Showing posts with label theater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theater. Show all posts

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Elvis's Birthday Fight Club

If the rest of 2011's weekends are as good as the first two, I'm a very lucky girl indeed. Last night, David, two friends, and I went to Elvis's Birthday Fight Club. Yesterday would've been Elvis Presley's 76th birthday, and some geniuses got the idea that nothing would better celebrate the King's birth (no, not that King! That was Dec. 25) than fighting and "hot ta-tas," as the evening's hostess explained.

They had two shows planned, both of which quickly sold out, but we were lucky enough to get tickets for a hastily-added show. We went out in the freezing cold to get these, then had to go back home for a while before heading out again. We waited 20 minutes in the freezing cold to get in, and it was totally worth it. We were treated to an hour of fake boxing, complete with punch and whammy sound effects. They pitted Abe Lincoln v. The Washington Monument. Abe was kicking some ass, but when he stopped to catch his breath, the Monument opened a panel on his front, pulled out a gun, and shot President Lincoln! His dying words were, "Every time I go to the theater!"

We also enjoyed a round between Sarah "Mama Grizzly" Palin and a really fugly "she-male," which is their term, not mine. I'm still trying to get the image out of my mind, but you can see his/her backside in my photo stream. Another winning bout matched Colonel Sanders against a giant chicken! It looked like the Colonel was going to be victorious over a chicken yet again, until he stopped and said, "In my day, we used to keep the white and dark meat separate ...," which was met with a resounding cry of boos from the audience. At that point, the chicken put the KFC bucket over the Colonel's head, tied the Karate Kid-style headband around his chickeny brow, and did the famous crow karate kick made famous by Ralph Macchio in the final scene of the competition in "The Karate Kid." This was complete with that cheesy song, "you're the best around, nothing's gonna ever keep you down," just one example of the care that went into selecting great music for this. Another example was the two burlesque dancers mock-fighting to Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It."

The picture above is from the fight between Mr. Roboto and The Washington Monument. It was comforting to hear the mega geeks behind us loudly singing the chorus to Styx's "Mr. Roboto." Mr. Roboto later was defeated by the chicken after she laid eggs and pelted the robot with them, thus ruining his delicate electronics.

At this point you're probably thinking, "Ok, sounds like a good fight club, but what about the hot ta-tas promised?" Don't worry, we were treated to excellent burlesque between the rounds by Reverend Valentine and L'il Dutch. I've seen L'il Dutch dance before and I've enjoyed her both times. Her best number was a striptease done to "Viva Las Vegas." She had fuzzy dice attached to the back of her thong, and her pasties were roulette wheels. She had a cute poker chip hat as an accessory. Rev. Valentine did a good striptease to "Jailhouse Rock," complete with a ball and chain attached to her ankle. My friend Shoshana and I found it oddly comforting that L'il Dutch, though beautiful, has a little meat on her bones, and it cracks me up that she says on her Web site that she is a lifetime member of Weight Watchers.

The only thing that could've made this night better (besides doing fake blow in the bathroom with my fake Elvis TCB (Taking Care of Business in a flash) cash) would've been kicking ass at Elvis trivia. Oh yeah, I did that! The hostess asked if anyone knew a lot about Elvis and all four of my companions started loudly pointing and saying, "Oh, she does! Pick her!" I was completely unprepared for this, and thus was wearing brown Uggs with a heather gray cashmere sweater. Oh well! It was me vs. a punk daring to call himself "Elvis Aron." Announcer "Elvis" stood between fake Elvis and me, and we fake-punched his arms with boxing gloves to ring in to answer a question. We battled it out over Elvis-related trivia in front of an audience of 100-120 people. I beat the punk solidly, and received a trophy: a banana-shaped dish in honor of Elvis' love of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. By the way, you haven't lived if you haven't eaten one; you laugh and judge it now, but make one, and you'll be an instant convert. Must be cooked in lard or butter for the full effect (that includes you, vegans), best summed up as "cardiac bypass on a plate."

I went into last night feeling pretty crummy from a cold-virus thingy, and I've undoubtedly prolonged my illness from the late night, hooting and hollering, and being so jazzed I couldn't fall asleep until 12:30 a.m. It was completely worth it, and it made me grateful to live in the city where we could access something so fun at the drop of a hat. In a strange way, events like that also solidify David's and my partnership with each other, because how many couples share that bawdy, gross, adolescent sense of humor? How many women are like, "Hey, honey, want to see burlesque and a fight club Saturday night?" Bonding over this type of shared humor is fun, and usually ends up with David giving me some kind of warm-fuzzy complement like, "The fact that we're doing this is just one more reason that you're the perfect woman for me." Aww... everyone wins!

