You are jealous of me. I saw Aimee Mann last night. What a great show she puts on. She played a bunch of songs from her new album, some favorites from the Magnolia soundtrack (before one of the songs she said "now just picture frogs raining down on you") and Bachelor No. 2. Some highlights:

"Red Vines" during the first encore

"Humpty Dumpty" and "Pavlov's Bell" were great

"Deathly" from B. #2, one of my favorite songs of hers. She also played "Calling it Quits" and "Susan" and among others, though not my favorite song, "How Am I Different"

a woman in the audience yelled out "Voices Carry!" and Aimee sighed and pretended to strangle herself. She said, "no, It's okay, I know you only said that so you'd see if I would get really angry or explode, right?" Then as the audience laughed she said "No - I'm gonna do it. I'm going to sing Voices Carry for you." she turned to the keyboardist and said "give me a C, a bouncy C" and the band started to play accompaniment, and she did it, she sang Voices Carry! I was so happy. That was a favorite song of mine in 1985-86, and I loved the video too, with Aimee's crazy freak-hair...

She had a new lighting guy who used projected polka-dot circles and mesh patterns that would rotate on the back wall of the stage then slowly slip up to the ceiling and then back down across the audience. Very beautiful and colorful and fitting.

Also, before the show I had a girls-night-out dinner at Cha's with Anya and Penny. It was very nice. I've always found it more difficult making friends with women than with men. Yet I crave female friends. I guess it's hard for me to be myself, all exposed without that veil of jokes and flirtiness to hide behind. Women see through all that bullshit (at least I do, and I assume others do) when they watch other women. Anyway. I've become so much less self-conscious than when I was in high school and college. It's made me more comfortable in my own skin. Life is just easier when you aren't constantly thinking of how other people are judging you or admiring you. Now I'm all, Who the fuck cares? When I was a kid, my parents had this embarrassing overweight single friend named Lee. Whenever there was a good song on the radio, she'd tap and slap her thigh in time with the music. It was mortifying and so, so dorky. Yet it's exactly what i did at the show last night (I would have been up dancing but this was an old theater with assigned seats and no dance floor). Lee didn't care and I didn't either.