thanksgiving (he let me share it with every patron in the restaurant), and then we went to an Irish pub with a kickin' band (for old guys) and our next-door neighbors showed up and they played One Bourbon, One Shot, and One Beer, which made me curse Alex a little for being such an asshole and killing himself, and then we went home, and in the morning Monstro and I had furtive "don't let anyone know we're already awake" sex. Which, besides camping sex, is about my favorite kind of sex.

All in all, a spectacular ringing in of this new decade. Holla!

I'll be onstage at the new Cleveland Improv tomorrow night, Tuesday, Nov. 15. Doors open at 6, show starts at 7:30. The Improv's new location is 1148 Main Ave, next to Shooters on the river. If you and any friends you'd like to bring drop my name at the box office, you'll get in for a buck apiece. The headliner is Ryan Dalton, who just won the World Series of Comedy in Las Vegas, and the show will also feature the Seinfeld writer who wrote the hilarious episode, "The Pick" ("It was a scratch!"). I hope you can make it, and if you can, bring your pals.

I'm listening to MFM talk to her physical therapist and she is just spouting nonsense. The thing is, she thinks it's the truth.

Got my "thanks but no thanks" email from the Cleveland Comedy Festival today. Suckage. I'm not surprised -- my video was less-than-professional grade (though it did start w/ the words "zit spooge," which I figured could only help my cause), and of the featured performers on the festival's Web site, TWO are women. Out of 20. Yeah, because 10% of the population is women, right? Whatever. This has me determined to be as funny as possible on my next Tuesday foray at the Cleveland Improv.

Both boys have coughs so we're all home today. Tomorrow both boys have the day off from school, you know, because it's so convenient to vote with two children in tow. Monstro and I did manage to get nearly all the leaves out of our yard and onto our tree lawn so the leaf truck could suck them up. Good thing, too, because our leaf wall was starting to fence us in!

So today was the second Saturday of a three-Saturday stand-up comedy workshop. It's being led by the inimitable Dave Schwensen, who has more ties to the comedy industry than Barney Stinson has ties. This week was all about presenting an in-depth version of the work we shared last week. Let me tell you, even to run rough-draft stuff through on the Cleveland Improv stage is a frickin' blast and a half.

Last week I did some stuff about the town where we live now, and bees, and cell phones, and more bees.

"We want to know more about you, Lynn," Dave said. "Like, why did you choose the city you live in?"

"Because my mom has mobility issues and this was the only house that suited her needs."

"Well..." he trailed off.

So I wrote more about our town and then wrote some stuff about being a full-time caregiver, and then I fretted throughout most of the movie Monstro and I watched last night, because it was "Bridesmaids" and that shit just wasn't funny. I even called Dana on my way to today's workshop, opening with, "Well, I'm off to my comedy workshop to not be funny."

And then I did my bit, and of course, the stuff about my town fell flat and they laughed, laughed, laughed at my caregiving stuff.

Comedy, you are a fickle bitch.

Monstro and I had a date night the other night and stumbled upon an AMAZING restaurant in our neighborhood: Opus Restaurant. If not for the $25 restaurant.com gift certificate I purchased for four bucks, we never would have stopped in, but I'm so glad we did because the drinks were stupendous and the food! Oh, the food! We became the first people to order "the tomahawk", a 32-ounce bone-in wagyu beef cut that was so rich, it tasted almost like liver (but in a good way). Plus, there was a jazz combo that played the type of jazz that even Monstro likes. And the red velvet cake we had for dessert was delicious (though I think the sugar kept me awake far too late).

OK, time to go to the gym.

When I found out this week I would need to contribute to a month-of-November class birthday party for Lex, I got kind of excited. See, I have this cute animal-face cake pan, and I had a box of banana cake mix in my pantry, so viola! Monkey-face cake! Found the icing directions and today I baked the cake....

And 10 minutes before it was to come out of the oven I thought, "hmmmm, wonder if I should have looked at the allergen info?"

