It's a Lonely Lonely Town

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I'm heading to visit NY with no plans to see any friends.

Most of my friend who've lived there in the past have married and moved to various suburbs, like you do. Others, the ones who aren't yet officially hitched, have either crept so far into their relationships that there doesn't seem to be room for any other human beings. The very few people I know who either aren't in a hermetically sealed relationship or haven't found the person with which to find that xenophobic bliss, they just don't seem to want to have much to do with me anymore.

I suppose it's not all that suprising; I moved to LA over 2 years ago and while I scrambled to get my life and sanity back together everyone else moved on with their lives and I've been left behind in the proverbial dust. Time and space can be trying on any type of relationship and friendships based on what now seems to be superficiality or proximity suffer the most with distance. Time might make the heart grow fonder for some, but I've found that in my case, it's just mostly out of sight, out of mind.

While it has always been fiscally responsible to be able to stay with friends while in town, it also provided me with that extra time with the hosts. Some of the best conversations can be held with a friend over the morning cup of coffee. With my dire lack of companionship, I have been forced to shell out an entire paycheck to find proper housing. Yes, this does give me a lot less money to play with as I wander up and down the streets of Manhattan, I am also foreseeing a deep sense of loss as I wake up and go to sleep without a friendly body in the next room.

New York itself has never let me down, and I only hope that on this next trip where so much will be spent in personal solitude, that the city I love is there for me once again.

My Adventures in Gastronomy

Thanks to the Food Network, I have been developing what I am hoping is the beginnings of a refined palate. Granted most of this refinement is going on in my mind, as I'm not really capable of indulging in seared foie gras or sweetbreads - mostly since I have no money. But I have been known to peruse various website and restaurant menus mentally indulging in their various gourmet offerings.

Recently, I was invited to Vegas to meet up with a friend of mine that I haven't seen in a long time. Thankfully, unlike some other people I've been to Vegas with, this friend loves to eat at good restaurants and has offered to pay for a meal at any restaurant in Vegas that I choose.

While on the surface, this seems, well, to be pretty damned amazing, I have found myself struggling with the abundance of choice.

Vegas has become a haven for fine dining, with many celebrity chefs such as Emeril Lagasse, Charlie Palmer, Jean-George, and the omnipresent Wolfgang Puck. The city abounds with menus promising heaven on a plate, be it from the ocean or the land. The more website I visit the more I become confused as to how exactly I want to take advantage of this bountiful offer.

A few days after returning from Vegas, I'll be flying to NY, yet another gathering of brilliant restaurants. Of course the difference there will be that I will be paying for the meals and my choices will be far more limited. I have been scouring the web for pre-theatre prix fixe menus and have had a hard time balancing my need to try new and exotic tastes with my ever shrinking wallet. Suggestions would be most welcome.

In the end, reading the lists of exquisite foods is nothing less than my very own brand of voyeuristic food porn.
I toast to the day I get to participate.

And I thought Pope on a Rope was Funny

Currently on Ebay, up for bid at this very moment, there is a chicken breast that if one looks hard enough, resembles the profile of Pope John Paul II.

While that might be amusing, there are actually people out there who are BIDDING on this. 58 bidders as of right now and the price has hit almost $230. Are people so starved for religion that they are willing to look to a piece of chicken? A piece of chicken that I might add has its own website.
My deity doesn't have it's own website.
Hrm, maybe I should start worshipping that piece of chicken too?

In other religious news, a man from Cupertino, CA took communion from Pope John Paul II in 1998 and saved the wafer only to put it on Ebay and make a cool two grand.
Now I'm not wholly buying into the whole concept of the communion wafer to begin with, but it just strikes me as odd that this man held onto the cracker, waiting for John Paul II to die so that the cracker would increase in value.
Didn't he realize that it already had spiritual value?

Everyone Has AIDS!

They are making a movie version of the Broadway musical "Rent" and from looking at the cast, there is chance it might not suck.

I love "Rent". I've seen it 5 times and at one point had memorized the entire score. To this day there are still certain songs that get me every single godamned time. And even though the subject matter can seem at time slightly dated, the show still has relevance. Today was the first I heard of the movie version and despite the director's helm being taken up by Chris Columbus who brought us such brilliant social commentary as "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Home Alone", the fact that they have almost the entire original Broadway cast is terribly encouraging.

I'm not quite sure how well the play will transfer over to the big screen, but I guess we should ready ourselves for a slew of these movi-fied Broadway Plays - "The Producers" is currently filming and I believe I heard rumors that they are going to make a movie musical out of "Hairspray". Of course both were originally movies before they were musicals, but I guess no one wants to think about that.

Should "Rent" prove to suck and suck hard, we can all just sit back and remember Matt and Trey's version "Lease" and hum the tune of "Everyone Has AIDS".

Who Says the World Isn't Coming to an End?

After watching the new NBC show "Revelations" I'm sure I'm not the only one who is currently on the lookout for the signs telling us it is indeed the end of days.

Today, I saw one of these signs.

