Footloose

I took the Butcher to see Footloose tonight.  In revenge, he says that he hopes our tattooed friend fights with my friend at lunch tomorrow and then takes her into the bathroom and “knows” her so loudly that everyone in the restaurant stares.

That being said, I think he liked it.

I’ll say this for it.  It’s better than the movie.

So, yes, I thought the singing was great and the acting was good.  But the play is what it is.  I really about wanted to take the whole cast and stick them in something else, just to see what they could do, but maybe that’s not fair.  I mean, it’s based on the movie.

But I felt like the play itself was a little too sketchy.  LIke the mom might as well be matrix ex machina for all the time she gets on stage, but the actor did a great job with the character.  And the woman who played the preacher’s wife did a great job conveying that kind of stiffling “we must let the men be in control” crap from the 80s.  The preacher was really good once his character was given a little conflict.

And the men… oh they can sing.  It’s worth it to go just to hear “Mama Says.”

And the girl who played Rusty was really, really good.

So, this is disjointed, but I liked it and we had a good time.  I think that, if you’re one of those folks who loves the 80s, you’d have a really good time and I think it’d be a great thing to take your kids to.

Wedding Plans

My intern has the most beautiful handwriting in the whole world. I shit you not. And I was marveling over it today at work and accusing him of developing such beautiful handwriting so that he could game the system in school, where he could write something like “Just adding three parts hydrogen to two parts water will result in a plethora of frogs” and his professors would be all like “Oh, my god, it doesn’t seem true, but how can anything be false in such a factual looking handwriting?”

Anyway, I was all “Oh my god, I want you to write…”

And he said “Your wedding invitations?”

And I said, “Well, I’d have to find someone and get engaged all before you go back to school in the fall.”

And he said, “Not really. We could just pick a name and put it on there–like John R. Smith–and you just advertise on Craig’s list that you’ll only see dudes with that name. Then they’re ready to go whenever you find the right John R. Smith.”

To which I said “Bwah ha ha ha ha.”

But to which I was, of course, thinking “I have to blog about that.”

Slow Exhale

Many of the folks I know and care about are in the midst of letting loved ones go.  It’s all I can think about, when I sit down to write, but I don’t really know what to say.

My dad being a minister, death was a matter of course in our house and the rhythms of the funeral are intimately familiar for me.  And yet it’s fresh every time.

The thing that strikes me about dead bodies, that has always struck me, is how little they look like the people you know.  I remember sitting in my cousin’s car, listening to her tell me about the death of her father, and she said, “They told us that it would be like he went to sleep, but it wasn’t like that at all.  It was like he left, something that was him left, and what was in that bed was all wrong–the face looked wrong, the body looked wrong.

It’s, to me, one of the things that keeps me believing in some kind of animating force–call it a soul, if you will–that is both us and not us.  Because, when you die, that thing leaves and you can see it leave.  Sometimes you can even feel it leave.

I don’t know.  You know.  Nothing in the universe is lost.  It changes form, but it’s never really lost.

I believe that to be true of us as well.  We are not unique in the universe in that way.  I don’t think, anyway, and so I have to believe that even we just change form and stick around.

I Can Only Be Grateful My Friends Don’t Know This “Joke”

Or maybe it’s a contest.  We all drink and the first one to pass out gets his crotch set on fire.

Mark Mays is Right

This is thebest thing you will see all day.

Sticks in Your Craw

Every once in a while you’ll learn something about a story that unsettles you, makes you feel like there’s something really not right, that you’re not being told, going on behind the scenes.

Such is the case with the death of Baron Pikes, who was tased multiple times by the one cop in the department likely to tase people, who are likely to be black, twice after he was already dead.

There’s a lot to this story that makes you wonder if you’re getting the whole story.  A man wanted on drug charges who had no drugs in his system?  I don’t know.  I know a lot of people who use drugs and, usually, if they use drugs, they use drugs.  You know what I mean?  Yet, here a guy wanted on a drug charge dies and there are no drugs in his system–not coke, not pot, nothing.  Just seems weird.

Then, of course, there’s the officer who claims that “something happened with his body that caused him to go into cardiac arrest or whatever.”  Yes, that something would be your office repeatedly electrocuting him.  Odd.

And then, at the bottom of the CNN story, there’s the whole sordid tale of corruption within the town where this happened.  So, it makes you wonder just a little what’s going on in that town.

But elle, phd points out something I hadn’t seen before.  Pikes was Mychal Bell’s first cousin.  And doesn’t that just stick in your craw?