They had clothes for me -- coats and boots and shirts and such, all black -- and there was a lot of being told to "Lower your jaw, okay, now scowl furiously -- okay, clench your teeth together hard -- really hard -- and look really angry -- menacing. That's good. No, we have to see it in the eyebrows."
So I clenched my jaw like anything for a couple of hours. Clenched and clenched and clenched. Then I went into the make-up room, while the photographers were moving some lights, and took a bite of some sushi with my freshly unclenched jaw, and nearly took the tip of my tongue off.
The shoot carried on with me sucking ice-cubes for my bleeding tongue, and scowling even more convincingly, and talking even less.
They showed me some of the photos on the computer screen. They're really good -- I didn't look like me at all. I looked, I decided, like a James Bond villain.
Then they put a big coat on me and stood me in front of a high-powered fan to make the coat billow, and took more photos. I now looked like a James Bond villain who had been cast in The Matrix.
In the evening I went, accompanied by Stephin Merritt, to see my friend Jennifer Barnhardt and the rest of the company, in "Avenue Q" -- a sort of Sesame Street for Grown-Ups. The show has recently transferred to Broadway, and is really fun -- watching the puppeteers on stage with the puppets is quite magical. In addition to which, songs like "The Internet is for Porn" and "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" teach life valuable lessons...
The tip of my tongue is currently black and swollen -- I'm not actually sure whether I'll be reading the Wolves in the Walls tomorrow, or the Wolveth in the Wallth. Well, I'll find out...