Chicago, IL (October 31, 2009) — For the first time in more than ten years, the legendary band Recollection has reunited under a new name — Guy Incognito — to christen Amp Rock Lounge in what some are hailing as the band’s werewolf bar mitzvah.

“Get it? Werewolf bar mitzvah?” said Amanda Newman, band manager and wife of keyboard player Rob Newman. Newman also masterminded the Groucho Marx glasses as a Halloween costume for the band.

“Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I suggested ‘Kosher Delight,’ but they just had to be ‘Guy Incognito.’”

For more than two hours on Saturday night, Guy Incognito delighted a drunken audience of dozens with their awkward jubilee and self-aware swagger.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, they’re so good,” said fan club president Ben Ferguson, whose wife, Abbie, wore a shirt with band members’ faces strategically situated atop her breasts. “I want to have their babies,” he added.

Once hailed for their electrifying live performances on the North Shore coffee house circuit and exclusive rehearsals in their drummer’s mom’s basement, Guy Incognito has spent the past decade cultivating their introspective pop sound. That is, they haven’t been doing much of anything for a long, long time.

[Caption: Drummer Scott Hinden's mom has a really sweet basement.]

Despite this hiatus — this period of “going incognito,” if you will — Guy Incognito continues to be one of the most influential bands in the lives of their little sisters, girlfriends, and would-be girlfriends, who know who they are.

Guy Incognito is the reunion of front man Barry Horwitz with his longtime collaborators and BFFs Rob Newman on keyboards and Scott Hinden on drums. The trio, then known as Recollection, first released an album in 1998 that featured photos of them at a suburban train station posing pensively while wearing denim jeans and sport coats and carrying single red roses. I mean, if that doesn’t make you swoon, then you’re just an animal.

In the past year, the band added bass player Matt Wechsler, primarily for his ability to grow his own ’stache.

“They hadn’t had much luck with keeping new bass players,” Amanda Newman said of Wecshler. “This time, they kept it in the Tribe. Sure enough, Matt stuck around, and next thing you know, the band was back and better than ever.”

“He’s hairy, just like us,” added Horwitz, whose own arm hair actually looked like crazy rocker tattoos that night. (See first photo, above.)

[Caption: Horwitz gets nice and sweaty, too -- just like Steven Tyler.]

Though not actually a member of the band, legendary rocker Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, pictured above, made a cameo. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, no one could really hear his voice very well.

“It’s too bad the balance was off,” said Kenny G, father of band manager Newman. ”I couldn’t hear Rob enough,” he added, placing his beer hand territorially on Newman’s keyboard. “I really, really love Rob. Have you seen that smile? It’s like the Kennedys!”

Kenny G later noted with some excitement that Newman wasn’t even wearing his wedding ring.

“I was afraid my ring would catch during a really intense glissando and I’d break a key,” Newman later explained. Newman’s signature is his athletic manner of playing the piano as if it were a drum set, including a lot of banging and foot stomping and often leading to cracked, bleeding fingernails. “Why, is Amanda pissed?” he asked.

Uncharacteristically, Newman’s wife did not fly into a jealous rage, although she was quick to indicate that, back in the day, the would-be girlfriends of the band then known as Recollection would routinely give her “the stink eye” when she showed up for gigs.

“They can have him,” she said. “He’s out of his mind. I mean, have you seen this guy? He’s dressed up as a Newsie, and not even for Halloween,” she said, referencing the 1992 cult classic film, Newsies.

Newman had no comment on her own ensemble, which was described by audience members as “showy” and “obnoxious,” though it remained unclear as to whether they were talking about the costume or Newman herself.

“I mean, she showed up with her parents in a white stretch limo,” said one audience member, who declined to give her name but was dressed up as what appeared to be a rose. “That’s a bit over the top.”

Newman, after claiming her parents ordered the limo without trying to be ironic, quickly added, “But, I mean, it went really great with my outfit, don’t you think?”

But no amount of sequins or Aquanet or electric blue tights could upstage the musicians of Guy Incognito that evening, who performed at their signature high intensity. Even the bartenders took note.

“I just wandered into this place after grabbing some pizza next door,” said some drunk guy dressed like Big Bird, “and the bartender is all, ‘Did you see Guy Incognito play? They totally rocked.’

