The idea was this: Give my head over to a hairdresser, who had complete creative control over my noggin. How will it turn out? Watch to find out. Or just fast forward to the end, I won’t tell anybody.

My boss may have been joking when he left work this afternoon, asking if anybody wanted to join him to see his daughter play a raindrop in her pre-school play. But I, of course, agreed. This would be a New Thing, and a pretty freaking adorable New Thing at that.

This being Hollywood, the play had elaborately tailored costumes, hanging microphones and lights, celebrities in the audience (Nicole Kidman and The Woman Who Played Ferris Bueler’s Girlfriend) and more video equipment in the audience than at many major sporting events. This being children, none of that mattered. They yelled their lines (the child equivalent of acting). They bumped into each other. At least four of them fell down.

It was, frankly, a little tough to follow. They may have been adorable but they weren’t enunciating. The story was something about an angel and a little city. At one point there was an old man (played by a child) who, it seemed, went around knocking on doors (played by other children). In the end my bosses daughter came out playing a raindrop. She did her job admirably.

The best part was, I was a bit cranky at work. It can be difficult writing funny things and getting notes and then putting aside that sense of frustration to get in a mood to write funny things again. But after seeing children in brightly colored costumes bump into each other on stage for 20 minutes, all was right with the world.

I didn’t want to tell the kids that in 25 years they’d be disillusioned, constantly cranky, and searching for meaning - just like me! But for now, I’ll let them have their fun now.

Her face matches my shirt.

It was a mono-ocoular day for me as I donned a cheap costumer-store eye patch for the whole day.

I’d like to say that I swung from one ship to another, cutlass clenched between my teeth, muttering “Yar”s and “Avast Ye”s as I did so. But instead I went into work and sat around the writer’s room. The people at work know about my project by now, so they barely batter an (uncovered) eye when I strolled in looking like a hybrid of buddy holly and redbeard.

Here is what I looked like at work:

There were a few moments when something happened to the left of me, and I couldn’t really see. And occasionally reaching for something, I missed visual triangulation. But worst was the sort of static I would occasionally have. The inside of the patch was white, and so if I was looking at something white (like, say, a piece of paper or a blank computer screen) my brain would try and find marry what my left and right eyes were seeing. This would basically make my brain go bonko for a few moment until I could convince it to stop trying so hard. This caused a bit of an eyeball-ache.

But the best part of the night was when I left work and headed to my car. For safety reasons, I decided to not drive while patched. I pulled back the patch and suddenly the world was a lot crisper, colorful and most importantly - three-dimensional. It was almost worth the eyeball-ache.

–opus

Yar.

PS - I have improved on yesterday’s Clementini. I froze individual clementine slices to use instead of ice cubes. Add a squirt of fresh clementine juice to keep it tasty. Delicious!

PPS - The plague of bugs that was cutting the saga short has been fixed. Now you can see a stranger eat chips on the internet. Goodness, isn’t your life complete now?

I had my first official project-related freakout today. I’m fairly proud of myself that it took this long.

I’m a busy guy. I have a writing job that often lasts for 10-12 hours a day. I have my project which takes up a lot of my spare time. And because a writer in hollywood is never really employed for long, I have to write to show people I can write so that they can, in the future, hire me to write. This is excluding a social life, which I traded long ago for a “consulting producer” credit.

So today at work I officially freaked out. People were asking me what I was going to do today that was new. And I did not know. Originally, I had planned to wear a fake mustache all day, but I woke up late and the mustache needed trimming and I couldn’t find my scissors and so I gave up. I figured I’d come up with something. But halfway through the day, I had nothing, and with the clock ticking away, I began to panic.

I’m not even a month into this thing. I’ve got well over 300 New Things yet to do. Each day I have to do it, then stop and write about it, and in the back of my mind I know it starts all over again. A friend was trying to help me brainstorm and eventually I had to ask her to stop - even talking about it was driving me further into Freak Out territory.

Part of me considered that having an offical All New Year panic attack would count for something. But the other part knew that doing that would not be healthy, and I had to solve my panic in the way that my family has for generations. Drinking.

So behold, my All New Thing for Monday: Inventing my own beverage!

I call it the Clementini. It’s basically one part vodka, one part tonic water, and a whole clementine. It’s pretty tasty - the juice from the clementine seeps out and makes the drink a little citrussy. And for now, it’s the perfect thing to chase away the fears.

Until tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day… and the next day… and the next day…

–opus

Thanks to Jennie CC and her boss and her boss’s client to does a bunch of voices, I was able to attend a fancy-ass big-shot red carpet hollywood premiere for Disney’s latest glassy-eyed animated epic, Meet the Robinsons.

I am not sure what I expected, but I sort of figured the “red carpet” was just that -a
lovely, velvety carpet one walked on, leisurely, on the way to the theater. In fact, it’s a strange a grueling gauntlet of photographers shouting, security guards shouting, and fans shouting. A lot of shouting.

Not that any of it was directed towards me, really. Because the Red Carpet has two sections: The front section, where the beautiful and formerly-beautiful people go to get right front of cameras, and the back-section, where schmoes like myself are yelled at because we’re in the photographer’s shot.

