Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.

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Las Vecinas as Greek chorus

Some cosas from the past several weeks written about in a somewhat odd manner:

play:
John and I saw Electricidad at the Mark Taper a couple of weeks ago, a sort of version of Electra reset in the Barrio. I�m not overly familiar with Electra, other than the most basic elements of murder and revenge, but overt knowledge of the original isn�t necessary for this piece.

Going in, I wasn�t too sure how well it would work, but it turned out that dropping a Greek Tragedy into a world of cholos and gangs was a smooth fit. The play was very interesting and engaging, touching on elements of power, forgiveness, searching for a higher meaning in life (which can be viewed as betrayal to the life left behind), misogyny, and life when it appears that there are no options.

The set was interesting, an open faced bungalow with a cement lawn surrounded by dry neglected palms, power lines, and an uncaring city, which when need be, would become Las Vegas by merely dimming the normal lights and shooting up neon. There were several times when Las Vegas was referred to as being named after the character of Electricidad, named after light, after power. There were also several references to why she will never see Vegas. She�s a chola, a homegirl. It gives her power, but her very identity seems to mean that she is nothing if away from home. Home being the barrio, or more literally her father�s house now owned by his killer, her mother.

I enjoyed the play enough that I was almost able to sort of ignore the annoying potato ship eating, cell phone call making French man who has the same subscription night that we do.

concert:
Margaret Cho was at the Wiltern this weekend for her Assassin tour. Good show; good audience; hate the seats at the Wiltern; one opening act was a belly dancer; the other was Bruce Daniels, who has gotten better over the years; he was very good; enjoyed her show, though it seemed more traditional stand-up (joke, joke, joke goodbye it�s over!) than her other shows have been; even with that mild not exactly a criticism she�s wickedly funny; she still loves the word p*ssy; she made mention of how her fans leapt to her defense, and buried people who had sent her hate mail calling her things like gook dyke, so that the haters were forced to send apology emails and beg for forgiveness, which was really funny to me because I following Margaret�s blog at the time and saw it happening for reals.

wedding:
John�s sister got married �round Easter. It was the second marriage for both her and the new hubby. With each bringing three kids into the act, there were far too many brady bunch jokes that night. Ceremony was nice. Riverside County is waaaay to far away. Despite spending the majority of the wedding out by their home, it still felt like more time was spent driving than being there.

easter but not really:
Easter proper was spent doing nothing much of anything. Not being particularly religious, John�s family did their traditional Easter things the week after, once everyone had recovered from the wedding. The mad dash for candy (instead of eggs) portion of the day was when John took the photo of me that I put up over at the blog as sad proof that spending all my time bundked up under layers of clothes protecting myself against an unusually cold and wet winter has left me as pale as a pale white guy.

angst:
There�s been a lot of annoying things going on in my life lately, one of the more bothersome of which was that I was in a car accident, or more accurately a woman with no sense of space or eyesight (or insurance) decided that she wanted to switch lanes and have her SUV occupy the exact same spot that my car was. It was a red light, it happened in virtual slow motion, no one was hurt and my car only suffered some overly expensive scratches. On the other hand, my tolerance levels for dealing with people has plummeted to all time lows, and I once again, hate everyone.

spell check:
This program�s spell check would prefer it if vecina were vicu�a.

more later,
nico

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