One night last week I took my wife to see my play “All Dressed Up But Going Nowhere,” which was presented as part of The Car Plays. The play concerned a husband and wife broken down in their car, awaiting AAA and reliving arguments past and present. This was probably the first time in 10 years or more that Valorie didn’t like one of my plays. “It wasn’t funny,” she said. On the way home, she added that it wasn’t funny because “I say those things!” Which elicited in my memory the response my writing professor gave me in college when I asked how his wife felt about his nakedly confessional poems:  “She knows how much I fictionalize.” (Later, they divorced.)

Last night we had my son’s (second) 18th birthday party. The time came for cake, and Valorie asked me what kind I wanted. I saw two kinds laid out:  chocolate and carrot. Here was our exchange:

Lee: I’d like chocolate.

Valorie: You’re kidding me.

Lee: What? No. Chocolate.

Valorie: I made this carrot cake from scratch.

Lee: I don’t care for carrot cake.

Valorie: I made it from scratch.

Lee: Sorry, I just don’t like carrot cake.

Valorie: I even made the icing from scratch. I can’t believe you.

Lee: Okay, I’ll have the carrot cake.

Valorie: You can have the chocolate, you know.

Lee: Uh… now I don’t know what to do. What’s the right answer?

I looked down on the plate she handed me and there was her solution:  two slivers of cake, one carrot and one chocolate. Diplomatically, I ate them both. Then she asked me, “How was the carrot cake?”

Lee: Amazing. Incredible. Never have I had cake like that!

Valorie:  I know this is going to wind up in a play some day.

She may be right. Luckily, she knows how much I fictionalize.

The Fourth of July isn’t until tomorrow, but today it feels like it’s Christmas that came early:  Sarah Palin is resigning her governorship. Why? No one knows — least of all, it seems, her. She says she “knows when it’s time to go,” and I’m sure that everyone who actually voted for her knows when that time is too:  when her term is over. Resigning early tells us there’s something up, even if we don’t know what it is yet. I’m sure that right now all my theatre friends in Alaska are cheering and buying rounds of drinks.

Man, that election last fall is the gift that keeps on giving.

Stephen Colbert reminds us how past words of GOP Congressmen come back to haunt them.

My taxes are complicated:  kids, mortgage, Schedule C income from writing, business income from my business, employment income from teaching, and any number of separate forms and deductions. All of it straight-up, but none of it qualifying as simple. Earlier this year I paid the full amount of what my accountant estimated I owed the state of California for 2008. Yesterday he came to me with a revision, based upon what’s going to be the final filing, and the good news is that the state now owes me a refund.

The bad news is that the state now has no money and who knows if I’ll ever get that refund. Starting today, my fair state started issuing I.O.U.’s. (Mostly to people in wheelchairs, judging from the news coverage.) No, there’s no forecast on when they’ll be repaid, or if there’ll be any interest. What if we all adopted this system? I go to fill up my car and hand the gas-station owner an I.O.U., redeemable… oh… when I get around to it. What if, after that, he decides that he needs someone to write him up a good sign explaining why he can’t accept I.O.U.’s, and we agree that I’ll let him redeem the I.O.U. in exchange for me writing that sign? Then we have a barter system — which I’m starting to think is where California is heading in its financial management.

Hey, by the way, if you’d like to take a crack at balancing the state budget (which would allow paying off those I.O.U.’s, and would wind up meaning more money in my checking account, thank you), here’s a fun interactive Deficit Meter on the L.A. Times site. Let me save you some time:  No matter what you do, you can’t follow the state GOP’s playbook of no-new-taxes and still balance it. At least, not without enormous I.O.U.’s to everyone in the future, wheelchair or not.

I well remember the revelation I had one day in my junior high history class. We were studying the fall of the Roman Empire, and we got to the point in history where the barbarians are at the gates. Classically this is presented as the fall of a great people before lesser, slobbering, uncultured, undeserving barbarous hordes. Although I’d heard about these barbarians before, for some reason this time I realized that these were what we would now call Germans, and I thought, “Hey, these are my people.” And then, quick as that, I thought, “Who says they were barbarians?” The answer:  other people other.

History’s funny that way.

I just finished reading <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0609809644?ie=UTF8&tag=counterintu0f-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0609809644″>Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=counterintu0f-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0609809644″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />, a book I picked up while back East.

Here’s the image of Genghis Khan I grew up with in school and have gotten used to via innumerable cultural references:  bloodthirsty conqueror with no regard for human life. I never gave that any further thought until reading this book, which paints Genghis Khan as someone who treated most of his people far better than the dictators, tyrants and aristocrats before him, who shared the wealth of his conquests across his lands, who was tolerant of all religions, and who encouraged the spread of science and learning. And he did this while conquering a terrain four times the size of the Roman Empire at its height, and doing it in 20 years (it took the Romans 200).

Who knew?

My first thought about all this was:  If someone can rehabilitate the image of Genghis Khan, for God’s sake, then maybe there’s hope for George W. Bush’s legacy. But then I realized:  Genghis Khan was a top-notch manager; history is never kind to incompetents.

On a similar note, it was nice last week to see another round of releases from the Nixon tapes. Every time I’m afraid we’ll all finally swallow the idea that he was a terrific statesman and gifted president who got unfairly entangled in the sort of scandal that “everyone” does, well, then more transcripts come out and set us straight again. There’s something to be grateful for.

About a million individual bug bites.

I didn’t see any of the notorious greenhead flies I grew up with. In the insect world, greenhead flies are the carnivorous flying Sherman Tank counterpart of the common housefly. They are heavily armored, and sink a tanker-sized pipeline into your arm or leg or neck. If you hit them, they pause, look up at you insolently, then fly off with the hunk of your flesh they’ve just extracted. The bite zone later turns into a burning itchy welt the size of Minneapolis. Whenever I’ve reported this to friends and acquaintances, they’ve seemed dubious — until seeing it in action themselves. Then I’ll get a call or email the tenor of which is:  “I can’t believe it! They’re huge, and they’re vicious, and you can’t kill them. You can’t!” Greenheads swarm to humans near water, which when I was a kid always made for a great day at Brigantine Beach. After my parents put in a pool whenever the family was swimming and one of us reported sighting the first greenhead fly, we’d all bolt for the safety of indoors.

It rained almost continuously the past two weeks while we were in the Pine Barrens, which dampened greenhead activity. (I guess the heavy buggers can’t get off the ground with the extra weight of water.) I didn’t see a one, although I sure wanted to show them just once to my doubting kids. But no fear, there were plenty of other biting bugs, which left a maze of dots all across my daughter’s back. Mosquitoes are troubling, sure, but at least you can hear them coming, and you can relish the triumph of slapping their slow asses. It’s the sneaky teeny gnats, or no-see-ums, that feasted on our sweet Southern California flesh.

Now we’re in the airport awaiting our return to Los Angeles, where all these menacing mites were exterminated long ago. Which is one good thing you can say for air pollution.

The New York Times reports that Dick Cheney has found a publisher for his memoir.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the publishing company headed by Mary Matalin.

I’m sure this book will be the hot fiction release of 2011.

If you’re going to commit suicide (and really, most of us would rather you didn’t), don’t do it at someone’s business. Especially in this economy.

There’s the ability to change your mind or get along with others. Then there’s this sort of flexibility. (Watch past the first 50 seconds.) I’m betting these girls were extremely popular with G.I.s.

(Thanks to friend and blog reader Rich Roesberg for making me aware of this video.)

OK, those tickets are now on sale for this Sunday’s added playdate of “The Car Plays.” If past performance is any indication, you’ve got about 9 minutes to get to the Moving Arts website.