(NOTE: Post edited March 29, 2010, so "last summer" would be the summer of 2009.)
For rather a long time, my avatar on a number of sites was a photo I snapped of Amanda Palmer (1/2 of the Dresden Dolls and a successful solo performer), holding the first 2 Trent Reznor Rock Star Dolls I knitted in the spring/summer of 2005. (You thought I was kidding about the artsy-craftsy fangirl bit, right?) I had gotten back into knitting after many years away earlier that year, and when I came across Debbie Stoller's Stitch 'n Bitch Nation and saw the pattern for Rock Star Dolls, I knew immediately what I needed to do (right after I damn near pissed myself laughing, that is)...
Let me state for the record right now that Nine Inch Nails fans are some of the cleverest, most creative, and funniest fuckers on the planet, bar none--it's too long and convoluted a story to tell in its entirety here, but suffice to say that 15 years of NIN fandom have been most entertaining, and not just because of the music. I don't know if the hardcore fans of any other performers out there get quite as wacky as NINnies do--does Bono have to put up with fans Photoshopping his face onto, say, Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music or Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (to name only two of literally thousands of 'shops)? T-shirt designs? Check. (Been there, done that, sold the shirt, will write about it later) Paintings? Check. Short stories? Check. Song parodies (known as BFPTs on alt.music.nin back in the day, which is also another story...)? Check. Tattoos? Check. My friend Julia/Cthulhia was one of the first to dive headlong into artsy fandom with her Infinite Halo series of postcards, which started out as "ways to depict the NIN logo" (mardi gras beads, Barbie doll legs, 9" acrylic fingernails--which were apparently a real bitch to deal with, plus you can't wipe your ass while you have them--fishnet-clad legs, Little Gator's Deep Shit cookies in a litterbox--that was my idea, I'm afraid; I shot it with my late lamented cat Mojo posing in the background, looking fairly pleased with himself--ramen noodles powdered up to look like cocaine, Prozac...you get the idea), and has since blossomed into more elaborate Photoshops for a tarot card deck she's designing. So, when I saw the knitted doll pattern, I bought the book and several hanks of yarn (Tahki Cotton Classic), and got down to business.
The first doll (the one in the brown tank top) was modeled after Trent's appearance onstage at the Orpheum in May '05, and Julia got that one (he still goes to shows with her when I can't come along, and IIRC had his photo taken with none other than Adrienne Curry at one of the very last NIN shows in LA last summer); the second one I did for myself, and was supposed to be Trent in his "working in the studio/screwing around playing video games" mode, but he didn't turn out quite as well that time around. I ended up making two more dolls; one in classic "Closer" video style, complete with ratty sweater knit out of twine, for my friend Izzy, and Coachella '05 Trent, complete with hand-sewn button-down white shirt, which I intended to give to the man himself as a friendly tongue-in-cheek joke during the fall '05 tour. (Of course, the one show where I didn't bring him was the one where we got a meet & greet--would you believe Madison Square Garden?--and I ended up entrusting the little guy to the care of Brandi the Spiral rep in Montreal, who took wonderful care of all of us sillyassed fan club members throughout the With Teeth tours. Alas, I have no idea if Trent ever actually did get his Mini-Me, or if it met some kind of horrible fate at the hands of the crew.) I've had a number of people beg for their own Trent, but although I've considered getting back into the doll business as an art project of sorts, and doing other performers as well (at the top of the list: the Dresden Dolls, of course), I only made the ones I did for myself and a couple of friends. They're way too labor-intensive to make and sell, plus I wouldn't be able to charge what my time would be worth; also...how do I put this? I only did them for people I knew wouldn't *ahem* have a little too much fun with them, ifyouknowwhatImeanandIthinkyoudo....I just couldn't let that happen to the poor man, even if it was in cotton yarn and not in the flesh.
Anyway, back to the picture of Amanda...it was taken at the late lamented Grand Opening adult toy store in early July of '05, when the Dresden Dolls were doing an in-store appearance to promote both themselves and the Audi-Oh, a wonderful little device that would pick up on any ambient sounds and turn them into vibrations--you could plug your iPod into it, or just crank the sound system and let 'er rip, so to speak. (Yes, I tried it out--over my clothes, I'll have you know--and yes, it's quite effective, if I do say so myself. For a split second I contemplated buying one to wear to a concert some time, until I realized that (a) security would probably think it was a recording device and confiscate it; and (b) if I actually managed to keep AND wear it throughout an entire show, it would probably be the death of me, with it taking the mortician a good 48 hours to get the big, shit-eating grin off my face.) Since the Dolls had opened up for NIN only a couple of months earlier, I figured they'd get a kick out of the little guys, and I was right. (Note to self, however: never hand anyone a doll to check out when there's an entire shelf just full of dildos within easy arm's reach. Virtue was preserved, but only just barely...)
I keep thinking I should get back into doll-knitting, but I'm not sure who I'd want to do...suggestions, anyone?
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Well, well, well...
I knew it had been a long-assed time since I'd posted here, but I didn't realize it had been nearly two years to the day...and such an interesting couple of years, too. Let's see...my cat Delenn, who had become diabetic but was never successfully stabilized, went downhill very fast and had to be put to sleep Easter weekend of '08; I had to have an emergency appendectomy the same weekend in August that my then-roommate was moving out (both her move and my surgery went just fine, BTW); and since New Year's I've been providing moral and emotional support to one of my oldest and dearest friends, whose marriage of 20+ years is going straight down the crapper due to her husband's unregenerate buttheadedness/Midlife Crisis From Hell...when your midlife crisis involves trying to knock up your first cousin in Arkansas, I think that qualifies as one From Hell, eh? (I wish I was making that part up, but it's all true...) And that's just some of what's gone on.
Perhaps most pertinent to this blog in particular, though, is my social life's 180-degree about-face: after spending 2006-07 being little Miss Boston Music Scene Booster and taking approximately 6,000 photos (no lie; it damn near killed that poor little digital camera), I have turned my back on all of that, and have once again become involved with the SCA and medieval/renaissance re-enactment, something I hadn't done in nearly 20 years.
Why the change? Well, to try to put some of it gracefully...in late 2007, let's just say that I was treated rather badly by a couple of people in the Boston scene whom I had previously regarded as friends, and it was brought home to me rather harshly that, no matter what I did, I was never going to be sufficiently "cool" to be considered anything more than a mere hanger-on, albeit one who provided them with many, many photos and periodic baked goods. (I really do enjoy being Mama Hen to various starving and not-so-starving artists--after all, there's only so much fussing and clucking that my cat and my friends will put up with--but when you get the distinct impression that you're being taken severely for granted in both your culinary and photographic capacities, it can definitely help sour you on particular people. Too, on a more practical note, I'm not getting any younger, which makes staying out late and going to work the next day more and more difficult, to the point of being damn near impossible...not to mention that my employers have the completely unreasonable expectation that I should be awake and functional while on their time. ;-) Since being employed allows me to indulge myself in certain luxuries such as eating and living indoors, I would prefer to continue being employed, and if not hanging out with assholes is the price I have to pay, well...I fail to see what the problem is here. /snark )
(I'd also like to state for the record, as people either don't know or don't bother to remember, that I'm both quite nearsighted and have some pretty significant inner ear nerve damage, the combination of which tends to leave me peering around clubs in a manner not unlike a mole dragged out of its burrow, missing a good percentage of what's being said because (a) I can't hear what people are saying--oh, I know they're saying something, but I can't actually hear what it is, and (b) it's dark enough that I can't rely on my fallback of filling in the blanks by reading lips because I can't see them, plus (c) between the darkness and the myopia, finding people in a dark club can be an absolute bitch, which means (d) that I'm doing my damnedest to figure out just what the fuck is going on, thankyouverymuch. And no, I didn't blow my ears out at shows; I was thrown to the floor of my grandmother's car in a fender bender when I was was two years old with sufficient force that it caused the nerve damage--in fact, my mother was told years later, when they finally realized I actually had a hearing problem, that if I hadn't already been talking so well and so clearly at that age--thanks, Mom!--that I very likely would have ended up with a significant speech impediment. Oh, yeah, and getting older isn't helping this, either. Onwards...)
