cats, thriller, and the rock

Monday, apr. 3, 2006   |   0 comments

Much like prom, the big theme for last week was “Bait and Switch.” All week, I kept thinking I was going to be doing one thing but then suddenly I’d find myself doing something totally, crazily different. Like Sunday, Marco and I thought we going to see Sunny’s band Knife and Fork play at Du Nord, but instead we found ourselves dancing to Thriller at Beauty Bar (which isn’t usually my favorite spot in SF, but actually turned out to be fun, despite all the farts) along with Marco’s surprise Japanese cousin Yuji — who, after consuming his very first Jager shot (USA!), for some reason wound up walking home wearing one of Marco’s shoes.

And then Monday, when Yuji discovered he’d read his plane ticket wrong and had to leave a day earlier than planned, I wound up semi-reluctantly (rain, cold) using his pre-purchased ticket to accompany Marco on a very long visit to Alcatraz, which was so weird and also disappointing (specifically, I kept trying to get Marco to pose for photos in a cell, with also his shirt off, but he kept smiling and nodding and yet leaving his shirt on???).

Then Tuesday, Kristin was all, do you want to go for a non-weekend discount-rate night at Dr. Wilkinson’s Spa and Motel in Calistoga? And even though I am not the hugest fan of mud baths (ever since I made the mistake of musing, while lying in a mud bath maybe eleven years ago, “hey I bet some sorts of people get a sexual satifaction from shitting here”), I went anyway! But I sort of inexplidiotically forgot my bathing suit, so we spent our first hour in town looking for a place to buy a new one. When all we found were hideous, eighty-dollar suits, I wound up with a twelve-dollar XXL “disposable” suit from a slightly-more-upscale spa up the street. I must say, the suit made me look mildly nuts; if a showercap could be a swimsuit, this is what it would be. It was made out of a sort of paper tablecloth type of material, and its primary structural elements were tight elastic cinchings at the legs, waist, and around the armpits. Everywhere else the suit BALLOONed out, and alternately carried huge pockets of air (getting in the pool) or water (getting out).

There was a small pack of teenagers in the pool when we first went down (in addition to the mud bath and spa, there were three pools: warm, hot, and hotter), and for a slice of a second I felt bashful, like maybe they would think I was a goon for wearing this disposable paper tablecloth swimsuit? But then I realized that I’m now so old that they’d think I was a goon no matter what I was wearing. And there’s something so delicious about that, the very particular “letting go” sensation that comes with arriving at an age that pretty much can’t be awesome in the teen sense, and so is totally absolved of having to know what words like “two in the pink, one in the stink” or “myspace” mean. It’s very freeing, this knowledge that nobody gives one fudgey chigger about what you know or say. It’s a cozy feeling, but titillating too, like (I IMAGINE) peeing in an already pee-warm pool, or … shitting in a mud bath.

Then on Saturday Marco and I were all set to go see Adam do a fundraising event for Encinal High School in Alameda, but unfortunately we didn’t pay close enough attention to the fine print and wound up going directly to Encinal High (the recipient of the funds to be raised) when really the event was all the way across town at Kofman Auditorium. So we roll up at Encinal, and it looked grim: there were maybe six cars parked in the lot, which seemed like a bad sign considering the show was supposed to start just ten minutes hence. And yet, the school’s marquee read “Mythbusters.” But, ominously, it also read “Cats.” Confused, we pulled up next to a man who was unloading off-brand concessions sodas from his car and asked him where the Mythbusters show was playing, and the guy visibly deflated, like, “there goes a third of tonight’s Cats audience,” but he nicely directed us to the correct venue. As we were pulling out of the sparcely attended parking lot, we saw an actual Cat — with the makeup and the ears and the tail and the ruffian clothing — getting out of her parents’ minivan, and we both squealed, “Look! A Cats!“ But anyway, we drove as fast as we could, but by the time we got to the right place (we did get lost once), Adam’s show had already started, and there was zero parking to be found. After driving and driving and driving and still not finding a spot, one of said, “Should we just go see Cats?” And that’s exactly what we did.