I Command My Monkeys

My husband and I have done a Bad Thing, and rather than repent, we're gonna embrace (literally and figuratively). We're also going to ask our readers to be complicit in our wickedness. Because that's how we roll: unrepentantly.

The bad thing: writing the Jennifer Scales series together, books which we ruthlessly wrote for the fantasy genre. That means that when the new book comes out tomorrow, EVANGELINA, some readers might not be able to find it.

The Betsy books, the werewolf books (DERIK'S BANE), the anthologies (FAERIES GONE WILD; DEAD AND LOVING IT), the Alaska books (THE ROYAL TREATMENT), the Gorgeous duo (DROP DEAD GORGEOUS), the Fred-the-mermaid trilogy (SWIMMING WITH THE SHARKS)...all those and more can be found in the romance section, under D for Dork (or, I s'pose, Davidson).

JENNIFER SCALES AND THE ANCIENT FURNACE, JENNIFER SCALES AND THE MESSENGER OF LIGHT, THE SILVER MOON ELM, RISE OF THE POISON MOON, THE SERAPH OF SORROW, and now (as of Tuesday, August 30) EVANGELINA can all be found in the fantasy section.

Yep. All of my books except the Jennifer Scales ones are in the romance section; JS and her ilk lurk in fantasy. That was the Bad Thing my husband and I did (don't worry, honey, I'm not breathing a word about the Bad Thing we did with all that silly string, or the Bad Thing we did with the pumpkin innards after we carved multiple Jack O'Lanterns last Halloween, or the Bad Thing we did with the honey butter they gave us at Anton's.). And since I just had a hardcover release in July, I wouldn't expect readers to think of checking an entirely different section in the bookstore for ever more MaryJanice (and Anthony Alongi).

But it's there! EVANGELINA should be there, cooling its heels in the fantasy shelves or, even better, on a New Release table near the front. If it's not, please don't hesitate to ask your bookseller or librarian to order it. Because Betsy and Jennifer are published under different imprints, they aren't marketed together. They have different editors, different marketing budgets, etc. And often, a bookseller or librarian will order my new hardcover for the beginning of summer, and then not even think to check a catalogue to see if I've got another book coming out 9 weeks later, at the end of summer.

But I do! And there's no escape. So don't fight it. As I said, it's our own fault Jennifer lurks in the fantasy section. We didn't have to write for that genre. Actually, we didn't: the Jennifer Scales books were originally written and marketed for the young adult genre. The trouble (though I'm not sure "trouble" is the right word) started when we began receiving fan mail from readers of all ages. In the same week, we had a fan letter from a 9 year-old boy and a 90 year-old grandmother. People of all ages were rudely going into the YA section and buying Jennifer Scales. The nerve! (And by 'the nerve' we meant 'that's awesome'.)

So! Marketing slapped a bunch of new covers on the books, and now they hang out on the fantasy bookshelves. Is it any wonder our readers sometimes have trouble tracking them down? We take full responsibility. And by "full" we mean "no".

Like we said: a Bad Thing. And like we also said: rather than repent, we could really use your help. If you want EVANGELINA (or the first in the series, JENNIFER SCALES AND THE ANCIENT FURNACE, or the second, etc.), check fantasy. If it's not there, mercilessly nag the bookstore manager. (Hey, that's what we do...and not even when there's a new book to bug them about.)

Fly, my winged monkeys! Fly!

I Almost Steal a Dog and am Not Mauled by a Bear (again)

We were up at our writer's retreat over the weekend, the house by the lake where bats and bears live. It's pretty quiet up there; the woods are all around. We've seen bald eagles, beavers, wild turkeys, deer, turtles, frogs, loons, and a bear we call Hammock. And this was a weird weekend, even by our standards.

I let my kid drive us into town to hit the Meat Shoppe (which is not the name of the business, but I like using the word Shoppe, so there you go). She's learning quickly; like her father and my father, she's an instinctive driver. Me, I've gotta think everything out and sometimes I still end up in the ditch. The little brat is already better at parallel parking than I am. (No Christmas presents for her this year, the lousy show-off.)

So anyway, we came out of Ye Old Meat Shoppe laden with bags of meat. The kid hopped into the driver's seat, I climbed into the passenger side. She checked mirrors, she looked behind her, and then she slowly started to back out. Then she stopped and (fluent in the local dialect we call Minnesota Nice) waved an older woman and her on-crutches husband to go ahead and cross behind her. The lady shook her head, so my kid began to reverse again...then hit the brakes. Hard.

