Backstage, in the green room. The actors are all putting on makeup, and the actresses are curling their hair. Tim shifts in the sofa. He?s the stage manager: thin, gangly, walks with a limp. “Okay, so in philosophy class I studied, hey, listen, I studied this puzzle and it?s pretty cool. So there are these two doors, right? And these two doors are guarded by these two robots.”

Cameron clicks on a laptop. She’s looking at rows and rows of her own headshot. “I have to get these done quickly,” she says. “I’m going to New York in three weeks. I?m auditioning there. New York.”

“And so these two robots, see, one of them always tells the truth. And one of the robots always lies. And one of the doors goes to heaven and the other one goes to hell. So which door do you choose?” asks Tim.

Clarissa says, “Did you guys see American Idol last night? I thought that tattooed one, Gina Glockson, she chose a bad song. It was like, if you’re going to select a song and you’re going to have punk out hair, you need to sing a punk song or an indie song. But she didn?t. With the red hair, you can’t do that eighties tune, whatever it was.”

“Wait a minute,” says AJ. “How many doors are there?”

I peer over Cameron’s shoulder and point at a headshot. “Stop it,” she says, shooing me away.

“Two,” says Tim.

“I choose the door on the left,” says AJ.

“No, see, you get to ask a question to the robots,” says Tim. “And you need to figure out which door you should choose.”

“I got it,” says Anthony, dabbing foundation on his cheeks. “Did Britney Spears shave her head?”

“No, you have to figure out what to ask the robots,” says Tim.

“I added her to the Hot Mess board on the wall,” says Anthony. A cork board is covered with cutout figures from gossip magazines, random celebrities with unflattering pictures. “Because let’s face it folks, Britney is definitely a Hot Mess.”

“No, wait wait wait, I know!” says AJ. “My question is, did Britney shave her head?”

“Are you guys hearing one another?” I ask.

“Ah, screw you all,” says Tim.

Dean plays scales on his violin. Cameron calls out, “Stop it, I?ve got a headache!” The violin halts abruptly

So I get a call from Sean. “Klahr and I have talked it over,” he says, “and we were wondering whether you’d be the officiant for our wedding in May.”

“What genre would you like your wedding in?” I ask.

During the pre-show for I Love You You’re Perfect Now Change, all the actors wander out into the audience in character, portraying clergy from various religions. My character is that of a minister. I’m the only one in the cast who actually enjoys talking to the audience while in character. My secret is to let the audience members do the talking — they’ve got plenty to say, and they’re quite funny. Last weekend a couple comes in, sits down left.

“What would you like to see tonight?” I ask them.

“Well…” says the man, “just don’t suck.”

I smile at another blue-hair in row C. “So what are the things you like to see most in the theater?”

“I like to see two things,” says blue-hair. “Comedy. And laughter.”

Daughter, early twenties, fashionably dressed, is sitting front and center. Next to her is mother, forties, dumpy, wearing a T-shirt with writing and shorts that show off stubby knees. Daughter clearly is embarrassed to an inch of her life as mother regales me. “Are you two related?” I ask.

Daughter says, “I’m adopted.”

“What kind of shows do you like to see?”

“Oh, all kinds of shows, all kinds, all kinds!” says mother. “We’ve been to see Ice Follies just a week ago, and my daughter here is going for her program at the San Diego Globe! Isn’t that a lovely theater, the Globe? They do Shakespeare. I love Shakespeare, but he just seems to have so many words in him. And we went to go see Anne Frank last Saturday. Have you seen Anne Frank?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “I love comedies.” Daughter involuntarily snorts and gives me a look that says, OK, maybe you don’t totally suck. Mother prattles on. “Oh, it was funny, it was indeed! When those doors wouldn’t open and he kept yanking on them. I laughed so hard.”

“Noises Off,” grunts daughter.

“Oh yes, that was Noises Off! Woah, I laughed so hard I thought I’d die.” Daughter rolls her eyes.

Another group of four decides to cross-examine me. “Are you really a minister?” a woman with black-rimmed glasses asks me.

“Yes,” I lie.

