The last normal weekend ever...

...or, "how to almost get into a fistfight at a folk music show in an Ethiopian restaurant in West Philly." Really.

You'll have to wait a bit for the G.G. Allin blast from the past, because I realized this bit was far more timely--this past Wednesday the 7th was the 4th anniversary of the event I'm about to describe, and in light of what happened just a few days later, I don't think I need to explain the title of this post; also, I'd like to think that certain of the issues involved in this particular episode (namely, freedom of speech and expression) have only grown in relevance over the past four years. *bites tongue to avoid going into hugeass political rant* Also, I feel duty-bound to admit that at least 75% of this is taken directly from my Monday-morning quarterback post to the Adam Brodsky mailing list at the time this all went down, so it's not completely new writing...but hopefully you'll get a kick out of it anyway.

Anyway...back in the summer of 2001, my good buddy (and now former housemate) Dante decided that I really needed to check out one Adam Brodsky, a moderately well-known (in folkie circles) anti-folkie from Philly. (Anti-folk, for whatever it's worth, is basically folk music played with a punk rock attitude, or at least tends to be far more profane and sexually explicit than your typical wispy folk; supposedly it got started in the East Village, and I'm not sure if the term is even used much anymore, but it was current then.) Trying to sum up Adam in just a couple of phrases is damn near impossible, but how does "the bastard offspring of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce" sound? (Actually, I should probably namecheck Phil Ochs instead, but Bob's Jewish, and considering that Adam exploits his ethnicity more than damn near any other Member of the Tribe I know, this is an exceedingly critical point.) He's the self-anointed Dork who's gone so far as to have "DORK" tattooed on his person, in a takeoff of the Robert Indiana "LOVE" sculpture you might remember from the '70s (one of which is in Philly, FWIW), thereby ruining his shot at being buried in a Jewish cemetary, unless it's Reform Judaism, in which case they might let it slide. Let's see, what else...smart, funny, irreverent, deliberately and provocatively offensive much of the time, possibly the biggest bullshitter on the planet (or at least on the East Coast), and oh, yeah, claims girls hate him, which is quite possibly the biggest load of bullshit he's ever dumped anywhere, no, really...

(Slight digression here: My former housemate Stephanie and I once came up with what I like to call the 50% Theory, which is that any man in close proximity to either a musical instrument or a microphone is automatically at least 50% more attractive to women than the same man without said accessory--if he's onstage holding forth, either bashing away on his instrument of choice or yowling into a mike, he'll be absolute catnip to women, irregardless of looks, personality, hygiene, and damn near any other variable you can think of. Most male musicians who are honest will freely admit that one of the reasons they took up music was to get laid, and it seems to be astonishingly successful--does anyone honestly believe that any of the butt-ugly musicians who've ended up dating/marrying models would have had a chance with these girls if they weren't musicians? I think not. Anyway, Adam is nowhere near as ugly as he likes to claim he is, and, between that and the 50% Theory, probably gets more ass than a toilet in a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop, but enough of that for now... )

Anyway, if you're actually curious about Adam after this particular intro, or decide after reading the rest of this that you'd like to check him out further, hop on over to http://www.adambrodsky.com --you must read the rants; I insist. Yes, really. You WILL be offended, but it'll be good for you, trust me. *smirk* Now, on with the story proper...

Dante and I got the deranged idea that heading down to Philly to actually catch Adam on his home ground seemed like a good idea, especially in light of the venue in question being an Ethiopian restaurant in West Philly called the Dahlak; Adam had spent a lot of time online talking up this particular show, and the combination of spongy bread and snarky anti-folk was just too good to pass up. I was recently unemployed and needed cheering up badly, and Dante, well... we met up at the Riverside T station at 1:30 that Friday afternoon, and the first thing he told me was that he'd been shitcanned...I mean, forced to resign from his job. As a result of various nutjobs shooting up their workplaces, apparently expressing the desire in confidence to throttle an annoying coworker is simply Not OK these days, even if one is pathetically obviously not about to act upon such unhappiness; this means, of course, that since venting is now out, we all get to sit and stew and fume and steam until we finally do explode, but at least no one said anything inappropriate...As you'll see, this turned out to be the main theme of the weekend.