“And I was all, ‘Guy Incognito’ — who’s that?’”

Indeed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The above footage was selected for publication specifically because it is Kenny G’s favorite song, and because it best illustrates Newman’s “foot-stompin’” style that his grandpa (who numbers among the six or seven who actually read this blog) loves so very much. More videos, in larger format, here.

For a complete photo gallery of the evening’s events, look at the pictures on the right. Or, oh, OK, I’ll make a link.

Where’d that last month go?

The holidays have come and gone, leaving behind an exponentially growing heap of work on my desk, a good eight extra pounds on my ass, and a million little pine needles all over the floor, all of which, for the life of me, I can’t seem to manage to vacuum up.

Let’s recap quickly, shall we?

Our annual Christmas party returned this year with a bang (and, of course, a John Bang!), after a yearlong hiatus while we were in Nashville. (Did I seriously live in Nashville? I can hardly remember.) It just didn’t feel like the holidays last year without inviting all eight million of our nearest and dearest to come over and trash our house. The good news is, I only got a picture of the “before.” I wish my house looked like this all the time:

Note the overwhelming presence of bacon-wrapped items:

Actually, apart from waking up to an arctic breeze flowing through my living room through an open window (!!!!), the collateral damage this year was far less extensive than what I remember from the past, though perhaps I had too many glasses of champagne to notice. A special shout-out to the girliest girls I know, Elizabeth and Abbie, who took over the kitchen and, I suspect, refilled my glass when I wasn’t looking. Let it flow, girls, just let it flow.

Christmas Eve and Day proved mild and, dare I say, almost a little boring? Nary a tear was shed (and I kept myself together pretty good, too) in our Honda CR-V as Rob and I raced back and forth between family parties, counting the minutes to ensure we were spending precisely the same amount of time with each family. We used to feel a crushing sense of guilt that we were Ruining Everyone’s Christmas and Beloved Family Traditions for our parents and siblings, but this year, either they stopped caring, or we did. It was awesome.

This is not to say that the holidays didn’t bring about the requisite drama. Christmas Eve (and Day) found me in the midst of eight dog fights, at least 25 Jews eating ham, a five-hour drive from Chicago to Highland Park, one ball-in-a-cup smackdown, two Mexican “hired help”-ers admiring my wedding album, one Korean Jazzercise instructor telling me how I look much less fat now than I do in my wedding album, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Mmmmm …. ham.

Mexico’s favorite game for over 100 years!

¡Qué gorda la novia! 

Molly, before going postal, holiday-style, on Autumn (my next dog will be a golden retriever):

and, of course, the grand finale:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, no celebration of The Birth of Our Savior Jesus Christ would be complete without a group of Jews singing church hymns in four-part harmony around the hearth. Can you spot the Holocaust survivor? (Hint: She’s 95 and has the best seat in the house.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, my head nearly exploded the first time I experienced this bizarre ritual, too.

But such commitment to wholesomeness, so fervent as to transcend social and religious norms, certainly could not limit itself to just one holiday. And so, for those of you who still don’t believe that Rob’s family has a Thanksgiving talent show and a sing-a-long, including such beloved hippie family classics as “Feelin’ Groovy,” “This Land Is Your Land” and “You’ve Got A Friend,” I give you my new family, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”:

(Just kidding, sort of. This is a little song by my friend Dan Fogelberg, about love, family, growing up, and the poignancy of life.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s see, where was I?

The new year sort of flew under the radar. I resolved to blog closer to daily than to monthly, and I promptly failed. My friends Liz and Joel have vowed to keep me on my toes, though — Joel because he misguidedly thinks I am hilarious, and Liz because she was getting really damn sick of looking at that ultrasound at the top of my blog for so long, for crying out loud, there are babies everywhere! – so you can all thank them for this gratuitously long entry.

Perhaps if I start blogging more often, Rob will start keeping his own new year’s resolutions. Sadly, I have yet to experience more than even the slightest hint that Rob might be giving me a back rub, in spite of his resolution to do so, and despite the fact that he knows full well what’s in it for him. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If you know what I mean.