“What is the name of your church?”

“Well, I just moved down. First Presbyterian of San Francisco. Have you heard of it?” I lie.

“Where did you study?”

“Harvard,” I lie, but only partly.

“Oh, you went to Harvard. And what did you major in?”

Quick, quick, you shouldn’t have to think about this stuff. “Divinity.”

“And what’s your degree title?”

“Um, I don’t have a degree in divinity.” Damn!

“Why not?”

“Oh, I decided to take off a year before I graudated and take the ministry to people in need. So technically I never graduated. But I studied for three years in the Divinity school.” Nice save, Byrd!

“Where was your ministry?”

“I went to South Korea to spread the Word. Some time in Tokyo.”

“Where in South Korea?”

“Mostly in Seoul.”

“Ah, yes? And how long were you in Seoul?”

Damn, lady! “Two years.”

She smiles broadly and lets loose a torrent of what I suppose is Korean.

“Lady, this is the theater and I’m an actor, suspend disbelief for one goddamned minute for me, will ya?” I said. Actually, I didn’t say that. “My Korean is a little rusty,” I say.

“What did you say your degree was in?” she asks.

“Oh, darn, look at that, I have to go back stage now to start the show. But golly I hope you stay afterwards for the free refreshments!” I beam, and then run off at top speed. Dammit. If I were a real minister, they wouldn’t give me such shit.

So I clicked on over to the Universal Life Church, filled in a form, and two days later, John Byrd is a legally ordained minister in the state of California. There’s a significant body of case law that says this insta-minister ministry in Modesto can legally hand out clergy titles like Pez, and the resulting marriages are binding and legal in 48 states and most of Canada. So now I’m ready to issue marriage licenses for the low low price of $5.00 per certificate. Amen. Let us pray.

Not much exciting to write about. To get my bearings in Orange County, I opened a teeny production of I Love You You’re Perfect Now Change weekend before last. The crowd is mostly moneyed blue-haired types. Most of the actors in the show are fifteen years younger than me, and obsessed with the things that people who are fifteen years younger than me ought to be obsessed about: gossip mags, Myspace, who hates who. San Francisco theater types are much more easygoing than the actors I?ve met so far — I’ve fallen in with an unusually catty bunch for this particular show. I’m constantly reminded in peculiar ways that I?ve moved deep into the heart of Republican California. Nixon’s birthplace is down the road, as is Ronald Reagan’s. The televisions at 24 Hour Fitness are all tuned to Fox News, and people speak with open disdain about San Francisco and yoga and vegetarianism and other liberal pastimes. I met a Log Cabin Republican after a particular I Love You show. He’s a seventh-generation OCer who’d rather tolerate all the insults and rejection rather than break ranks with Big Red. Being gay around here is better than being Democrat. Regardless, I purchased a West Virginia state flag and perched it right smack on top of my garage here in Costa Mesa. When my father brings my guns out to California I plan to sit on the porch and shoot at the postman. Work’s been nice, nearly meditative. I can spin out miles of code like spiderwebs, and the hours pass harmlessly. I’m slow to make friends, here and everywhere. I tend to rank people based on the estimated breadth of their hearts. My wife is working from home, and although she superficially appears happy to be in the company of the house she’s made immaculate, I’m concerned that she doesn’t naturally have enough chances to find a posse or tribe down here in the OC. I’m apparently the outgoing one in the relationship, and I haven’t found kindred spirits down here yet.

Christmas eve, Fishersville, Virginia. Every year, we eat fried oysters, brown beans, corn bread, and fried taters for Christmas eve dinner. The wife and my Dad clean the table while I sniffle into Kleenex. The family has killed off a bottle of Freixenet champagne. Since my modeling debut, it?s now the family favorite. Dad has had several drinks tonight.

“Got a couple things here,” says Dad, “when your mother and I are not around anymore, I want y?all to have. Really, they all yours anyway, John.” He goes into the second bedroom, rummages around in the closet, and returns with a semiautomatic pistol. He peers at it and pulls back on the trigger.

