Okay, let me take my mind off of it by talking about Broadway! This has been a busy week. I took a job as a comedy writer on the new Rosie O'Donnell Variety Show, and I've been doing a reading at the same time. First the TV show: I just started so I can't tell 'ya much, except that it's gonna have some fabulous guests. I was a comedy writer on the first Rosie O'Donnell show, and this one has the same people I worked with ten years ago. I dreaded walking in and having everybody clandestinely count wrinkles and multiply them by my hairline (the equation for "Yowtch! You've aged."), but I was pleasantly surprised when everyone commented about how I must be working out because my chest is so big. Hopefully, I'll be sitting behind a desk for the rest of the gig or else people will start to notice that my waist gained the same amount of inches that my chest did, and not in muscle. I'm also doing a reading of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm based on the Shirley Temple movie. Yes, I'm a little long in the tooth for the role of Rebecca, but what I lack in youthful glow, I make up for in lethargy and a bad knee. Actually, there's a little girl playing Rebecca, and she's adorable. The rest of the cast is great, too. The great character actor Marc Kudisch is playing a Rooster Hannigan-type and sassy Tony winner Cady Huffman is his moll. Brooks Ashmanskas plays a shy, radio engineer and when we saw each other, we immediately started reminiscing about The Ritz. I was about to launch into a story about some of the inappropriate backstage behavior that the near-naked Ritz boys pulled when I realized that I was surrounded by a group of little, underage girls in the ensemble. I put the kibosh on my story, deciding that they don't yet need to learn what Quell is used for. Never one to be at a loss with adolescent girls, I immediately launched into a dissection of the "Twilight" book series with one of the 12-year-olds. It's about a teenager who's in love with a vampire, and I'm on the second book. Let me just say that it's enjoyable, but it's no "Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself." 'Nuff said.

If you don't know what a reading is, it's when a play is read (and sung) by actors to give the creative team and producers insight into what's working and what's not. There's no staging — you just sit in front of a music stand and work off of the script. There's a union term for it: a 29-hour reading. That means that you can use the actors for 29 hours in a week and pay them $100 each. I was talking to one of my fellow actors, who has done a ton of these types of readings, and he said that actors always jokingly complain about only getting $100, but recently he did a reading with producers who didn't use the actors for the full 29 hours (but it was very close) and therefore paid them nothing! How cheap is that? And who were the producers? The Ropers?

The book for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was adapted by Daniel Goldfarb (Modern Orthodox), the lyrics are by Susan Birkenhead (Jelly's Last Jam), and Henry Krieger (Dreamgirls) wrote the music. I was hoping to get a big Dreamgirls-type ballad to bring the house down with, but then realized that it takes place in the thirties, so I wouldn't be "Steppin' to the Bad Side." However, I soon had to accept not only would I not have the 11 o'clock number, but I wouldn't have any number. I will instead try to bring the house down with my baritone harmony parts in two group numbers. The best part is that my friend Christopher Gattelli is the director. We started working together on the opening number of the 1998 Easter Bonnet competition, and we've done seven numbers since then. I'm so proud of him for getting a Tony nomination this year for South Pacific, and I'm sure he's proud of me…for being able to snag a pair of tickets.

Last Monday night, I hosted an event for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. It was a salon held at a beautiful apartment, which overlooks Central Park. People paid money to come mingle with Broadway folk, and every ten minutes, some celeb got up and sang. Well, almost everybody sang. Chris Noth got up and chatted to the crowd…and was fun-nee. He introduced Ron Pobuda, who donated the gorgeous apartment, by saying, "Ron, like David Duchovny, just went to rehab for sexual addiction." He then said that Ron didn't finish his time because he wanted to keep his wild sex life. I found it hilarious…and so did the many ten-year-olds from the Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm reading who were there. Just kidding, they were all home, probably reading "Twilight." The other non-singing guests were the cute David Steen and TV legend Rue McClanahan. I interviewed them, and they talked about their current TV show, LOGO's "Sordid Lives," where David plays a man with no legs and Rue plays his lover. They told us that the love scene they recently filmed a. broke the bed they were on, b. was boycotted from LOGO because it was too graphic. Seriously. I then said, since we're talking about sexy, What's up with Bea Arthur? Rue said that they're still in touch and speak all the time, which I loved hearing because it's nice to know that the friendship on "Golden Girls" was real. I asked Rue if it was true that her autobiography, "My First Five Husbands . . . And The Ones Who Got Away" was being turned into a stage show. She said it was, and I asked her if she was nervous that somebody else would get the part. She said, "Absolutely not!" I reminded her about Carol Channing/Barbra Streisand, and she said, "Carol Channing is Carol Channing…not Dolly Levi. I am Rue McClanahan!" She has a point.