matthearn.com

*hack* *cough* *sniff* *snort painkillers*

Sick. Not real bad sick, but sick enough that I didn’t go to the office. I am of course dialing into all the usual meetings, so I’m not entirely sure I can say I’m resting. Luckily, I have TV available to me, and plenty of food, and I don’t have to wear pants. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted! Except that my throat feels like somebody made me gargle with battery acid.

I, of course, thought all weekend that my allergies were just acting up. I had mowed the lawn on Saturday morning, so I figured once my body had expelled all the mold spores and grass seed bits, I’d be breathing normally. So I went to all my Carmen rehearsals as scheduled and breathed all over the leads. Truly wonderful. Hopefully nobody important gets sick. I’m going to advise them to bathe in vats of Purell.

I’m taking various medications (mostly just ibuprofen at this point, since my sinuses are reasonably clear, it’s just my throat that’s in agony), and hoping this thing will blow over by the weekend.

Meanwhile, rehearsals continue, and while I’m clearly still out of the league of the other folks, the differences aren’t QUITE so glaring, since at least I know my lines now. (Yes: it’s an opera, and it has dialogue. Apparently this is something relatively common with “light” French opera of the late 19th century. Who knew?) I also get to participate in a swordfight, and no one’s been injured yet! Miracles: may they never cease.

That’s all I have time for at the moment because I need to go cough up part of my lung, but I shall be back at a later date, fo shizzle.

Went I went out to my car this morning, there was frost on it. And the grass. It’s winter! Yaaaaay!

It’ll probably be in the 80s next week. And people wonder why I spend this time of year heavily sick. I’m lucking out at the moment; I’m sure I’ll catch the full-blown flu the week “Carmen” opens.

Nothing much occurring around here other than that. I ran 3.3 miles in 32:16 the other day, my fastest time since I had to outrun those South American natives after I stole their golden idol. Man, were they pissed. Based on my calculations, I should be able to run a 5K in 30 minutes 33 seconds. I could take State with those kind of numbers. Hopefully my Lil Sis and I will set some ridiculous records for “5K time for a brother-and-sister combo weighing a combined 350+” when we run our 5K in November. I have no doubt that it will happen. Because I am hella fast. For a fat kid.

You may have noticed that my output here as increased over the last few weeks; no, I’m not any less busy, but I’m coming to the realization that if I don’t do a better job of keeping y’all in giggles, what miniscule readership I have (hi Mom!) will disappear. If I were you, I would expect to see more stuff here, mostly just pointless blog entries completely devoid of anything that makes any bloody sense, each of them probably not much longer than THIS pointless entry making little sense. Since I won’t be bothering to edit much, you’ll be noting more grammatical errors and the like, so don’t think I’ve had a stroke or anything. I’m just in a big dang hurry.

Stay loose, killers. More to come next week.

Wow, does my brain hurt. A whirlwind few days of “Carmen” rehearsals have left us with one simple fact: I am working with very talented people, and am only barely keeping my head above water. It’d be helpful if I could learn my dialogue and music, I think, so I’ve spent probably 10 out of the last 24 hours muttering to myself in French. In French! And I’m enjoying it, which is doubly surprising. I’d always considered French to be the province of beret-wearing, chain-smoking, skinny men with a deep knowledge of Proust.

I have more of a knowledge of Beavis and Butthead, myself.

In other news, Charles continues to expand in size and capabilities; despite having a head that’s planetary in scale, when lying down he basically insists upon holding his head and legs in the air. It’s an abdominal workout that I can’t even begin to duplicate. It’s becoming clear that our son is very strong. Like, World’s Strongest Man strong. It’s my dream to see him competing against Swedes, his enormous belly hanging out over his kidney belt, throwing huge boulders at passersby. If he was green I’d’ve named him Bruce Banner. Or maybe Elphabor, or something.

Note: the previous paragraph contains something for everybody: sports references, comic book characters, even Broadway shows. Thusly, it probably made sense to no one on this earth but myself. Forgive me: my brain is functioning partly in French at this point.

Charles also seems pretty darn smart, if you ignore the fact that right now he’s attempting to eat plastic. I base this on his ability to watch Baby Einstein DVDs; he lasted about 15 minutes through one the other day and followed everything. This is in sharp contrast to Sarah and I, who sit and stare at the screen for the full 30 minutes as if we had just eaten a 13×9 pan of pot brownies.

Not that I, uh, know what those are. Just…nevermind.

If you want to party, let me tell you, Seaford, Delaware, is the Place To Be. There’s a Friendly’s, and a Walmart, and a strip club right next to the middle school! And you thought London was classy.

Okay, I’ll stop burning Seaford, because it really is a nice little town, and also because the residents are just close enough that they might consider repaying the favor and burning my house. We were in town Tuesday and Wednesday so we could do “Billy Lee’s Washington” at Seaford High School for various groups of school children. The first show was at 10am Wednesday morning, so rather than make us all get up at the buttcrack of dawn to be there by 8:30 to get costumed and painted, the organizers put us up at the Seaford Best Western on Tuesday night. As a hotel, it’s everything you could possibly dream: it had a beds, and an alarm clock, and shady characters wandering around at all hours (some of which were in our group).