"My smoothie!" I wailed. "Nooooo!" Then I realized: the man had fallen, and Chris had seen him disappear from her mirror. Aw, shit. Also: my smoothie!

While mourning said smoothie, I popped my seat belt and hurried out of the car. My daughter was right on my heels as she always is when she thinks someone's hurt, or that Mom's over her head. (So she's on my heels a lot.)

Turns out the poor guy had fallen...he was pretty unsteady on his crutches. His wife was trying to help him up (tricky, as he outweighed her by a good twenty pounds) with one hand while clinging to their dog's leash with the other. So I stepped forward, gently took the leash from her and said, "I'll hold him for you." And as I did that, my kid flanked me and tried to help him up from the other side.

What? Listen: the kid's got the strong legs and back. She's also, due to extensive martial arts training, much much more coordinated than I am. If she'd grabbed the leash and I'd hustled over to help the gentleman, not only would I have fallen on my ass, but the poor guy would have broken my fall. Why should we both get our hips broken?

Meanwhile, a few guys had pulled up and hopped out of their trucks to help. So while they tried to get him settled, I soothed the dog, one of those big friendly golden labs, the kind with a head like a fuzzy cinder block, and a tail three inches in diameter that numbs your shins in an instant. I think I did too good a job of soothing him, because he sure cheered up: "Ow. Ow! My shin! Uh..." I saw they were looking at me while still tending to the man. "I'm fine. Don't worry about me." Nice one, MJ. Your ass isn't the one on the pavement (for a change), so suck it up.

Someone came over with a chair, so he could sit and regain some strength and then try to get back on his crutches, and someone else brought him a bottle of water. Meanwhile, I was getting pretty enchanted with the lab...I've always loved hunting breeds, and this one was typical of labs, what with the friendly slobbering and the tail thwacking and the shin numbing.

Just as I had decided to encourage him to leap into my car (they'd never catch me! and my kid would probably be able to catch a ride home with one of the Good Samaritans in the lot), the crisis had calmed. "Thank you so much, and your daughter, too, for helping us," the wife said, reaching for the leash. I'm afraid I held onto it a little longer than was proper, and we had a brief tug of war over who got to kidnap the lab from the Meat Shoppe parking lot. She won. She was elderly, but spry and with wiry strength. So, dog-less, I slunk back to the car.

As we pulled back onto the highway, my daughter asked why I'd gotten out of the car and run over to the man on the ground so quickly. I told her, "I didn't know why he fell. I worried he'd had a heart attack. I know CPR, so..." I shrugged.

"So you would have done it? If he'd needed it? Done CPR and mouth-to-mouth and all?"

"Sure, if there wasn't an off-duty paramedic or nurse or whatever around."

"I think that's cool," she said, delighted. "You probably know CPR because Grandma taught you."

(My parents suck at retirement, and both got certified so they could go on ambulance runs at all hours of the night in the middle of the Smoky Mountains. Because that's their idea of retirement: take tons of classes and a new job and invite strangers to haul your ass out of bed at 3:00 a.m.)

As it happens, my mom didn't teach me, but she sure could have. When she was learning CPR she and her partner had to practice on a dummy (one of the creepy ones, whose eyes follow you) to get certified. The instructor is supposed to push a button after a few minutes, which makes the creepy-eyed dummy appear to regain its pulse (eeewww!).

The button was broken, but no one knew. So my mom labored over the creepy-eyed dummy for twenty minutes. By the time the instructor clued in, Mom was thinking that even Jesus couldn't pull a Lazarus on the wretched thing. Natch, she passed the course, and the instructor loved that she didn't quit after four minutes and complain. A closed-heart massage will pop a lot of calories; imagine doing it for twenty minutes! I would have complained. Actually, I probably wouldn't have gone near the dummy in the first place. Natural selection, baby. If the dummy was meant to live, it'd live. Otherwise, let it and all its creepy kind die out.

So we saved the day (not really) and home we went. We'd had our adventure for the day. There weren't any more surprises in store for us.

Enter Hammock the bear. And then, enter me.

Some background: I hate working out. Frankly, I hate leaving the house. I'm working really hard on phasing myself out of my family's lives so I can make a fort out of sofa cushions and never leave the safety of said cushion fort. I love my sedentary lifestyle and I'm looking forward to being a shut-in. But I have to admit, walks outside (as opposed to a treadmill) make me feel good. And not just the ones where I bring chocolate Zingers in my fanny pack. (I feel safe wandering around the woods knowing I'm loaded with carbs, sugar, and fat. I cannot explain this. At all.)

