When I found out this week I would need to contribute to a month-of-November class birthday party for Lex, I got kind of excited. See, I have this cute animal-face cake pan, and I had a box of banana cake mix in my pantry, so viola! Monkey-face cake! Found the icing directions and today I baked the cake….

And 10 minutes before it was to come out of the oven I thought, “hmmmm, wonder if I should have looked at the allergen info?”

(See, Lex's classroom is tree-nut free, due to some food allergies suffered by his classmates).

Allergen info: Contains wheat, soy and (wait for it) TREE NUTS (pecans).

Shit. Off to the store we went (me, BK, and MFM) to buy a non-nut mix. Of course, the fancy-pants supermarket had only gluten-free mix, and I'll be darned if I'm going to present THAT to my little angel, so I tried Walgreens. They had two boxes of allergen-free yellow-cake mix. I bought them both and raced home, then washed the cake pan, made a yellow-cake monkey-face cake before Lex got home from school (popped it out of the pan about three minutes before he got off the bus), and then made a batch of cupcakes, just in case there's not enough monkey-face cake for everyone.

Nine eggs later and all I need to do is ice everything. Damn straight I'll be posting pictures. 🙂

I continue to go to the gym nearly every day. The scale hasn't budged so much as a pound but I can tell that I'm getting stronger. I had a fit-test analysis done when I began my membership and then another one month later, because I was burning out a little and, again, the scale wasn't budging. Well, if the gym's tape-measure analysis is to be believed, I dropped 5% body fat in a month. Pretty cool.

My smallish goal once I started my gym regimen was to learn how to run on the treadmill without falling off. Now I run on the 'mill nearly every time and I have yet to fall off (though I have accidentally tripped the “emergency stop” button a couple of times, which brings the damn thing to a screeching halt and, yes, is more than a bit of a buzzkill). Typically I run about three miles. Yesterday I started on the rowing machine — rowed 2000 meters in 9 minutes 40 seconds, and then got on the treadmill and ran 2.5 miles. Then I punished myself on a few of the strength machines before saying “screw it” and taking a nice, hot shower.

Today I have a callus and a bit of a rubbing blister from where my wedding bands rubbed against the palm of my left hand. So, yeah, I'm feeling pretty badass, and hardly sore at all!

My BFF, Fringes, is doing the National Blog Posting Month. It's kind of like National Novel Writing Month, but with a lower word count. Basically, bloggers are encouraged to write every day. While it would be spectacular to post 30 blog posts this month, I'm not going to go all crazy with it, but I will encourage myself to check in here more often than usual.

Yesterday was Halloween. The boys got a tremendous haul of candy — even MFM's physical therapist showed up with goody bags for them — and today the sugar hangover was powerful, indeed.

I couldn't sleep last night. This was due to a combination of factors: BK's cold, MFM's trying to wedge her walker into her half-bathroom around midnight, the shocking conclusion to this week's episode of The Walking Dead, and Kim Kardashian's failed marriage. Now, nobody who knows me in real life is surprised by my hatred of all things Kardashian — even the illustrious Bruce Jenner has dropped about 100 notches in my estimation — but this 72-day wedding after the $10-million hoopla makes me violently ill. E Online has been whoring this family out for years and I wonder whether they're a mite pissed off that Kim filed for divorce during the same month that they showed a two-night Kardashian Wedding Spectacular brouhaha. Or maybe they're happy because divorce = drama = good TV = happy advertisers.

The whole thing is sickening. The SF Chronicle posted a story about other celebrity marriages that quickly failed — Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman's nuptials only lasted 10 days — but you know what? That doesn't make me feel better. Especially when so many people are screaming that same-gender marriage destroys the sanctity of the union. My friends Nicki and Emily have been married for six years and they're doing a lot more to promote the sanctity of wedded bliss than any cheap-ass cat-faced reality “star” did.

I wonder how many people who argue against gay marriage watched both nights of the Kardashian Wedding Spectacular.