We had a fairly uneventful trip down, aside from the Garden State Parkway being an absolute bitch on a Friday evening; and couldn't help but notice that the route into Philly via the Betsy Ross Bridge has more damned billboards peddling heroin rehab services and laser eye surgery than one would have thought possible or desirable. (Too bad no one thought to combine the two businesses, a la Wilson's Soul Food and Hair Salon, or Gresham Disco and Body Shop in Athens, GA, ...get your eyes fried and your monkey off your back in one fell swoop!). We finally arrived safely arrived at the Dahlak just in time to park right in front of it, scouted around the place for Adam, who was nowhere in sight, and then settled in with several other friendly Dorkateers for a lovely combination plate of the finest in Ethiopian fare and enough spongy bread to choke a horse. I was bending everyone's ears with tales of how I became the alt.music.nin Reznor heater t-shirt queen when Mary the Merch Bitch (read: tour manager and all-around go-to person) walked in, followed by the Dork himself, who was most surprised to see us there. We all got to chat for a bit while he was setting up and restringing the guitar; this wasn't hard, because the Dahlak didn't have a stage per se, so before a show all the tables had to be moved to the back of the room and chairs set down in front of a small bit of floor space where the performance took place. (Keep this in mind; it becomes important later...) Dante got his Pocket Pussy (aka a coin purse with the "DORK" logo--one of the "prizes" one could get by attending X number of shows), and all seemed to be going well.

The show kicked off with a charming young man named Eric Peterson singing his little heart out and bashing away on a beat-up acoustic guitar with the kind of passionate political consciousness you can only have in your early 20s (call me a cynical old fart, OK? He was still pretty damned good...). The audience area was fairly crowded at that point, and there was a small pack of about three screamingly obvious babydykes sitting on the floor (hey, when you're wearing a t-shirt with your orientation all over the back of it...), right in everyone's way; one of them, a curly-haired brunette, was quite definitely in her cups even at that point, having apparently been tanking up at the bar throughout the evening and not eating any spongy bread to soak up the liquor. (Dante isn't convinced that any of these girls were old enough to be drinking; if they were indeed legal, then it was just barely.)

Finally, it was time for Adam to go on, so I dug out the camera gear and set everything up (hey, I am the Mad Photographer, and having been informed by both Mary and Butch that Adam is a--ahem--challenging subject, I was ready to call their bluff).

At the time, Adam's main hit, such as it was, happened to be a cheerful little ditty called "The Girl I Like is a Diesel Dyke"...I believe I did mention that offensiveness was one of his major traits, no? About halfway through the set, Drunken Brunette Babydyke and her buddies had already started yelling out (OK, slurring) their requests for "Diesel Dyke", and when said request wasn't immediately forthcoming, DBB started heckling Adam. He, of course, started slinging it right back at her, cracking jokes about sexually unsatisfying ex-girlfriends, restraining orders, and the like. This didn't sit well with DBB and her buddies, who started heckling even louder and wouldn't move either themselves or their full mugs of beer out of Adam's way so he could keep on stomping back and forth into the crowd.

This, unfortunately, is where things got ugly... At some point (I think it was at the beginning of "Cubicle Girl", but don't quote me on that), he "accidentally" (well, that's his claim, and he's sticking to it...) knocked over DBB's beer, and then accidentally (I do believe him on this one) kicked the same girl (not terribly hard) when they wouldn't get up off the floor and out of his way as he tried to work the crowd. Baseball Cap Butch, DBB's buddy (dunno if she actually is her butch, but I wouldn't be surprised) and Orange Flowered Scarf decided this was Not Okay, leaped to their feet (so that's what it takes to get them to move...) and started trying to pick a fight with Adam. Mary got in the butch's face and started telling her, politely at first, and then much less so, to back the fuck down. "DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR!!!". By this time, there was a great deal of shoving, yelling, and threats, with Baseball and Orange trying to get at Adam, Mary valiantly (and physically) holding them off, and Adam continuing to play and sing, while I searched fractically for a large pile of napkins to mop up the beer, having the horrible mental image of Adam stepping back into a puddle and being electrocuted in front of God and everyone. (Hey, my dad was a lineman for 45 years; I get paranoid about this kind of thing...) The final song of the night, a charming little ditty entitled "Bite Me", was sung to the young ladies in question with much feeling by virtually everyone in the joint, with the girls starting to back down and threatening to trash Adam's vehicle as soon as they found it. (Luckily, he came in Mary's car that night, and they didn't know what that looked like.)

Finally the babydyke posse, along with a couple of their SNAG ("sensitive New Age guy", aka "guys who pretend to be PC and sensitive to get into girls' pants") buddies, decided to retreat to the bar, but after most of the audience had left, they came stomping back out to verbally harangue Adam some more, having decided that it was safer to try to bust his balls when there weren't as many people around who'd have his back. They were ranting and raving that he was anti-woman, threatening (yeah, right, I could kick his ass if I needed to), harassing, hostile, claiming that it was their bar and their hangout (somehow I think the nice Ethiopian folks who run the joint might disagree...) and he didn't make them feel safe (again, I could wipe the floor with his ass), demanding that he leave West Philly, take the rest of us with him, and never return again to either that establishment in particular or their neighborhood in general (their neighborhood? Considering they were obviously white upper-middle-class college girls, I don't think the 'hood is exactly their neighborhood...), etc. etc. etc. He was being very polite the whole time, explaining that while he would apologize for knocking over the beer and accidentally kicking the one girl, he was not about to apologize for his entire back catalog, stage patter, manner of dealing with hecklers, or personal existence, as they were demanding he do.