“Look here,” he says. “Takes rifle rounds. Yer ammunition goes into the clip here.” He presses a button on the pistol and it spits out a clip, which clatters to the kitchen floor. Now the safety is?” He trails off, as he presses a few switches on the side of the gun. The barrel of the pistol waves past my wife?s head and she ducks.

“What kind of gun is that?” I ask.

“Pistol,” he says. With some effort he shoves the ammo clip back into the gun and engages the semiautomatic trigger.

“Now look. Here?s the safety. Click here, pull back the muzzle, safety?s off. Click here, safety?s on. Wait a minute, I?ll get some ammunition.” He heads back into the bedroom and returns with a box of rifle shells. “Remington bullets there. Feel how heavy that is.” He pulls a bullet out of the box and puts it into my hands. “That goes in one side of ya, no big deal, but it makes a bigger hole goin out than comin in.”

I dry-fire the pistol into the ceiling a couple times. “Come here,” he says, walking into the bedroom. “I got a couple other guns in the other closet.” I drank the rest of the Freixenet and left the pistol on the table. My wife eyed it nervously. I followed Dad into the bedroom.

“How come you keep your guns in the closet?” I ask.

“They?re not my guns, they?re yours,” he says.

“But you have a gun rack,” I say. “You should keep your guns in the gun rack.”

“This way, a burglar won?t be able to find the good ones though,” Dad says. He rummages around in the closet and pulls out several rifles, and he throws them onto my bed. Then he hands me a particular burnished blue shotgun. “Look at this one. Friend of mine offered me five hundred dollars cash for it, but I turned him down flat. Remington model twelve. Look at that patent. Must have been made around 1912. You know when this gun was made?”

I Google the serial number on the gun. “That gun was manufactured in 1927,” I tell him.

“That?s about what I thought,” he says. “That gun is worth some money. And this one, if my grandson ever wants to know more about his granddad, he can have this here gun. It’s a good gun.” He arranges the two shotguns on my bed.

“Now look here,” says Dad. “Something else to show you.” He shows me a makeup case in a dusty corner of another closet. “Lift that out,” he says. I can?t lift it. I?m only able to drag it out of the closet. Dad opens it. It?s full of wrapped coins.

“Are any of these coins special?” I ask.

“Well, some of them?s eagles and some of them?s states,” he says. I unwrap some of the coins: it?s true, some are eagle-head quarters, and some quarters have states on the back.

“Well, each one?s worth a full twenty-five cents,” I say.

“Not all of em,” says Dad. “Some of em in there are wheat pennies.”

“You know, Dad, there?s this thing called inflation,” I say. “It means that if you leave your coins in the back of your closet for a year, that five hundred dollars worth of loose change will be worth about four hundred ninety-five dollars. And next year, four hundred ninety, and so on. You need to take that money to a bank.”

“It?s not my money. It?s your mother?s. It?s her fur coat fund,” he says.

“You need to invest that in a money market account,” I say. “Or U.S. savings bonds at the worst case.”

Dad laughs and hollers at Mom. “Tena, your son thinks I don?t know how to invest your fur coat fund. He thinks I should be putting all that money in a bank,” he says.

“What!” yells Mom.

“He?s tellin me to put that money in a bank!” yells Dad. He collects the shotguns off my bed.

“That?s right!” yells Mom. He wanders back into the kitchen and sits down at the table. The pistol?s still on the table; the wife hasn?t touched it.

“Isn?t this how people get shot at family events?” I say. “Fooling around with guns and such at the dinner table? Don?t you always read about how family members always get shot around Christmas due to family stress and such?”

Dad blinks, thinks for a moment, and says. “Oh. But we’re not fighting.”

We put away all the guns. Then we all watched some college football on TV.