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A Long Weekend Of Good Art

I heard about the band Gogol Bordello for the first time on NPR's On Point radio show, my favorite podcast. Host Tom Ashbrook was interviewing GB's singer, Eugene Hutz, and asked him to describe the world-famous GB concerts. Hutz's response: "It's like a great, cosmic orgasm." I knew I had to hear this band. The group is best described as gypsy punk, but they are a group of eight people from all over the world, and their collective cultural heritages seem to come out in the music. Besides their great sound, what really captivates me about GB is their catchy, yet profound, lyrics. This first struck me when I heard "Zina-Marina," a catchy-as-hell little ditty that happens to be about ... sex trafficking. Hutz told Ashbrook that the song was inspired by a trip back to his native country, Ukraine, when he noticed that all the beautiful women were gone. He asked someone about it, who said that they are recruited as overseas "models" and are sold into sex trafficking.

In a similar vain of catchy, but pointed, songwriting, Hutz sings in "Break the Spell," a song about prejudice against the Roma, "You love our music, but you hate our guts. I know you still want me to ride the back of the bus." Ouch!

A great GB classic is "American Wedding,"(video link here), which manages to capture the boring nature of most American weddings. This is where attending mostly Orthodox Jewish weddings has spoiled me: they make most other American weddings, including other Jewish-but-not-Orthodox weddings, seem lovely but ... boring (no offense meant if you had one!) Thus, "American Wedding" cracks me up.

Anyway, back to their show: it was as close to a cosmic orgasm as I could imagine -- I have never seen a band more masterfully work their crowd. The fans, and GB, were loving it, and they played a good mix of old favorites and lots of stuff from the new album. It was a great time, and even though my feet were killing me from standing for 4.5 hours (the club is standing-room only), it was really worth it. In the coolest move ever, after the encore, one of the band members announced that they would meet fans at the after party at the bar across the street from the club! How cool! If I had the stamina, I would've gone.

Kudos to the 9:30 Club for having free Wi-Fi so I could play my Scrabble games against David and my sister in between the acts. One of those opening acts, Man Man, was the most hilarious performances I have ever seen. These guys, whom David points out have not one, but two, xylophones, had their faces painted and all started off wearing white shorts that look ridiculous on grown men. The singer ended up wearing a bunch of different outfits, including a flasher-style trench coat, and a beaded ladies' tunic. Man Man's act was so bizarre and funny to me, I literally had tears of laughter streaming down my face. As for their music, I can't improve upon David's description: "Imagine if Frank Zappa hired Devo to play klezmer music, and added Tony Clifton as a frontman."

Our second great arts experience of New Year's weekend was seeing the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of Candide. It had gotten rave reviews from media in D.C., but it really upped the ante to see it when my mom -- who lives in Memphis, TN, -- said she had heard it was incredible. In a moment of serendipity, the day after that conversation with my mom, I got a Goldstar notice that they had $30 tickets for Candide over the weekend. I never read "Candide," so I had no idea what to expect, but I really enjoyed the show. The subject matter at hand is whether the doctrine of Optimism -- whether everything that happens is for the best and furthers God's plan -- is viable or true (Voltaire's answer, and mine, is a resonant "no.") Interestingly, I have a devout Mormon friend who believes this, that everything that happens is part of God's plan. This has come up with her in several discussions, and I always have a universes colliding moment, because that is so not my worldview, or that of my faith. Anyway, back to the play: it managed to be amusing, cheeky, provocative, and entertaining for a full three hours. The acting, music, and sets were really awesome, and I felt privileged to have seen it. I was pleased that the male and female leads were both in the Broadway show "Rock of Ages," which of course you knew about since you read my blog post about when I met Dee Snider.

We had a tiring weekend, since both the concert and musical meant that we couldn't go to bed until past 12:30 a.m., but we really enjoyed ourselves and got to experience two very different kinds of great art.

One of the things that occurred to me when we saw the play was how awesome Washington theater has gotten in the past decade. I don't recall D.C. being a great theater town when I moved here in 1994; the Kennedy Center was the most prolific professional theater around. Now there are tons of great theater companies doing all kinds of quality theater, and what limits my theater going is money, not lack of desirable options. There is such a variety and glut of good choices, David and I have resisted subscribing to any one theater, preferring to not be locked into one company and being able to pick and choose. My dream would be some kind of collective theater subscription, where a bunch of theaters pooled subscriptions and I could pay for a package of shows at different places.