Keep in mind now that I'm normally the World's Biggest Fucking Wuss, and I hate, hate, HATE conflict of any kind--even loud raised voices upset me, much less actual ranting and potential physical threats. However, while I'm legendary for letting people walk all over me, to the point where I ought to just get "WELCOME" tattooed on my forehead and have done with it, when it comes to other people or causes that I care about at all, look out, because the Queen of Righteous Indignation WILL get verbally medieval on your ass, and you WILL fucking well pay attention! So, in full-throttle Damsel in Shining Armor mode, I leapt into the midst of the melee and lit into the whole pack of obnoxious little twerps, screaming at them (shaking in my shoes all the while) and thereby impressing the HELL out of Dante, Adam, Mary, and, well, pretty much everyone else in the joint except the recipients of my righteous rage. When one of the SNAGs started whining, "Well, I just don't want to live in a country with people like that," my immediate retort was "WELL, DELTA IS READY WHEN YOU ARE!" When Orange started whining again about Adam's entire schtick being offensive to her "as a feminist" and a woman (then why in God's name were you there in the first place? Obviously you knew his work well enough to make requests, so you should have known what to expect...), I snarled, "THAT IS A FUCKING PATHETIC EXCUSE!" (Excuse me, but I've been a feminist since way before these particular snot-nosed brats were finger-painting with chocolate pudding in day care, and I really fucking resent others trying to speak for me, as I'm quite capable of doing that for myself, thankyouverymuch...) I'm not sure quite what else I said, although I think I yelled at one of them "WELL, WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU WANT?!?", although the answer at that point was pretty obvious even if they weren't willing to come right out and say it--they wanted him to totally pander to them, cave in on everything, admit to his horrible guilt as a white straight male (sorry, Adam, I guess being a Member of the Tribe doesn't get you any slack here...), and generally snivel, cringe, and validate their self-concept as Properly Politically Correct, when it was pathetically obvious that they were really a bunch of spoiled little coeds with their satellite boys, flirting with alternative lifestyles so they could piss off their upper-middle-class families, and used to having their every whim catered to and dubious opinion agreed with. Anything less, judging by their attitudes, deserved nothing less than being hung, drawn and quartered in the middle of South Street, with the ashes scattered to the four winds.

Obligatory old-fart rant: I'm a good old lefty (and, FWIW, have the photo of Billy Bragg in the Athens Pro-Choice Action League T-shirt I bought him to prove it) and have a wide collection of friends & associates with all kinds of alternative lifestyles--I may lead a boring life, but my friends sure as hell don't--so their being lesbians was/is Not A Problem, (even if I do strongly suspect they were classic LUGs--Lesbians Until Graduation, for those who haven't heard the term). Rather, it was that they were insisting on playing Overly PC Thought Police and saying that it was all right if they were behaving badly, but other people calling them on it was not OK, that really Burned My Ass. (Drunk and obnoxious at a show is still drunk and obnoxious; it doesn't matter who's doing it or what the "official" excuse for doing it is, as it's extremely rude to both the performers and the audience.) It also really pisses me off to see people trying to play the victim card when the circumstances don't support it--I've known way too many people myself who've dealt with all kinds of horrible situations (including members of my own family, trust me on this one), and IMNSHO spoiled brats trying to co-opt language intended to apply to people who've genuinely suffered trivializes real misery--frankly, it's fucking sickening, and it made me want to bitchslap all of them upside the head good and hard. Not wanting my very first trip ever to Philly to be capped off by a night in lockup, though, I fortunately managed to restrain myself; I wasn't about to ask Dante to prove his friendship by bailing my sorry ass out of the pokey that night.

(Side note to the SNAG in the leather cowboy hat (gee, talk about PC headgear...): the usual term used these days to refer to our darker-skinned brothers and sisters is "black", not "colored"; the latter term tends to be associated more with genteel white folks in the '60s who were trying a bit too hard to pretend they weren't actually racist, and I've seen people go absolutely ballistic over being called "colored". Hey, if you're going to play Thought Police and bitch about word use, be prepared to watch your own language, buddy... Also, aren't there bigger fish you could fry, if you really want to go after someone for not living up to your particular version of PC? I mean, you could always go picket an Eminem or Insane Clown Posse show...Oh, yeah, right...you might get your asses kicked--much better to gang up on a solo performer in an offbeat venue, don't you think? *seethe*)

