| I was at a hotel in Hawaii. I wasn’t there with anyone, I was just enjoying my birthday vacation. As I sat in the lobby, sipping my fruit juice, I saw a guy I thought I recognized. “AL!” He turned, looked at me, realized that I was a rabid fan, and booked it for the hallway leading to the beachfront suites. Sighing, I flopped back down in my chair. Just then, Bermuda wandered in, carrying about six tons of luggage. “Bermuda!” I hopped up and ran to him, taking some of the luggage. “Let me help you.” He grunted a thank you (he had a luggage strap in his mouth) and we hauled the luggage to his room. After all the stuff had been stowed, we went back out to the lobby to get some more juice. “Bermuda?” “Yeah?” “It’s my birthday today…do you think…do you think you could get Al to perform for me?” He thought about it. “PLEASE, Bermuda!” Finally, he said he’d see what he could do. He led me to a seat by the bar and told me to wait right there while he talked to Al. I sat there, fidgeting, until Al came out. He was wearing some kind of orange earpiece with a microphone attached. He climbed up on a chair and walked on top of the bar to the center, where he yelled “HEY! Half of you go that way! Half of you go that way!” The crowd in the lounge obligingly split into two halves and went into the doors at either side of the lobby, which turned out to lead to the performance hall. I could see Rubén standing by one of the doors with a blue earpiece on that matched Al’s. When the room was empty, Al looked down at me. “And you…you come with me.” I leapt up and followed him. He took me backstage, sat me down in the wings, and went out on stage with the band. They played the rap from MHS’s play Alice in Wonderland. Kind of odd, but it was still cool. I was on my feet singing along as Al bounced around the stage. When they were done, they bowed and left on my side of the stage. As they walked by me, one of them invited me to a post-show get together. I got up and followed after them. They all sat down in the lobby, off to one side, in a circle on the floor. Al reached into his pocket and removed a little six-inch high robot. “This is Igor. Look what he can do!” Igor started lurching around the circle. At one point, it ran into my foot, turned, and started to go up my skirt! I picked it up off the ground and lectured it on morality, propriety, and common decency. It must have been pretty funny, because the group laughed like crazy all the way through. After that, the group dissolved into pairings, and Al and I decided to go to a movie together. It was a 3D movie…pretty darn cool. But instead of the traditional guy’s-arm-around-girl thing, my arm was around Al’s shoulders. During the intermission, I told Al that he should go surf some fan websites, because there’s some really cool stuff online dedicated to him. He didn’t seem too sure. So, just to entertain him, I mentioned to him how many words Bermuda had thought up to help people surf to weirdal.com. (You know, the ones he submitted to the search engines?) Specifically, all the imaginable misspellings of his name. By the time I got through the list, he was laughing again. My Take On It Next Dream |
| Hawaiian Birthday 06/14/01 |