Back to the walks: I'd grabbed my iPod, hollered to the kids that I'd be back in half an hour, hosed myself down with bug spray, and then out the door I went. Fifteen minutes later, as I was listening to the theme from the A-Team (my iPod is an eclectic place) I mused, "This isn't bad. It's maybe fun. And by doing this, I'm being kinder to my body. Really, there's no downside to...

(At this point, I glanced to my left and observed Hammock the Bear staring at me from the ditch about seven feet away.)

...aw, shit. Being mauled by an American Black Bear is not being kinder to my body. It'd be safer if I'd taken up smoking crack. Should have stayed in the house and broken open a new pack of Zingers.

I instantly resorted to survival skills learned in high school: I dropped eye contact with the popular kid. Caaaaaasually turned around. Slooooowly started walking away. Thinking: oh shit oh shit oh shit. Thinking, they can run thirty miles an hour. Thinking, don't YOU run. Thinking, maybe I can strangle him with the cord for my ear buds. Thinking, like I need another reason to hate exercise?

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, after Hammock the Bear had been spotted in our backyard a few months back, my husband insisted that I strap a fillet knife to my hip for my walk that day. So like all loving wives, I took that as a signal to scoff and mock him. Weeks later, in the middle of trying not to be run down and devoured, I remembered the scoffing and thought: Tony's gonna be heartbroken when they find my gnawed remains, but also vindicated. But mostly heartbroken. Prob'ly. He does sort of get off on I-told-you-so, almost as much as I do. Irony, why do you hate me? Well, that's it. If I lived through this, I wasn't gonna tell him. Because being devoured by a furry omnivore is actually preferable to an I-told-you-so. Don't ask me to explain the logic. It just is.

As I passed our ironically-named bear box (the thing we keep garbage in to keep Hammock out), I risked a glance over my shoulder. Hammock had left the ditch and was standing in the middle of the road, still watching me. I reminded myself that the black bear hardly ever attacks over territory; it's more likely to try to pull your face off if you accidentally scare it. A sedentary writer with dreams of a sofa cushion fort, it must have known, was no threat. Ever.

So I risked breaking into a brisk trot...our front door was only thirty feet away, and Hammock was now a ways behind me; I couldn't even see him anymore. I trotted more briskly (brisklier?).

Inside the house, my kids were puzzled, since they could hear my sneakers slapping on the gravel. "Who's jogging?"

They looked out the window. "It's Mom!"

"What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know! Look at her, she's coming in pretty fast. Maybe it's a seizure? Some kind of weird seizure that makes her run?"

"I didn't know she even could run."

"Maybe we should call the cops. Maybe that's not Mom at all."

My kids looked at each other, beyond confused, and then heard me hurl the door open, then slam it shut. "FUCK!"

"It IS Mom!"

"Thank God. I didn't want to take on a robot or pod person or whatever. Uh...Mom? We heard you running. What's up with that?"

While wheezing, I related the tale. Then I went to my room to lie down and have a heart attack. Once my pulse had dropped, I cranked up the laptop and double-checked to make sure my Hammock knowledge had been accurate. It had been. Then I got on Amazon and ordered four cans of bear spray, which you can apparently squirt at them from ten or more feet away. Because I don't want to shiv Hammock with a fillet knife (this is the wilderness, not an episode of Oz), and strangling him with my ear buds seems iffy. But squirting something that will annoy him enough to keep him back without causing long-term effects looked like the way to go.

The funny thing is, I actually preferred the bear encounter to the whole bat thing this past winter. By a LOT. How dumb is that?

And to think: I had no idea what I was going to blog about this week. It's just been too peaceful around the joint. Thanks, Hammock.

I Reschedule Myself

Kare TV did not learn their lesson! They've invited me next week, Thursday, August 18. I'm already hatching diabololical schemes and working on my nice-to-meet-you-I-promise-I'm-not-crazy handshake. When you get right down to it, I have no choice but to go back...it's the only way they'll learn.

Diana Pierce And President Obama And I Are Not On TV

President Obama cut me off while I was talking vampires with Diana Pierce, which I never saw coming. I was okay with it, though...I think I even needed it. Because just when I think I've heard it all, something like that goes and happens. Which is good! It's never smart to forget the world's a weird place.

