As you may recall, I spent the better part of a year dealing with arm pain and numbness and tingling.

And then I got ACDF surgery, some spinal surgery through my neck that cured me instantly.

It was freaking awesome.

But I have a story to tell about that surgery that may or may not surprise you.

Your Daily Lex So before I got the surgery, of course, as one does, I asked the doctor about side effects.

And he’s like, you’re going to be fine.

You’re not going to have any side effects.

It’s like the only thing you’ll potentially experience is a tiny bit of a loss of range of motion with your neck.

And the only thing you won’t be able to do with your neck is, it’s like, you remember in the 80s or 90s when you would hold a phone or a cordless phone in your cruck of your shoulder, between your shoulder and your ear?

Like you might lose some of that.

And that doesn’t matter because we don’t do that anymore.

So really, you’ll have no long term impacts other than being healed.

I was like, wonderful.

Anyway, I’m in a play called Same Time Next Year, which takes place across about 25 years from the 60s through the 70s, I guess from the 50s through the 70s.

And I have several phone calls during that show on an old school rotary phone where I’m doing stuff with my hands while holding the phone.

You guessed it, between my shoulder and my ear.

And only two nights ago when we finally had the real prop phone there, I was like, oh my God, this is really hard.

And I just powered through it.

And last night I was doing it again.

And the director was like, you look awkward holding that phone in there.

And I was like, well, I’m going to admit something to you.

When I auditioned for the show, it was freshly after that surgery.

And I told you that the surgery and my recovery wouldn’t affect me in any way.

And yet here we are, it is affecting me in these ways.

And he’s like, oh my God, great.

Lean into it.

Don’t hold the phone that way.

Like keep moving it back and forth.

Like you’re already a totally neurotic character.

Like be weird about how you hold the phone, but don’t do it in any way that hurts you.

He’s a nice guy, that director.

There are various things I’ve worried about through the rehearsal process.

One was making sure I got all my lines down.

One was the piano I played during the show.

One was miming piano during the show.

Last night was the first time I was truly doing the miming while they played the track for this Chopin etude.

And as I was miming along to it, I have to be careful not to actually hit the piano keys because the piano is live the whole time.

It’s an electric keyboard hidden inside a grand piano wooden frame.

And they leave the keys up the whole time in part so I can bang the keys at the end.

And it really does seem like I was playing it since I am playing it the other two times.

But as I was banging along, I noticed I was like really flopping my head around and getting into it because it’s an intense piece.

And my hair was flopping around.

I was like, I think I must look like a piano playing Muppet.

And during the notes that the director gives after each run, he’s like, I love how you’re miming.

It looks so good.

And you kind of look like a Muppet as you play the piano.

Hey, that’s what I was going for.

So all that stuff went well.

The piano went well.

The lines went well.

Didn’t miss any.

Two things that I have never worried about, I messed up.

They were both prop related.

I made mistakes, one for the second time in a row where I forgot to pick up a prop.

That’s very important that I pick up.

And another time I took on a suitcase that I’m very explicitly by the script not meant to have.

In each case, I did my best to cover for those things during those runs, but embarrassing mistakes.

So I intend to fix them tonight.

We don’t actually open Friday.

We have an invited dress rehearsal Friday, so we’ll treat it like a show, but it’s not a show, but we do open Saturday.

Sunday show is sold out.

Saturday’s is not yet, but it probably will get there.

Or if not, it’ll get very close.

Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful weekend ahead of you.

If you’re in New Jersey and you’re not coming to see my show, you are dead to me.

And that’s all I got.

Happy January 15th.

Lex.