Celebrity sighting

Brush with fame: I saw Hedy De Vine: Brunette Phantom at the Wedge tonight. 

My purchases: lasagna and an expensive cookie.

Only an expert can deal with the problem

So I got the email -- one of those canned ones that you usually just delete without reading -- and it said:

Buy now before they are gone.
A limited number of great seats have just been made available for Laurie Anderson's Homeland on April 16 at 7:30 pm. Don't miss this extraordinary performer

.

So I freaked out...and I did.

So I made my flight back from DC in the nick of time. I got myself down to the theatre with moments to spare. I was zipping up my fly from peeing when the chime sounded for us to take our seats.

We all took our seats like happy, excited cattle. I was farther back than I was for the New York Ballet. For that one, I was close enough to hear toes pounding the floor. This time I couldn't see facial expressions. It didn't matter.

Laurie told a story: about a time long ago, before there was a world -- only air. And the birds flying in it, around and around, had nowhere to land. And one day, a bird's father died. And she had nowhere to put him. She didn't know what to do with him. And then she got an idea. She buried him in the back of her head.

This is how memory began.

A little later, Laurie played this one:

We all clapped our fingers off afterwards.

Shiny happy people

Did anyone else catch REM on The Colbert Report last night?

After a rather amusing interview -- wherein the host sat on a much larger stool than his guests, and asked Michael Stipe about picking girls out of the audience, and Peter Buck mentioned D. Boon --  Mike, Mike and Peter were joined by guitarist Scott McCaughey and ex-Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin for a pretty decent performance of their new "Supernatural Superserious."

Check it out here:

And here they are from nearly 25 years ago (can it be that long already?) on their very first television appearance with David Letterman: