And an afternoon with a Moustache Brother.

I stopped by the Moustache Brothers’ house one afternoon to drop off an article I had seen in the New York Times which mentions them. Lu Maw corralled me inside and I was served tea by his cousin, the former political prisoner Lu Zaw. Lu Maw quickly put me to work helping him out with some of the English-language expressions he wanted to use in his show (words/phrases he was working on: “groupies”; “bun in the oven”; “energy boost” (which he got off of a bottle of moisturizer); “cheapskate/miser/Scrooge/tightwad”; “straight shooter/shoot from the hip.”)

Here’s a joke Lu Maw tried out on me:

A Burmese man wakes up one morning with a toothache. He gets on a bus and travels all day and all night to the Thai border. He sneaks across, and goes to see a dentist there. The dentist asks him, “Why did you come all this way? Don’t you have dentists in Burma?” “Yes,” replies the man, “but in Burma no one’s allowed to open his mouth.”

In Myanmar, this kind of stuff gets you nearly six years in prison.

To anyone planning on visiting Mandalay: Lu Maw asks for English-language news magazines. He also wants to get his hands on an Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (Dictionary)