Though I have to hand it to my husband: he is coming home from work at a reasonable hour.  I suspect, however, that this has more than a little something to do with his brand new speakers. He loosens his tie, pours himself some bourbon, and settles in on the couch, flipping through the unending library of music on TiVo Rhapsody and listening to some tunes, man, all the while tuning out the rest of the world (including, say, his wife, or a dog whimpering by the door to be let out).

Speaking of Molly, she is about two incidents away from going to the glue factory. Apart from developing an overly dominant state of being (that’s Dog Whisperer-speak for getting into some nasty dog fights), she remains a mischevious holy terror around the house.

Because she can no longer have her head in the garbage for what amounts to a good four hours of the day (Abbie had the brilliant idea of turning the garbage can around), Molly has now redoubled her effort to retrieve food from the counter. The other day, while I was attempting to make corn chowder, I left on the counter a mixing bowl with two cups of whole milk (for which I had made a special trip to the store, and that I had just measured out and poured the rest down the drain) while I ran in the office to look at the recipe on the (laptop) computer (that I very well could have brought into the kitchen, but that would have made too much sense).

CRASH! SPLASH! Wait … splash?!?

I came running into the kitchen to find milk EVERYWHERE.

Note the tail in the background. Not pictured: the milk dripping from the tops of the cabinets and — I kid you not — the ceiling.

And, of course, that was the end of the corn chowder. It was the end of a really bad day, and I’m not gonna lie: I cried. I cried over spilled milk.

It has been snowing a lot, which has meant that I’ve been outside shoveling. We live in a condo building, and of course we are paying someone to do this kind of thing for us — not that he has done it in, oh, about four of the five years I’ve lived here, not that I’m counting, but the condo president refuses to fire him, and he happens to be the same neighbor that tried to punch me, so I’m not going anywhere near this one. (Wait, have I not told you that story yet?)

Anyway, I do a lot of shoveling. We all know my affinity for mindless household tasks and manual labor, such as painting the mantel or installing light fixtures, so I can’t exactly play the martyr.

Molly adores the snow and is thrilled when I ask her if she wants to “go shovel.” She treats a snowy day like a crime scene investigation, shoving her nose, then her snout, then her face and entire head into the snow banks, sniffing relentlessly to verify the identity of the culprit that has covered her entire world in this cold white stuff. Once she uncovers a piece of evidence — be it a stick, a piece of cloth, or a McDonald’s cheeseburger wrapper — she flings it up in the air and bounds over and through the snow, prancing around with trash hanging out of her mouth like she won a prize.

It’s good entertainment.

Here she is, enjoying a frigid afternoon and beautiful “wintry mix”:

Because she’s a cute dog, my neighbors assume (and insist) that she should be wearing a sweater, or at least some doggie boots. But I swear, Molly could live out in that snow and never get cold. When it’s time to go in, she puts on her best pathetic face and pleads for five more minutes.

Some days, I have half a mind to just leave her out there.

Have I suitably made up for having missed an entire month? I hope so. Even I’m getting sick of me by now.

Last night, after an amazing dinner at Mercat a la Planxa (which has forever changed my negative opinion of Spanish food and lima beans), on one of our few actual “dates” since we moved back to Chicago and after an exhausting few weeks for us both, Rob and I came home late, looking forward to a long, restful night in a nice warm bed.

I’m sure you can see where I am going with this.

You know that Family Guy episode where Peter gets stuck in an out house and it tips over? And he goes, “Augh … augh God … auugggh … its everywhere!” (Watch it here)

That’s essentially the condition we found Molly in last night. Though she somehow managed to get “it” everywhere without actually tipping her crate over. Why am I not surprised?

Poor Charlie (and his perpetual state of gassiness) got blamed for the smell for a short while there, but I think he’s forgiven me, don’t you?

Several months ago, Ben and Abbie had their first “for better or for worse” moment: they decided to run a marathon together.

They started out strong, running together six days a week along the lake shore, past their new condo and the grassy spot where they got engaged, nothing between them but the Chicago summer sunshine and a gigantic yellow lab.

Of course, life eventually got in the way – as it always does. Abbie’s responsibilities as Dimmer Queen of the World kept her out of town for days at a time, and Ben was spending more and more time in the lab, playing with worms under the auspices of finding a cure for cancer.

Then, Ben injured himself. He claims he hurt his knee trying to keep up with Abbie’s high school track-star pace, but the physician in him knows the truth: after one too many sleepless nights studying at Starbucks North & Wells, his leg muscles had finally atrophied.

