The Girl Who Cried Wolf

(No baby yet.)

Now, with that out of the way, I have a funny story for you.

As much of an egomaniac this blog may make me seem, I am pretty humble. Honest. Here's an example. For the past year, I've been taking writing classes at the Second City Training Center, which is the school attached to the comedy group's theater. For the past couple of months, my class has been preparing a show (titled, lovingly, "The Devil Went Down to Denny's"). Opening night was Friday.

I don't know how I feel about the show. I think parts of it are funny, and I'm proud of what I wrote (I suppose), but it's not as if it was produced on merit. My fellow students and I finished the program and Second City was obligated to do this for us.

So it opened on Friday, but nobody I know came (probably because I didn't tell anyone the show's specifics, such as the all important "when" and "where"). But Kristen got mad at me because I haven't been talking about it, so here it is:

If you want to go to the show, it's every Friday at 9 PM at Second City (which is on the corner of Wells and North Ave in Chicago). Tickets cost $10. The show lasts an hour, and there are at least a couple of laughs somewhere.

That's not the funny story, however. After the show, we had a post-opening celebration at a bar across the street. All the writers and actors and the director went, and we all had a drink or two (or in many cases three or four). Now I'm not a drinker. I often tell the story of how when we moved into our last apartment the landladies gave us a bottle of champagne. When we moved out three years later, we took the champagne with us. Also, I wasn't really going to drink much because Kristen was at home, 9 months pregnant, so I wasn't going to do anything that could impair my ability to drive like a maniac to the hospital if necessary.

So I had one beer. (A $6 beer, by the way, which never makes me happy. That's lunch, people!) I got home at around 11:30 (Kristen was already asleep), and went to bed.

Here's the funny part (finally, right?). At about 6 the next morning, I feel a poke at my stomach. I wake up, and Kristen is standing there next to the bed.

"I need you to come with me," she says.

This is it! It's go time! Go! Go! Go! So I jump out of bed (as much as I can on a Saturday morning, a morning after I had that one beer), and follow her.

"Are you having contractions? Did your water break? Are you okay? Is it go time?"

No, not go time. She just wants me to look at the cat litter box. Because it smells really bad. And she wants me to do something about it.

At 6 in the morning.

This is not the first "false alarm" from Kristen. Last night, for example, I woke up at around 3 to see her sitting up in bed. Go time, you'd think, right? No, she was just eating some peanut butter crackers. Last week, I was in the living room and she calls out to me, "Raphe, come here. I need you." I go rushing into the bathroom to find that she's run out of toilet paper and needs me to get her another roll out of the hall closet.

Does she not know what every call across the apartment signals? Or that her sitting up in the middle of the night eating crackers could mean something?

The one good thing about this, though, is that I'm ready. Ready as I'll ever be.

I think.