Not too terribly long thereafter, while I was still licking my wounds and debating whether or not I wanted to venture back out into the scene, I went to Arisia '08 and ended up having a wonderful time that weekend; in particular, thanks to the attentions paid me by a particular gentleman and long-time acquaintance, but also due to the many people in fannish circles who helped me feel as if I just might possibly kinda sorta belong somewhere, instead of being perpetually pressing my nose against the window and looking wistfully in...did me a world of good, I must say. ;-) The gentleman in particular is a long-time SCAdian, which reminded me that I'd always enjoyed getting medieval in the past (I was, after all, a medieval studies minor in college), and that one of the main reasons I slipped away from the scene in the mid-80s was because I was finally in a large enough metropolitan area and could take advantage of the various cultural options (shorter version: I moved to Boston and was finally able to be the band-follower in my 20s that most people are in their teens). So I got in touch with the good people of the Barony of Carolingia, and have been greatly enjoying my return to the fold. It's always nice to spend time with a group of people who share your interests and who don't appear to be as obsessed with "cool" as certain other social circles, hm? I could get used to this... :-)
What really sealed the deal, interestingly enough, was one of those rare occasions where I actually did stay out late for a show--in this case, Billy Bragg at the Somerville Theatre. I've been a fan of his for nearly 20 years, and have been toting along baked goods to his shows for about that long as well, and he's definitely worth losing sleep, spending money, and flinging flour 'round the kitchen over. IMNSHO, he's really and truly one of the sweetest, kindest people on the planet--if they ever manage to work the bugs out of human cloning, they really need to put Billy on the shortlist to be cloned, as (again IMNSHO) the world could sure as hell use more people like that. (No, he isn't paying me to say that, and no, this isn't an attempt at world-class-suck-uppery, either. He just really IS that good of an egg, and nearly 20 years of friendly acquaintance have only made that clearer. But enough butt-kissing...back to the actual story, now...) I stopped by the theatre around soundcheck with the usual contingent of freshly baked cookies, and was welcomed in by the (for want of a better term) entourage, who are also all lovely people fully deserving of praise and baked goods. I was waiting down in the green room when soundcheck finished and Billy came downstairs, and I must say, it really does a girl's heart good to have someone spot you, come running right over, give you a big hug, tell you that you look great, ask what you've been up to, and--gasp!--seem quite genuinely interested in the answer AND include you in the conversation as well. My, my, who'da thunk it? (The show, of course, was a blast, and if you haven't actually gotten out to see him perform yet, for God's sake, go! Gogogogogo! What are you waiting for?!?)
It wasn't until the next day, though, as I was e-mailing a dear friend about the previous evening, that it really hit me: Here's a man who's been internationally famous for well over 20 years, who can sell out decent-sized venues, hobnob with political leaders, and who, God knows, has seen me make an ass out of my self on plenty of occasions since 1989--and he always treats me like an intelligent human being worthy of respect and friendly behavior; whereas someone who's known me for less than two years, is barely known outside of eastern Massachusetts, and is still playing rathole clubs, basically thinks it's OK to treat me like crap even though this person had previously been perfectly friendly, and who doesn't even have the balls to say something to my face, but deputizes someone else to do his dirty work?
FUCK YOU, BUDDY.
(Mind you, playing rathole clubs is by no means a character flaw or an indication of lack of talent; I'm simply using that fact as a way to Compare and Contrast, so no offense whatsoever meant towards struggling performers, OK? Good.)
**************************************
In the meantime, I'm afraid I haven't updated the robinthemadphotographer.com website in about as long as I had this blog, partially due to a series of computers failing (at one point I suggested people just start calling me the AppleKiller), but even after that due to just not wanting to stir up old ghosts in the process of revamping the site. Please understand--I still like most of the people I met on the scene, and I feel bad that I haven't been going out to support them (there's only a couple of people on my shit list), but on some level it's felt necessary to remove myself from those circles and take stock of my life and dreams, and decide where I'm going from here. I guess you could say I'm having my own midlife crisis of sorts, but hey--unlike my friend's husband, at least mine doesn't involve banging a close relative, eh?
Don't be fooled, though--I haven't given up on being a fangirl completely, not by a long shot! If I can ever get myself to the point of regularly updating this blog, I'll try to tell more of my fangirl anecdotes from over the years, and maybe even post a few recipes here and there! I'm still trying to decide the exact path I'd like my writings to take, but in the meantime, I thought I should pop in and let anyone who's actually reading this know where I've been. See you all soon (I hope)...
Perhaps most pertinent to this blog in particular, though, is my social life's 180-degree about-face: after spending 2006-07 being little Miss Boston Music Scene Booster and taking approximately 6,000 photos (no lie; it damn near killed that poor little digital camera), I have turned my back on all of that, and have once again become involved with the SCA and medieval/renaissance re-enactment, something I hadn't done in nearly 20 years.
Why the change? Well, to try to put some of it gracefully...in late 2007, let's just say that I was treated rather badly by a couple of people in the Boston scene whom I had previously regarded as friends, and it was brought home to me rather harshly that, no matter what I did, I was never going to be sufficiently "cool" to be considered anything more than a mere hanger-on, albeit one who provided them with many, many photos and periodic baked goods. (I really do enjoy being Mama Hen to various starving and not-so-starving artists--after all, there's only so much fussing and clucking that my cat and my friends will put up with--but when you get the distinct impression that you're being taken severely for granted in both your culinary and photographic capacities, it can definitely help sour you on particular people. Too, on a more practical note, I'm not getting any younger, which makes staying out late and going to work the next day more and more difficult, to the point of being damn near impossible...not to mention that my employers have the completely unreasonable expectation that I should be awake and functional while on their time. ;-) Since being employed allows me to indulge myself in certain luxuries such as eating and living indoors, I would prefer to continue being employed, and if not hanging out with assholes is the price I have to pay, well...I fail to see what the problem is here. /snark )
(I'd also like to state for the record, as people either don't know or don't bother to remember, that I'm both quite nearsighted and have some pretty significant inner ear nerve damage, the combination of which tends to leave me peering around clubs in a manner not unlike a mole dragged out of its burrow, missing a good percentage of what's being said because (a) I can't hear what people are saying--oh, I know they're saying something, but I can't actually hear what it is, and (b) it's dark enough that I can't rely on my fallback of filling in the blanks by reading lips because I can't see them, plus (c) between the darkness and the myopia, finding people in a dark club can be an absolute bitch, which means (d) that I'm doing my damnedest to figure out just what the fuck is going on, thankyouverymuch. And no, I didn't blow my ears out at shows; I was thrown to the floor of my grandmother's car in a fender bender when I was was two years old with sufficient force that it caused the nerve damage--in fact, my mother was told years later, when they finally realized I actually had a hearing problem, that if I hadn't already been talking so well and so clearly at that age--thanks, Mom!--that I very likely would have ended up with a significant speech impediment. Oh, yeah, and getting older isn't helping this, either. Onwards...)
