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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.
Wednesday 05/26/2004
I am the rabbit
I mentioned briefly in the last entry that John, Alex, and I saw UrineTown at the Wilshire Theater. It was a happy, dour, chipper, pessimistic show of unending drought, ecological disaster, political corruption, murder, wise beyond their years waif characters who exist to point out the oddness of the musical she was in, dance numbers, and yes, songs proclaiming that peeing is a privilege. Along with everyone else in the audience, I found myself laughing at the end of the world.
It was a good musical, what little of it I could hear that is. The performers were all overmiked as if for a Madonna or Janet concert. Large distracting baubles hanging off of everyone's faces would have been forgivable, except that the sound and acoustics were horrible. I could more or less hear the actors when they spoke, but anytime more than one person sang, it was a struggle to make out the lyrics.
I largely enjoyed myself and it was good, but since I missed out on a lot, the show was probably much better than I thought.
Dinner afterwards was at a generic Middle Eastern place somewhere near WeHo. Food was adequate, if a bit greasy. Rather than a place you go for the food, it seemed to be a place to be seen for the scene. There were different rooms and patios to eat in, and the one we sat in had a young early twenties straight couple sitting off in a corner.
There was something odd going on with them. They looked a bit tense when we walked into the room, sort of unhappy and dour. Figuring out the best way to sit on an odd bench, I caught the woman frowning in our direction. A few minutes later and she was all over the guy, holding, feeding, touching, and kissing him. There were so many mirrors placed around the room it was hard not to see what they were doing, but it was hard to imagine why her personality seemed to change so rapidly. I'm narcissistic enough to assume that it had something to do with us, but why would it? I can imagine a scenario were she feared for her boyfriend, but that is just silly. Eh, it's not important, just odd.
Missing out on aspects of entertainment was also theme for the only thing I did last weekend that is worth mentioning here. I saw the La Dolce Vita revival at the Rialto in South Pasadena instead of going to Long Beach Pride like a good gay boy (sorry, but after so many years of going/marching/attending, I just wasn�t that interested). There were several late thirty/early forty-some gay couples in the audience, so I wasn�t the only one skipping out on pride, or maybe they all went to the parade on Sunday instead of spending the day weeding as I did.
Um, lost my point�Which was that this was my first time seeing La Dolce Vita and while I enjoyed it, I left the theater thinking that I needed to see it again because I don�t think I caught everything that was going on. For a film that appears to merely be an aimless series of scenes of shallowness following the life of the tabloid reporter Marcello, there is a lot of depth. Must be why it�s a classic. A long, long, long classic. I don�t think I would have minded the length, except that the seats at the Rialto are somewhat old and somewhat hard. I spent a lot of time being squirmy.
Even with never having seen the movie, many of the scenes have been copied, referenced, and parodied so many times they were easily recognizable, such as a christ statue being carried over Rome by helicopters, or rather the shadow of the christ stature passing over buildings as it flew overhead.
It was a bit hard not to flash back to a French & Saunders skit where a helicopter flies around carrying a pointy busted madona statue.
More famous than the helicopter is the scene with a blond American actress wading into the Trevi Fountain. The image of the woman, portrayed as a force of nature, pouring water over Marcello�s head was certainly provocative. I never knew there was an overtly religious tone to it, or that it apparently served as a counterpoint to a section of the movie with children who have had (pretend?) visions of the Madonna (false religion? abused religion?)
It seems there is going to be a two disk collectors DVD edition released this September, so I foresee a future birthday gift to myself.
-nico