It looked like Ben wasn’t going to be able to run the marathon after all.

But on the morning of the Chicago Distance Classic, he was up with the sun (like he is every day), pumping himself full of coffee (like he always does) and lacing up his running shoes (which were still brand new and in the box). Ben knew how important it was to Abbie that they run this race together, and that alone made it important to him.

So he ran with her.

He ran with her when the gun went off and thousands of people swarmed through the gates. He ran with her along the lake front, where they had begun their training, and he ran with her as the course grew unfamiliar. He ran with her when his knee began to ache, refusing her offers to stop to rest and rehydrate.

And when he could run no more, Ben did what he always did: he urged Abbie ahead.

This is a guy who manages to succeed in everything he tries — a talented student, scientist, singer, photographer, even drummer. You kind of want to hate him, but here’s the thing: he has absolutely no ego about it.

When it comes to Abbie, on the other hand, Ben has an undying confidence in her ability and insists that she follow her dreams. Like the time Abbie casually mentioned to Ben that she was thinking about getting her MBA –- and suddenly, business school catalogs mysteriously began to arrive in the mail.

For her part, Abbie is incredibly strong and independent. She’s out of town all the time, and she rarely whines about having a husband who spends 95 percent of his time in the lab. 

Ben and Abbie are both completely fine on their own. But here’s the remarkable part: after they’ve been apart for any appreciable amount of time, you can actually see them light up when are together again. Ben and Abbie love to be together, not because they need each other, but because they love each other. And that’s amazing, after ten years together — to still light up like that.

Anyway, Abbie ran ahead, determined to finish the race not just for herself, but for the both of them. She ran strong and fast, on the heels of the Ethiopians and the gazelles, and I swear to you that she was barely sweating.

When Abbie crossed the finish line, she kept on running. She looped back around the crowds, past Museum Park and back on the course, against the current of other runners. She ran until she found Ben, hobbling pathetically along the course.

All they had to do is look at each other, and they just lit up. And they knew they could carry on.

They ran together those last few miles, laughing and entertaining each other with their usual silliness and stupidity, the way only best friends can.

When they reached the home stretch, Ben and Abbie fell into step with each other. They were holding hands when they crossed the finish line.

Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs.! Have a great time in Maui! And Ben, stop reading my blog on your honeymoon! That iPhone is so confiscated.

I made the mistake today of going out into the real world wearing yoga clothes.

Being that I work from home, I tend to forget that the vast majority of the population does not live their lives wearing Lycra pants and a hoodie. After all, I only emerge from my house to go across the street to the gym (where everyone is wearing spandex), or to walk Molly down the block and back (where, if I’m wearing anything other than PJs or yoga clothes, the neighbors start asking questions about where I’m headed off to, looking so nice). I live in yoga clothes, changing out of them only at nighttime, to put on my comfy pants.

I am fine with this. In fact, I think I look my best in yoga or otherwise lounge-y clothes. I am far more confident about my appearance in spandex or pajamas than when I’m all gussied up. I can’t wait until the day I turn 60 and it finally becomes appropriate for me to shop at Eileen Fisher. I knew Rob was “the one” the day he remarked that I looked better in my beloved gray pajama pants than in a dress.

So it’s easy for me to forget that I shouldn’t go straight from yoga to, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security office downtown to finally officially change my name, lest I should attract unwanted attention.

Spandex is a privilege, not a right — and this is a lesson I am beginning to learn the hard way.

Of course, I have made this mistake before. Last winter, I left my yoga studio in Nashville, picked up Molly, and started the drive up to Chicago for the weekend. I made it all the way to central Indiana before having to pull over at a truck stop to gas up the Honda. And wouldn’t you know it, no sooner than I stepped out of the car did the truck drivers start in with the commentary.

It wasn’t all bad, though. Who doesn’t like to be called “Hey Gorgeous” once in awhile? And one of the guys practically fell all over himself to scrape the ice that had accumulated on my windshield. 

I made a mental note never to wear yoga pants out again. But today, I did.

I dropped off my yoga mat at home and, without changing my clothes, headed out to go downtown. I hadn’t even made it to the Sedgwick L station when I heard from behind me:

“Girl, you’re pretty juicy for a white girl.”

