Okay, sorry. I haven't been here for you. I've been, uh, busy. I know, that's a poor excuse. You need the fix only I can provide. Well, I'm here to make it all better, baby. Just lay back, and let The Hearn take you higher than you've ever been before. The Hearn will rock you like it ain't no thang.

Uh...let's pretend that paragraph didn't happen.

Here's the short list of what's been going on over at Hearndom:

• "South Pacific" - Spring musical over at Brandywine High School. Once again, Sarah's doing choreography, I'm doing vocal direction. As an added twist, this year I'm conducting the pit band! We'll see how that goes, since my conducting experience consists mostly of air drumming to Pat Boone albums. Side note: I tried to get them to do "Hair," but the idea of a bunch of 14-18 year olds running around on stage naked set of some kind of "prude" alarms in the Powers-That-Be. So much for freedom, huh?
• St. John Passion - Long oratorio-type thing by J.S. Bach. Getting performed the day after "South Pacific" closes. Rehearsals every Monday. I just remembered I have to learn a solo.
• Work getting hectic. We've basically reached the point at work where everybody's working 50+ hours a week, just putting out fires. We're completely event driven at this point. I'll let whole projects sit and fester for weeks because I'm working 9-10 hour days just responding to people calling me and asking about something they need. If they lay anybody else off the whole place will simply collapse. I'm raving again.

Between all that and the usual stuff (church choir, etc.), I'm out of the house 11-12 hours every day of the week, including weekends. But you don't wanna read my whining. You wanna read some funny stuff!

I just have a few comments about the Oscars, nothing major. It was nice to see so many people show up in costume; Liv Tyler came as Lisa Loeb, and Charlize Theron came in the makeup she wore in "Monster." It was pretty neat to see that, since the odds of me ever, EVER sitting down to watch a movie about a lesbian serial killer are similar to the odds of Rick Springfield answering my love letters.

Uh...forget I said that, too.

The guy that won the Animated Short Film award brought along Pixanne! It was nice to see her. I always thought she was dead.

I'd like to point out that Alison Krauss had TWO songs nominated for Oscars, and one of them involved Sting. Usually, doing a movie song with Sting is an absolute Oscar-lock, but somehow she managed to lose. I'm willing to ignore the fact that the Academy could pass over Sting (maybe they were drunk), but to give an award to Annie Lennox??? Sting even played a Hurdy Gurdy! What the hell, man! How can you turn him down?

Okay, last thing: a fellow named Kevin Brofsky wrote a play about Claymont, Delaware. This intrigues me, particularly since it involves a young gay man in the late 60s. I didn't know that Delaware HAD gay folks in the 60s. And I didn't think Claymont had any NOW. Anyway, the play appeared in NY for about a month and then closed. Anybody that actually SAW it, shoot me an email at spam |at| matthearn.com and let me know what it was like, and how it compares to "Wicked," which apparently is the "in" Broadway show right now, despite not being about AIDS or vaginas.