I can't tell you how the lecture went in Santa Barbara because I didn't go. I was less than an hour from departure when my knee — you know…the one I'd just said here was getting better — suddenly reacted like Lizzie Borden had taken forty whacks at it plus one for good luck. Maybe the worst pain I've ever experienced, not including writing for The McLean Stevenson Show. I called my orthopedist, cancelled out on S.B. and staggered like a zombie out to catch a cab.
So what's wrong with my joint? He doesn't know but he shot it up with short-range anesthetics and longer-term cortisone. I always thought cortisone shots worked rather quickly. That's because my only experience with them was occasionally hearing that someone had injured something in a football game so they shot him up with cortisone and sent him back in. Turns out they take a day or two to kick in…so I'm sitting here icing the knee and waiting for the day or two to pass. It doesn't hurt too much if I don't walk on it. Or exhale in that direction.
Please…don't inundate me with home remedies, suggestions, warnings that my doctor doesn't know what he's doing, etc. I suspect that if I had a splinter and my doctor was about to remove it, someone would write in and say, "Omigod! That's the worst thing you can do for it! I know someone who did that and he wound up losing both his arms up to the socket, plus his cat died!" I know people mean well when they do this — well, most of them do — but I can't follow fifteen sets of advice. I'm going with my doctor and don't need people trying to lower my confidence in him because they once went to one who tried to take their appendix out through their left nostril.
Anyway, the students in Santa Barbara were not deprived in the least by my not being there. They had Laraine Newman and Gregg Berger — two of the smartest, most talented people I know — to discuss voiceover work and careers in show biz. My apologies to the class and its instructor, Cheri Steinkellner, but you really didn't need me…and if I had been there, all you would have gotten out of me was shrieks and moans and many newly-invented cuss words.