Not too terribly long thereafter, while I was still licking my wounds and debating whether or not I wanted to venture back out into the scene, I went to Arisia '08 and ended up having a wonderful time that weekend; in particular, thanks to the attentions paid me by a particular gentleman and long-time acquaintance, but also due to the many people in fannish circles who helped me feel as if I just might possibly kinda sorta belong somewhere, instead of being perpetually pressing my nose against the window and looking wistfully in...did me a world of good, I must say. ;-) The gentleman in particular is a long-time SCAdian, which reminded me that I'd always enjoyed getting medieval in the past (I was, after all, a medieval studies minor in college), and that one of the main reasons I slipped away from the scene in the mid-80s was because I was finally in a large enough metropolitan area and could take advantage of the various cultural options (shorter version: I moved to Boston and was finally able to be the band-follower in my 20s that most people are in their teens). So I got in touch with the good people of the Barony of Carolingia, and have been greatly enjoying my return to the fold. It's always nice to spend time with a group of people who share your interests and who don't appear to be as obsessed with "cool" as certain other social circles, hm? I could get used to this... :-)
What really sealed the deal, interestingly enough, was one of those rare occasions where I actually did stay out late for a show--in this case, Billy Bragg at the Somerville Theatre. I've been a fan of his for nearly 20 years, and have been toting along baked goods to his shows for about that long as well, and he's definitely worth losing sleep, spending money, and flinging flour 'round the kitchen over. IMNSHO, he's really and truly one of the sweetest, kindest people on the planet--if they ever manage to work the bugs out of human cloning, they really need to put Billy on the shortlist to be cloned, as (again IMNSHO) the world could sure as hell use more people like that. (No, he isn't paying me to say that, and no, this isn't an attempt at world-class-suck-uppery, either. He just really IS that good of an egg, and nearly 20 years of friendly acquaintance have only made that clearer. But enough butt-kissing...back to the actual story, now...) I stopped by the theatre around soundcheck with the usual contingent of freshly baked cookies, and was welcomed in by the (for want of a better term) entourage, who are also all lovely people fully deserving of praise and baked goods. I was waiting down in the green room when soundcheck finished and Billy came downstairs, and I must say, it really does a girl's heart good to have someone spot you, come running right over, give you a big hug, tell you that you look great, ask what you've been up to, and--gasp!--seem quite genuinely interested in the answer AND include you in the conversation as well. My, my, who'da thunk it? (The show, of course, was a blast, and if you haven't actually gotten out to see him perform yet, for God's sake, go! Gogogogogo! What are you waiting for?!?)
It wasn't until the next day, though, as I was e-mailing a dear friend about the previous evening, that it really hit me: Here's a man who's been internationally famous for well over 20 years, who can sell out decent-sized venues, hobnob with political leaders, and who, God knows, has seen me make an ass out of my self on plenty of occasions since 1989--and he always treats me like an intelligent human being worthy of respect and friendly behavior; whereas someone who's known me for less than two years, is barely known outside of eastern Massachusetts, and is still playing rathole clubs, basically thinks it's OK to treat me like crap even though this person had previously been perfectly friendly, and who doesn't even have the balls to say something to my face, but deputizes someone else to do his dirty work?
FUCK YOU, BUDDY.
(Mind you, playing rathole clubs is by no means a character flaw or an indication of lack of talent; I'm simply using that fact as a way to Compare and Contrast, so no offense whatsoever meant towards struggling performers, OK? Good.)
**************************************
In the meantime, I'm afraid I haven't updated the robinthemadphotographer.com website in about as long as I had this blog, partially due to a series of computers failing (at one point I suggested people just start calling me the AppleKiller), but even after that due to just not wanting to stir up old ghosts in the process of revamping the site. Please understand--I still like most of the people I met on the scene, and I feel bad that I haven't been going out to support them (there's only a couple of people on my shit list), but on some level it's felt necessary to remove myself from those circles and take stock of my life and dreams, and decide where I'm going from here. I guess you could say I'm having my own midlife crisis of sorts, but hey--unlike my friend's husband, at least mine doesn't involve banging a close relative, eh?
Don't be fooled, though--I haven't given up on being a fangirl completely, not by a long shot! If I can ever get myself to the point of regularly updating this blog, I'll try to tell more of my fangirl anecdotes from over the years, and maybe even post a few recipes here and there! I'm still trying to decide the exact path I'd like my writings to take, but in the meantime, I thought I should pop in and let anyone who's actually reading this know where I've been. See you all soon (I hope)...
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Damn, it's been a while...
...I really need to get off my butt and start posting here again, eh? (Not that I did all that much, but considering that it's been over a year...) It was long enough that I didn't realize Google had taken over, and there was much frustration every time I tried to commend in someone else's blog, only to not have my info accepted ("what do you MEAN that's not the right password?!?").
Don't really have time to post more than a quick update, but I do finally have a website: Robin the Mad Photographer. Go check it out--you can see at least some of what I've been up to over the past year or so, namely, taking lots of band pictures with my new(ish) digital camera, a Valentine's 2006 present to myself. Its purchase (and it's not even that expensive, really; it's a Sony DSC-W7) left me seriously brokeass for way too long, but considering the boost in my creative output, it was well worth the expense--one of the things (possibly the main one) that held me back from doing more 35mm photography was the cost of buying film and getting it processed, but with digital, I can hop on down to CVS and burn a picture disc for $2.99 for myself (and another one for the subjects, should I want them to have one), or upload them straight from the camera to the computer! Considering that I've gone from the 24- or 36-exposure roll, where every shot was fairly carefully composed (or as carefully composed as you can do with something like live concert photography), to just being able to blast away for 100+ shots, and the differences I've found in image quality and the way the shots turn out, well...the song may remain the same, but the pictures sure as hell don't. Anyway, go take a look, and tell me what you think, OK?
Don't really have time to post more than a quick update, but I do finally have a website: Robin the Mad Photographer. Go check it out--you can see at least some of what I've been up to over the past year or so, namely, taking lots of band pictures with my new(ish) digital camera, a Valentine's 2006 present to myself. Its purchase (and it's not even that expensive, really; it's a Sony DSC-W7) left me seriously brokeass for way too long, but considering the boost in my creative output, it was well worth the expense--one of the things (possibly the main one) that held me back from doing more 35mm photography was the cost of buying film and getting it processed, but with digital, I can hop on down to CVS and burn a picture disc for $2.99 for myself (and another one for the subjects, should I want them to have one), or upload them straight from the camera to the computer! Considering that I've gone from the 24- or 36-exposure roll, where every shot was fairly carefully composed (or as carefully composed as you can do with something like live concert photography), to just being able to blast away for 100+ shots, and the differences I've found in image quality and the way the shots turn out, well...the song may remain the same, but the pictures sure as hell don't. Anyway, go take a look, and tell me what you think, OK?
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Public Animal Number One
According to various friends and associates, I am the possessor of a truly rare and wonderful gift: the ability to totally charm and sweettalk notoriously prickly creative types to the point where they're damn near eating out of my hand, sometimes almost literally if I don't yank my hand away after they've grabbed hold of that particular munchie. (Admittedly, showing up at venues with homemade baked goods does tend to get you on most folks' good sides--nobody, but nobody doesn't like chocolate unless they're actually allergic to it, and all the others can be won over with blueberry muffins...I'm not the Purveyor of Quality Photographs and Fine Baked Goods (as my old business cards used to say) for nothing! :-)
It's always funny to hear people talk in hushed tones about So-and-So and just how horrible they can be, and then see the looks on their faces when I pipe up "Hey, I met them once, and they were pretty nice!" Case in point: I am, as you should have already figured out by now, a pretty damn hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan of 11+ years' standing (which boggles people right there if I'm wearing one of my homemade long print dresses--talk about the World's Most Unlikely Looking Ninnie...), and over the course of those 11+ years, I've seen them play 15 times and met Trent himself on three separate occasions, which never fails to get the following response from mundanes:
"Oh, wow...*tone of great trepidation*..."Um, so...what's he like?"
"Oh, very nicepolite, soft-spoken, witty as hell, awfully shy, but a total sweetheart, really!"
"*boggle*"
(You just know they were expecting something along the lines of Taz with Tourette's Syndrome...If I had a dollar for every time this particular scenario has played itself out--particularly when paired with "but YOU don't look like a Nine Inch Nails fan!"--I could afford to follow the entire tour instead of hitting just a few select dates, but I digress...)
