August 10, 2025

My morning chores normally include tasks like watering my garden and then admiring my garden, but this morning I awoke to a huge problem. My Genovese basil seedlings were leaning like the Tower in Pisa that overlooks the same sea as their eponymous home. I wondered if I’d ever recover.

I’d planted the basil seeds in 3/4” cubes of freestanding soil instead of sowing them in cell trays or directly into their final growing medium. It’s a technique known as “soil blocking.” But I’d let these guys grow too tall and they’d started to list. So I went down to my storage locker, opened my giant Rubbermaid bin full of dirt, and started sifting. As one does when they live in a high-rise apartment in midtown Manhattan. I up-potted my basil and this afternoon I’m happy to report that they’re back to standing upright. Thank god. Now I can continue with my day.

My next order of business was calling family. Mostly to tell them about Basilgate, but also just to catch up. I like to do that seasonally.

Then on to Important Show-business: following up with a comedy agent. Last night a comedy agent called to ask if I was free to work tomorrow night. It went to voicemail. I wish I could say it was because I was too busy performing on stage, making a theater full of thousands of audience members laugh their heads off. But, I was sitting on a piano bench next to Wiff while we figured out the key in which Ariel sang in each of two versions of The Little Mermaid. So today I called him back. “Can you feature for Chris Kattan tomorow.” I said yes. Then he said, “but I’d need a favor.” In showbiz, “I need a favor” usually means money or sex or, in rare instances, both. In this case, thankfully, it was neither. “Can you pick him up from the airport?”

Can I pick someone up from the airport that I used to watch on TV every Saturday night when I was a kid? And then drop him off at his hotel, and then pick him back up and drive him to the club? And then perform for 25 minutes while he watches my set laughing his head off? And then drive him back to his hotel where he’d presumably invite me in for a drink and we’d become best friends and no “favors”?

I played it cool. “Sure.”

So that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow night. After I play Uber driver to an SNL alum, I’ll be performing at Borrelli’s Taproom out on Long Island. And then becoming best friends with someone I admired on TV.