I looked up to see the man pass me. He’s black, a little disgruntled and insane-looking, quite possibly on his way to the rehab facility/homeless shelter next to the L station. He’s pushing a shopping cart full of cans, but he pauses, craning his neck to take a second admiring look at my, erm, juiciness.

Now, ordinarily, I am not offended by whistling and ogling and so forth. This is mostly because I don’t get hit on too often, so, hey, I’ll take what I can get.

But juicy? Really? He obviously meant it appreciatively, but I had to bite my tongue to keep from demanding, “ARE YOU CALLING ME FAT?” (I figured the best way to kick off an afternoon in the social security line was not by confronting someone who’s on — or worse, not on — something.)

White girls do not want to be juicy. In fact, we go to great lengths not to be juicy, or even to appear to be juicy. When we put celebrities on the covers of magazines, we airbrush out any and all traces of juiciness. We aspire to be completely juice-free.

When I called Rob to whiningly ask if he thinks I am fat, he maintained that juicy just means “sexy,” with no allusion to size or shape or muscle tone whatsoever.

I know better. So does Urban Dictionary, which defines juicy as:

1. Description of a girl’s high sex appeal and shapely figure, often related to the curves of a round butt or large breasts; thick and curvacious.
2.  Laced with PCP, as in, “Man, I’m ripped. Was that chronic juicy or something?”
3. As in Juicy Couture, a cheap but overpriced brand of tacky velour sweatsuits bought mostly by preteen girls and white-trash middle-aged women who think they’re on the cutting edge of fashion. 

Thick and curvaceous? I am now feeling very distressed about the size of my derrière. I mean, I know I’ve been getting a little jiggly, ever since I started up with all those smoothies on our honeymoon. I know I’ve gained back, like, ten of the 20 pounds I lost a few years ago, when I was at my juiciest. I just didn’t think it was that … noticeable.

Ugh. Why do I always allow the offhand commentary of the homeless to usher in a major personal life crisis? 

Oh well. I’m off to make banana bread out of the healthy bananas I bought with the express purpose of letting them over-ripen so I could make some sugary, carb-filled banana bread. I’m putting chocolate chips in there, too. And I will probably have eaten half of it before the night is over.

So stick that in your juice box and suck it.

But wait, there’s more! You didn’t think I would leave out all the intimate details of our honeymoon, did you?

It was inexplicably wonderful to vacation in Maui with a big group of family and friends — we pretty much took over the resort! We couldn’t walk from one end to the other without running into at least a handful of people we know — but we were glad that we opted to honeymoon on another island altogether. The sheer exhaustion of all that socializing (and almost two years of, for me, planning, and for Rob, worrying) hit us like a ton of bricks, which seemed apropos given that we were vacationing on an island completely covered in rock.

With several active volcanoes spotting the terrain, the Big Island feels more like the moon than a tropical paradise. You can drive for an hour and scarcely see another soul, let alone a shrub. A thin haze (or vog, as they insist on calling it) hangs in the air, giving the days a dreamlike quality and making the nights almost frighteningly dark. And there is lava everywhere.

The landscape is absolutely breathtaking and unlike anything I have ever seen. I’m not one to cry at a pretty sunset, but something about setting foot on earth that was only just created 20 years ago gives me goosebumps. It feels like the end of the world, and the beginning, all at the same time.

On a drive through Kilauea national park, home of the most active volcano, the road comes to an abrupt stop because, just several dozen years ago, lava flowed over it. How ridiculous is that?

The whole “active volcano” thing made Rob a bit nervous. Here he is on our way up the mountain, preparing to put the top back on our sweet white Chrysler Sebring convertible, when the weather abruptly changed.

And here he is as we passed a sign that warned us to roll up our windows, as the emissions from the volcano contained sulphur and were unsafe to breathe. I, of course, insisted on rolling them back down to take a picture.

Rob was having none of it.

The entire vacation, he worried that the volcano was about to erupt and we’d all be swept into the ocean to our certain deaths. I made fun of him, naturally. They can predict when the volcano is going to erupt, they wouldn’t let tourists in dangerous places, this is America, blah blah blah.