I was in charge of Charles (of his days, and also sometimes his nights) until Sarah got home from class on Tuesday, so I got a late start, arriving at the hotel around 9:30. I got settled in my room and looked over my score for Carmen (oh, I’m appearing in Carmen with Opera Delaware, I may not have mentioned that; more later) for a while, until Jenny (previously referred in this space as My Illustrious Costar^TM) arrived around 10:30, and we decided we’d like to have a beer. So we went a-driving, looking for an open restaurant.

Apparently Seaford basically shuts down around 10, because no restaurants were open, and no liquor stores either. We ended up driving to Federalsburg, MD, in a search for a 7-11 over the state line that might sell beer. We found a Citgo with a liquor store attached, which was of course closed. So we returned to the hotel and to our respective rooms, and bemoaned the lack of booze in our lives. Total time spent failing to find tasty liquor: about an hour.

The next morning we enjoyed the hotel’s Continental breakfast. By “Continental” I assume they mean Africa, because there was hardly enough food for a family of one. They had set out roughly a gallon of milk, some cereal, and, strangely, a waffle-maker and about 20 gallons of batter.

Seaford High’s auditorium is really nice, though, and seats some ungodly number of kids. The performances went just great, and we followed them up with one more at Caesar Rodney High in Dover yesterday afternoon, and now we are D-U-N, unless the folks at Mount Vernon call and ask us to come perform there, which I’m not sure is going to happen because the cost of renting the costumes again would be prohibitive.

Now if I could get the songs out of my bloody head. Rochambeau est bon camarade! Rochambeau est bon camarade! Rochambeau est bon comarade, que personne ne disputer!

Please shoot me in the face.

So I was talking to the French Ambassador to the US, Jean-David Levitte, and his wife the other day, and I said . . .

What? Of course I’ve met the French Ambassador to the US, Jean-David Levitte, and his wife. Hasn’t everyone? Oh right, I’m sorry, I’m just That Special.

Ha ha! Just kidding! I’m not THAT much of a tool. (Yes I am.) But I did meet the French Ambassador to the US, Jean-David Levitte, and his wife, on Friday night. Let me back up a weeeeeee bit.

I may or may not in this space have mentioned that I am playing George Washington in a new musical written by noted local composer Evelyn Swensson. We spent most of September rehearsing, and opened at the “Baby Grand” (a new, small theater built next to the Grand Opera House in downtown Wilmington) on Friday morning for a bunch of school kids bussed in from all over creation. On Friday night, we had our “gala debut,” which involved some extra scenes with Revolutionary War reenactors, and the presence of the French Ambassador to the US, Jean-David Levitte, and his wife.

The show itself is lovely; it’s approximately 75 minutes long, and features music from the 17th and 18th century that Evelyn adapted with different words to fit her story and script. The cast is quite good, featuring a group of talented kids and some of their parents. Even the ever-remarkable Jennifer Kennard (whom you may remember as My Illustrious Costar^TM from Brigadoon in 2004) appears as Martha Washington.

After the show was over, I was introduced to the French Ambassador to the US, Jean-David Levitte, and his wife, at which time I apologized for what I had done to their language (one of the songs I sing is “Rochambeau Est Bon Camarade,” the French-ified version of “Rochambeau’s a Good Fellow”), and we had a lovely conversation in which I pointed out that Washington himself was probably sterile, which caused a brief awkward look between the Ambassador and his wife. If there’s anything that Matt Hearn knows, it’s embarrassing himself in front of foreign diplomats.

I’ve decided I would very much like to be His Excellency something. Even if it’s just His Excellency the Royal Garderobe Sponger.

A surprising fact that you may not realize is that I graduated from high school in 1996. Sure, I act like a 4-year-old, but I am in fact 28 years old. We celebrated these facts on Saturday at a 10-year reunion at Costa’s, a Greek place in Wilmington.

Now, I’m not much of a drinker (cough, cough), but to be on the safe side we dropped our little boy off at Sarah’s parents and rented a hotel room near the restaurant for the evening. So we checked in with some friends at about 5pm and hung out, watched a little football, and walked over to the bar at around 7:45 (trying to be fashionably late, and all).

We were, of course, among the first people there. Well played, Trebek. I rented a Heineken from the bar and began the chatting. There’s no need to come up with a complete replay, but here are the highlights:

• Hearing TJ joke about the time that he caught his jacket on fire in chem lab on a Bunsen burner being operated by me and Josh. In 1993, it was not funny, as TJ seemed likely to kill us. 13 years later, it was life-threatening funny, as we had been drinking.
• A nice gentleman whose name I won’t reveal here, let’s call him “Kansas,” passed out in the men’s bathroom covered in excrement (whether it was his own or he had somehow acquired someone else’s was unclear). He later reappeared and got in a cab, but not before Brian touched him. I will never shake Brian’s hand again, and I recommend none of you do either.
• My wife decided that, as the party wound down, we should go to Mikimoto’s. She doesn’t like sushi. HW is remarkably unpredictable after between 2 and 7 cocktails. As it turned out, they were closed anyway, so we went to the Washington Street Alehouse and rented some more beer and met some more friends.

The next morning was tragic and painful, but we applied emergency McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches and felt much better. And that was about that. Not much of a story, really. Possibly because I don’t remember much.