The hour badly spent

It was a chilly night, 28 degrees. The Memory of Water was sold out by the time Smallville & I arrived. Our plans dashed, we ended up going to Auntie Mae’s with the Poetess.

"We’d better smoke all our cigarettes once we get there, while we still can."

The Poetess had just found her long-lost driver’s license and was in a rare celebratory mood.

"You don’t want me to buy the first round?" she offered.

"If you put it that way, I’ll have a screwdriver." They’re cheap here.

"Yuch."

We sat at a booth open right there (it was not as crowded as we’d expected). "How’s your drink?"

"A little weak."

Nevertheless, we were having a good time. We talked and talked and talked. Smallville said later that I kept hijacking the conversation. I’d like to think it was because of the double G&Ts, but it’s more likely that I’m just generally a boisterous fool. I told her and the Poetess, for the 83rd time, about how I used to get awful service at every eatery in Miami; about how it was a while before it occurred to me to not tip people for bad service.

Last call came around. Katie the waitress brought me a Manhattan and my check.

I went up to the bar and got change for a five from Robin, the bartender. She hadn’t served me all night, but I left her a tip just because I like Robin. I got ready to hand the rest of my change off to Katie. Before I could do so, I had the worst "customer service experience" of my life, which I told a friend about over Digsby the next day.

The Hour Badly Spent: i was there with a couple of ppl, and they announced they were closing up
The Hour Badly Spent: i still had a drink, so i started chugging it. this guy comes by and he’s like "get out! get out!" so i chug my drink faster, but it’s a manhattan, so it’s a little hard to down
The Hour Badly Spent: he stopped at our table and said "let’s go! get out!" so i said "i just need 30 sec more to finish this, please"
The Hour Badly Spent: i’ve done that before. i go to that bar a lot
The Hour Badly Spent: and they’re usually like "okay, just hurry up and finish"
The Hour Badly Spent: but this guy said "no. get out"
The Hour Badly Spent: and i said "please, just a few seconds"
The Hour Badly Spent: and he’s like "no, it’s 2 o clock. get out"
The Hour Badly Spent: so i checked my phone. it was 1:49
The Hour Badly Spent: so i said "can you stop being an asshole? i just need a few seconds"
The Hour Badly Spent: and he said "so i’m an asshole? THIS is how much i care about your drink." then he picked up my glass and smashed it on the floor
The Hour Badly Spent: unfortunately, that guy was a bouncer. so he called another bouncer ("Dan," who wouldn’t tell me the name of the guy who slammed my drink on the floor) and they escorted me out.
The Hour Badly Spent: obvs, i shouldn’t have called him an asshole, but i don’t think it justified the display of violence
The Hour Badly Spent: your thoughts?
Magneto: u were in the right.
The Hour Badly Spent: what really sucks is that’s the bar i ALWAYS go to. whenever me or anyone here i know say we’re going to the bars, it’s always that one bar. i’m there at least every week, sometimes twice, and i always just sit w/my friends, drink, and mind my own business

It’s not even that I’m angry; it’s more like did that really just happen? At Mae’s? I went to the speakeasy-type-place to see Jimbo Ivy and sip vodka with other English majors. I ended up swept away in some twatnozzle’s fratboy melodrama. If I wanted this kind of bullshit I could have just gone to Kite’s.

"I didn’t think you were the type to get kicked out of Mae’s," the Poetess said. We were outside. I still had the cash for Katie’s tip in my hand.

[Auntie Mae’s Parlor]

Well. So. My playwriting class kinda disliked Laramie Project. Let’s walk through some of their issues.

First. Costumes: We agreed that everyone’s shirts looked kinda dirty. I noted that the costume designer put little logos and symbols on everyone’s grey shirts, but the thing is, the audience couldn’t really see the logos, which renders them pointless. It’s even worse when you can _kind of_ see the logos, but not clearly enough to make them out, so that they just look like dirty spots.

The uniforms and their, uhhh, uniformity, was also confusing to the class. It was confusing to me at first too. A uniform would make a speech, disappear, and another uniform would come back out. After a while I realized that the play was organized in a way that kept story arcs distinct even if characters weren’t. No one else in the class seemed to realize this. Ha ha ha, I’m more sophisticated than everyone else.

Second. Act II dragged. Yeah, they’re right with this one. After the scene with the big-ass band of angels, the other loose plot arcs felt so minor that I wasn’t even concerned with them.

Third. There was a sense that it was too preachy? In a literal sense, there were a lot of priests as characters. But my classmates were annoyed that sometimes the interviewers distracted from the monologues. Like, when talking to negative characters, the interviewers would pace and frown.

I say: so what? Were they supposed to be ‘neutral?’ And if so, why? As someone who’s done a tiny bit of journalism, my best interviews — the ones that yield the most information — are the hostile ones. Like when people feel insulted that they have to answer such a dumb question, or they feel that they’re under attack and have to articulate their positions better. But that’s all beside the point. The point is that the actors are, in fact, not journalists; they’re characters too. Their characters are _acting_ the way a gay man or woman would act confronting a haughty, adversarial religious figure. Can I get an amen?

Fourth. One student (Patrick) said he saw the Laramie Project performed, years ago, at an "International Thespians’ Conference," and that their performance "blows this one out of the water." He mentioned several times that he had been to the International Thespians Conference, from which I believe he meant to make it clear that he is a Pretentious Literary Douchebag. Every English class has one of these, and usually it’s me, but not this time I guess.

