Yesterday I awoke to the aggressive crunching, drilling, scraping, shouting, shoveling and truck beeps that come with trees being planted on my street. Without warning. Part of Mayor Bloomberg's Million Tree project.

I can attest that at least 12 have been used so far. It's nice but I'm glad it's not a daily process.

This morning, the fourth day of spring, brought a gentle dusting of snow on parked cars and the ground. The path in the pic above called to me saying it was probably the last time I'd live enough close to it in this condition to slip in for a quick hike, but I needed to hustle in order to be productive and industrious today.

The grapple between winter and spring is such a metaphor for so many things orbiting me right now. You know how you get that feeling of dread right after 60 Minutes is over? You think, “I could use 1 more day.” That's how I feel about this last 6 months.

We met a year ago today. I was supposed to see Sondheim on Sondheim for his 80th birthday celebration with a friend. She was supposed to do an informal reading of an evening of one-acts. But another friend asked me to be in a reading of his short plays that night and she was given a last-minute ticket to see Sondheim on Sondheim.

So I didn't see Sondheim and she didn't do that reading. We met anyway because Ringling Bros was running the elephants at midnight across 34th Street from the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the only way to get them to Madison Square Garden. She came down from 54th Street to meet her friends from the reading. I said something aloud about her having a beautiful voice when she walked away at one point. Her friend told her what I said and she stared at me the rest of the night. I thought, “she must think I'm weird.”

We didn't say one word to one another.

I took a few cruddy pictures of the night on my Blackberry, including this blur of the elephants running by at what seemed to be more than 10 mph. I asked my friend to tag the pics on Facebook. He only tagged Aimee. She friended me. I wrote a thank you.

Mr. Sondheim is 81 today. The Ringling elephants are at Nassau Coliseum this week while MSG is being renovated. Aimee and I are involved with 2 different staged readings tonight but I'm confident we'll see each other anyway near 34th Street before midnight.

I killed the other blog I had. It was for a show I did 4 years ago. It only had 7 page views. I think it was the right decision. There’s only so much space on the internet for useless garbage. Also, I don’t want to confuse people with multiple blogs.

A few years ago, I cleaned out a trunk full of old journals filled with pages bemoaning my terrible time dating and figuring out how to become an actor. I think the world is better off with those chunks of paper sent off to compost. There must’ve been 30 of them. The act of clearing them out ended my hobby of journaling. I’ve picked up a few since then and have written some deranged notes about this or that but nothing consistently. I guess I don’t need it as much.

I used to worry about whether my handwritten journals would ever be seen by others. Partly this was out of concern that it would be embarrassing but also because I didn’t want to be unclear to my unknown reader.

There was a story in The Times today about a female student at Duke University writing a fake thesis with a Power Point presentation on her sexual encounters with 13 student-athletes during her time there. It leaked to the internet and the names were not hidden.

On the one hand, it was a joke for a few friends. On the other, it’s an object lesson on some basic dos and don’ts. Is it more embarrassing for the girl or her former partners?

It’s fair to wonder whether the person you decide to date or even hook up with is digitally trustworthy. Years ago, the raging jilted would take to a water tower or overpass with a can of spray paint to say what a slut or asshole someone was. I remember as a kid feeling sorry for those people who had their names plastered for drivers by to see.

Fame without discretion drives so much of the pop culture and its coverage now. When we went by those paint scrawls, we didn’t know who actually did the spray painting. Now the tagger and the subject both get their 15 cyber minutes of infamy. And it’s caused some fatal outcomes.

I’ve endured some humiliation and ridicule but nothing to the degree of this recent spate. Hopefully it’s a tasteless fad that will even out. I have a friend, a talented and intelligent person, who started a tell-all dating blog under another name. I know because she sent out a mass email requesting page views and to send potential dates her way. She said she wanted to get the attention of industry people who might find it funny. The blog is similar to the Duke student’s fake thesis. It is easy to figure out who the subjects are. I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would send someone to face this, unless they hate that person and are getting some kind of revenge. If the blog was an upfront part of the dating process and potential dates knew about it, then they get what they get like the fame junkies on a reality tv show. But this sneaky approach makes me not trust this friend and I don’t know that anything can be done about it, except to keep a polite distance from this person.