But no sooner do we get home than the the Big Island’s name was splashed across headlines:

Huge Fountain of Lava Gushes From Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii
Kilauea volcano magma meets ocean with 100-foot lava burst
Scientists scratch heads at unpredicted eruption, should have listened to paranoid tourist

Yes, that’s right. Our honeymoon spot was ablaze.

The flight home was obscene. Do not, under any circumstances, fly United Airlines to Hawaii. Here is Rob, in the teeny-tiny, seven-gate, outdoor, cockroach-infested, Greyhound-station-esque airport, on hour three of our 30-hour delay, making the most of the mandatory down-time by billing some hours.

And here I am, on hour 29.

Caption: I hate it

Finally, for what amounted to (or at least felt like) three days without sleep, we were back in Chicago. And just in the nick of time for wedding numbers two and three!

It is not a good idea to move one month before you get married.

It is not a good idea to forget that you don’t own a swimsuit until exactly one week before you leave for your wedding in Hawaii.

It is a good idea to start using Crest White Strips seven days before your wedding. I’m three hours in, and already my teeth are so sensitive that even the thought of eating makes them hurt. Which is of some consolation when you are trying on swimsuits in a department store dressing room and wondering why you haven’t felt inspired to start dieting until RIGHT NOW.

It is not a good idea to take even one day off from writing thank-you notes for the multitude of gifts from your registry that arrive on your doorstep each day.

If you would like to single-handedly destroy the environment, I would recommend registering at Williams-Sonoma. The amount of boxes, wrapping paper, and bubble wrap used for each shipment is staggering. The sheer volume of packing peanuts alone is enough to endanger at least three species. More often than not, a huge box will yield the tiniest item, but you have to actually break a sweat to get to it. It’s like those Russian nesting dolls. Seriously:

Today’s delivery, weighing 13.3 pounds and measuring 19 by 19 by 18 inches

was full of mostly packing peanuts

and a big white box (which was wrapped, but I forgot to take a picture first)

Inside the big white box were three smaller boxes (and some more packing peanuts)

And inside THOSE boxes was a lot of bubble wrap.

And nestled inside the bubble wrap there were four salad plates, four bread plates, and four pasta bowls.

Elapsed time: 23 minutes, most of which was spent trying to corral the packing peanuts, which go flying in every direction, which makes the dog want to eat them even more.

The big picture:

And just when I’m starting to get half a mind to call Williams-Sonoma and complain about their packaging materials, I spot a notice printed on one of the boxes:

Now there is just no way in hell I’m making a special trip for all these flipping packing peanuts. Rob already complains that I have two garbage cans in the house (one for garbage, one for recycling) and that I want him to help me load up the car with the absurd amount of cardboard boxes we have accumulated between moving and getting married so I can take them to the recycling facility, because Chicago STILL DOESN’T RECYCLE.

So yeah. That’s what I’ve been up to for the past month. Unpacking boxes.

We’re getting married in TEN DAYS!

Rob just read this and said, “I think I got the wet feet.”

Today is Friday, and Friday is the day Brad comes to visit!

Get a load of this story:

Rob moves to Nashville, and the first friend he makes at his law firm is Brad.  Brad had also just moved from Chicago, where he had lived exactly one street away from us and knew and loved all the same Old Town spots.

In law school, Brad dated and became good friends with a girl named Julie, who is from Rob’s home town and of course went to high school with him. Julie lives in Old Town as well and is now dating a guy named Adam.

Adam is in a very good band, so Julie and Adam are moving to Nashville, where Julie will likely end up working at Rob’s law firm, in the position Rob just left.  In his office, even.

Adam’s band is playing tonight at the Double Door, along with a band formerly known as the Redwalls, whose original members went to high school with Rob. In fact, when the Redwalls were freshmen, they used to open for Rob and Barry’s band, which at the time of course was the toast of the town.

After looking at Adam’s band’s website, we discover Adam’s last name and realize that Rob went to high school with him, too. Adam was a senior when Rob was a freshman, they appeared together in the school’s production of Bye Bye Birdie. Rob’s big line (which we’ve heard time and again ever since, always delivered with the utmost in emotional integrity, as Rob is a great actor, don’t you know) was: “He’s coming! He’s coming! Conrad Birdie is coming!” And you’ll never guess who played Conrad Birdie. That’s right: Adam.

