I lost my fucking sunglasses.

Normally I wouldn’t give a shit.  But these were my SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA sunglasses.

The one souvenir I took back with me from by 4 performances conducting KAREN O’s psycho opera STOP THE VIRGENS last year at The Sydney Opera House.

I’m not counting the 20 koala bear hair clips that I brought back for everyone else, or the stupid AUSTRALIA towel that the cashier at the Cosmic Diner made me promise I’d get her.

These were pink, beautiful special Sunglasses that deserved that capital S.  Everytime I put them on, I could see the quality of the light in Sydney before me.  It was like a sense memory for my eyes.

They’re gone now, so I have to move on.

Let them go. As a Jewish Buddhist lesbian musician, I pray to Saint Anthony regularly. “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around, something’s lost and can’t be found. They’re my Sunglasses.”  I always add that part at the end, just in case Saint Anthony doesn’t quite know what exactly it is that I’ve lost. I just want to be sure he understands what I’m talking about.  I will tell you this: he has never failed me. I have ultimate faith in Saint Anthony. But this time, my faith is wavering.  Let’s see if typing to him works too.

I thought I had taken the Sunglasses out with me to meet my new Social Media Strategist buddy Alea.  She was waiting for me at Machiavelli on the Upper West Side. Machiavelli is a place that prides itself in the fact that all the chairs and tables  are handmade.  They even have the names and pictures of the artists who made them in the menu.  It’s slightly disconcerting when you want to order food and have to go through 4 pages of resumes before you get to the entrees.  But it’s a great place for a meeting and there is even a pianist who plays there every night with an honest to goodness tip jar on the piano. That was the last time I thought I had the Sunglasses with me, and since we sat down briefly and left, I called Machiavelli from my cab on my way downtown and asked them if I’d left them.  Of course, I hadn’t, and now I only had and hour before I’d have to conduct Jersey Boys.

Being the Associate Conductor of Jersey Boys on Broadway is a fucking fantastic gig. This week the Conductor is out of town on vacation so I am conducting 7 shows.

I would have conducted all 8 shows this week, but once a month I take off for my monthly Buddhist meeting, and it happened to fall on Wednesday night of this week.

The Cosmic Diner is hosted by a spitfire Greek woman named Mel, and she was in rare form today. Alea and I sit down at a booth.  We inform Mel that she is going to be one of my first guests on the Podcast that I’m going to be doing soon.  I tell her she is going to be talking about men, probably.

“What the hell do you want me to talk about men for?”, she asks, pointing her fake nails at me.

“I want you to talk about women too”, I say…”like how you identify prostitutes the minute they walk into the diner.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” She grins triumphantly.

Who the hell knows if she was right, but I never care. Her character analyses are so unbelievably entertaining to me, that I could care less if she is right or wrong.  The Cosmic Diner is part of my routine before conducting the show.

You know when your MAC battery gets so hot that you are afraid to use your laptop because you think it’s going to spontaneously combust on your lap? That’s what’s happening now, so I’m going to finish.

This is what happens:

I give Alea a tour backstage and she goes on her way.

I conduct the show.

And Saint Anthony fails me for the first time in my life.

Maybe. (They’re my Sunglasses.)