We were setting up the stage Friday afternoon, putting Glow-Tape along the edges of the platform. I was thinking about Glow-Tape, the glow-in-the-dark strips of tape that keep actors from falling on their faces in the dark, and how it was such a big part of my high school theatre experience. Glow-Tape reminds me of that huge theater in Katy, how you’d have to talk and sing as loudly as you could to have your voice hit the back of the theater. It’s why I’m such a loud singer; I never learned any other way to sing.

There was a rumbling and a scraping coming from the ceiling. Pounding.

“Is that a rehearsal room?” I asked. “Is someone up there rehearsing?”

The lighting designer lost his smile. “No. Um, actually, it is… well it was… Herb Ritts Studios.”

We were all quiet for a while after that, listening to them clear out the space of a man who left entirely too soon.

“It was cool being under the studio,” he said. “Sometimes we saw really famous people. No Doubt was hanging around once.”

My secret, deep-down, mostly pretentious and egotistical confession is that I always wanted to be photographed by Herb Ritts. I wanted to be just famous enough that he’d bring out the sexy, sexy part of me — half-covered in black pellets of sand, or standing with my legs spread wide as I threw my head back with lusty abandon. I wanted to be holding my naked breasts in my hands, a look of slight surprise and mild amusement on my face — maybe the smoke from a cigarette partially clouding your view of my perfect skin. He made everybody have the most perfect skin. He made stars look like the beautiful people you knew they were. Everybody was flawless through his lens. He made the world incredibly beautiful. He told us it was okay to worship glamour. He gave us Cindy Crawford shaving k.d. lang. He gave us the True Blue album cover. He made videos that would freeze you in one position, mouth dropped open, your eyes spooning up images and stuffing them into your brain. He made everything so damn beautiful.

I am horribly saddened that he is gone.

[db]

Okay, smart guys. What’s going on with my computer this time? You’ve fixed my modem problems, my printer problems, my forum problems, my writing problems, my grammar issues and now, now that I have DSL, I have a new problem.

It won’t let me FTP.

I can connect to my website, and it’ll say it’s sending the file, but then it’ll hang on the last packet and time out, replacing the file with a blank page, effectively taking down pamie.com until I go back to dial-up and ftp the files that way.

Dial-up. Just when I try to get out, it pulls me back in.

The DSL company says this is completely not their fault. I’m wondering if it’s because of my hub, but I used to have this very hub and update my site last year. Could it be some kind of firewall protection that the DSL has that’s conflicting with pamie.com? I haven’t tried FTP’ing to any other server yet, because it’s all so frustrating. This is happening only on my Macs, but not the PC (but the PC said it didn’t work, but it did). On the Macs it was happening with both Transmit and Fetch. On the PC I was using Win_FTP. Any ideas?

Omar’s latest entry made me miss my comedy troupe. Obviously, Omar’s a good writer, as not much else would make me yearn for those days.

And you guys? Check this out.

I do wish reviewers wouldn’t tip funny bits, but I’m guessing nobody will remember when they go to the show. Besides, I’m not complaining. Four paws! My first review!