Orlando, Florida. Aunt Beverly died on Monday and today is her funeral. All her life, she wanted to Entertain, but she never really got the chance. Since the earliest photo of her in 1955, her photos were never completely candid: she’s grinning, or hamming, or posing, or preening, for the camera and the nonexistent audiences behind it. Aunt Beverly could sing, but not as well as some, and she couldn’t dance much, or rather not at all, and opportunities for girls and women who sing some and dance less in rural West Virginia were slim, so as a result, said Troy her boy in her funeral oratory, “she missed her calling in life.” Over her later years, she developed fibromyalgia, which I am told, is a disease that was only so named starting in 1990. Before that it was usually referred to as “it’s all in your head.”  It’s a non-specific, general, fleshy, agonizing sort of non-specific pain, that covers your entire body and eventually just makes you want to die. Several years of fibromyalgia, and she wanted to, and she did. I expected Dad Bill to be a wailing mess, like when Grandmother Byrd died, but instead his funeral oration was coherent and loving and funny. He’s a lot more fun to listen to, now that he’s off the pills and booze. The cousins, Troy and Jeff and Dean, are all aerospace engineers. Jeff and Dean have military backgrounds as well. And so when Jeff and Dean got to the podium to give their oration for their dead mother, they began in dry to-the-point NASA tones: “I won’t rehash the previous details that have been stated about her…”  The Byrd family’s not Jewish, and thus we are all entombed within fine open silver-plated caskets, bedecked in white flowing pillows. Aunt Beverly was dead, but she was beautiful nonetheless, with flowing white hair and a snapshot beside her, where she is smiling widely and beckoning toward the camera and the invisible nonexistent audience. She was sent off in an ocean of flowers, a large poofing swath of overflowing bouquets of roses and a stack of pallid white fainting wailing carnations, and a show choir of blood-red poinsettias, and we all cried a fine and decent cry. Now she is dead, all her children are without a mother, and I am down one aunt.

I have come down with a screaming head cold, probably acquired from kissing a lesbian several days ago. Lesbians are highly infectious generally. Back to MCO and through security. A Georgia peach in a miniskirt is toodling a poodle through the metal detector. “My little dawg had to wait so lawng that he ended up makin a mess, raht thair, in the security lahn,” she tells me. “An I had to clean it up with tissues, and I was gawna thow it away, but the security lady said No, you gotta run that threw the metal detector.”

“Wait a minute,” I asked. “You’re telling me, airport security required you to run your dog’s shit through the metal detector?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me thow it away.” I sneezed.

The walk down to the gate was twenty miles. I could barely breathe. I was sweating, my heart was pounding, and snot was actively running down my face onto my shirt. Yes, this is very gross, but this blog focuses on the facts and the facts are that snot was running down my face onto my shirt. And as I was toting and snotting down the halls of Orlando International Airport and looking the least hot that I have ever looked in my life, I spotted this chick reading In Style magazine and I fleetingly thought, Damn, I?m a model in that fashionable magazine. Whereupon I sneezed on her.

Washington, DC, at my brother?s apartment. My brother Chris is half a head taller than me, a square-jawed, gently spoken military type. He’s deep in biochemistry exams and this is his finals week, a bad time for unexpected visitors. I called him this morning from California and asked whether he’d put me up for the evening. Aunt Beverly died two nights ago in Orlando and my father asked me to come down. The drive to central Virginia, and the corresponding Christmas vacation with my mother, will have to be delayed. My brother has been good enough to take me and the wife in on no notice. Tonight I need to figure out how to get to Orlando.

Costa Mesa, California. So we’re packing to fly to Christmas with the parents in Virginia when I receive:

________________________________________
From: Bill Byrd 
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 9:44 PM
To: Chris Byrd; John Byrd
Subject:

Children,
Bobagee died in her sleep this evening. I have lost a dear friend.
Dad

San Francisco, at Jelly’s Club on Sixteenth Street. Sixty people scream happily at us. “We’re going to take a little break,” says Jett Screamer. “But we’ll be back in ten minutes.” I take the guitar off my shoulder and we all step off stage. The sound man puts on drum and bass music.

Our drummer, Mr. Fantastic, goes to the bar and gets an orange-and-pineapple juice. The drink is called the Thirsty Thirsty Hippo. After dozens of sets and empirical tests, we’ve discovered it’s the fastest way to rehydrate between sets.

A lesbian couple grins up at me. I kiss them both on the lips and they both comment on how beautiful my wife looks. One coughs a little. “Oh, I just got over a cold,” says one. “I’m fine, though.”

