ATTENTION THEATERGOERS: I know that there are many of you who go to see plays and musicals because you love them, and you own the soundtracks, and you know the plot, and you have great respect for both the members of the cast and your fellow audience members. I'm not talking to you.

I'm talking to the rest of you: you people who go to see theater for some mystery reason that I have not been able to quite figure out. I mean, you don't know the plot. You've never heard the songs. You usually end up not liking the performance very much at all, and then commence to fidget, crumple, whisper, talk, and noisily leaf through the Playbill every 5 minutes to see how many songs are left before Act Two is finished. Here's a thought: how about all of you bored, middle-aged people with nothing better to do than to plunk down anywhere from $70 – $200 for a pair of tickets to see a show that you don't even really want to see, for Christ's sake, how about leaving if you don't like it. How about doing us all a favor, — "us" being those of us who have budgeted money, who have scrimped and saved for tickets to a show that we love and will actually sit still for the 3 hours of the show — do us a favor and when you stand up at intermission, go out into the lobby and keep walking straight back to your hotel, or your mansion, or your yuppie loft, or wherever it is that you live. (I mean, I can't believe that so many clueless people pay top dollar for a show and then walk out at intermission, but at least they're not bothering me anymore.&#41

This rant was inspired by our experience of finally winning the Rent lottery last Friday night. The Rent lottery is a drawing before each show for the $20 tickets for the first two rows of seats in the theater. When Jonathan Larson created Rent, he wanted people that wouldn't necessarily be able to afford regular seats to be able to attend theater performances, so he came up with the $20 seats. Back in 1993, the first two rows were sold on a first come, first served basis, which was the official beginning of "The Line," where people ("Rentheads"&#41 would wait for days on end for the seats. The New York line (and lines across the country&#41 have now been discontinued in favor of the supposedly safer lottery. The first two rows are largely populated by the same people who would wait in The Line — dedicated fans who have seen the show 10 times or more, at least. In San Francisco, we have witnessed middle-aged tourists who had nothing better to do win the seats, watch the show and rudely fidget/talk through the whole thing. This, to me, is a damn shame, because 1&#41 there are people who would sit in those seats and love them (like us&#41 and who will appreciate the experience for the rest of their lives, and 2&#41 the tourists who do win, more than likely could afford good regular seats. In my opinion, there should be a rule that you have to have seen Rent at least 3 times to enter the lottery, but that'll never happen in this liberal fucking city.

Over the course of the last few weeks I have become firmly convinced that someone, somewhere, is trying to cosmically erase me. Maybe with a voodoo doll, maybe with something more powerful than a voodoo doll, but somebody's definitely playing around. It all started when I decided that I wanted to go buy some more Joe Boxer Girlfriend underwear, because they're the only company that makes thongs which are both comfortable and have a cool thick waistband. After seeing the Joe Boxer underwear month after month after month in various Bay Area Macy's stores, the moment I decide to buy some it seems that Macy's no longer carries them. (At first I thought that it was just the fact that we were in the small, bland mall Macy's rather than the zillion-square foot, ever-expanding extravaganza that is the downtown Union Square flagship Macy's, but I've been there since, too, twice actually, and to no avail.&#41 The only clue to Joe's existence was a bunch of Joe Boxer Girlfriend sleepwear — some of which looks nicer than the shirts I wear during the day — hanging from various clearance racks. An e-mail to the "Contact Us" section of Mr. Boxer's website asking "Where has Joe Boxer Girlfriend gone?" has yielded no results.

Then there was a whole shoe-shopping debacle. I got a $50 gift certificate to Nordstrom for my birthday last month, and of course I wanted to use it to help pay for a pair of new shoes, as Nordstrom is well-known for its immense shoe department. What's happened to shoes? I like heavy, clunky, chunky-heeled shoes, preferably black — shoes that you can alternately wear with a skirt and tights for work and a pair of jeans on the weekend. I've been envying shoes that fit this description for the past year, and now that I actually want to purchase a pair, all of a sudden all the shoes have poofy three-inch foam soles. Don't get me wrong, I love big shoes…but these are so light! There's no clunk to them at all! Not to mention that those foam soles split right down the middle if you walk in them for more than an hour a day. And all these strappy, barely there, pointy-toed sandle things! How functional are those? I actually went to every shoe store I have ever visited in San Francisco and could not find one shoe to my liking. And while we're on the subject, when did shoe prices get so inflated? What ever happened to the $70 pair of shoes?

While at the mall, I stopped into Express. Express has always served me well for work clothes — inexpensive, fashionable clothes that lasted wash after wash, dry clean after dry clean. Now the only things that Express sells are "stretch"-y outfits made from their one-fabric-fits-all "stretch"-y material. Everything is stretchy. Tight and stretchy and short and black. When did Express become a place to buy clothes for nightclubbing in Cancun? I simply refuse to wear tight, stretchy tube skirts to work. Ugh.

The latest thing that I've bought for years that has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth without explanation is my favorite deodorant. Yes, Tom's All-Natural Anti-Perspirant and Deodorant: Unscented Roll-On in the little blue bottle is gone as well. I've seen it in Safeway, Walgreen's, the corner health food store…everywhere! Now it's…nowhere! I've actually gone miles out of my way to find a simple bottle of deodorant. And do you know what they all say? "That's funny, we usually have it." When I do find it, it's the stick kind, or it's just plain deodorant, no anti-perspirant. Everything I've been buying faithfully for years is disappearing! What's next? Who's trying to erase me? Put the pencil down!