Monday now, after an especially good, long weekend. Nothing like a visit from Alex to make a weekend good. As is my custom, I feigned cultural involvement and we saw the Sesame Street Exhibit at the Chicago Children's Museum (kind of lame although there is a nice video montage of Ernie singing the Rubber Duckie song in all the languages where Sesame St. exists. Also, interesting to me that Canada has their own version of Sesame St. called Sesame Park which seems just a wee bit excessive...okay, the muppets speak in english/french instead of english/spanish but could they not, in fact, make do with Sesame Street and not force muppets to sport maple leafs as though that, in and of itself, made something culturally specific?)

The clerk at the front desk of The Chicago Children's Museum told us that normally, adults who are NOT accompanied by children are not allowed in the Chicago Children's Museum.

"Is that to keep, like, R. Kelly out?" I asked the clerk who was not amused. However, there is an exception for the Sesame Street Exhibit.

Lemme tell ya...any Chicago area hipsters thinking of seeing the Sesame Street exhibit? It ain't all that.

We also saw the exhibition of Ronco television products at the Chicago Cultural Center where I felt very American talking about the phenomenon of Mr. Microphone with Alex-they had no Mr. Microphone north of the Border, nor any Pocket Fisherman. But then I spoke with my friend Rosemary on Saturday evening and she was unfamiliar with both Mr. Microphone and the Pocket Fisherman and she's almost 29 goddamn years old and has watched HEAPS of television so I just felt old, and not merely american.

still...

I know that the Mr. Microphone line is "hey baby, be back to pick you up later," and, in fact, when the audio of this came on I represented this phrase to Alex as being part of being American. To be American was to know Mr. Goddamn Microphone where lads in a convertible sought to pick up girls in another, passing convertible.

But Rosemary never picked up on that.

Bless her heart.

Got some email from Mr. Drew Katchen, currently of New Jersey, formerly of Mass. (that's where I met him) and before that of South Carolina (which is why, I assumed, we felt a rapport with one another) He's a hell of a writer and an all around fine fellow. If he wasn't in a different time zone I don't doubt we would be hanging out lots even though he likes, you know, guitar-centric rock and I, you know, don't. But failing that, I suggest that his online archives are well worth a perusal.

Otherwise, as far as the weekend went, we saw Jonathan Goldstein, 500 Clown Frankenstein, the DVD of SPELLBOUND and talked about lots of books.

I'm hear to tell you, while THE NANNY DIARIES is dreadfully written, it does make the time, time spent, say, going to the airport to meet a late flight, go very fast. If you are looking to speed some time along, you could hardly do better than THE NANNY DIARIES assuming, you know, no new Harry Potter books are available.