Last night at the Office Bar, although the karaoke was loud and fun, there was a muted quality to the party, a sense that we were all out past our bedtimes.

Around one a.m. the wife and I left the bar. Keite was in the parking lot, shuffling nervously in her pink leather tube top. She held a plastic bottle of water out to the guy sprawled on the sidewalk.

“Come on, Joe,” she said. “Drink some water.”

Joe made a sound and turned his head. His face rasped on the sidewalk.

“Your friend?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said. A runnel of something dark — spit? blood? urine? — drifted from Joe into the gutter.

“He’s had booze and something else,” said Keite. “Maybe pot, maybe something else. Joe?”

Joe said, “Yshsgs.”

“Joe, I want you to drink this water.” Keite placed the bottle of water squarely on the sidewalk. Joe made no move for the water.

“The guy I came with,” said Keite to us, “left without me. I invited him here tonight, and I think he got tired of waiting for me. I’ll find a ride home,” she said. And her tired eyes brimmed with tears.

I thought of Gilman Street and gutter punks and three-chord rock and I idly wondered how many times Keite had practiced this scene. Random assholes and the women who take pity on them.

“Let’s give you a ride,” my wife said.

“No,” Keite said. “I’ll find a ride.”

We left without her. There are two kinds of people: people who pass out on the sidewalk, and people who take care of them.

I’m neither kind.

“Pro Tan,” I said to my wife, removing the foam sponge brush from the side of the bottle. “Just the thing for Starbuck. It’s what all the bodybuilders use. It contains DHA, which causes your skin to tan by itself, and a rather large quantity of brown food coloring.”

I squirted a sploot of Pro Tan onto the foam brush. It was the color of shoe polish. My skin was still a little red from the visits to the tanning salon. I slathered the brown goop onto my body. Standing in the bathroom, I painted my calves, my shins, my chest with the muddy color. Little dots of brown paint spattered all over the bathroom tile. As I swabbed at the little brown spatters with toilet paper, I realized at that point that I couldn’t color my back. I called to my wife.

“Honey,” I said. “Can you come in here and help Pro Tan me?”

“What?” she said, wandering into the bathroom. Then she gasped, and screamed with laughter. “My God! You’re orange!”

“Half orange,” I corrected.

She painted my back and my neck. “Your ass is really white,” she said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said.

“If you turn around for me, I’ll paint your ass,” she said.

“Moof,” I said. Marriage is the most sacred of institutions, in which a man and a woman can paint each other’s asses and call one another orange.

Hi there, John,
Just wanted to say it was nice to chat last night. Oh, and I checked out 
your website and those of your friends. That whole journal entry thing 
is a very cool idea. Kind of wild to have all these thoughts just 
floating about over the waves for anyone to see. And all those links to 
pictures and things. You must be very quick at what you do.

I also wanted to say that you did very nice work at the end of Act 3. 
That bittersweet quality is going to make the moment linger for the 
audience.

Here's to our next kiss being easy and tender and soft and authentic.

Love,

alex

We open in three weeks. Have you got your tickets yet?

Update: Rehearsal photos.

Now I don’t know this asshole from Adam, but according to him I am an Expert Marketing Advisor and the author of “How to sell your mama online.” Click this link and check out the bottom of the white text.

I would never, ever sell my mama online. Bricks-and-mortar retail business, that’s the way to go.

So, what do you want for Christmas? Hell, I been good this year…

Update: Even more uncensored Yuletide action for you.

Dear J.,

Excellent question! I can tell you from personal experience that it is in fact possible to be a flirty son of a bitch and have a stable happy homelife with a loving wife. And as you well know, the majority of my friends are hot sexy women. There are several techniques I have used to maintain this extremely enviable existence.

One of the key techniques I use, first, is not to fuck other women. This is a point that many men overlook. Other men tell their wives that they love them, yes, and bring them flowers, yes, but then they run out and get fellated by some random skank down at the Office Bar. Not so, John Byrd. I am certain that many attendees at the Dickens Fair would tell you otherwise, but in my personal experience, not having sex with anyone else is a key ingredient to a stable marriage.

Once you have the not fucking anyone else part down, you’re ready to build on that. In my case, I recall when we were putting on the Rocky Horror Show, the wife was frequently sad and upset with me. Was it because I was making lots of female friends and spending lots of time with them? No. Was it because I was engaging in frottage with random audience members four or five times a night? No. It was because I wasn’t able to dedicate a significant chunk of time to spend with her. I had no time to tell her (see point one) that I was not having sex with other women. She was upset because she wanted my TIME, and at that time I had no time to offer.

“Although I must say,” interjects Mandy, reading over my shoulder, “the no-time-with-me thing leads to the concern that there was somebody charming or lovely in the Rocky group that you preferred to me.”

You see? Every significant other is different, and the fears and insecurities they carry around are all different. Now were I the proprietor of a hot perky-breasted twenty-something blonde like yourself who worked in a gym and was constantly surrounded by guys, would I be jealous? You bet your sweet ass I would be jealous, but only if I felt there was a possibility you would run off behind the leg flexor with one of your overbuff workout buddies and fellate him there.

In Mandy’s case I found a great solution to her time concerns. I simply dragged her along to several of our Rocky shindigs. Before we tied the knot, the wife and I used to party pretty hard in college — one of our first dates was a Rocky Horror show — and if you put a couple beers into her she’ll be shaking it like a Polaroid picture. I gave her specific orders to have fun and not be judgemental of the group. I was a little worried about integrating her into the Rocky crowd — hell, she might have been impregnated — but in fact it worked out gloriously and everybody turned out as friends.

So this makes me wonder whether your husband could be dragged into the after-hours socialization that you are currently experiencing. It all depends on what he’s insecure about. Time allotted? Your faithfulness? Penis size? Many factors to consider here. Whatever his concern is, you’ve got to find the core of the concern, which frequently is not “you can’t have friends of the opposite sex.”