I feel a little guilty following up Trent with two people he's no longer on speaking terms with (to put it mildly...), but...Courtney Love was a total sweetheart to me all the times I met her in the early '90s and dubbed me "the brownie lady" after learning I was the one who'd brought my semi-legendary brownies to the most recent Hole show in Athens (sure, so she flamed me on Usenet that one time for something I didn't even write, but I don't hold that against her...), and even Marilyn Manson was perfectly polite and friendly, although I did hear a nasty rumor that he ended up smearing his brownies all over his hotel room walls (BAD MANSON! NO MORE BROWNIES FOR YOU!). Then again, I'd have to say it was worth a smeared batch of brownies to be able to witness the following: Marilyn Manson, the God of Fuck, the Destroyer of Innocence, the Defiler of All That is Good and Pure and Holy, on the pay phone in the lobby of the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Georgia, calling home to his sweetie in Florida...
*high-pitched, cutesy voice*..."I love you too, honeybunch..."
Believe me, there is NO WAY IN HELL that I can EVER be able to take Antichrist Superstar seriously ever again after that particular exchange. *smirk* It even topped the time I saw one of the guys from Gwar (who at the time were driving the world's most fucked-up tour bus, a remodeled school bus they'd apparently "liberated" from the Road Warrior set before decorating it in their own inimitable style; long-dead creatures on the dashboard were only the beginning...), maybe even the mighty Oderous Urungus himself, on the 40 Watt Club's pay phone, looking like (*gasp*) a normal person, albeit on the scruffy side...chatting with his wife and asking how all the kids were doing. Granted, it's not quite on a par with seeing Mickey Mouse with his head off and revealing the sweaty, cranky teenager inside the fursuit, but as far as the indie rock scene goes, it came Pretty Friggin' Close.
****************************
Back when I was still in school, one of my best friends senior year was a girl named Angie, who was more or less the Semi-Official School Punk/New Waver--she was possibly the world's biggest Adam Ant fan who had trained her cat to come running every time she called out "ADDIE!" (yes, really; I witnesses this firsthand), had dyed her hair fuschia (and nearly caused three traffic accidents involving unsuspecting rubberneckers while walking back from the salon as a result), wore disarticulated handcuffs as bracelets (which apparently makes it hard to moves one's wrists while taking care of personal hygiene issues, or so she said...), started her own unofficially frorority (fraternity/sorority) called Omega Nu Wava, and generally stood out like the proverbial sore thumb amongst the usual upstate New Hampshire types; so it shouldn't come as any kind of big surprise that Angie was the one who introduced me to the work of one GG Allin...
Now, if you don't know who GG was, then you might not get the rest of this piece, because I'm not sure if I can do the man, the myth and the legend justice in just a few lines, but here goes: He was born in way upstate New Hampshire to a religious nutjob who actually named him Jesus Christ at birth, but was rechristened Kevin Michael by his mom. Growing up in the boonies of Buttfuck, New Hampshire with no indoor plumbing and a freezedried wackaloon for a dad will apparently do quite the number on one's psyche, because this particular small-town boy grew up to be quite possibly the single most offensive musical performer of all time, or at least one of the top 10--Marilyn Manson only dreams he could be that fucked up. Let's see...defecation, coprophilia, urination, masturbation, assault (sexual and otherwise), sex with dead animals, drawing blood, setting himself on fire, cutting himself up with cans and broken bottles, inciting riots, knocking himself out...um, am I leaving anything important out? Didn't think so... (In case you need to know anything else, remember that Google is your friend; but you might just want to avoid that approach if you've got a weak stomach...)
Anyway, Angie had one of his earlier albums and I think some of his singles--I don't remember which specific ones, but "Drink, Fight and Fuck" was definitely one of the songs--and thought he was just great, partly because listening to him was guaranteed to piss off and offends just about everyone, but mainly, I think, because he was a Bona Fide New Hampshire Rock Star, which wasn't something we had a whole lot of of back then. (Sure, Aerosmith may have gotten started around Lake Sunapee, but this was long before the days of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Scissorfight, and homegrown rockers were few and far between.)
About a year later, I'd just moved to the Boston area when WBCN, the biggest rock radio station in Boston, decided to host the WBCN Rock & Roll Expo at the Bayside Expo Center in Dorchester, complete with live broadcasts, real live DJs up close and personal, and maybe even some Actual Musicians. Hmmm...sounded pretty good to yours truly, small-town girl who'd only just been to her very first concert within the past year (I had an incredibly sheltered childhood and adolescence, OK?), so off I went, lugging my backpack and my paperback Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats because I'd started collecting autographs in it--I think I must have thought it made me look more intellectual than your run-of-the-mill fangirl, God help me.
The Expo itself was lots of fun, and I even got a couple of new autographs for my collection, including Jimmy Miller of Rolling Stones' production fame ("Mick and Keith say hi" was what he wrote), so it had already been a pretty successful day for me when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotten an oddly familiar figure...a seriously scuzzy-looking, drugged-out, skinny guy with a sillyassed mustache/goatee combo, wearing an absolutely filthy denim vest and jeans, and sporting a crudely-done upraised middle finger tattoo on one arm...it was none other than GG Allin, Public Animal Number One.
What the HELL he was doing at something so seemingly middlebrow as the 'BCN Expo, I have no earthly idea, but there he was, big as life, wandering around aimlessly checking out some of the exhibits, and being given an exceedingly wide berth by all those in the vicinity who were all too aware of his reputation. I, of course, having no fear and being way naive to know what the hell I might be getting myself into, was absolutely delighted at the sudden opportunity to meet a real live musician, and marched right on over to him.
Picture this, if you will: The aforementioned Mr. Allin, looking the way I described, and yours truly: short, plump, shoulder-length curly dark hair, rosy cheeks and innocent brown eyes, wearing a navy-blue floral print cotton dress with puffed sleeves and a white, lace-trimmed collar, toting a large blue backpack, and carrying a pen and a handy piece of paper. Ponder this a moment, and picture the doubtless horrified facial expressions on any attendees close enough to witness what was sure to transpire...now hold that image a moment:
"Mr. Allin?"
"Yes?"
"Could I have your autograph for my friend Angie? She's a huge fan of yours..."
Surprise, and then a half-smile..."Sure!", as he took the pen and paper, scribbled away, and handed both back to me.
"Thank you!"
"No problem..." and then he ambled off, resuming whatever rounds he was making.
(Yes, I probably should have asked for one for myself, but then I wasn't the fan, Angie was; and I didn't want to waste too much of his time.)
Angie, of course, was thrilled when she got my letter and the autograph in the mail the following week, and I didn't really think about the whole business much until a few months later, when, while browsing through a stack of albums at Nuggets in Kenmore Square, I happened to glance up and noticed a familiar face looking back at me from over the shelves...
"Hey, Angie...how're you doing?"
Of course, it was none other than GG, somehow operating under the delusion that I was Angie, and remarkably chipper for someone of his usual mien.
"Oh, fine...and you?"
"Pretty good...hey, nice to see you!" And back he went to his record browsing.
I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and didn't try to explain to him that I wasn't Angie; but for the next couple of years, every few months or so I'd run into GG at Nuggets or Newbury Comics, and every time he happend to glance up and see me, he'd always say hi and be perfectly friendly and polite to me. (From what people say, I may be one of the only people on the planet who can honestly say that...)
**********************************************
A couple of years ago, I was at home visiting my parents when somehow I happened to mention GG's name to my mom. "You never told me you knew him!"
"Well, I didn't really know him--we were mainly just friendly acquaintances..."
"If I'd known, I'd have saved that article from the Littleton Courier for you! They're having all kinds of trouble up there with people visiting his grave and making a big mess, you know."
You see, GG is buried at St. Rose of Lima Cemetary in Littleton, New Hampshire, about 20 miles from my own hometown (which I knew anyway, having seen the t-shirt printed with his death certificate while I was still living in Georgia), and over the past few years a whole slew of fans have been busy turning that end of the cemetary into the white trash punk rock version of Pere Lachaise--I don't know if there's graffitti on any of the tombstones with arrows pointing to GG's grave, as there are for Jim Morrison, but suffice to say that most of the visitors have been, shall we say, behaving in a manner befitting his life and death (that's a nice tasteful way to phrase it, isn't it?), and a hell of a lot of locals who also have loved ones buried there are well and truly pissed off and demanding that SOMETHING be done--I don't know if this means there are plans to dig him up and dump him somewhere else, the way the Pere Lachaise folks are trying to do with Jim, or what, but the last I heard he was still up there, one of the biggest tourist draws in the whole damn town., believe it or not.
