You really must excuse me for taking a departure from more high-minded topics and letting you inside my world and maybe even the scary place I call my  head. For just a few minutes.  A slice of life.

So yesterday I spent the afternoon in San Francisco with a girlfriend. Well, ok, we are both well-past “girlhood,” but still, she is someone I love spending time with. We had a long, chatty lunch and then saw this crazy, audience-participation play that is billed as “sort of adapted from Chekhov’s The Seagull.”  You know you’ve seen a lot of San Francisco theatre when you recognize two of the seven actors from other plays (“She was the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods! And I saw her at ACT and Magic!”)  and of course, my companion is a playwright and she knew them all.

Anyway, in this play, one character was so whiney that when he threatened to shoot himself in the head at least two of us wanted to yell out, “Go ahead! Put us out of our misery!”  By the time the play ended two hours plus intermission later I felt like I’d inhabited it for the entire day. Stupid fuxx king bird, indeed!  We were spent. So off I went to the train station to go home.

My train wasn’t in yet, but waiting for it were seven, count them, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven uniformed San Francisco sheriffs. I take the train all the time, and this is very unusual. I have rarely seen even one cop there.  They watched carefully as the train unloaded hundreds of South Bay Giants fans heading for the World Series ring ceremony. Then, four of them disappeared into the train station with some Caltrain workers, leaving three in the yard, including a sergeant.

Since no one was talkin’ and they weren’t ready to let us board I just stood and looked at the officers. I mean, what else was there to do–I could have watched the Caltrain workers empty trash, but have you ever seen a Caltrain worker? I rest my case.

So there they were, three fine specimens with their bad-ass shaved heads, standing there with crossed arms so as to better display their bulging biceps. None of them had necks, either, a tribute to their obviously diligent workouts. I looked at their badass guns in their holsters and what was either mace or a grenade. I am nothing if not a supporter of law enforcement, so I looked at them for the entire 15 minutes we had to wait before boarding and I must admit, the time flew.

Finally, we boarded and we rolled our way back to San Jose where, at the station I found my husband, who also has a bad-ass shaved head from time to time as well as a fine pair of biceps that are genetic, because he had them when he was 20. And of course, he also knows how to use a weapon, and his gun as well. And I was very glad to spend the rest of the evening admiring my view of him from our home. Or what is serving as our home during renovation, which is to say a couple of bedrooms filled with boxes.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Thanks for indulging me.