I had one of the best mornings ever, and not just because my teenager greeted me with, "I've got good news and bad; the good news is, you looked really pretty on TV." How often does a suburban mom get to hear that? And how shallow does it make me that I care? A) not more than once or twice a week, and B) really, really shallow. More than usual shallow. Bordering on Betsy shallow (yikes!); not one of my better qualities, but what can you do? Once a former Miss Congeniality, always a former Miss Congeniality.

Getting interviewed on TV is the best, unless you're the person of interest local law enforcement has been looking for. Believe me, that is not as exciting as it sounds. Don't fall for the hype! But if you're at the studio for other reasons, it's great. The place is always air conditioned (I'll admit I don't appreciate that as much in January), the green room is occasionally green, and the staff is unflappable. They can't be flapped in any way. After a while, you almost want to try and flap them, just to see them not flap. Which brings me to President Obama and how he couldn't flap them.

After the cheerful receptionist greeted me, the intern came out to bring me to the green-room-that's-actually-green. (I was always surprised when rooms that weren't green were called the green room.) Intern is an innocuous word for a job that's cooler and harder than can usually be summed up in two syllables. I wouldn't put the word up there with, say, teacher or doctor, but I'd put it up there with warden or hostage. Anyway, I've never run into one (intern, I mean) who was anything less than cheerful, professional, or harried, and today was no exception. In fact, given what they face each workday, I'm surprised interns aren't more wild-eyed, shrill, and/or tearful.

Like I said, this one was no exception; she came out to the reception area so she could bring me to the studio, and introduced herself so I could forget her name right away. I know...not too Cliched Big Shot, right? Is it worse that I instantly forgot names when I was a Cliched Little Shot, and a Cliched Nobody? That I think TV guests who don't recall proper nouns are Cliched Asshats? Because they absolutely are, and yep, I am their queen. You could donate a kidney and I'd still have to make an effort to remember your name: "I wanna say...Jenny?" "Beth." "Right! Thanks again for the gift of life, Seth." "Beth." "Right!"

Anyway, she explained that she wasn't sure when I'd be in front of the camera; apparently the president was going to make an announcement but they weren't sure when. So in addition to the crushing daily stress, the staff would have to be constantly be prepared to be interrupted on camera at any second for who knew how long, or maybe not, but be ready. Just thinking about it gave me a headache, but Her Name Escaped Me seemed to take the whole thing in stride. I always feel sorry for interns on account of their job being so horrific, and today promised to be worse than usual for her, but you'd never know it. You'll never catch an intern admitting to the horror of their job. Like retired people moving to Florid and pretending it's not hot (Mrs. Seinfeld: "Who wants hot chocolate!"), interns pretend their jobs don't entail long hours and constant stress for shit pay, or no pay. It's true! You can prompt them with lines like, "I can't imagine how stressful your job must be," and they'll smile and shrug off pressure that would give me an aneurysm.

But it was all good from where I was standing. I was square in the middle of the Kare 11 chaos because in a stroke of great good luck, one of the producers (I'm not using Christina's name, so as to protect Christina from the horrors of being blogged about) is a big Betsy fan. So this wasn't my first time at the rodeo. I'm not going to say that she schedules me to appear on an award-winning news show to find out how Betsy's going to avoid becoming the Big Bad of the future, because Christina is a thorough professional who puts the interests and needs of Kare 11's viewers ahead of her own summer reading list, but wouldn't it be the awesomest if she did? Think about how great that would be for me! A near-priceless PR opportunity practically in my own back yard, a chance not practical/foreseeable/feasible for 99 out of 100 writers, and it'd be right in my lap through no effort of my own! God, I get light-headed just thinking about it!

Anyway, back to the show. I told Her Name Escaped Me that I was camera-ready and could go on in five minutes or fifty, regardless of when Obama was coming on, or I could come back in a day or a week; however it worked for them. These things were all true, because the TV people were the ones doing me the favor; it wasn't the other way around. Her Name Escaped Me was thankful I wasn't lying on the floor drumming my heels and shrieking, "I wanna go on in the next segment I wanna go on in the next segment THE NEXT SEGMENT TELL OBAMA TO WAIT HIS DAMN TURN!" Oh, please. Like I'd ever act like such a brat if there wasn't chocolate involved.

Then Diana Pierce, the reporter, came in to meet me and talk about UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED. And I just went to pieces. Inside, where she couldn't see.