(See, Lex's classroom is tree-nut free, due to some food allergies suffered by his classmates).

Allergen info: Contains wheat, soy and (wait for it) TREE NUTS (pecans).

Shit. Off to the store we went (me, BK, and MFM) to buy a non-nut mix. Of course, the fancy-pants supermarket had only gluten-free mix, and I'll be darned if I'm going to present THAT to my little angel, so I tried Walgreens. They had two boxes of allergen-free yellow-cake mix. I bought them both and raced home, then washed the cake pan, made a yellow-cake monkey-face cake before Lex got home from school (popped it out of the pan about three minutes before he got off the bus), and then made a batch of cupcakes, just in case there's not enough monkey-face cake for everyone.

Nine eggs later and all I need to do is ice everything. Damn straight I'll be posting pictures. :)

I continue to go to the gym nearly every day. The scale hasn't budged so much as a pound but I can tell that I'm getting stronger. I had a fit-test analysis done when I began my membership and then another one month later, because I was burning out a little and, again, the scale wasn't budging. Well, if the gym's tape-measure analysis is to be believed, I dropped 5% body fat in a month. Pretty cool.

My smallish goal once I started my gym regimen was to learn how to run on the treadmill without falling off. Now I run on the 'mill nearly every time and I have yet to fall off (though I have accidentally tripped the "emergency stop" button a couple of times, which brings the damn thing to a screeching halt and, yes, is more than a bit of a buzzkill). Typically I run about three miles. Yesterday I started on the rowing machine -- rowed 2000 meters in 9 minutes 40 seconds, and then got on the treadmill and ran 2.5 miles. Then I punished myself on a few of the strength machines before saying "screw it" and taking a nice, hot shower.

Today I have a callus and a bit of a rubbing blister from where my wedding bands rubbed against the palm of my left hand. So, yeah, I'm feeling pretty badass, and hardly sore at all!

My BFF, Fringes, is doing the National Blog Posting Month. It's kind of like National Novel Writing Month, but with a lower word count. Basically, bloggers are encouraged to write every day. While it would be spectacular to post 30 blog posts this month, I'm not going to go all crazy with it, but I will encourage myself to check in here more often than usual.

Yesterday was Halloween. The boys got a tremendous haul of candy -- even MFM's physical therapist showed up with goody bags for them -- and today the sugar hangover was powerful, indeed.

I couldn't sleep last night. This was due to a combination of factors: BK's cold, MFM's trying to wedge her walker into her half-bathroom around midnight, the shocking conclusion to this week's episode of The Walking Dead, and Kim Kardashian's failed marriage. Now, nobody who knows me in real life is surprised by my hatred of all things Kardashian -- even the illustrious Bruce Jenner has dropped about 100 notches in my estimation -- but this 72-day wedding after the $10-million hoopla makes me violently ill. E Online has been whoring this family out for years and I wonder whether they're a mite pissed off that Kim filed for divorce during the same month that they showed a two-night Kardashian Wedding Spectacular brouhaha. Or maybe they're happy because divorce = drama = good TV = happy advertisers.

The whole thing is sickening. The SF Chronicle posted a story about other celebrity marriages that quickly failed -- Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman's nuptials only lasted 10 days -- but you know what? That doesn't make me feel better. Especially when so many people are screaming that same-gender marriage destroys the sanctity of the union. My friends Nicki and Emily have been married for six years and they're doing a lot more to promote the sanctity of wedded bliss than any cheap-ass cat-faced reality "star" did.

I wonder how many people who argue against gay marriage watched both nights of the Kardashian Wedding Spectacular.

I just had to tell my mom how to spell her name while she signed her voter registration application... should I really be mailing this to the Board of Elections? Or should it conveniently "get lost"?

Yeah, I mailed it. But only because by the time the presidential elections come around, corporations will get 100 votes for every resident, so her one vote won't matter. Right?