Rob even dated Adam’s little sister Jessie when he was a freshman, and they still keep in touch. In all likelihood, she will be at the Double Door tonight for her brother’s farewell gig, along with her music-loving friend Sara, who happens to be one of Rob’s very best friends.

I mean, that just freaks me out. If Rob’s parents break it to him tomorrow that Rob and Brad are actually twins who were separated at birth, I would believe it. I’d believe anything at this point!

You know what’s expensive? FURNITURE. Specifically, bedroom furniture. I can swallow dropping six hundred bucks on a nice kitchen table that I’m going to have to look at every day while I’m eating dinner off a $400 coffee table while sitting on a $500 couch and watching a television set that cost more than I care to think about. I’m even registered for a $200 saucepan that is never going to do anything more than heat up a can of Campbell’s soup.

But bedroom furniture? Really? Some fancy, expensive drawers in which to store my Old Navy wardrobe? A nightstand where I can stash stash old editions of Yoga Journal and the rosary I got for my First Communion and don’t know what else to do with? This is what I’m supposed to pay upwards of $4,000 for?

Seriously! A bedroom set costs four grand! Do you know how many fancy purses you can buy with four grand? That’s enough to take a nice trip to Italy to visit Andy and Sarah. Or buy a wedding cake in Maui, for that matter!

Of course, not all the furniture is quite this expensive, but can I help it if I have champagne taste? I like Pottery Barn, so sue me. But Target doesn’t sell king-size headboards, Ikea is disturbingly modern, and Roy’s Furniture in Chicago is full of (according to our dear friend J.G.) “paisley goy shit.” (MAN is it good to be back in Chicago!)

How in the world do people afford to furnish their homes?

In Nashville, we kept all our clothes on the floor of our walk-in closet (Rob’s heaped unceremoniously, mine stacked hapazardly but at least looking somewhat tidy). But the moving trucks are bringing all our stuff to our 1,400-square foot closetless condo on Friday, and I don’t know WHERE we’re gonna put it!

I haven’t even been in Chicago a week but it’s as though we never left. Scratch that — some things have changed. The bars here are gloriously smoke-free, the Sedgwick L stop is now really nice (as in, there is only an 80 percent chance that you will be mugged, instead of absolute certainty, or at least if you are mugged, it will be against the backdrop of a pretty urban mural on the train platform) and, well, hm. That’s about it. I have been loving every minute of it, though and wondering why we would ever have left in the first place. It feels like waking up from a bad dream. It wasn’t a nightmare, and it was interesting enough, but I sure am glad to be awake now.

I’m going back to Nashville today. No, seriously. The movers come tomorrow morning, and we have a few loose ends to tie up there. You know, the usual things: canceling utilities, selling off appliances, renting a Haz-Mat suit so I can take down the wreath with the poop nest … ugh, it was smelling pretty funky when we left last week. What are the odds that there are no dead baby birds in there? Barf.

So I’m packing a carry-on suitcase in the bedroom, and Molly is watching me nervously. I ask her if she wants to go for a walk, and she goes her usual amount of nuts and then sits by the back door. But the back door, which leads to the garage, means “go for a ride,” and the front door is what we open to “go for a walk.” Molly knows this, but I think nothing of it at this point.

Once we’re outside, she runs right up to a parked SUV and sits by the passenger door, waiting to be let in. And it is only then that I realize: She saw me packing the suitcase, so she thinks its time to go for a ride.

Rob got his job in Nashville just a few weeks after we brought Molly home with us. In the six months that followed, she and I would make the drive between Chicago and Nashville and back again more than a handful of times to visit Rob and house-hunt in Nashville. And even since Molly and I moved to Nashville officially, she has been with me on several trips back up to Chicago.

But I’m flying this time, so she can’t come with me. And I swear she knows this, because she proceeded to sit down in front of every single SUV we passed (not the cars, mind, you, but the SUVs, which look like our Honda CR-V). And when we got to the end of the block and turned around, she practically pulled my arm out dragging me all the way home. Poor dog wants to come with me!

Or maybe she’s just afraid of being left alone with Rob for two days (and I don’t blame her — I’m not sure he even knows where we keep her food). Who knows. I can’t read her mind, but apparently she can read mine. I swear she goes ballistic if I even THINK about taking her to the dog park. It’s totally wild.