Because I am tired, and because I have been engaged in intense activity for five days a week for the past month, and because that activity will soon come to an end, and because I haven’t been home in a long time, and because a machine ate my ATM card and I don’t know what I’m going to do for money until Monday or for that matter for the rest of my life, I’m very emotional tonight. So that when I got to the theater hoping to see Carl & the Passions and Johnny Roast Beef for the last time only to find out that I was too late to get in to the sold-out show (because I had gone home to take a nap, because I was tired — are you seeing how this feeds on itself?), I almost burst into tears. If there’s one phrase designed to evoke every fear and failure in my life, it’s “too late.” (And yet I’m late all the time. What fucked-up message am I sending myself?)

Instead I went upstairs and saw Roadster (Harold team) and Felt (puppet improv), which cheered me up somewhat, especially since I found my friend Jessica there, who had also gotten to the theater too late, and for the same reason. Afterwards we went next door to the Salt & Pepper and had coffee and mozzarella sticks and talked about writing and improv and waited for the downstairs show to get out so we could go see Dave Pasquesi and Tracy Letts.

Once in, there was a lot of time to kill, which I spent by communing with people in other classes. My friend Zoe sat up at the bar with me and we talked about writing and improv and waited for the show to start. (I would like Zoe and Jessica even if they weren’t both drop-dead gorgeous, but as it happens, they are. It’s nobody’s fault.)

The Pasquesi/Letts show was wonderful, probably the best thing I’ve seen since I got here . . . including the TJ and Dave show, which those who know their work say was only so-so by their standards. I thought it was great, and it was, but tonight I saw exactly the same format on a whole new level. It was even a similar storyline, which really brought out how much deeper this one went. In both shows, a sympathetic character is trying to make a connection with a woman, but whereas TJ’s character two weeks ago was sweet and goofy, Dave’s character tonight was a little darker and more complicated — to the extent that even though at the end of the piece he had quit his timesuck of a day job and scored a date with the girl, it was unclear how optimistic we should be about his prospects.

After it was over I turned to Zoe and said, “Everything Dave said in that piece perfectly expressed my philosophy of life.” “Me too,” she said. She has a boyfriend.

Whenever I’ve seen Jonathan Richman play, at the end of the show I felt like I wanted to invite everyone there home to my house to hang out and listen to records. I felt the same way at the end of the show tonight, partly because the show itself was so fraught with unexpressed emotion and partly because I had such a strong connection to so many of the people in the room. As the end nears I can feel people drawing more closely to one another, because even if they say they’re going to keep in touch, most of them won’t. (The blackout tonight was Dave’s character saying goodbye to his now-former workmate, who said “See you around,” to which Dave replied “Nah.”)

So one way I can make the most of my last day in class is to get a fulll night’s sleep. I leave you now.