The good news is, I've been accepted into Dave Schwensen's Comedy Workshop: three Saturdays of comedy development, capped by a Wednesday-night, five-minute showcase at the Cleveland Improv. To say I'm stoked doesn't even begin to cover it. I'm particularly looking forward to developing some clean comedy, so I can take part in the coffeehouse open-mics which are much more in line with my bedtime.

Other good news: Monstro, the boys and I are going to California next month, where we'll see my dad and stepmother for the first time in over a year. I'm so eager for this I'm practically ready to start walking there.

And now for the rest of it. MFM got a wild hare last week and rushed out the front door without her walker and of course crashed to the ground. She didn't break anything but wrenched her right foot and has been in bed for the past five days, so I'm waiting on her hand-and-foot (no pun intended) and GD that's tiring. And, she just referred to my husband as "what's his name." She will be staying in respite care while we're away; I'm really looking forward to the break. I'm tired.

We joined a gym last Sunday and I was there for seven consecutive days. They have childcare but not MFM-care, so I'm going whenever Monstro's schedule allows, as well as whenever the hired MFM-care is in place. It's nice having somewhere to go.

Well, since last I wrote, I have moved to Ohio, seen Niagara Falls, started one kid in Kindergarten, another in Preschool, sent Monstro off to his new job at Case Western Reserve University, renewed a friendship with a dearest friend from high school who also lives in the realm of our new home in Ohio (Cleveland area), hired and fired one home-health agency for MFM, hired a second agency (this one seems better, please cross your fingers), and have as of yet managed to stave off the nervous breakdown that's probably coming along any.minute.now.

So yeah, things are in flux and have changed but are mostly good. Except for MFM, who becomes a more unreliable narrator every day. Her diagnosis as of eight weeks ago is "Parkinson's dementia" and yes that's as crappy as it sounds, and it will likely only become crappier, so that, well, sucks.

Nevertheless I am moving forward, trying to find a little bit of work so I'm not exclusively providing care to MFM and the boys. I'd like to be doing some stand-up out here but so far all the ones I've found in bars don't start until 10 pm and the ones in coffee shops are in coffee shops were people are unlikely to be drunk and I'm unlikely to be allowed to be the blue-vulgar comic I am. So I'm working on some clean stuff, and have come up with a couple of bits, but for now they're being shared just in my notebook or Facebook.

Good news: the woman who came from the new home-health agency has a friend who is willing to watch my kids, so Monstro and I have a date night tonight. Too bad we don't have a van conversion. Which reminds me of BK's new favorite joke: What is the mouse's favorite game? Hide and squeak! Squeak squeak squeak!

And here are the YouTube links, courtesy of the very funny Matt Woodland:

Part 1 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 2 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 3 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 4 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 5 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 6 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 7 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 8 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour
Part 9 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

I've never tried this before but here's my NOT SAFE FOR WORK scriptnotes with post-mortems in parenthesis.


Opening Joke: I want to open a seafood restaurant called “Fishy.”

NSFW dirty jokes about Mr. Hugh Hefner and OTRs

(I told them the title after asking if they knew what NSFW meant, and one girl said “Not Safe For Work” into the mic for me. I asked if they liked my coat, that I was trying a new look, and the response was pretty positive. I asked if they could guess where my coat was from and [P. De Vries?] shouted, “Old Navy.” And I said,

“You’re right! Maybe that will be my thing. ‘Oh, yeah, she’s the one w/ Old Navy.’ I need some Navy jokes now.)

(Then I said that I’d written these pages last night and I was glad to be there. I read the title and then explained that there was a footnote because I’ve read a lot of David Foster Wallace, and if you’ve read even a little of DFW you’ve actually read a lot because that’s what reading him’s like, and that an OTR is an "on-topic related" and that's a real thing that I made up and you should tweet it so I can see it when I get a Twitter.)

I’m not saying Hugh Hefner is old and gets laid a lot, but his balls are retreads.