I just had to tell my mom how to spell her name while she signed her voter registration application… should I really be mailing this to the Board of Elections? Or should it conveniently “get lost”?

Yeah, I mailed it. But only because by the time the presidential elections come around, corporations will get 100 votes for every resident, so her one vote won't matter. Right?

The good news is, I've been accepted into Dave Schwensen's Comedy Workshop: three Saturdays of comedy development, capped by a Wednesday-night, five-minute showcase at the Cleveland Improv. To say I'm stoked doesn't even begin to cover it. I'm particularly looking forward to developing some clean comedy, so I can take part in the coffeehouse open-mics which are much more in line with my bedtime.

Other good news: Monstro, the boys and I are going to California next month, where we'll see my dad and stepmother for the first time in over a year. I'm so eager for this I'm practically ready to start walking there.

And now for the rest of it. MFM got a wild hare last week and rushed out the front door without her walker and of course crashed to the ground. She didn't break anything but wrenched her right foot and has been in bed for the past five days, so I'm waiting on her hand-and-foot (no pun intended) and GD that's tiring. And, she just referred to my husband as “what's his name.” She will be staying in respite care while we're away; I'm really looking forward to the break. I'm tired.

We joined a gym last Sunday and I was there for seven consecutive days. They have childcare but not MFM-care, so I'm going whenever Monstro's schedule allows, as well as whenever the hired MFM-care is in place. It's nice having somewhere to go.

Well, since last I wrote, I have moved to Ohio, seen Niagara Falls, started one kid in Kindergarten, another in Preschool, sent Monstro off to his new job at Case Western Reserve University, renewed a friendship with a dearest friend from high school who also lives in the realm of our new home in Ohio (Cleveland area), hired and fired one home-health agency for MFM, hired a second agency (this one seems better, please cross your fingers), and have as of yet managed to stave off the nervous breakdown that's probably coming along any.minute.now.

So yeah, things are in flux and have changed but are mostly good. Except for MFM, who becomes a more unreliable narrator every day. Her diagnosis as of eight weeks ago is “Parkinson's dementia” and yes that's as crappy as it sounds, and it will likely only become crappier, so that, well, sucks.

Nevertheless I am moving forward, trying to find a little bit of work so I'm not exclusively providing care to MFM and the boys. I'd like to be doing some stand-up out here but so far all the ones I've found in bars don't start until 10 pm and the ones in coffee shops are in coffee shops were people are unlikely to be drunk and I'm unlikely to be allowed to be the blue-vulgar comic I am. So I'm working on some clean stuff, and have come up with a couple of bits, but for now they're being shared just in my notebook or Facebook.

Good news: the woman who came from the new home-health agency has a friend who is willing to watch my kids, so Monstro and I have a date night tonight. Too bad we don't have a van conversion. Which reminds me of BK's new favorite joke: What is the mouse's favorite game? Hide and squeak! Squeak squeak squeak!

And here are the YouTube links, courtesy of the very funny Matt Woodland:

Part 1 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 2 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 3 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 4 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 5 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 6 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 7 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 8 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 9 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

I've never tried this before but here's my NOT SAFE FOR WORK scriptnotes with post-mortems in parenthesis.

Opening Joke: I want to open a seafood restaurant called “Fishy.”

NSFW dirty jokes about Mr. Hugh Hefner and OTRs

(I told them the title after asking if they knew what NSFW meant, and one girl said “Not Safe For Work” into the mic for me. I asked if they liked my coat, that I was trying a new look, and the response was pretty positive. I asked if they could guess where my coat was from and [P. De Vries?] shouted, “Old Navy.” And I said,

“You’re right! Maybe that will be my thing. ‘Oh, yeah, she’s the one w/ Old Navy.’ I need some Navy jokes now.)

