This morning when I woke up I was thinking about the scene in "Back to School" where Robert Downey Jr. is demonstrating something sexual to his buddy while laying on the floor, and Rodney Dangerfield says, "Get up. You look like the poster boy for birth control." Meanwhile, Oingo Boingo is playing "Dead Man's Party" in the background.

Every single morning I wake up with some random scene from a movie, TV show or play (yeah, I've even woke up thinking of my high school drama club performance of "Bring Me My Bride" from "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum") stuck in head, where it stays the whole time I am getting showered and dressed.

And it's never a really great scene or anything like that. I don't relive the "Braveheart" speech. I hardly ever think of E.T. telling Elliot to "be good." Nope, instead it's scenes from classics like "Back to School" or perhaps even a snippet from a "Just Shoot Me" episode I saw once while I was sitting awake one night, waiting to puke from illness.

Tonight is opening night for M*A*S*H. Last night, we did a preview performance and it went pretty well. We are playing the whole thing very campy and light, just the way it's written in the script. With an audience, we could tell where the "funny" bits were; it was like having a laugh track. Remember when the TV show MASH added the laugh track... and how much it sucked? Good God. When I was a kid and "The Flintstones" would come on, I always, always thought it was stupid that there was a laugh track. Fred would come and say he was sorry, but he had sex with a triceratops handler, and Wilma would say something like, "Oh, Fred, you're always thinking with your prehistoric dick!" and the laugh track would come banging into the soundtrack to punctuate the joke. And that time when Pebbles got run over by a big stone wheel and Bab-Bam dragged her body all over Bedrock until he found a mystical healer-man who waved saber tooth tiger urine over her body and re-animated her, and the first thing she did as a zombie was grab Bam-Bam's club and whack his head open with it, the laugh track added a slight, "Ohhhh!" to the raucous "Ha Ha Ha!"s. Thank goodness for laughtracks. Otherwise I'm not sure I would have known to laugh or not, in that case.

Speaking of Pebbles and Bam-Bam, I never liked when they would have "reunion" shows later on that showed them as teenagers who were all into each other. It ruined the cuteness of the two lovable cavechildren; she with the bone in her hair, he with the violent smashing tendencies.

And were the Flintstones neanderthals, technically? Shouldn't they have been drawn with sloping, thick foreheads and a shuffling, hunched gait? I also hated how the Bedrock residents enslaved pterodactyls to do their bidding. Baby pterodactyls had to carry shit everywhere and be messengers. Brontosauruses were also forced to lift heavy things and build things with fat old Fred sitting on their backs. It was very much a caste system, with dinosaurs on the lowest rung. If the show had even a smidgen of truth to it, Fred and Barney would be totally creamed by the dinosaurs, who would uprise and overcome the Man holding them down. And the Order of Buffalo or whatever it was would not be able to stop them.

And then there was the issue of Barney's laugh. Can't you just hear it right now when I bring it up? Eeeeheeeheeeheeee! If it was realistic, Barney wouldn't laugh, because he would be too busy picking a wooly mammoth corpse clean after the hyenas finished with it, and trying to keep from freezing to death in the harsh tundra winters. There was no room for laughter in a neanderthal's busy day. Only toil, suffering, hunger and underdeveloped motor and language skills.

I'm not going to get started on those punks the Jetsons.