Supposedly the cemetary caretakers aren't terribly friendly to anyone they think is there to visit GG, and they won't tell you where he's buried, either, but I keep thinking that one of these days I really ought to go up there to pay my (polite, well-mannered) respects to his memory and maybe even leave some flowers for a tortured soul who, for all his many faults, was always kind to me, and who's hopefully found at least some of the peace he never had in his lifetime.
(Of course, dollars to doughnuts someone's probably going to set the damn flowers on fire and then piss on them to put out the flames, but it is the thought that counts, right?...)
It's always funny to hear people talk in hushed tones about So-and-So and just how horrible they can be, and then see the looks on their faces when I pipe up "Hey, I met them once, and they were pretty nice!" Case in point: I am, as you should have already figured out by now, a pretty damn hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan of 11+ years' standing (which boggles people right there if I'm wearing one of my homemade long print dresses--talk about the World's Most Unlikely Looking Ninnie...), and over the course of those 11+ years, I've seen them play 15 times and met Trent himself on three separate occasions, which never fails to get the following response from mundanes:
"Oh, wow...*tone of great trepidation*..."Um, so...what's he like?"
"Oh, very nicepolite, soft-spoken, witty as hell, awfully shy, but a total sweetheart, really!"
"*boggle*"
(You just know they were expecting something along the lines of Taz with Tourette's Syndrome...If I had a dollar for every time this particular scenario has played itself out--particularly when paired with "but YOU don't look like a Nine Inch Nails fan!"--I could afford to follow the entire tour instead of hitting just a few select dates, but I digress...)
I feel a little guilty following up Trent with two people he's no longer on speaking terms with (to put it mildly...), but...Courtney Love was a total sweetheart to me all the times I met her in the early '90s and dubbed me "the brownie lady" after learning I was the one who'd brought my semi-legendary brownies to the most recent Hole show in Athens (sure, so she flamed me on Usenet that one time for something I didn't even write, but I don't hold that against her...), and even Marilyn Manson was perfectly polite and friendly, although I did hear a nasty rumor that he ended up smearing his brownies all over his hotel room walls (BAD MANSON! NO MORE BROWNIES FOR YOU!). Then again, I'd have to say it was worth a smeared batch of brownies to be able to witness the following: Marilyn Manson, the God of Fuck, the Destroyer of Innocence, the Defiler of All That is Good and Pure and Holy, on the pay phone in the lobby of the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Georgia, calling home to his sweetie in Florida...
*high-pitched, cutesy voice*..."I love you too, honeybunch..."
Believe me, there is NO WAY IN HELL that I can EVER be able to take Antichrist Superstar seriously ever again after that particular exchange. *smirk* It even topped the time I saw one of the guys from Gwar (who at the time were driving the world's most fucked-up tour bus, a remodeled school bus they'd apparently "liberated" from the Road Warrior set before decorating it in their own inimitable style; long-dead creatures on the dashboard were only the beginning...), maybe even the mighty Oderous Urungus himself, on the 40 Watt Club's pay phone, looking like (*gasp*) a normal person, albeit on the scruffy side...chatting with his wife and asking how all the kids were doing. Granted, it's not quite on a par with seeing Mickey Mouse with his head off and revealing the sweaty, cranky teenager inside the fursuit, but as far as the indie rock scene goes, it came Pretty Friggin' Close.
****************************
Back when I was still in school, one of my best friends senior year was a girl named Angie, who was more or less the Semi-Official School Punk/New Waver--she was possibly the world's biggest Adam Ant fan who had trained her cat to come running every time she called out "ADDIE!" (yes, really; I witnesses this firsthand), had dyed her hair fuschia (and nearly caused three traffic accidents involving unsuspecting rubberneckers while walking back from the salon as a result), wore disarticulated handcuffs as bracelets (which apparently makes it hard to moves one's wrists while taking care of personal hygiene issues, or so she said...), started her own unofficially frorority (fraternity/sorority) called Omega Nu Wava, and generally stood out like the proverbial sore thumb amongst the usual upstate New Hampshire types; so it shouldn't come as any kind of big surprise that Angie was the one who introduced me to the work of one GG Allin...
Now, if you don't know who GG was, then you might not get the rest of this piece, because I'm not sure if I can do the man, the myth and the legend justice in just a few lines, but here goes: He was born in way upstate New Hampshire to a religious nutjob who actually named him Jesus Christ at birth, but was rechristened Kevin Michael by his mom. Growing up in the boonies of Buttfuck, New Hampshire with no indoor plumbing and a freezedried wackaloon for a dad will apparently do quite the number on one's psyche, because this particular small-town boy grew up to be quite possibly the single most offensive musical performer of all time, or at least one of the top 10--Marilyn Manson only dreams he could be that fucked up. Let's see...defecation, coprophilia, urination, masturbation, assault (sexual and otherwise), sex with dead animals, drawing blood, setting himself on fire, cutting himself up with cans and broken bottles, inciting riots, knocking himself out...um, am I leaving anything important out? Didn't think so... (In case you need to know anything else, remember that Google is your friend; but you might just want to avoid that approach if you've got a weak stomach...)
Anyway, Angie had one of his earlier albums and I think some of his singles--I don't remember which specific ones, but "Drink, Fight and Fuck" was definitely one of the songs--and thought he was just great, partly because listening to him was guaranteed to piss off and offends just about everyone, but mainly, I think, because he was a Bona Fide New Hampshire Rock Star, which wasn't something we had a whole lot of of back then. (Sure, Aerosmith may have gotten started around Lake Sunapee, but this was long before the days of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Scissorfight, and homegrown rockers were few and far between.)
About a year later, I'd just moved to the Boston area when WBCN, the biggest rock radio station in Boston, decided to host the WBCN Rock & Roll Expo at the Bayside Expo Center in Dorchester, complete with live broadcasts, real live DJs up close and personal, and maybe even some Actual Musicians. Hmmm...sounded pretty good to yours truly, small-town girl who'd only just been to her very first concert within the past year (I had an incredibly sheltered childhood and adolescence, OK?), so off I went, lugging my backpack and my paperback Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats because I'd started collecting autographs in it--I think I must have thought it made me look more intellectual than your run-of-the-mill fangirl, God help me.
The Expo itself was lots of fun, and I even got a couple of new autographs for my collection, including Jimmy Miller of Rolling Stones' production fame ("Mick and Keith say hi" was what he wrote), so it had already been a pretty successful day for me when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotten an oddly familiar figure...a seriously scuzzy-looking, drugged-out, skinny guy with a sillyassed mustache/goatee combo, wearing an absolutely filthy denim vest and jeans, and sporting a crudely-done upraised middle finger tattoo on one arm...it was none other than GG Allin, Public Animal Number One.
What the HELL he was doing at something so seemingly middlebrow as the 'BCN Expo, I have no earthly idea, but there he was, big as life, wandering around aimlessly checking out some of the exhibits, and being given an exceedingly wide berth by all those in the vicinity who were all too aware of his reputation. I, of course, having no fear and being way naive to know what the hell I might be getting myself into, was absolutely delighted at the sudden opportunity to meet a real live musician, and marched right on over to him.
Picture this, if you will: The aforementioned Mr. Allin, looking the way I described, and yours truly: short, plump, shoulder-length curly dark hair, rosy cheeks and innocent brown eyes, wearing a navy-blue floral print cotton dress with puffed sleeves and a white, lace-trimmed collar, toting a large blue backpack, and carrying a pen and a handy piece of paper. Ponder this a moment, and picture the doubtless horrified facial expressions on any attendees close enough to witness what was sure to transpire...now hold that image a moment:
"Mr. Allin?"
