Austin TX Fri Aug 8

How great!! What a great crowd! Cheered and yelled. Almost felt like Europe! Just me and Mike.

Before the show I got into the elevator of the hotel to go to the venue. Two women got in with me. They both stared at me.

“Look at you! You’re CUTE!” said one.

“SO cute! said the other.

“Well, thanks!” I said, a bit taken aback.

“And your blouse is so pretty!”

“REAL pretty!” said the other.

“Well thank you, I like it.” I said. It was a gold silk Catherine Malandrino blouse. I love her designs.

“And that long coat of yours is real sassy.” she said, inspecting me up and down. This never happens in New York. Women don’t just compliment each other in the elevator. It was either sassy or silly, since it was 110 degrees all day and wearing a long coat was the last thing on most people’s minds. But I was feeling chubby, and so that was that.

“I was feeling ok, but after looking at her I feel real travelled. Maybe I should just go back upstairs”, she said to her friend.

“Yeah,” said her friend. This made me feel bad.

“Well, I am a singer, and I am going to perform now. That’s why I am dressed up.”

“Oh!” they said together.

“Hence the cough drop!” said one unexpectedly, referring to what I had in my mouth. She pronounced it “hints”.

“Exactly!” I said, and went off to the venue feeling “cute” and “sassy”.

Before this we had dinner in a little Mexican restaurant with a mariachi band playing, and Mike told the story of his years playing with John Cale. He can never give an abbreviated version, it is always at least 15 minutes long, ending with a flourish of wild hand waving as John Cale goes off the deep end and kills a chicken onstage with an ax, after which Mike quits the band and becomes a vegetarian.

During the show I had some trouble with my throat, trouble swallowing and breathing. I think it was the heat or the humidity. The dressing room was so odd! The manager of the club said to me, “We call this the Malkovitch Room.” It was as though they had built the floor somehow around the door, so that the doorknob was down around my knees and the top half of the door was a normal proportion. It looked like a detail out of one of my weird architectural dreams.

I read on the Undertow that there was a drunken woman on line after this show complaining that I took a long time to come out, and someone else said they waited for about an hour. This is probably true. I was with a woman backstage who was a girlfriend of my brother Tim, who died last year. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and we were consoling each other about his death. We had a lot to talk about.

Met some Towies who wanted to know the name of the hoof strengthening stuff I was using on my nails. I think I mentioned it in the Anaheim page of this journal.

There was a long line of people to meet afterwards and one man had brought me a small golden shopping bag with a Captain Underpants doll inside, in memory of Last Year’s Stories.

The last scene of the evening was a middle aged woman so drunk she couldn’t stand up, being dragged from a taxi in front of the hotel. As we all went to our rooms, she decided to curl up and go to sleep on the floor in the hallway. Her family kept coming back, attempting to wake her up and get her back into her room.

“There but for the grace of God,” said Phil.

[Next: Nashville, TN - August 9, 2003]