Mike’s performance tonight was superb. It’s amazing to see how far the show has come since that first full rehearsal in January of 2001, and even since the last time I saw it last summer. They’ve really tightened it up and improved it in a multitude of ways. Fascinating process, like editing a manuscript but in four dimensions.

Afterwards, we ate at a lousy restaurant where two women were lapdancing guys at the bar. Jean-Michele encountered one of them in the bathroom and something amazingly funny happened, which I challenge her to tell in her own blog, should she finally start writing it.

Later we came home and once again fortified with ice cream and the inescapable flavored seltzer water watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I’d never seen it in widescreen before, and hadn’t realized just how beautiful the film is.

I feel almost dirty making a transition from that masterpiece to our recent work, but the reason I sat down to file this dispatch was to put up some snapshots taken during our filming.

This is, predictably, me with the camera. It’s the lovely and talented Canon XL-1, with a Sony stereo microphone attached to the boom you can just barely see in Jean-Michele’s hand there at the left. I have two of those microphones. The first one died because I left the battery in it for six months in storage, and so I bought the second one right before coming to New York. Then I realized the first one wasn’t dead after all–I was just incompetent. Now I have two identical fully functioning microphones. I’m such an idiot.

Here are Mike and I in Chinatown, getting ready to do his bit about pornsniffing day at Amazon.com. We recorded a performance of this bit on stage in preparation for the show over a year ago, and it was strange to be doing it again in this very, very different environment.

Jean-Michele did sound for the shoot, operating the boom mike. Here we are working on the Promenade, the lovely park that looks off the coast of Brooklyn (there’s an odd phrase) towards the Financial District of Manhattan. Yes, there were once two huge buildings right over there across the water, but then some fucking idiots made their bid for glory.