There's a reason I set most of my books in Minnesota: I've lived there the longest and I'm really, really lazy. I don't have to pop open Google to find out where 35W goes if you take the exit a few block's from Khan's. Oh, and also, I love Minnesota and think it's beautiful and feel lucky to live there, and when I wasn't living there I was homesick. When I chose to move to be with my husband, and knew I wouldn't be back for years, I cried. And because my parents had Kare 11 on all the time when we lived there, and when I visited, just hearing certain voices or names even as background would remind me of how homesick I was when I lived in Massachusetts. Even now, after living here for a decade, I'll hear a name and remember how much I missed living in Minnesota, and how happy I was when I moved back.

(Massachusetts, simmer down. You were beautiful, too, it just took me a while to appreciate you. And I love visiting you; I look forward to visiting you all year, I promise! I cried when I had to leave you, too, so don't get excited. Come to think of it, I cry a lot when I move. I guess I just really hate packing.)

Anyway, sorry to veer into the swamp of the sentimental, but there it is: certain names have deep significance to me, like Diana Pierce. Whose hand I was now shaking. I was touching Diana Pierce and she was talking to me. Two thoughts jumped into my brain as she introduced herself, and one of those thoughts was the truth and one was a lie. The lie was, "Hi, I'm not screaming inside my own head because it's so exciting to meet you because you are a symbol of all that I love about the great state of Minnesota, and I'm definitely not thinking about stealing your scarf or lipstick and keeping it hidden so I can secretly sniff it every morning after my Malt O'Meal."

I said the truth, which was, "What a pretty dress!" (It just seemed easier, and why needlessly alarm Diana Pierce?)

She said, smiling, "Thanks, I really like this dress. I got it last year and after a while some viewers asked if I had any other dresses, I was wearing it so often."

I thought: Those bitches! How dare they? HOW DARE THEY? They will rue the day, Diana Pierce! Just point them out to me, Diana Pierce, and I will kick their asses so hard their MOMS will feel it!

I said: "Well, that wasn't very nice."

I tried to get a grip on myself, and was a little successful since it's often total chaos inside my brain anyway, and this wasn't the first time I had to tell myself to just GET A GRIP already. So I told Diana Pierce that UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED had hit the New York Times list, and reminded her I'd gone to school in the area and was a Cannon Falls High School graduate, sort of a Local Girl Makes Good angle (which always sounded better than Local Girl Hears Voices).

Diana Pierce was pleased to hear it. Diana Pierce thought I was pretty great. "Also I'm the new David Hasselhoff in Germany," I added helpfully. Why? No reason. Wait...there was a reason. I had said that for a reason...the show! "They're making The Betsy Show in Germany." How great was it to bring that up?

It was exciting and cool just to be there, to have the chance to talk about my work on television, and of course it was exciting to meet Diana Pierce, but even better, it was acceptable to begin a conversation by telling Diana Pierce how terrific I was. Most times a reporter knows she's got maybe a minute and a half before the cameras come on to find out things she hopes will interest her viewers, so when I blurt "The Betsy Show in Germany", it not only makes Diana Pierce's job easier, it reminds everyone in the room (so, Diana Pierce and me) how terrific I am.

Before I knew it, Diana Pierce and I were gabbing a mile a minute, and had shifted from talking about Betsy (a fictional vampire and unemployed secretary) to Christina (a real life producer) and then incredibly, unbelievably, Diana Pierce said, "The three of us should have lunch! I think it'd be great if we could get together over lunch...we'd have so much to talk about! What do you think? Would you like to?"

What do I think, Diana Pierce? I think you've got a mean streak. I think you're playing a cruel joke. Because the obvious answer to, "Would you like to?" is yes. Would I like to see world peace in my lifetime? Yes. Would I like to crack the top ten on the NYT list? Yes. Would I like to have lunch with you and Christina? Doy, yes! (I'm trying to bring 'doy' back.) Doy, doy, a thousand times doy!

"Well, sure," I told Diana Pierce. "I mean, I'm sure I can fit you in. Go right ahead and mark me down for that one, ha ha!" My mouth has never been this dry. I have never uttered a faker laugh. My mouth is the Sahara. My laugh is the cackle of a dying parrot.

Now we're in the studio. I've been miked (and it didn't hurt a bit!). Nobody knows if Obama's going to have anything to say, or when he might say it (or not say it). The intern tells me to "go ahead and sit with Di", like Diana Pierce is a normal person another normal person could just go and sit with, like they were both normal. She's so adorable, thinking people can just sit down with Diana Pierce like that!