"Yes?"
"Could I have your autograph for my friend Angie? She's a huge fan of yours..."
Surprise, and then a half-smile..."Sure!", as he took the pen and paper, scribbled away, and handed both back to me.
"Thank you!"
"No problem..." and then he ambled off, resuming whatever rounds he was making.
(Yes, I probably should have asked for one for myself, but then I wasn't the fan, Angie was; and I didn't want to waste too much of his time.)
Angie, of course, was thrilled when she got my letter and the autograph in the mail the following week, and I didn't really think about the whole business much until a few months later, when, while browsing through a stack of albums at Nuggets in Kenmore Square, I happened to glance up and noticed a familiar face looking back at me from over the shelves...
"Hey, Angie...how're you doing?"
Of course, it was none other than GG, somehow operating under the delusion that I was Angie, and remarkably chipper for someone of his usual mien.
"Oh, fine...and you?"
"Pretty good...hey, nice to see you!" And back he went to his record browsing.
I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and didn't try to explain to him that I wasn't Angie; but for the next couple of years, every few months or so I'd run into GG at Nuggets or Newbury Comics, and every time he happend to glance up and see me, he'd always say hi and be perfectly friendly and polite to me. (From what people say, I may be one of the only people on the planet who can honestly say that...)
**********************************************
A couple of years ago, I was at home visiting my parents when somehow I happened to mention GG's name to my mom. "You never told me you knew him!"
"Well, I didn't really know him--we were mainly just friendly acquaintances..."
"If I'd known, I'd have saved that article from the Littleton Courier for you! They're having all kinds of trouble up there with people visiting his grave and making a big mess, you know."
You see, GG is buried at St. Rose of Lima Cemetary in Littleton, New Hampshire, about 20 miles from my own hometown (which I knew anyway, having seen the t-shirt printed with his death certificate while I was still living in Georgia), and over the past few years a whole slew of fans have been busy turning that end of the cemetary into the white trash punk rock version of Pere Lachaise--I don't know if there's graffitti on any of the tombstones with arrows pointing to GG's grave, as there are for Jim Morrison, but suffice to say that most of the visitors have been, shall we say, behaving in a manner befitting his life and death (that's a nice tasteful way to phrase it, isn't it?), and a hell of a lot of locals who also have loved ones buried there are well and truly pissed off and demanding that SOMETHING be done--I don't know if this means there are plans to dig him up and dump him somewhere else, the way the Pere Lachaise folks are trying to do with Jim, or what, but the last I heard he was still up there, one of the biggest tourist draws in the whole damn town., believe it or not.
Supposedly the cemetary caretakers aren't terribly friendly to anyone they think is there to visit GG, and they won't tell you where he's buried, either, but I keep thinking that one of these days I really ought to go up there to pay my (polite, well-mannered) respects to his memory and maybe even leave some flowers for a tortured soul who, for all his many faults, was always kind to me, and who's hopefully found at least some of the peace he never had in his lifetime.
(Of course, dollars to doughnuts someone's probably going to set the damn flowers on fire and then piss on them to put out the flames, but it is the thought that counts, right?...)
Sunday, December 11, 2005
I'm still alive...
(cue the Eddie Vedder earworm)
Yes, it's been a while since I've gotten off my butt to post here...sorry about that, folks. A few of the reasons why I've been a slackass:
1. It took about 2 months for me to finally move back into my bedroom from the futon in the living room after the Great Leaky Bedroom Ceiling Debacle--my landcritters apparently work with the Most Incompetent Plumber in Greater Boston, as it took him the better part of two months to figure out that the reason my ceiling only leaked when someone was in the shower upstairs taking one was because their damn tub/shower needed regrouting and if someone was actually taking a shower, water would splash around and slip through the crappy grout. *sigh* Once the actual leak was fixed, I finally moved back into my room, and the ceiling was actually repaired a couple of weeks after that with surprisingly little fuss and very neatly by the landcritters' contractor cousin. I still haven't gotten completely over losing the better part of two months to fucked-up plumbing, though...
2. I went off to play hardcore fangirl with NIN in five different cities (DC, NYC, Philly, Boston and Montreal), and had a wonderful time--it was truly just what I needed, and got me away from my job (let's not go there...) for a while. Five shows, five soundchecks, one meet & greet (NYC), one show spent on the rail of the pit (Montreal)...it was all a blast, but unfortunately it lead to...
3. The Ninnie Death Flu, aka "the crud I caught in NYC or Philly"--I left my house for the Boston show with a 100.4 fever (luckily, Tylenol knocked that down), and was just getting better when Montreal rolled around, whereupon I promptly came down with my friend Dante's cold and he mine (yeah, sharing a water bottle thoughtfully handed to Dante by Sweeney would do that...). Spent three days home sick from work before feeling well enough to stumble back, but kept on coughing my head off and running a low-grade fever, which my doctor assured me was par for the course with this particular bug. Started spiking a much higher fever (101.8 F) last weekend and felt as if it was taking all my strength just to breathe, so Monday morning it was off to Mass General and my doctor's office to see if anyone in the practice could see me. One office visit and chest X-ray later, it was determined that I didn't have pneumonia, but I did have some kind of bacterial infection (apparently in my lungs and sinuses), and one scrip of Zithromax later, I'm feeling MUCH better. Still dragged out from basically being sick for a month, though...how the hell do Trent & Co.--and any other touring musicians--manage not to get sick, or do they just hide it better? Whatever superduper combo of herbs or whatever they're using, I want it!
4. General slackassedness, brought on by 1, 2 & 3, not to mention my normal tendency to procrastination. I met a new friend today for the first time, and told her that what I really need is someone to crack the whip on me and demand new posts on a regular basis, which is unfortunately all too true--I get all kind of great ideas for things to yak about (many of which have nothing at all to do with music), but then I get sidetracked, or I decide "I can't post about that without pictures, and I don't have a decent setup to post pictures yet", or I think "I can't talk about that until I talk about X, Y & Z", so on and so forth. Anyone feel like playing Good Cop/Bad Cop, or maybe just Strict Teacher, and kicking my ass to get me writing more?
Let's just hope I end up having a better holiday season this year than I did last--trust me, there are definitely better ways to spend New Year's Eve than on a exam table, feet in stirrups, with the doc up to his wrist in you at the stroke of midnight. (And yes, I promise to post about this in much greater detail, if you think you've got the stomachs for it...)
Yes, it's been a while since I've gotten off my butt to post here...sorry about that, folks. A few of the reasons why I've been a slackass:
1. It took about 2 months for me to finally move back into my bedroom from the futon in the living room after the Great Leaky Bedroom Ceiling Debacle--my landcritters apparently work with the Most Incompetent Plumber in Greater Boston, as it took him the better part of two months to figure out that the reason my ceiling only leaked when someone was in the shower upstairs taking one was because their damn tub/shower needed regrouting and if someone was actually taking a shower, water would splash around and slip through the crappy grout. *sigh* Once the actual leak was fixed, I finally moved back into my room, and the ceiling was actually repaired a couple of weeks after that with surprisingly little fuss and very neatly by the landcritters' contractor cousin. I still haven't gotten completely over losing the better part of two months to fucked-up plumbing, though...
2. I went off to play hardcore fangirl with NIN in five different cities (DC, NYC, Philly, Boston and Montreal), and had a wonderful time--it was truly just what I needed, and got me away from my job (let's not go there...) for a while. Five shows, five soundchecks, one meet & greet (NYC), one show spent on the rail of the pit (Montreal)...it was all a blast, but unfortunately it lead to...
