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What time is it? Anybody? I'm on a plane to England and my computer says 1:20 AM, but the sun is outside my window. I, of course, thought I'd have a delicious sleep on the long flight across the sea so I'd be refreshed when we landed, but that idea went flying out the window when I sat down and discovered that each seat had individual TV screens! With tons of movies and TV shows to chose from!!! How could I possibly go to sleep when instead I could watch old Friends episodes I could easily tape any day of the week on my television and Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder I could just as easily Netflix? I had to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. By the time I decided to turn off my personal screen, I tossed and turned in my coach seat for an hour and soon the lights came on and they started serving breakfast. And by "breakfast," I mean the vegan breakfast I ordered and ignored while salivating over James' croissant.

Let's start at the beginning. I began the week by playing the third concert of Betty Buckley's Broadway By Request in Fort Worth. Each concert was fantastic and Betty not only sounded great, she also had so many funny moments. Of course, people always request "Memory" and she always saves it for the end. Right before she got to the song someone yelled out "Sing anything from Cats!" Betty said, "Actually…I only know one song from it." Her honesty was refreshing. Then someone from the audience wrote a question on the request slip asking her if she ever joked around onstage and she revealed that she always pulled pranks on final performances. During the opening number of Cats she always stood between Hector Mercado and Terrance Mann. On the night of her final performance Hector and Terrance kept looking up at the ceiling during the number because apparently there was a major leak. They then found out after the show that the "leak" was actually Betty secretly squirting them with water guns she had hidden in her leg warmers! PS, I love that her leg warmers were roomy enough to hide water guns. I'm going to start a trend: on nights I go out on the town and don't feel like carrying a bag, I'm going to carry my wallet, keys, water bottle, iPod, etc., in my leg warmers. They're back in style, aren't they? They're not? All right, I'll carry all of that in my acid-washed jeans.

Back to Cats. On her last night in the show, Betty made her first entrance as Grizabella holding a stuffed beaver from FAO Schwartz. She wasn't cradling it in her arms, it was literally hanging out of her mouth. She was at first going to buy a stuffed mouse but it didn't look like a mouse next to a human-sized cat. Betty said that the stuffed beaver had the best human-to-cat size ratio. After she entered, she stood with the stuffed beaver between her teeth and told us that the little "kitten" who normally approaches and paws the air in front of her was so confused as to what he was seeing that he just froze "mid-air/mid-claw." She had tipped off Anna McNeely that she'd be bringing something onstage and that Anna should let her establish it and then take it. Betty said once the laughter in the audience started to spread from left to right, Anna moved in front of the frozen kitten and snatched the beaver/mouse out of her mouth. Betty was laughing so hard describing to us how it essentially looked like Grizabella had entered right after killing a mouse. Brava! I'll have to ask her if she ever re-purposed that bit. It could have easily worked for Norma Desmond's first entrance as well.