There is a difference between clowns or comedians who know how to play with an audience and those who don’t. The truly skilled ones never put the joke on those in the seats but always back on themselves. They never ask the audience to carry their workload for them. Real funny doesn’t begin with picking a fight.

If someone is heckling or making it a bad environment for other patrons, then the comic can unload on that person all they want. I saw an amazing comic in London reduce a jerk in the audience who was trying to insult the comic. He responded, “Are you still talking? Have you noticed no one laughs when you do that?” The audience cracked up. “Do you hear that? I did that. There it is again. And again. I can do this all night. You nothing.”

Those that go after their audience or the unsuspecting with online or live bully pulpits are weak. To do so to gain notoriety is just plain gross.

Tom Rowan, the director for FU 4 Your Service, made a good point tonight at the rehearsal for the staged reading on Saturday about not being afraid to simply read. The danger in this is one can get caught up in the acting and making eye contact too much and lose where one is in the script. Then lines are lost, read wrong, cues dropped and the pacing deadened. You want to connect and listen to your scene partner but not to the detriment of the script.

He said a little eye contact goes a long way and I agree. The idea, he said, is that we are wanting to give the sense of the shape of a performance of the play, not the second rehearsal.

I'm playing a guy running for Congress who has gone crazy in this play. I have to push the game more than allowing it to happen. The trick is doing that slickly but still having enough genuine there to seem like I'm still from the planet Earth. Otherwise it's too Jim Carrey, but maybe I shouldn't worry about it.

It's a good play and I think the reading will show how ready it is.

Makes me wonder about first read-throughs in general. Folks make a lot of hay about their purpose and worth. Some say they are only good for getting through the first day. Others like to use it to lay the foundation. But tonight makes me think that it really is to get a road map towards what the audience will encounter on opening night.

I've never had a second read-through. I mean, I've been in shows that read scenes endlessly and do a looooot of table work. But I haven't sat down with the script and cast and read it all again half-way through rehearsals either as a reminder or as a way to clear out some of the b.s. I wonder if it would help? I've read plays from beginning to end on my own when I've been lost but not with others.

Then again, I've only had the luxury of too much rehearsal a few times and it was usually just a colossal disaster of a show, with a lot of impossible ideas layered on things for no reason other than ego. Good times. Good times.

I secretly enjoy working on Sunday mornings because I get to mark off a work day while most people are sleeping off the previous night’s debauchery. While I could have used similar rest having been up late Saturday seeing Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind at the Kraine (huge fun, go see it), I went to work in the new normal in NYC: chilly, overcast and/or rainy, and darker earlier than I like. A perfect day to go on a late afternoon stroll through Central Park.

Aimee and I met down by the entrance of CPW and 59th Street. We made our way past the ballfields where I saw that one can buy beer at the little clubhouse. Brilliant. When we went by the carousel, Aimee notice they were playing a calliope version of “Another Saturday Night,” which is featured prominently in Apostles of Park Slope. I wanted to call Jason but I knew he was off in Puerto Rico and I didn’t think it was funny enough for him to incur the phone charges.

We went by a great jazz quartet wailing away near the promenade and saw other street performers but the one that got me to crack my wallet was a 10-year-old boy who was juggling pins on a unicycle. Then we weaved around a street fair near the band shell where they were breaking down the booths. One contained a 15 foot Lego sculpture that look like an elaborate series of castles.

While there may be rabid animals roaming the park, as noted by the many warning signs, the urban wonder does connect with several civilized places to use the restroom. I chose the Metropolitan Museum. Going there decreases your chances of having to work around someone bathing for the first time in days in the sink. And you get to take in some art. Since the museum closes at 5:30, we were pressed to get in and out quickly. Must go back again soon. And the food trucks out front are really fancy.