(Then I said that I’d written these pages last night and I was glad to be there. I read the title and then explained that there was a footnote because I’ve read a lot of David Foster Wallace, and if you’ve read even a little of DFW you’ve actually read a lot because that’s what reading him’s like, and that an OTR is an “on-topic related” and that's a real thing that I made up and you should tweet it so I can see it when I get a Twitter.)

I’m not saying Hugh Hefner is old and gets laid a lot, but his balls are retreads.

A retread, in case you’re from New York and don’t know, is a tire that was all used up but remanufactured in order to extend its useful service life.

Retreaded for an extended useful service life. Now, to me, that sounds like Hugh Hefner's balls.

Right on, Mr. Hefner. I believe every word of it.

I don't, however, know what Hef's balls look like in real life: never seen a picture or anything. Which is funny to me, because he publishes the *seminal* (ahem) magazine for naked-women peeping, and yet we’ve never seen his own goodies.

In the day and age of the sex tape of EVERYONE, where is Hugh Hefner's sex tape? What, there’s no videocameras in the Playboy Mansion?

The hilarious Nick Cårøn closed this joke with, “Hugh Hefner has tons of sex tapes; he’s just not IN any of them.”

Anyway, I demand equal play for equal wank. That’s got to be in Title IX, somewhere. (I asked, a few people in the audience knew Title IX enabled equal funding for men’s and women’s collegiate sports.)

Anyway, he was going to be married this weekend but now it looks like the wedding’s off. It’s too bad they couldn’t work it out, Hef and his twentysomething fiancée; you know, for the grandchildren’s sake. Hell, they’re not so different from one another… For instance, his brandy decanter is crystal and her name is Crystal. They enjoy long walks on the beach together: Crystal in her Shape-Ups, Hugh in his oxygen tent.

(Then I offered “Alternate Endings for this joke: Iron lung? Tanning bed? Pajama factory?” Pajama factory worked both with this crowd and my D&D adventuring party.)

They both have bald crotches: hers because she waxes, his because first it went gray and then all his pubes fell out. (When I wrote this joke I laughed so hard, I snorted. I made myself snort. Fucking awesome. So I told the audience, and they asked me to snort but I said I couldn’t do it on demand, that it was an organic thingy. )

This is merely to poke fun at a man who's had my respect for two decades. I'm a 20-year Playboy subscriber. (Told the young audience, “It’s OK to be pushing 40 because you can say you’ve been doing something for 20 years and when you started it wasn’t illegal) and there's a lot to be said for the magazine. Really. The longevity alone: December 1953 was issue one. That was 58 years ago. Some of you have great-grandmothers who are 58-years old. (I told the audience that after that sentence was a parentheses with “Holyoke?” therein and that got all the laughs whereas the great-grandmother part was met w/ crickets.)

Playboy publishes interviews, jokes, searing journalism. I read it for the pussy.

“Retreaded balls.” Funny. I don't think “retreaded cock” sounds as funny as balls. Maybe “prick.” What do you think? Are retreaded balls funnier than a retreaded cock would be? (Someone in the audience yelled, “Johnson!” I said, “Yeah, I’d use that, but my last name is Johnson and I wouldn’t want to seem self-aggrandizing”, which broke the place up and I snorted and they laughed even harder and someone (Matt Woodlawn?) yelled “there it is!”)

Retread. Look it up! If you really want to know about it, you can also retread stairs, which is strange to me because tires and stairs are very different shapes to be associated by the same action verb. For that matter, so are cocks. END of SET

Despite tornadoes raging throughout Western Mass, I went to Bishop's Lounge to do my third-ever stand-up comedy set. I got there too early because I had a lot of material and needed to make an outline of what was going to go where. The sign-up sheet had 15 slots on it and I chose number 12, so that I could go on after people'd had enough booze but so I wouldn't have to follow anyone too funny (the funniest people sign up at the end). The audience was small (I blame the aforementioned tornadoes) so it was basically a whole lot of comedians and maybe five or six actual audience members. Tough room but we made it work.

