Emergency Rooms and Playing Dress-up

It's funny that I cannot manage to write on this when I am actually in DC where Wifi is rampant, but the weekends I have at home seem to fly by without pause. This one particularly so.

I headed back to DC for an extended weekend, which was to include the Helen Hayes awards on Monday -- which is basically DC's version of the Tony's. I have gone every year since moving here, and find them to be a fascinating evening, for various reasons -- sometimes riddled with drama, other times just the ultimate scene of schmoozing and boozing while dressed to the nines. However it turns out, it is usually a good time. Before making it to Monday though, weekend highlights included:

- temp work at the law firm. woo-hoo.

- a reading of a play I have been involved with since this past fall. The playwright has continued to develop it since we did the first reading, and we did a second reading of it Monday before the big Helen Hayes sh-bang. I am happy to be staying with it, and I like the idea of continuing with a play through an extended gestation period. We'll see where it goes.

- attending super-mover-man's (SMM, until I come up with a better moniker) opening night. The show is an extremely movement based retelling of Macbeth. I won't get into an interpretation, because I don't think blogs are appropriate for that. But after the show I went out into the reception to wait for the cast to come out, and the artistic director comes over to find me and brings me out into the hall. There is SMM with a gash in his forehead. A deep, many layers of skin gash. As he tells it, he had a run-in with a piece of scenery and the scenery won. Shit. I am not good with these things. "Ummm, did someone who knows anything about these things look at that?" "Yeah, we need to take a trip to the Emergency room". So a fellow audience member drives us to the emergency room, where we spend the next three and a half hours getting SMM stitched up.

Twelve stitches total. It looks like they did a good job, but what do I know about these things? While in the waiting room (not my favorite place -- I am always afraid that someone is going to come in with a severed limb and I am going to have the image burned into my psyche forever) we saw a surly man in a wheelchair ("Why are they not calling me? Shouldn't they be calling me? Nurse - when are they going to call me?"), a couple who kept conferencing with a police officer about something that had happened with a "perpetrator" of some sort, a group of college girls decked out in sorority letters surrounding their little friend who kept clutching at her stomach, and the piece de resistance -- a woman with her breasts pushed so far up that it seemed they must be blocking her line of vision.

"Stripper" SMM whispered.

I couldn't really look because it would be obvious that I was looking at her and not just "looking around", but after SMM went in for his stitches I snuck a few peeks. Sure enough, she was accompanied by a bouncer and had that world-weary stripper look about her. But how does a stripper hurt her hand (which was wrapped in a towel)? Pole burns? The mystery was solved when the bouncer mentioned returning to "Coyote". Coyote Ugly. Of course. She wasn't a stripper at all. She was a bartender who earned her tips by almost, but not quite, displaying her rack. More power to her.

By Monday and Helen Hayes the last thing either of us needed was any more drama, but I managed to create a little with a hair meltdown. I think because I am normally so low maintenance about anything beauty related, I get particularly stressed out in situations where I have to step up to the plate. Two and a half hours, six bobby pins, two combs and a handful of barrettes, a pump bottle of hairspray, and three cab rides back and forth from Mount Pleasant later, we made it to the awards -- about fifteen minutes late. My friend and sort-of-professional (as opposed to academic) mentor won an award for best direction, and I missed his speech, which was too bad, but when I told him he just started laughing and said, "You were late! That's perfect!" I guess my reputation kind of precedes me. (Let it be known. I was never late for rehearsals. Just social events.)

All in all it was a lovely time. Saw some people I haven't seen in a while, laughed a lot, mingled, and finally fell into bed and slept the sleep of babies. Or else the sleep of three vodka tonics on an empty stomach. (Don't worry mom, I really don't have a problem.) The evening's one downfall was the lack of my dear friend MA who has punctuated every previous HH I have been to by getting drunk and shouting "H and H! H and H, baby!" to the masses of bejeweled and bedecked rich people, but who knows – maybe we’ll drag MA back next year.