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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Dos cosas de mi vida, a couple of weeks after the fact because I�m all about the procrastination:

Movie:
So I saw a matinee showing of the Hitchhiker�s Guide to the Galaxy flick since I was curious, but didn�t feel like devoting too much towards it money wise. My reaction to the movie was middling. As it was a movie and limited in time, I didn�t mind the changes to, and simplification of the story (though I was a bit unimpressed with the introduction of the dual love stories), and I found it neither as outrageously funny, nor as terrible as some Adam�s fans have written about online. Essentially, I neither hated nor loved it. It was amusing, but that was about it.

The only thing I�d read about it before the matinee was a brief, mostly unimpressed review that seemed to find it�s main fault as being too talky. I�m not sure if that was meant to be a critique of its �failure� at being a typical summer action flick, or if the writer hated the hitchhiker entry interludes. If it were the later, then that�d be an odd complaint, sort of like complaining how the next batman movie is going to have a guy dressed up as a bat.

There was huge string of trailers before the thing started and once again the mix was really strange. It started off with Batman Begins, then went on with kid�s movie after kid�s movie after kid�s movie, stopping briefly for a horror movie with what appeared to be blood or bloody water or something foul dripping from a ceiling and menacing a single mother and her child, before segueing into the trailer for new Herbie movie. Given the number of kids in the audience, jumping from kids in outer space, to dripping blood, to a magical car from the late sixties reimagined for the present seemed a tad inappropriate to me.

For the most part, the audience was quiet during the trailers, bored quiet that is, not rapt attention quiet. The only noise came from two younger boys sitting a couple of rows behind me. In a loud stage whisper, they told their dad that they REALLY wanted to see batman, and a couple minutes later in an even louder whisper, that they were NOT going to see the adventures of lava girl and shark boy.

Play:
The newest play at the Kirk Douglas is A Distant Shore by Chay Yew, a story of lovers in an unnamed Southeast Asian nation with the first act set in the 1920�s and the second act in the same location but now in the modern day. The second act involves essentially the same characters, reset in modern times, reincarnations if you will. So there was forbidden love, colonialism (both traditional political and modern commercialism), fate, religious fanaticism, racism, and other fun stuff.

I enjoyed the play, though I could have done without some lines towards the end explaining the idea of reincarnation, of returning, of repeating lives until you get things right. I�m not the smartest guy around and if I figured that out on my own, it�s bound to be obvious and a detailed analysis (even one disguised as poetry) is redundant.

After the play I told my friend Kricket when Eric D. Steinberg (playing a �native� rubber plantation owner named Zul) walked out on to stage shirtless in traditional clothes, my first thought was cool, quickly followed by another thought that unfortunately since the second act took place in the present he�d probably spend all his time fully clothed. She laughed �cause she thought the exact same thing. Luckily we were both wrong about the second act.

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