Back again, after one of the most gruesome days of travel I’ve yet experienced. My flight into O’Hare was delayed by two hours. Then, when we finally arrived, we sat on the tarmac for ONE HOUR before getting a gate assignment—meaning I had exactly 15 minutes to run to my next (thankfully also delayed) flight. Arrived back in Major Eastern City at 1 a.m., but at the wrong airport: mid-flight, they announced they were sending us to a different, theoretically also local but much more inconvenient airport. Said airport did not have a gate for us. So we sat on the tarmac for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. Didn’t get home until 2.30 a.m., after a $60 cab ride.

Really, the only good thing about the day was finishing up the Thursday NYT crossword puzzle and starting to work out ideas for my first week of class (including reading the first half of the first book for my survey—hooray!).

Slept in a little today, though not enough. George Washington Boyfriend arrived in town in the afternoon and we had a great evening—happy hour drinks with two playwright friends (hereafter, PW1, GWB’s best friend from high school, and PW2, who went to drama school with PW1). Cheap margaritas and off-color jokes ensued and a good time was had by all. Then GWB and I took off to see a David Mamet play (yes, that one). GWB and I see a lot of plays, since he works on the theatre and we both have friends in the biz, but this is the first live-performance Mamet I’ve seen. It was a great production, and it’s a play I really like—but, somehow, I’m not left with anything more to say than, “damn fine job.”

GWB teaches this particular play regularly, and so wound up getting the souvenir poster and lurking around the stage door to get a couple of the actors he admires to sign it—very sweet and rather strange. (I stood several yards away, out of the melee of fans, hiding myself in the program notes.) Sometimes I forget what a theater geek he is.

He does have a good Mamet joke, though:

Guy and his wife leave the theatre one night—a prosperous couple, habitual theatre-goers. Just outside there’s a bum, who asks them for five bucks. The husband, smiling at his wife, decides to give the bum a little lecture. “My friend,” he says, “neither a borrower nor a lender be. That’s a little Shakespeare for you.” And the bum—being a Broadway bum—pulls himself up and says, “Oh yeah? Well FUCK YOU. David Mamet.”