A retread, in case you’re from New York and don’t know, is a tire that was all used up but remanufactured in order to extend its useful service life.

Retreaded for an extended useful service life. Now, to me, that sounds like Hugh Hefner's balls.

Right on, Mr. Hefner. I believe every word of it.

I don't, however, know what Hef's balls look like in real life: never seen a picture or anything. Which is funny to me, because he publishes the *seminal* (ahem) magazine for naked-women peeping, and yet we’ve never seen his own goodies.

In the day and age of the sex tape of EVERYONE, where is Hugh Hefner's sex tape? What, there’s no videocameras in the Playboy Mansion?

The hilarious Nick Cårøn closed this joke with, “Hugh Hefner has tons of sex tapes; he’s just not IN any of them.”

Anyway, I demand equal play for equal wank. That’s got to be in Title IX, somewhere. (I asked, a few people in the audience knew Title IX enabled equal funding for men’s and women’s collegiate sports.)

Anyway, he was going to be married this weekend but now it looks like the wedding’s off. It’s too bad they couldn’t work it out, Hef and his twentysomething fiancée; you know, for the grandchildren’s sake. Hell, they’re not so different from one another... For instance, his brandy decanter is crystal and her name is Crystal. They enjoy long walks on the beach together: Crystal in her Shape-Ups, Hugh in his oxygen tent.

(Then I offered “Alternate Endings for this joke: Iron lung? Tanning bed? Pajama factory?” Pajama factory worked both with this crowd and my D&D adventuring party.)

They both have bald crotches: hers because she waxes, his because first it went gray and then all his pubes fell out. (When I wrote this joke I laughed so hard, I snorted. I made myself snort. Fucking awesome. So I told the audience, and they asked me to snort but I said I couldn’t do it on demand, that it was an organic thingy. )

This is merely to poke fun at a man who's had my respect for two decades. I'm a 20-year Playboy subscriber. (Told the young audience, “It’s OK to be pushing 40 because you can say you’ve been doing something for 20 years and when you started it wasn’t illegal) and there's a lot to be said for the magazine. Really. The longevity alone: December 1953 was issue one. That was 58 years ago. Some of you have great-grandmothers who are 58-years old. (I told the audience that after that sentence was a parentheses with “Holyoke?” therein and that got all the laughs whereas the great-grandmother part was met w/ crickets.)

Playboy publishes interviews, jokes, searing journalism. I read it for the pussy.

“Retreaded balls.” Funny. I don't think "retreaded cock" sounds as funny as balls. Maybe "prick." What do you think? Are retreaded balls funnier than a retreaded cock would be? (Someone in the audience yelled, “Johnson!” I said, “Yeah, I’d use that, but my last name is Johnson and I wouldn’t want to seem self-aggrandizing”, which broke the place up and I snorted and they laughed even harder and someone (Matt Woodlawn?) yelled “there it is!”)

Retread. Look it up! If you really want to know about it, you can also retread stairs, which is strange to me because tires and stairs are very different shapes to be associated by the same action verb. For that matter, so are cocks. END of SET

Despite tornadoes raging throughout Western Mass, I went to Bishop's Lounge to do my third-ever stand-up comedy set. I got there too early because I had a lot of material and needed to make an outline of what was going to go where. The sign-up sheet had 15 slots on it and I chose number 12, so that I could go on after people'd had enough booze but so I wouldn't have to follow anyone too funny (the funniest people sign up at the end). The audience was small (I blame the aforementioned tornadoes) so it was basically a whole lot of comedians and maybe five or six actual audience members. Tough room but we made it work.