So I sit, I remind myself to sit up straight (I have a tendency to turtle...I can form my upper body into a perfect C without half trying). We're going live in about two minutes. We're talking like normal people. I have no idea what we're talking about. Probably vampires. Or books. Maybe both. Who knows? Like I can keep track of the voices inside my head AND Diana Pierce's voice? I'm just a woman, dammit!

We're live! Diana Pierce says something along the lines of readers being able to sink their teeth into UNDERMINED, and I cough up my strangled parrot laugh, and then Diana Pierce is asking how I came up with Betsy, and right around the phrase "plumber vampires" we get cut off. Viewers aren't seeing me anymore (or hearing my 'ha ha' dying parrot laugh), they're seeing...a bunch of suits milling around. They've interrupted our regularly scheduled program to show...nothing. They are going to tell us that President Obama is going to have an announcement for us...but not now. In fact, Obama hasn't even left his office. The network is going live to show...Obama not being there.

I burst out laughing; it never fails to crack me up when they show"LIVE at the bottom of the screen so we can see they are RIGHT THERE for the BREAKING NEWS that nothing is happening at that particular spot at that particular time, LIVE, right before our very eyes.

So Diana Pierce and I sit there, miked, watching...nothing. "If they cut back to us within two minutes, we can finish," Diana Pierce tells me, so we wait for the news to stop telling us they don't have anything to tell us, so I can go back to talking about plumber vampires. Unfortunately, they need the entire two minutes to tell us nothing. We're done; it's time for me to go.

Diana Pierce apologizes. Christina apologizes, and Her Name Escaped Me apologizes, which is really nice of them because what just happened was beyond their control. I threaten to come back. I mean, offer. I offer to come back. They pretend I'm the one doing them the favor, and agree to have me back on the show within the week. We talk for a bit longer about the UNDEAD series and my upcoming release, A WOLF AT THE DOOR, which is the first full-length werewolf book I've done since DERIK'S BANE. Right! Because this is my job and that's why I'm here, to talk about my job, which in this case is writing books. Not only do I get paid to do that, people then want me to come on television and talk about doing that. Which is why I'm here. I remember now! It's all coming back to me...

I de-mike myself and give Diana Pierce the mike. Then Diana Pierce asks for my cell number again, because the first time I couldn't hear her over all the static in my brain ("Kkksssttttt...Diana Pierce is talking to usssssskkkkkttttttt!"). Christina tells me she thinks lunch is a great idea, and we'll set something up. Of course lunch is a great idea. Of course we'll set something up. Because this sort of thing happens all the time. A TV producer wants to have lunch with Diana Pierce (no surprise) and me (gigantic shocker)! Ssssssskkkkkkkkttttttttttt!

Then I'm outside, blinking in the sunshine and clawing for my cell phone. It's so exciting! It's all so cool and exciting and this is my life and I'm lucky, lucky, in the whole world there's not one person luckier than me, so I call my assistant to tell her, and when she answers I greet her with, "Oh my God it was just too much fun and can you believe viewers can be that catty? It was a great dress. I think it's nice that Diana Pierce has good taste in clothes plus she's sensible about getting her money's worth. Plus they want me back and hopefully I'll get to come on and talk about A WOLF AT THE DOOR in addition to the next Betsy, right? I mean, I didn't even think of that, I was just jazzed to be there. Christina was really psyched about A WOLF AT THE DOOR, so maybe I can, you know? Wouldn't that be great? And the intern was really good at pretending her job wasn't a living nightmare what with all the stress, it must be just like being in Hell except everybody's great looking and has nice clothes. She never knew when Obama was going to interrupt us, none of them knew but they were super nice about it. I mean, that's what I'd expect but it's still great to see for myself, right?"

"Well, that's good," Tracy replied, because she's great at knowing what I'm talking about with no prep or hint of any kind. "Did they say when they could reschedule?"

"Reschedule?"

"Reschedule you to come back on the show."

"Why would--?" Oh. Oh! Right. Reschedule being on the show. In all the excitement of not being on the show, I'd forgotten I wasn't on the show. "Right! Reschedule. Gotcha." Of course, I'd have to check with Obama before I rescheduled a damned thing, but once we coordinated our schedules... "Sure, reschedule."

So I went home, and when I walked into the house my teenager had good and bad news. Good news: she thought I looked great on TV. Bad news: "They cut you off to show us a bunch of suits milling around because nothing was happening, and to tell us the President wasn't ready with his announcement and hadn't left his office yet. And then you never finished talking about plumber vampires because it was over."

Breaking news, bay-bee! And to think, a moment of living history, and I was there.