We paused for a gander across the Marathon Man reservoir. Fitting for my dental appointment the next day.

Maybe it was a combo of the time of day and year, but it got quiet north of the reservoir. Like people don’t know all this park is sitting up there, especially on the east side. My quest was to show Aimee the Harlem Meer, which sits in the northeast corner of the park. I’d only been there at odd times like at 7 in the morning but always liked. We pushed north and came across Compost Road. It’s like the Elephant Graveyard in Tarzan but for tree trunks and 30 foot mounds of steaming cedar. If I was 8, I’d have climbed all over them until my parents had to come look for me.

Instead we weaved back to 5th Avenue, near the Museum of the City of New York and El Museo Del Barrio by the Conservatory Garden, which closes at the imprecise time of “dusk.” It was closed and not dusk enough in my opinion but the Giants were taking on the Bears that night so there’s no reason I should be surprised.

The meer is amazing. I dare say it’s the most spectacular spot in the whole park. We took in the sunset there and felt like we were in some other city. Really nice. In film they call it the magic hour. Understandably so. The buildings and the trees were speckled in golden light.

We shuffled up through a good chunk of central Harlem and staved off the urge to indulge to Make My Cake. But we will be back. I got a toothache just looking at the place. Good thing I was hitting the dental chair the next day.

I’ve been involved with several staged readings lately. Back in August, my voice played the part of a jilted lover in Marin Gazzaniga’s In Ways Both Frivolous and Deep, directed by Alexandra Aron at Primary Stages. After several attempts to record in a studio, Alexandra decided to have me call her iPhone and leave my performance on her voice-mail. It apparently worked better. I had no idea that the actress playing my ex would be Jessica Hecht. I’ve always liked her work but couldn’t be there for the actual reading so it bummed me out a little to have missed that.

Next, I did a private reading of Robin Rice Lichtig’s Suki Livingston Opens Like a Parachute, directed by Tracy Bersley. Robin made a lot of changes since the script-in-hand performance we did back in March at Theater for the New City. The board room in the office where we read had an incredible view of the city’s eastern and southern territory. I played numerous iconic figures in the play including JFK and MLK jr, believe it or not. It’s not an easy play to write (it’s quite epic and very personal) so my hat’s off to Robin who is continuing to work on it.

Then I got to play a perfectly nice Jewish guy on a first date in Alexandra Beech‘s Little Monsters, directed by Michelle Bossy at Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Octoberfest 2010. There are something like 52 full-length plays being read in that so there is plenty of high-quality pieces to see. Alex usually writes more political pieces so it was nice to see her put out a comedy. Because of things coming together at the last minute, I only rehearsed my scenes in isolation and heard the rest of the play for the first time with the audience. I laughed through the whole thing during the scenes in which I wasn’t involved.

On Saturday afternoon, I’m reading the part of a magazine reporter in an untitled play that Aimee is directing. She was recommended to the playwright by Cusi Cram after Aimee directed Cusi’s short play in the 7even, 7even, 7even this summer.

Next up is this drama with comedic grace notes about a war veteran coming home from our recent war with Iraq. I play “Dutch” Wackenhut, a guy off his nut runnnig for Congress. I have a really funny monologue in this. Please check it out.

F U 4 Your Service by Eric Conger
Octoberfest 2010 at Ensemble Studio Theatre
549 West 52nd Street, 2nd Floor

Directed by Tom Rowan

Saturday, October 9th, 9 p.m. and Monday, October 11th, 7 p.m.

With J. Alex Brinson, Peter Brouwer, Rosalyn Coleman, Bill Cwikowski, Maria Gabriele, Chris Harcum, Debbie Lee Jones and Alanna Wilson.

Reservations recommended: boxoffice@ensemblestudiotheatre.org or 212-247-4982 ext. 105.