A couple of interesting things arose last night:

1: Background: two Wednesdays ago, I met a woman who'd been kind of slandered in that day's newspaper -- she managed a local restaurant. I was pretty outraged so I wrote a letter to the editor, which ran in that Saturday's paper. Then, about four days later, I went to that restaurant, and a few minutes after I sat down, a waitress approached me. "Are you the one who wrote that letter?" I said that I was, and she thanked me profusely. But I didn't know how she knew it was me until I saw her at Bishop's last night. After the comedy was over I talked to her. "Did you know I was the one who wrote the letter because you'd seen me do comedy here?" I asked. "Yes," she said. Crazy!!!!

2: Even though there were plenty of available spots, nobody signed up to go on after me. Hmmm.

OK. As for my set, it went well. I had two friends in the audience, one of whom taped me until his batteries died. Here's the link for Lynn B. Johnson's June 1, 2011 tornado-day set. This is the first five minutes and it's actually pretty safe for work. The dirty stuff didn't come in until the end. So, except for some eff words, this video is pretty tame. Another comedian taped my whole set and I'll post that link when I have it.

I'm starting to think there's something to this, people...

I went back and did more stand-up comedy last night. Spoiler alert: I got more laughs than expected. I arrived at 7:36 and the list was already pretty full.

"Is there room on the list?" I asked Nick, the M.C.

"Just put your name down toward the end," he replied. Score!

The place was super crowded and my friend Ruth showed up with a couple of friends in tow, so this time I knew someone in the audience. This made me a bit more nervous than I would have been, but it wasn't anything a Maker's Mark on the rocks with a splash of water couldn't cure. I had to sit through a lot of comedians because I was in the final four (final three, actually, but who's counting? Me.).

I'd prepared a bunch of stuff over the past week and then didn't use any of it, choosing instead to use the stuff I wrote in the car on the way over. It worked great: much better than expected, per the spoiler alert. I'm proud to say that I didn't recycle any jokes from the week before; it was all new material.

Once again I was the only woman to take the stage, so my opening line was, "I'm Lynn B. Johnson and let's give it up for all the guys who came before me (big applause) because I was on the balcony with them before the show and they ALL came before me (big laughs), which means they're all either really good at it, or really bad at it.

Then I talked about how it's my personal philosophy to set the bar low, except when playing limbo, and how I've lost 60 pounds since the day I gave birth to my second kid, and about my size 16 skinny jeans being like a one-night stand: you're not fooling me, and you're not fooling you, but you're saying what I want to hear, so yeah, I'll get in your pants, Old Navy. Then I talked about fast-food and I got to tell my filthiest joke, yay, and then I talked about BK's $1.99 apple fries (because when I buy an apple I want to pay extra for the packaging), and how God is smarter than us and how that was proved by my conversion to Christianity, and about this Saturday's alleged apocalypse, which everyone had heard about so really, not a bad return-on-investment for that guy's life savings, and then I closed with, "I'll tell you this one last thing: if on Saturday, I'm raptured away, and you loot my house, I will fucking haunt you." Big laughs. Thanks, you've been a great crowd, goodnight!

Then, at the end of the night when the M.C. puts all of the comedians' names in a hat and the bartender pulls one out and a crappy prize is awarded, guess what? I won! I gave the M.C. shit about the sweater vest he was wearing -- I accused him of stealing it from my mom but seriously, I would *never* let my mom wear that thing -- and he gave me a credit-card-payment folio with a "happy anniversary" bean in it; I'm to plant it and then it allegedly will unfurl a blossom that somehow conveys a message of "happy anniversary."

Well, we had already known each other for a week, so I suppose it's apropos. Got lots of "you're funny"s after the set and plenty of hearty handshakes from the other comedians. Nick told me how happy he was that I won tonight's mystery prize, and how he just grabs something crappy from his room to raffle off every week.

Terrific, terrific, terrific. Maybe there's something to this, after all.

Not bad for halfway through my first cup of coffee this morning... this is a "how's it sound?" track as a warm-up to a little concert I'm giving at Teacher Appreciation Day this Wednesday. It helps me a lot to hear a recording of an in-progress song: completely revolutionized my rendition of "Fields of Gold," though that's not what this song is.