What these yuppie puppies need to realize is that their attempts to police the language are not only doomed to failure, but are extremely likely to be co-opted by their political enemies on the Right Wing--after all, there are plenty of people out there who find lesbians extremely offensive and want to banish them from the public consciousness, remember? Between my musical taste and my wide-flung circle of, ahem, unusual friends and acquaintances, I'm used to reading and hearing about attitudes and writing that would be considered controversial by a lot of the so-called mainstream", and I'm all too aware that people have been and are attacked for such attitudes and subjects all too often. (I can't be the only person who remembers hearing about all the kids who were harassed and/or thrown out of school for being "weird" after Columbine...) Remember, kids, don't create a weapon that could very easily be used against you by people who would be more than happy to do so--those strange bedfellows you're working with to try to push your agenda would be all too happy to stab you in the back once they get their own way, which is why the sight of the married gay Republican couple on my block posting Bush/Cheney signs on the house last year--do they really think they're going to be spared from the ovens just because they're "good Republicans"?--boggles me so much...OK, enough of the digression; on with the rant...

Anyway...the owners, bless their hearts, finally managed to sweettalk the pack into going back to the bar (probably by offering them free booze), and the rest of us helped Adam & Mary grab all the gear and haul ass and their friend Bob (who was blind, and therefore needed a bit of guidance in an unfamiliar neighborhood) back out the door and into Mary's car. I was still shaking even after they left; Dante, having waited years to see me tell somebody off, was impressed as all hell that I finally stood up and ripped a bunch of morons a collective new asshole; I don't know what Mary thought about it, but I did get a nice big goodbye hug from Adam for my trouble, so I can't complain too much.

After all this excitement, it was time for Dante & I to hit the road and head back into New Jersey to find a cheap motel for the night, and something to nosh to get my blood sugar back up. We finally found both (a drive-through Dunkin Donuts and a Howard Johnson's Express in Cherry Hill, NJ), and crashed for the night...or, rather, he slept and I laid there in the other bed trying desperately to turn my brain down from 78 RPM to 33 or at least 45 , and listening to him snore. At one point he actually stopped snoring, and I was paranoid enough about his sleep apnea to actually turn the lamp on to make sure he was still breathing, as I had this horrible mental image of being stuck in a cheap motel in Jersey with a dead body and no way back to Boston because I can't drive. I did finally manage to conk out, only to be rudely awakened by the phone ringing...a wrong number, of course, and they had to wake me up just when I was trying to explain the concept of "colloquial" and R.E.M. to an origami box turtle an inch long that my friend Feline had made me...can you say "fucked-up dreams brought on by exhaustion," kids?

Got the pictures developed the next day at a downtown Philly K-Mart and dropped them off with Adam's then-housemate Butch (they were much better than we'd expected; so much for not being photogenic!), and stopped at a used bookstore next door, where I picked up Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union--considering Susie's usual topics of sexuality, self-expression, censorship, and other such issues, and in light of her differences with the self-proclaimed Arbiters of Decency on both the left and right, and the previous night's events, I thought it was more than appropriate that I turned up one of her books.

We finally got back in the car and headed out of town, hitting a WaWa en route and restocking the car with fine Tastycake products (my heater shirt screenprinter, a Philly native, once had a friend ship him a case of Butterscotch Krimpets--it was apparently the high point of his year), and getting to hear Dante yell "HOT BACK DOOR!!!" upon spotting a bottle of Nantucket Nectar's Half and Half in the fridge. (Can't say as I've ever heard anyone comparing lemonade and iced tea to buttfucking before, but whatever... ) The rest of the trip back to Boston was pretty uneventful, although I'm still wondering why the cheap Chinese buffet in the Big Ass Mall on the NY state line had Italian Chicken on the steam table, and we pretty much put the pedal to the metal all the way back to Boston, arriving at my place in Cambridge at 12:45 a.m. and setting a new personal best time for Dante's driving.

So...all in all, a very entertaining adventure, and very educational, too...things we learned on this trip:

1. Nine Inch Nails' Broken is EXTREMELY effective soundtrack music either when driving through Jersey to Philly, or driving from Philly looking for a cheap motel and ranting and raving about ignorant, pathetic fucks at the top of one's lungs...Trent, bless his angsty little heart, is nothing if not cathartic!

2. K-Mart photofinishing isn't all that great, but when the CVS photofinishing booth is out of commission, they will do in a pinch (but you knew that anyway, right?).

3. Seriously lethal brownies are a wonderful way to make new friends--yes, I did another long-distance brownie schlep; after all, I do have a reputation to uphold!

4. Oh, and Mary kicks ass...literally, if she has to! (Adam only does it figuratively.)

To finish this all off, here's a Susie Bright quote for y'all:

The right to free speech, when you get right down to it, is the right to make someone else uncomfortable, to outrage the respectable, and to question everything held dear. Who, after all, needs protection to say they like Mom and apple pie?

Thank you and goodnight... *falls over*