So about that naked ice skating...

Here's the scoop on the naked ice skating:

I made my annual fall trek to Los Angeles to see Darling Daughter and her Prince Charming a couple of weeks early to celebrate my birthday and to see DD's school's production of A Chorus Line.

After the Sunday matinee, several of the school staff treated the Guest Director and his Best Friend to dinner at a restaurant that I happen to like to visit when I'm in LA, and PC and I were invited along.

PC and I somehow wound up at the table with DD, the GD and his BF, and the two folks who work closest with DD on these things, the school's Set Designer and the Theater Arts Coordinator. I don't know how PC and I wound up separating SD and TAC from DD, GD and BF, but we did, and that left DD having a lively theater chat with those two and PC and me sort of on our own to figure out whether to listen to that or to drop in on SD and TAC, whose conversation would potentially be must less interesting because they've been friends for so long.

Not long enough, it turns out, for SD to feel as if he knew all he could about TAC's background, so SD asked the question of how TAC got from his European beginnings to a private school in Pasadena, California.

One worthwhile stop along the way was a set designer job at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Among other things, TAC had designed sets for an ice show there. PC and I chuckled at the idea of ice at a place called "the Tropicana," but that was only the beginning.

One of the stars of the show was a young man TAC and I remembered from our younger years as the voice of NASA who had counted down to blast-off in the early days of manned space exploration. I had always assumed the voice we heard was that of a NASA engineer or astronaut or someone with "official" ties to the space program; the notion that an actor—in fact, an ice skater—counting us down to man's first steps on the moon just somehow seemed illogical.

But then it got worse: TAC told us that one of the shows was supposed to feature a rain shower, so he had had to design a way to get rain on the rink without melting the ice. So now we have the voice of NASA. Ice skating. At the Tropicana. In the rain.

Naked.

DD seemed to be having a lively and interesting conversation with the GD and his BF. PC and I were trying to keep from rolling under the table.

A day or two later the three of us were rolling around the kids' apartment in preparation for taking off on our next adventure. When PC finished his shower, he hollered out the bathroom door at DD about something, and I reminded him that if he was about to come out of the bathroom, he might want to grab a towel first. A couple of minutes later, he slipped from the bathroom into the bedroom with the towel wrapped around his midsection.

"No nudie show for me this afternoon?" I called through the bedroom door.

"Let me grab my skates!" he hollered back.

Priceless.