Motormouth fans will be excited to learn that this is my first "New Music" post to feature Mr. Koa (my new tenor uke) as well as my alter-ego, Auntie Haole Badass. Enjoy!

And I know this because a jury of people 10+ years younger than I, with whom I was in no way personally acquainted, laughed their asses off at the stand-up comedy routine I performed at Bishop's Lounge last night. Twelve hours later and I'm still buzzing from the high of it all.

I'm particularly happy because boy oh boy did they set me up to fail. I got there late so I was #11 on the list. Number 10 was a guy who was obviously a crowd favorite, who started his set with the announcement that this would be his last night at Bishop's because he was moving to NYC, and then he went on to do a hilarious set that included jokes about how his grandma buys his clothes and how everyone in the room had measured their own penis at one time or another. Trust me, it was funny.

Then the M.C. took the mic and introduced me with, "I think this is this person's first time here, and I don't know anything about her, so don't feel like you have to react, just do what you'd normally do, it's cool. Please welcome Lynn B. Johnson." Thanks dude. No blowies for you.

So I changed my opening line to "I'm Lynn B. Johnson and I have never measured my penis, that last guy is full of shit." And the whole crowd laughed. Then I talked some more and they kept laughing. I couldn't even tell you about 25% of what I said, it just flowed from my hastily scribbled set-list outline. I talked about my Michelle Obama arms (yeah, OK, you got me, I'm not black), about childbirth, about Baby Safe Havens, about diaper changes, about allergies and married sex and snoring. Some girls in the front row had been eating pork paninis, and the M.C. had made much of this, so I referred to Monstro's tool as a pork panini and I thought those girls were going to fall down laughing. My final joke is a thinker, so people were laughing hard and then harder as I left the stage and went back to my corner in the back of the room.

A young woman at the bar got my attention and we went to the lounge area, where she told me that a guy she works with puts together comedy nights in Holyoke and she had to get him in touch with me because I'm "fucking hilarious." It was about then that my friend Dana showed up ("Lynn, I was on the sidewalk three stories down and heard people laughing and clapping for whom I can only assume was you."), and after the comedy was over and we were outside on the balcony, she was there to witness all the other comedians coming up to me and saying wow, how great I was, and how they hoped I'd come back next week, awesome set.

I feel like Cinderella. Well, Cinderella with a filthy mouth and no pumpkin.

When 9/11 happened, I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains with no TV. I read the news but didn't see it. While out the next night for Shannon's birthday at Original Joe's, I sat with my back to the news. Even now, I can honestly say I've seen a mere handful of video captures from that horrible day.

And now, today, Britain's Prince William married Catherine Middleton and she was so beautiful and his uniform was Irish and Westminster Abbey, hard to find a place holier, and the entire event choreographed to high pomp and... eyepiercingly lovely and right, a London fairytale.

And MFM's a total anglophile and would have loved to have watched it with me, and she started watching at 6:00, but I didn't set my alarm and I didn't end up coming downstairs until the young marrieds were happily-ever-after-ing to Buckingham Palace in the convertible coach.

And yeah, of course I DVRd it on the TV in the family room and maybe we'll watch it tomorrow, or this weekend, but I feel guilty. I never manned up to watch any 9/11 videos, the most violent images to be filmed on U.S. soil. What's my worthiness factor for commemorating the happiest and fanciest day of this new millennium?

(Linking my thoughts of the Royal Wedding with NYC mass murder. These connections will be a real boon to the stand-up I'm writing.)

I'd never clicked "slideshow" before, but then TA said she'd just done it and enjoyed it, so I clicked to the Lex in the Snow photo and right above the comments line where it says Posted to: you click the (View as slideshow) link. Some of the connections are funny-creepy but all the photos are safe for work yes, I promise and I have a BA in photojournalism so they mostly don't suck, and it goes pretty quick if you set it for two seconds a picture, and that's all I have to say about that.