“Were you able to hear everybody in the last set?” I scream at Mr. Fantastic.

“What!” he screams, over the din of the drum-and-bass.

“Look, we gotta talk outside,” I scream at him. I flag down Jett Screamer and the Basspod, and they follow me out onto the patio. The air outside is crisp and fine, and the lights of the Bay Bridge glisten across the water.

“Guys,” I tell them. “It’s ten thirty-five. The owner informs me that we have to be out of the space by midnight. I figure we have twenty-five minutes to play the next set, and then an hour to break down.”

“We don’t need that much time,” says Jett Screamer. “Twenty minutes tops to get all the gear in the truck.”

“Twenty-five minutes,” says the Basspod.

I look through the glass wall into the bar. Several lesbians are marveling over my wife’s dress. They proceed to feel her up and laugh about it.

“Twenty-five minutes,” I say. We head back into the bar and we turn our instruments back on.

The guard waved at me in a stop-now-you-fucking-idiot sort of way. I guessed off-duty police officer. His arms were ripped. I stopped the Jeep, rolled down the window and parroted the magic words. He asked me for my driver?s license and copied a bunch of data. A red light turned green and gate #4 slid up.

I parked directly at the foot of the water tower. There’s a cartoon called Animaniacs in which the principal characters were imprisoned in this water tower for eighty years. Bungalows, low offices, clean but used.

I walked past the museum and found studio number 6. The front door was locked. The side door was locked. The back door was locked. The other back door was ajar. There was a low ramp, and a table with a tray coffee and donuts and fruit. Inside I could hear the sounds of musicians tuning their instruments. A sign said: EASTWOOD SCORING STAGE.

For almost eighty years, all the best music in movies has come out of this room. The room was originally built in 1929 and rededicated to Clint in 1999. Today, it held about forty orchestral musicians: a dozen brass, a dozen strings, a dozen woodwinds, a full rock kit, two drummers in soundproof booths, with a hundred microphones swinging and pointing and angling in every direction. Musicians fingered and fretted and buzzed, with freshly-printed Finale orchestral scores.

Damn, but it felt like coming home.

When they’re recording, the red light goes ON and nobody breathes. I listened to an hour of live music on the studio floor, and then I went into the booth to listen from there. We can’t appreciate the difference between highly compressed mix-down predigested music and the live direct-to-your-ears variety until we can hear the difference side by side.

A password got me into the Blue Room, a secret, small four-star restaurant on the Warner Brothers lot. We joked a lot about blowjobs. All theater and movie people are dirty minded fucks back in San Francisco — it was reassuring to find them thus in the heart of Mecca. I got a lot of business cards of people who I really should not have access to.

Three more hours of recording. I snuck out during a flubbed take. In the space of a few hundred feet, cities fell and rose before me. I walked through River City, Iowa, but the seventy-six trombones were long gone. I also walked through Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Bugsy, Casablanca, Blade Runner, The Big Sleep, and downtown Hazzard from The Dukes of Hazzard. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts everywhere.

I’m in!

Nowadays, the standard modern liberal joke is to call yourself a terrorist. Yeah, either you?re with Bush or you?re a terrorist, so I guess we’re terrorists, ha ha ha, aren?t we being darkly ironic. But there’s a more creative, funnier, and more honest response. Bush, and the Republican establishment, like to wrap themselves in the historical icons of US patriotism, using their semiotic power as shorthand for their own political ends. Liberals should be doing the same thing, but with more creativity… we should take back the symbols that have been borrowed from us:

AMERICA! GEORGE BUSH CAME TO POWER THROUGH A COURT DECISION!

AMERICA! GEORGE BUSH LIED TO GET YOU TO SUPPORT THE WAR IN IRAQ!

THOUSANDS OF UNITED STATES MEN AND WOMEN HAVE DIED BECAUSE OF THIS LIE!

AMERICA! IMPEACH GEORGE BUSH NOW!

ALSO, DON?T EAT SO FUCKING MUCH!

AMERICA! PORTION CONTROL NOW!