3. The Ninnie Death Flu, aka "the crud I caught in NYC or Philly"--I left my house for the Boston show with a 100.4 fever (luckily, Tylenol knocked that down), and was just getting better when Montreal rolled around, whereupon I promptly came down with my friend Dante's cold and he mine (yeah, sharing a water bottle thoughtfully handed to Dante by Sweeney would do that...). Spent three days home sick from work before feeling well enough to stumble back, but kept on coughing my head off and running a low-grade fever, which my doctor assured me was par for the course with this particular bug. Started spiking a much higher fever (101.8 F) last weekend and felt as if it was taking all my strength just to breathe, so Monday morning it was off to Mass General and my doctor's office to see if anyone in the practice could see me. One office visit and chest X-ray later, it was determined that I didn't have pneumonia, but I did have some kind of bacterial infection (apparently in my lungs and sinuses), and one scrip of Zithromax later, I'm feeling MUCH better. Still dragged out from basically being sick for a month, though...how the hell do Trent & Co.--and any other touring musicians--manage not to get sick, or do they just hide it better? Whatever superduper combo of herbs or whatever they're using, I want it!
4. General slackassedness, brought on by 1, 2 & 3, not to mention my normal tendency to procrastination. I met a new friend today for the first time, and told her that what I really need is someone to crack the whip on me and demand new posts on a regular basis, which is unfortunately all too true--I get all kind of great ideas for things to yak about (many of which have nothing at all to do with music), but then I get sidetracked, or I decide "I can't post about that without pictures, and I don't have a decent setup to post pictures yet", or I think "I can't talk about that until I talk about X, Y & Z", so on and so forth. Anyone feel like playing Good Cop/Bad Cop, or maybe just Strict Teacher, and kicking my ass to get me writing more?
Let's just hope I end up having a better holiday season this year than I did last--trust me, there are definitely better ways to spend New Year's Eve than on a exam table, feet in stirrups, with the doc up to his wrist in you at the stroke of midnight. (And yes, I promise to post about this in much greater detail, if you think you've got the stomachs for it...)
Friday, September 09, 2005
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*
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*
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Don't go chasin' waterfalls...
...because the motherfuckers will come to you when you least expect it, usually on a Sunday morning when you've just gotten out of the bathroom to find water dripping out of the ceiling onto your bed. (I'll explain this in a bit...)
I'm going to try to start posting in here much more regularly, partly because I've been meaning to use this as a venue for my writing/performance jones (too bad I can't do audio posts; I've been told the best part of my stories is hearing me tell them), and partly because I'm feeling shamed into it...you see, my friendly acquaintance Rob just started his own Blogger blog recently, after holding forth on MySpace for quite some time; he's always been a kickass writer with a hysterically warped view of the world, but his recent posts have raised the bar so high that I can only bow before him and hope to catch up to his level of...well, I'm not quite sure WHAT to call it, but I'm sure I'll think of something. *smirk*
My good intentions may have to wait a bit, though, as my apartment is in a certain amount of upheaval--my bedroom ceiling sprang a leak almost 2 weeks ago, and I've been camping out on the futon in the living room ever since. The actual leak stopped very quickly once the plumber came by and determined that the problem was the second-floor shower in the apartment above me (funny, I didn't realize there WAS a bathroom right over me), but I now have a gaping hole in the ceiling right over the head of my head, covered by a contractor's trash bag screwed to the ceiling ("Why not use duct tape?" "It won't stay on."), and with a hole poked into it just in case the damn plumbing starts dribbling again. To add insult to injury, while I was musing aloud to myself whether I should even think about sleeping in my own bed, or just give up and decamp to the living room, the plumber offered this helpful bit of advice: "Why don't you just kick your daughter out of her room?"
I don't HAVE a daughter.
I DO have a female housemate (the lovely and charming Laura), who is, admittedly, 18 years younger than me, but the only "children" I have at this time shed like hell, puke on the floor, and crap outside the litter box on a regular basis. (In the increasingly unlikely event I ever do manage to spawn, I figure looking after Jezebel and Delenn will stand me in good stead in terms of dealing with general ickyness.) When you're tired, freaked out about your home possibly falling down around your ears, and feeling rather sensitive about your age, you REALLY don't need random strangers telling you that you look old enough to have a daughter Laura's age, believe me.
Needless to say, I redid my gray roots the very next night...
In the meantime, I'm having to go online while sitting perched on the edge of my bed, which has now been shoved to the opposite end of the rather small room from where it usually sits, which means that my Comfy Chair is now in the kitchen, where it's holding a trash bag full of clothes and shoes for Katrina survivors until I find a place to drop them off. I feel as if I shouldn't complain that much, especially in light of the horrific events in NOLA and the Gulf Coast, but damn it, I'm paying too much rent as it is to live in a freaking BASEMENT (excuse me, "garden apartment"), much less not having full use of my property and fucking up my back sleeping on the goddamn futon, AND having to lock up all the cats in the living room during the day just in case the contractor/landlord's cousin by marriage deigns to show up and actually patch the friggin' ceiling (the cats have both litter boxes, food and water, soft places to sleep and a window to look out of, but I still feel like a rat having to shut them up like that)....OK, I'll shut up now, just needed to vent a little... *sigh* Anyway, it' s much easier to spin funny yarns about rock star dolls, generally freaky people, and former clubowners who jack off with conditioner when I'm nicely settled into my chair, and so further anecdotes will have to wait a bit--I do promise, though, that I'll tell the strange story of how I became acquainted with none other than G.G. Allin very soon.
I'm going to try to start posting in here much more regularly, partly because I've been meaning to use this as a venue for my writing/performance jones (too bad I can't do audio posts; I've been told the best part of my stories is hearing me tell them), and partly because I'm feeling shamed into it...you see, my friendly acquaintance Rob just started his own Blogger blog recently, after holding forth on MySpace for quite some time; he's always been a kickass writer with a hysterically warped view of the world, but his recent posts have raised the bar so high that I can only bow before him and hope to catch up to his level of...well, I'm not quite sure WHAT to call it, but I'm sure I'll think of something. *smirk*
My good intentions may have to wait a bit, though, as my apartment is in a certain amount of upheaval--my bedroom ceiling sprang a leak almost 2 weeks ago, and I've been camping out on the futon in the living room ever since. The actual leak stopped very quickly once the plumber came by and determined that the problem was the second-floor shower in the apartment above me (funny, I didn't realize there WAS a bathroom right over me), but I now have a gaping hole in the ceiling right over the head of my head, covered by a contractor's trash bag screwed to the ceiling ("Why not use duct tape?" "It won't stay on."), and with a hole poked into it just in case the damn plumbing starts dribbling again. To add insult to injury, while I was musing aloud to myself whether I should even think about sleeping in my own bed, or just give up and decamp to the living room, the plumber offered this helpful bit of advice: "Why don't you just kick your daughter out of her room?"
I don't HAVE a daughter.
I DO have a female housemate (the lovely and charming Laura), who is, admittedly, 18 years younger than me, but the only "children" I have at this time shed like hell, puke on the floor, and crap outside the litter box on a regular basis. (In the increasingly unlikely event I ever do manage to spawn, I figure looking after Jezebel and Delenn will stand me in good stead in terms of dealing with general ickyness.) When you're tired, freaked out about your home possibly falling down around your ears, and feeling rather sensitive about your age, you REALLY don't need random strangers telling you that you look old enough to have a daughter Laura's age, believe me.
Needless to say, I redid my gray roots the very next night...
In the meantime, I'm having to go online while sitting perched on the edge of my bed, which has now been shoved to the opposite end of the rather small room from where it usually sits, which means that my Comfy Chair is now in the kitchen, where it's holding a trash bag full of clothes and shoes for Katrina survivors until I find a place to drop them off. I feel as if I shouldn't complain that much, especially in light of the horrific events in NOLA and the Gulf Coast, but damn it, I'm paying too much rent as it is to live in a freaking BASEMENT (excuse me, "garden apartment"), much less not having full use of my property and fucking up my back sleeping on the goddamn futon, AND having to lock up all the cats in the living room during the day just in case the contractor/landlord's cousin by marriage deigns to show up and actually patch the friggin' ceiling (the cats have both litter boxes, food and water, soft places to sleep and a window to look out of, but I still feel like a rat having to shut them up like that)....OK, I'll shut up now, just needed to vent a little... *sigh* Anyway, it' s much easier to spin funny yarns about rock star dolls, generally freaky people, and former clubowners who jack off with conditioner when I'm nicely settled into my chair, and so further anecdotes will have to wait a bit--I do promise, though, that I'll tell the strange story of how I became acquainted with none other than G.G. Allin very soon.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
The Slippery Saga of Humectress Man...
