A week and a half ago, we went to see a new musical called Falling For Eve. I discovered afterward that the reviews for it are a little hit and miss, but I really liked it quite a lot. In fact, there was very little I didn’t like about it and some parts of it were phenomenal. This one specific song in it, “Where Will I Sleep Tonight?” I have seen mentioned positively in nearly every review, good and bad, with good reason. Mostly it is being held up as a standout song, even a show stopper in some reviews, but I would go a step beyond that. I found this particular song so freaking haunting that it belongs to that small percentage of standards from Broadway that should, and will, live forever – like “Children Will Listen” or “What I Did for Love” or “The Impossible Dream.” So, if Falling For Eve kicks it on over to Broadway, I think the song will gets its dues.

Saturday night, we went to see Lend Me a Tenor. There was a lot, LOT, to love. The script is hysterical, and they really went for it with the physical comedy. Anthony LaPaglia is amazing and Jan Maxwell is truly something to see. How exactly Scarlett Johansson took home the Tony in the category in which Jan Maxwell was nominated for this role is, sadly not as much of a mystery as I would like it for be, but definitely upsetting. But the real surprise was Justin Bartha. As someone who first saw Justin Bartha on Teachers (which I loved and miss dearly), and has seen him in only one other full movie, Failure to Launch, and one movie in snippets, National Treasure, not by choice, I was blown away. I mean, I knew he wouldn’t have been cast if he didn’t have the chops, but he had the biggest, most impressive chops. Sounds nasty, don’t it? Anyway, he was un-fucking-real. Who knew that he had this in him? I mean, besides him? And his mother? And his acting coach? And his co-stars? And maybe some Jesus-Yahweh creator-type?

The best performance of Saturday evening though happened on the train back to Jersey City.

Let me set the scene for you -

It ‘s 11:35 pm on a train bound for Jersey City… by way of Hoboken (fucking late night schedule). Tired Jersey-based New Yorkers, and a couple of losers who find the living cheaper in eastern Pennsylvania, ride the rails in silence.

The doors open at 14th Street and the last large group of passengers board the train (with only stragglers to come after at 9th and Christopher Streets). As the passengers come aboard, a smell infiltrates the car. I look at the armpit of the guy in front of me. He looks at my armpit. Silently, we blame each other.

But, then, somewhere in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River, a large black woman suddenly jumps up. She’s angry. She’s offended. She looks somewhat destitute and not well-kept, and she is apparently the source of the body odor, because a black man in a suit tells her to stop touching the woman beside her, because she stinks. The stinky woman gets riled up and begins to testify.

“I know I smell bad! I smell like the truth!” she exclaims.

She leans butt-first into the woman she was told to keep herself off of. On purpose? On accident? Who’s to say? But the woman jumps up out of her seat and flees to a three-foot distance.

“It’s white people technology. It sucks our energy!” the raging woman continues.

She looks to a couple across the aisle, a black man and a white woman. “She’s going to suck your energy,” she says. “White women, they look cute and they act all nice and all shy. They’re cute and charismatic and polite. But they suck the energy out of black and Latina women.”

She repeats the attributes of white women that make them dangerous several times. During much of the diatribe, it’s hard to know if I, as one of the whitest of white women, am being insulted or complimented.

“And they use LED light bulbs,” she further explains. “White people technology! It sucks the energy of black and Latina women.”

With both white women and LED light bulbs in play, I was a little bit hazy on the details of exactly how the energy-sucking process works. I know only that I’m a part of it.

“That’s the truth,” the woman rails, in case I hadn’t yet accepted my culpability. “The truth I know from God. And that’s what I smell like. Truth. I know God personally. He tells me the truth.”

To which the guy in front of me, who has turned off his headphones and turned around just to enjoy the show, looks at us and says, “Knows Him personally! We oughta be praying with her.”

The performance continued all the way through the Hoboken stopover to our stop at Pavonia/Newport. And then, sadly, like all good things, it came to an end. For us. Because we got off the train. But, since she promised she would preach the truth every day until she died, I’m sure, somewhere, the sermon rages on.

Also, the opening sequence of Up? What an incredibly painful opening for such a light-hearted movie. Brilliant. But painful.