A couple of interesting things arose last night:

1: Background: two Wednesdays ago, I met a woman who'd been kind of slandered in that day's newspaper — she managed a local restaurant. I was pretty outraged so I wrote a letter to the editor, which ran in that Saturday's paper. Then, about four days later, I went to that restaurant, and a few minutes after I sat down, a waitress approached me. “Are you the one who wrote that letter?” I said that I was, and she thanked me profusely. But I didn't know how she knew it was me until I saw her at Bishop's last night. After the comedy was over I talked to her. “Did you know I was the one who wrote the letter because you'd seen me do comedy here?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. Crazy!!!!

2: Even though there were plenty of available spots, nobody signed up to go on after me. Hmmm.

OK. As for my set, it went well. I had two friends in the audience, one of whom taped me until his batteries died. Here's the link for Lynn B. Johnson's June 1, 2011 tornado-day set. This is the first five minutes and it's actually pretty safe for work. The dirty stuff didn't come in until the end. So, except for some eff words, this video is pretty tame. Another comedian taped my whole set and I'll post that link when I have it.

I'm starting to think there's something to this, people…

I went back and did more stand-up comedy last night. Spoiler alert: I got more laughs than expected. I arrived at 7:36 and the list was already pretty full.

“Is there room on the list?” I asked Nick, the M.C.

“Just put your name down toward the end,” he replied. Score!

The place was super crowded and my friend Ruth showed up with a couple of friends in tow, so this time I knew someone in the audience. This made me a bit more nervous than I would have been, but it wasn't anything a Maker's Mark on the rocks with a splash of water couldn't cure. I had to sit through a lot of comedians because I was in the final four (final three, actually, but who's counting? Me.).

I'd prepared a bunch of stuff over the past week and then didn't use any of it, choosing instead to use the stuff I wrote in the car on the way over. It worked great: much better than expected, per the spoiler alert. I'm proud to say that I didn't recycle any jokes from the week before; it was all new material.

Once again I was the only woman to take the stage, so my opening line was, “I'm Lynn B. Johnson and let's give it up for all the guys who came before me (big applause) because I was on the balcony with them before the show and they ALL came before me (big laughs), which means they're all either really good at it, or really bad at it.

Then I talked about how it's my personal philosophy to set the bar low, except when playing limbo, and how I've lost 60 pounds since the day I gave birth to my second kid, and about my size 16 skinny jeans being like a one-night stand: you're not fooling me, and you're not fooling you, but you're saying what I want to hear, so yeah, I'll get in your pants, Old Navy. Then I talked about fast-food and I got to tell my filthiest joke, yay, and then I talked about BK's $1.99 apple fries (because when I buy an apple I want to pay extra for the packaging), and how God is smarter than us and how that was proved by my conversion to Christianity, and about this Saturday's alleged apocalypse, which everyone had heard about so really, not a bad return-on-investment for that guy's life savings, and then I closed with, “I'll tell you this one last thing: if on Saturday, I'm raptured away, and you loot my house, I will fucking haunt you.” Big laughs. Thanks, you've been a great crowd, goodnight!

Then, at the end of the night when the M.C. puts all of the comedians' names in a hat and the bartender pulls one out and a crappy prize is awarded, guess what? I won! I gave the M.C. shit about the sweater vest he was wearing — I accused him of stealing it from my mom but seriously, I would *never* let my mom wear that thing — and he gave me a credit-card-payment folio with a “happy anniversary” bean in it; I'm to plant it and then it allegedly will unfurl a blossom that somehow conveys a message of “happy anniversary.”

Well, we had already known each other for a week, so I suppose it's apropos. Got lots of “you're funny”s after the set and plenty of hearty handshakes from the other comedians. Nick told me how happy he was that I won tonight's mystery prize, and how he just grabs something crappy from his room to raffle off every week.

Terrific, terrific, terrific. Maybe there's something to this, after all.