Ye Gods, it's March already.

How did that happen?

I dorked around a lot tonight, talked to a few people on the phone, and didn't get back to this like I planned. Ultimately, the upshot of the Rose Parade was that we were thrown into very close quarters with a couple of hundred strangers that were, by the end of a few days, very good friends. I found myself marvelling at this one afternoon on the bus ride back after rehearsal, since there was a time when I would have been too shy and self-concious to get involved with the DSG at all, much less volunteer for a trip where I'd be surrounded by virtual strangers and have to sleep in a bed with someone I'd never met. There I was, though, trading barbs with a bunch of crazy Brits, harassing my Utah and NC roommates, and getting roundly abused by Skippy the Mad Aussie.

The dynamic is substantially similar, as it turns out, in all of the Garrisons. The camaraderie is there almost instantly once we all stop seeing each other as unfamiliar faces and just use the Star Wars thing as the bridge from which to build a friendship. I love the cross section of people because they are, for the most part, very intelligent and witty, and damned creative (if they made their costumes themselves) or clever (if they found ways to have others make their costumes for them). Yes, we get into lame discussions about details that the average person wouldn't give a rat's ass about, and if that average person were to hear that discussion and nothing else, the assumption would likely be that we're all unemployed and living in our mothers' basements, and that except for our own very narrow pool for hookup selection, generally unf***able. We don't live in some other version of reality where we're scanning the clouds looking for a floating city with an antenna underneath that has a scruffy, sweaty dude hanging on it crying about how his father just hacked his hand off.

I realized too that we of the DSG are incredibly fortunate that we can see each other regularly. Members of the German Garrison (who *rocked*,for the record) live in far distant parts of the country from one another and get to mingle maybe a couple of times a year. Contrast that with me calling 2035 and Pirate Chickie the other night and saying, "Spouse and I just got paid, let's hit the strip club." Man, I drank more that night than I have in . . . quite a while.

I hate to play favorites, in retrospect, but the group I became most fond of had to have been the Italians. "Shocker Boy" and brother "the Quiet One", "Statutory", and "Vain Guy". God, they were fun. I've actually talked to Statutory more since I've been back than I have the others, and as it turns out he has a sister that (1) troops, and (2) is Shocker Boy's girlfriend. How totally excellent is that? We also both have webcams now . . . don't take that the wrong way . . . so when he's up in the middle of the night, I can make silly faces at him and he can see them half a world away. 2035 and 13 have managed to formulate something new to harass me about now, after we hung out with Shocker Boy . . . SB and I share a talent for harmless flirtation, you see, and since he and his brother are very fluent in English, it was GAME ON from moment one. They all had the dark, brooding hotness that seems inherent in that bloodline, so it wasn't exactly painful to run around with them. Anyway, now when we're out and 2035 or 13 needs to make a joke about my . . . "passionate nature", let's say . . . the standard line is something that indicates that I can control myself, except in the presence of Italians . . .

It's okay. They had to come up with something eventually to regularly bang on me about.

More later. Hopefully not three months later.