Witness, for example, Mr. Magnum. PI, who plays a character named “Tom Selleck” or something:

You’ll notice some schmuck that is either: A) Standing a few feet behind Selleck PI’s back, trying to be unobtrusive, or B) growing from Selleck PI’s shoulder. That head is me.

Other famous people there included:

Sabrina, The Teenage Witch

Rufus Wainwright

One Of The Monkees

Angela Basset

The All-American Rejects (A band consisting of men in tight jeans whose model girlfriends man or may not be surgically attached to their arms)

Jodie Foster

Louden Wainwright

Opus Moreschi

There was also numerous child actors there. You can tell child actors because they:
A) Are dressed like little adults, even if that’s wildly inappropriate
B) Have a glassy faraway look in their eyes not unlike the computer animated characters in the movie
C) If you look at them for more than five seconds, you can feel your own childhood being destroyed, not just theirs. That is the power of the child actor.

Because Jennie was working, we were following her client, the incredibly nice and graciuos Ethan Sandler, as he made his way from station to station on the red carpet. Which meant it took us over and hour to walk the 50 yards of red cloth into the theater.

I’ll leave the reviews of the movie to the reviewers, but I will say this: They gave us free popcorn and drinks, and our seats were better than Angela Basset’s.

Afterwards there was a huge tent party which fun and activities for the entire family. Since I have no family, I had to act like both adult and child. Jennie CC was more than willing to do the same.

I still have a child’s inate and, in my opinion, appropriate fear of costumed characters. There were people at the party who looked and acted like Cirque Du Soleil understudies - in stretchy colorful spandex, balancing on balls and juggling things and riding unicycles. I do not have photos of these people because they made me very uncomfortable. I worry for the people inside: Either they hate this job, which is sad. Or they love the job, which is even sadder.

Jennie wanted her photo taken with the movie’s protagonist, Blonde Hydrocephaletic Boy.

She then wanted my photo with this same lad. He frightened me and also gave me a strange look as to how I would appear in my own personal hell.

But once away from the day-players in costumes, we had a great time. We ate food, did crafts, oogled the strange people and made our own soap. Everything was free and everywhere we turned a caterer was there to, well, cater to us. It was a strange and delicious taste of what it’s like to be rich and powerful. And frankly, I liked it. I could get really used to this, i thought.

So now, I have a plan. I am going to sew my head onto Tom Selleck P.I.’s shoulder. That dude is loaded, and nobody says no to him. Surely nobody would say no to his slightly less attractive second head. It’s so brilliant it just might work.

–opus

Today I walked the red carpet, saw a movie premiere, hob-knobbed with celebrities, and made my own soap. More information will come. For now, please enjoy this novelty souvenir photo of me and All New Year patron saint Jennie CC in a spaceship.

I had always preferred “Rock Paper Scissors” over its mathematical counterpart, “Oddsies, Evensies.” Mostly because the concepts of Odd and Even (along with analog clocks and tying my shoes) were beyond my grasp. It was simple to understand that rock crushed scissors, and scissors cut paper. That paper “covered” rock… well, I can take that on faith.

It seemed that entering a professional Rock Paper Scissors game, the RPS5, would be pretty easy. So why was I so nervous?

Apparently people really get into this. There was a guy dressed as a huge brain, another two dressed as Siamese competitors, a “ro-sham-bo-bot” and one dressed, inexplicable, as Jim Henson. I pulled out the ol’ Blue Tux and went as my stage name: Your Prom Date. *

After having a few gulps of liquid courage, I was pulled outside by a cameraperson from Current TV, the network founded by Al Gore that runs on rainbows and hugs from children. They asked me what my strategy was, how I prepared, and how I was planning on demolishing my opponent.

I think my answer was mostly “Um”. I hadn’t planned a thing! I just knew I had to throw a rock, a papers, or… um… the other one. Oh, crap, I’m really not ready!

As I’m being interviewed, an Ice Cream Truck is slowly coming towards me, just off camera. I am balancing the nerves of being interviewed, with the nerves of my upcoming competition, with the nerves of an ice cream truck parking three feet from my face.

I re-enter the arena a nervous man. My name was called and I stepped into the circle. Around me, cheering crowds. In front of me, my opponent: Le Moustache. A dastardly frenchman bent on destroying Your Prom Date.

Much like many real prom dates, it was quicky, messy, and over way too soon. I won at first with a rock crushing scissors, but in the three-out-of-five match, he quickly came back. His paper covered my rock. His scissors sliced my paper. His rock crushed my scissors. I dropped to my knees. Hours ago I didn’t care at all about this match. At that moment, though, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than to lose.

I do not think I am cut out for the high-stakes, high-pressure world of semi-professional rock paper scissors. I am going into retirement.

Until next year, when I rise, Rocky-like, to fight again.

–opus

*My actual prom date, when I was in high school, was Katie Lukas, who designed this lovely web page, as well as my other site Hey Its Opus. She’s great!