Back in 1988, I got the bright idea to go visit scenic Athens, GA on vacation, with an eye to living there, decided I loved the place, and came back 7 months later with all my worldly possessions in a U-Haul trailer attached to the back of my friend Martin's Mitsubishi Montero...and spent the next 8 1/2 years there, vacillating between "I LOVE this place!" to "Get me the FUCK out of this hellhole NOW!!!" (Athens is the kind of place that tends to provoke that reaction; I'll get more into this some other time.) I've often heard Athens called "Berkeley with a southern accent", and considering that the Bay Area and Athens-Clarke County are both home to some of the fucked-up people you'll ever meet (or, in some cases, wish you hadn't met), I'll buy that; but Deep South depravity, in spite of or perhaps because of the suffocating weight of so-called Christianity ("so-called" because something tells me there's no way Jesus would recognize any of the assholes at the Prince Avenue Baptist Church as followers of his...but I digress) has a special kind of flavor--quite literally in some cases.
(A quick example: if you ever happened to see the documentary Athens, GA Inside/Out, you might remember a band called the Bar-B-Que Killers, fronted by one Laura Carter, who resembled nothing so much as a seriously pissed-off and drugged-up 13-year-old boy. Well, Laura's post-BBQ Killers band was called Felch, and their very first band flyers, posted all over downtown Athens, depicted exactly that activity...somehow I don't think the 40 Watt Club was terribly happy about having to pay the fine simply because they'd booked the damn band in the first place. Anyhow, at one of Laura's live performances--which usually involved some degree of nudity by the end of the set--she had apparently stuffed the better part of a sack full of Mardi Gras beads up her hoohoo, and proceeded to pull them out, one or two strands at a time, and throw them into the audience...certain members of whom actually proceeded to put them in their mouths and suck away gleefully. One friend of mine told me that was the very first show she ever saw in Athens shortly after she moved to town; frankly, I'm just amazed that she didn't run screaming all the way to Hartsfield International to catch the first plane home to Toronto, but I guess she was made of stronger stuff than that. )
I could go on, but I promised you a different story, and it's time I started telling it...)
Humectress Man was none other than the SO of a housemate of mine in Athens; at the time the events to be described took place, he was involved in the operation of a music venue in town. I had thought he was being friendly to me simply because he was a nice guy, and perhaps he was, and thought I was reasonably cool (at least, that's what he claimed once), but his main motive was to get into my housemate's panties, at which he was eventually successful. Too bad he already had a girlfriend at home--somehow he neglected to mention that particular fact until the housemate was already quite on the hook, the schmuck--so his extracurricular activities tended to be conducted either backstage at the venue, or when the GF was out of town...
One time, after the evening's entertainment was over, he made a booty call to invite her to the now-empty club...at some point during the late-night entertainment, he decided that showing her some of his girl/girl porn magazines might be just the trick to get her terribly hot and bothered. (Apparently it didn't occur to him that most straight women find fake lesbians boring, stupid and not at all arousing.) Not one to waste an opportunity for good clean fun, and more than willing to take matters into his own hands, he disappeared into the venue's shower (which his female business partner tended to use to clean up before heading home), returned several minutes later from the club's shower with her bottle of Nexxus Humectress conditioner, and proceeded to jack off in front of the housemate while reading the magazine, using the Humectress as lube. (I imagine it worked pretty well, especially if you happen to like having nice, soft, coconut-scented pubes, although I'd bet his partner would have been PISSED to find out what he was using her expensive conditioner for...) Needless to say, after my incredulous housemate told me the tale the next day, I immediately dubbed the wanker "Humectress Man", and that he shall remain, at least in our personal mythology.
(One more tale of HM's boundless creativity: One fine weekend, he had the housemate over to his own personal love shack (the official sweetie was, of course, out of town), but unfortunately Little Elvis just wasn't in a partying mood that evening due to rather too much Bolivian Marching Powder snuffed up earlier in the evening. Being an inventive fellow, though, he disappeared into the kitchen and triumphantly re-emerged with a ziplock bag half-full of Wesson Oil...which he then proceeded to use to attempt to fire the Surgeon General while she watched. Of course, she had to tell me the tale the next day, and was damn near rolling on the floor by the time she got to his go-round with the baggie.
"My," I observed dryly..."that certainaly puts a whole new spin on "Wessonality", now doesn't it?")
(A quick example: if you ever happened to see the documentary Athens, GA Inside/Out, you might remember a band called the Bar-B-Que Killers, fronted by one Laura Carter, who resembled nothing so much as a seriously pissed-off and drugged-up 13-year-old boy. Well, Laura's post-BBQ Killers band was called Felch, and their very first band flyers, posted all over downtown Athens, depicted exactly that activity...somehow I don't think the 40 Watt Club was terribly happy about having to pay the fine simply because they'd booked the damn band in the first place. Anyhow, at one of Laura's live performances--which usually involved some degree of nudity by the end of the set--she had apparently stuffed the better part of a sack full of Mardi Gras beads up her hoohoo, and proceeded to pull them out, one or two strands at a time, and throw them into the audience...certain members of whom actually proceeded to put them in their mouths and suck away gleefully. One friend of mine told me that was the very first show she ever saw in Athens shortly after she moved to town; frankly, I'm just amazed that she didn't run screaming all the way to Hartsfield International to catch the first plane home to Toronto, but I guess she was made of stronger stuff than that. )
I could go on, but I promised you a different story, and it's time I started telling it...)
Humectress Man was none other than the SO of a housemate of mine in Athens; at the time the events to be described took place, he was involved in the operation of a music venue in town. I had thought he was being friendly to me simply because he was a nice guy, and perhaps he was, and thought I was reasonably cool (at least, that's what he claimed once), but his main motive was to get into my housemate's panties, at which he was eventually successful. Too bad he already had a girlfriend at home--somehow he neglected to mention that particular fact until the housemate was already quite on the hook, the schmuck--so his extracurricular activities tended to be conducted either backstage at the venue, or when the GF was out of town...
One time, after the evening's entertainment was over, he made a booty call to invite her to the now-empty club...at some point during the late-night entertainment, he decided that showing her some of his girl/girl porn magazines might be just the trick to get her terribly hot and bothered. (Apparently it didn't occur to him that most straight women find fake lesbians boring, stupid and not at all arousing.) Not one to waste an opportunity for good clean fun, and more than willing to take matters into his own hands, he disappeared into the venue's shower (which his female business partner tended to use to clean up before heading home), returned several minutes later from the club's shower with her bottle of Nexxus Humectress conditioner, and proceeded to jack off in front of the housemate while reading the magazine, using the Humectress as lube. (I imagine it worked pretty well, especially if you happen to like having nice, soft, coconut-scented pubes, although I'd bet his partner would have been PISSED to find out what he was using her expensive conditioner for...) Needless to say, after my incredulous housemate told me the tale the next day, I immediately dubbed the wanker "Humectress Man", and that he shall remain, at least in our personal mythology.
(One more tale of HM's boundless creativity: One fine weekend, he had the housemate over to his own personal love shack (the official sweetie was, of course, out of town), but unfortunately Little Elvis just wasn't in a partying mood that evening due to rather too much Bolivian Marching Powder snuffed up earlier in the evening. Being an inventive fellow, though, he disappeared into the kitchen and triumphantly re-emerged with a ziplock bag half-full of Wesson Oil...which he then proceeded to use to attempt to fire the Surgeon General while she watched. Of course, she had to tell me the tale the next day, and was damn near rolling on the floor by the time she got to his go-round with the baggie.
"My," I observed dryly..."that certainaly puts a whole new spin on "Wessonality", now doesn't it?")
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