Okay, good points:

When I heard about what the play actually was — a series of monologues based on interviews — I was pretty sure it would be boring. But it’s not! Tectonic actually managed to frame some story arcs out of what information they gleaned, and they managed to make an overall story arc out of it, which was pretty rad.

The play builds a sense of "going there," of approaching something and almost arriving but not quite. Even acting out the confession feels lacking; something dire has been excised from the narrative. That something is Matthew Shepard. That, in its subtle way, is the point. He’s gone and can’t say anything, no matter how badly we want to hear from him.

I saw the dress rehearsal, obvs, and that wasn’t bad. There was a long moment, after Reggie found out she might have AIDS, when Mackenzie looked me dead in the eye. I couldn’t turn away, and she just wouldn’t. After a few moments I felt something strange. I….I think some dust got in my eye. Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, I thought her performance would have been powerful and moving without that eye contact. But with it, I felt, just for a moment, that there might actually be more to life than just martinis, girls, and guns, that I have a higher purpose, and that maybe I should live to love more deeply and fully. Then her scene was over and I had a cigarette and was back to normal. THAT WAS A CLOSE CALL.

Before I saw the second performance, the Grey Lady told me she found out how to really make a better emotional connection with her character(s). It sounded like some art-fag nonsense, but then I saw the performance a second time, and she was absolutely right! I kept hoping for her to make eye contact with me, but it’s a good thing she didn’t, because then I might have, ahem, had more dust in my eye. People would have gotten the wrong idea.

My plan for academic success was as follows:

Smuggle in some vodka and take a shot every afternoon immediately after my last class of the day. Then begin the homework. When done, take another shot. Or two. I think this shows great foresight on my part. When I got my room assignment and schlepped my suitcases up four floors to 426, I discovered that I had a roommate. NO WAY am I gonna share my liquor with some 20-year-old, I thought, but apparently that won’t be a problem. Aaron is my RA.

No, there will not be any catty "check out his hypocrisy" type of blogging, because that’s lame, and would probably go like "He steadfastly maintains he will only drink Dr. Pepper, but I secretly switched his drink with Diet Dr. Pepper and four out of five times, he couldn’t tell the difference!" But needless to say, I need a new blueprint for academic success. I think I’m going to stash some jack in the Hale Library stacks on the fourth floor, somewhere high up behind some foreign-language tomes, and just take a sip every night I go there to study. And if I don’t actually drink it, I will still be happy just knowing it’s there.

And OF COURSE I am working on that maturity thing.

In pretending to be a movie critic, I’ll straight up agree with all the rest of them and say the Joker was every bit the hype we’ve all heard.

Not that you didn’t already know that. In my fair city, the Dark Knight is sold out for the next five days, which means everyone has seen it three times by now. On IMAX.

I went into the theatre thinking, yawn, here he comes, I guess I’d better get ready to be wow’d. I also went to the theatre with this flask that looks like a cellphone, but the "antenna" unscrews and you can pour in vodka. Or whatever you like, which I’m sure will be vodka. It’s even got a belt holster. Anyway. Heath Ledger did not disappoint, delivering a strong presence in every scene, finishing it off with his tics of speech and body language. Solid acting performances all around, along with a plot that kept Batman moving and being amazing, made every minute in that dark theatre fully worth it.

The only thing nobody likes about these movies is Rachel Dawes.

Batman deserves someone with style, with understanding. Katie Holmes made me groan every time she Expressed Disapproval, pursing her lips and doing that thing with her dimples. You just get tired of it. Wouldn’t it be a shame if something were to happen to Rachel Dawes, you think, empathizing with the bad guys (ha ha, spoiler). She was more of a downer than Batman. But you could console yourself, at least, knowing she was pretty. So another groan: finding out that Maggie Fucking Gyllenhaal was going to play this role that was already overbearing, uptight, and hands-down just unappeasable.

Gyllenhaal pulled it off so much better than Holmes. Rather than just berate Bruce, now she’s an unwilling collaborator to Bruce Wayne’s exaggerated, foppish persona. Bruce strides into a party with a famous superhottie. And another one. And another one. Gyllenhaal’s lips curl up ever so slightly at the ends — you’ve gotta be looking for it to see it — wryly, smugly. How far will Bruce go to pull this off, she wonders. And so we see Bruce Wayne through Rachel’s eyes; she’s still huffing with indignation, but she remains, like the rest of us, entertained. One might believe, for a second, that there is a side to her that is a bit glib, a bit saucy, that she doesn’t have such a huge metaphorical pole up her behind (insert obvious anal sex joke here, but do it slowly and lovingly, the way I like it).

To boot, it did look pretty cool when she gut-checked the Joker (Ha ha, spoiler).

By slant and inference, you can see Bruce Wayne losing himself in "Batman." There is one part where you see him shirtless, from the back (settle down), and there are some pretty vicious bruises and scars. In fact, when he’s not in costume, he does look skinny, small; and even his face looks a bit dark and hollow, like he spends his nights being rode hard and left wet, and it hurts, but he likes it. He’s not really there until he puts on the cowl. What brings this out is, when he’s Batman, that way he looks at at the camera when someone is telling him something Really Important; his eyes narrow, focusing on the speaker, and he turns his head a few degrees to the side to hear better.

Speaking of which, that thing they did with the eyes — you’ll know what I mean when you see it  (just kidding, they made them glowey. ha ha, spoiler) — was just super kewl.