I was browsing the New York Times website, looking for some article to entertain me while I ate my lunch and lo, I found this. I don't know about anyone else, but this scared the bejeezus out of me.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie "The Wedding Singer" and thought that it was easily Adam Sandler's best role. "The Wedding Singer" showed us that Drew Barrymore could be adorable and likeable again and that fashions from the 80's really were as awful as we remembered. Surprising almost everyone, "The Wedding Singer" became a smash hit and still has a healthy life rerunning on cable television. The movie spawned two soundtrack albums, both of which were worth buying, and that seemed to be the end of it.

But with the success of shows like "Spamalot" and "Hairspray", Broadway producers seem to be scouring IMDb for movies that can be made into toe-tapping, knee-slapping musicals. And they've settled on this - "The Wedding Singer".

What exactly about this movie screamed "live stage production"? And how exactly are they going to get Billy Idol to show up every night for his cameo at the end of the performance? Has no one thought about the fact that 90% of the charm of the movie was generated by the chemistry between the 2 leads and perhaps 2 other actors, talented as they might be, might not be able to recreate that charm?

While "The Wedding Singer" is by no mean a classic that should never be touched, I do see it as a work of art (in the larger sense of the word) that really doesn't need to be remade in any other medium. I'm now waiting for the musical of "Pretty Woman" or the dramatic retelling of "Animal House" since it really does tell of the epic struggle between good and evil, dark and light, rude frat boys and rich frat boys!

I just found out that they are developing a full scale restaging of all 3 Lord of the Rings movies, which I'm sure will translate brilliantly to the stage.
Perhaps "The Wedding Singer" won't be so bad after all.

Vegas, Gay Men and Me

This past weekend I was back in that haven in the middle of the desert, Sin City, and a zillion other names. That's right, I was back in fabulous Las Vegas (the fabulous is if you believe the Welcome sign as you drive into the city).

Middle of last week, I felt an extreme need to get the hell out of Los Angeles, and agreed to go with my friend David to Vegas for the weekend. We managed to find flights out of LA, but finding flights back in proved to be more difficult. Yet the need to be away was so great that we bought outbound tickets without having return tickets as well. It's just a 5 hour drive from Vegas to LA, so we thought worse case scenario, we'd rent a car and drive back on Sunday. Luckily, 2 seats opened up later that night. As much as I love a good car trip, 5 hours of driving through the desert doesn't really appeal to me when I just want to get home.

Anyway, we had grand plans for the weekend. And they involved 2 very very gay men.

Friday night we saw Barry Manilow in concert. Yes, the Barry Manilow. Funny story: I actually met Mr. Manilow around 6 years ago when I was working at a Holocaust museum in LA. He was our celebrity guest at the annual Youth Holocaust Commemoration. Didn't get much interaction with him, but damn if he didn't bring with him an entire entourage of people. I'm supposing to protect him from all those 5th and 6th graders. Anyway, his show was suprisingly entertaining. I knew far more of his songs than I had previously realized. (When we decided to see Manilow, I told David that I was going to sing "Copacabana" no matter what song Barry himself was singing, mostly since that is the only song of his I thought I vaguely knew). I found it odd that for the song "Mandy" Barry did a duet with a video image of him from the 70's, but who am I to judge? Throughout the concert, we were treated to a slew of horribly cheesy dirty jokes a la Manilow. I never knew Barry was so dirty. We were all given glowsticks to crack open during Copacabana and the entire theatre was full of raving geriatrics. Overall, I left shouting about how much I loved Barry and was now a "fanilow".
This feeling has since waned.

The other gay man we saw was Elton John, the gayest of them all.

EJ's show was in the same theatre where Celine Dion does her shtick most of the year. I've seen Celine and EJ's show couldn't have been more different. Celine's show was done by someone from Cirque de Soleil (which now has around 4 or 5 shows in Vegas). EJ's show was done by a guy who has directed a slew of music videos and commercials, and it showed. I must sy for a man who likes penis, there were an awful lot of naked female breasts in the videos that played at Elton sang. The breast highlight was during the song "The Bitch is Back": the video was Pam Anderson doing a pole dance wearing precious, precious little and from the top right hand corner of the same popped out two HUGE inflatable breasts. It was quite easily the largest rack I've ever seen. As for the show itself, he may be old, he may be short and fat and waddle across stage, but man oh man can Mr. John perform. The music as good if not better than the original recording and in an age when it is so accepted to lip synch, he belted out each song with extreme gusto. In person it is easy to see what an incredible virtuoso he is; like his music or not the man can play. Though David and I spent the better part of the pre-show waiting debating about what he would close with, EJ surprised probably most people and closed with "Your Song", a sweet and sentimental favorite that helped everyone leave feeling just that much better about the world.

With Siegfried and Roy out of it, Liberace dead and no more headlining Elvis impersonators, at this point all I have left to see to complete the "cheesy-show tour of Vegas" is Wayne Newton. I'll be the one singing "Danke Schone" through the entire show.

Cookie Monster Redeux

Apparently I'm not the only one who feels that parents should be the ones held responsible for their kids' eating habits, as shown here.

While I agree that this issue of childhood obesity can use all the help it can get, do we really want parents thinking they are absolved of it just because Cookie monster will no longer inhale cookies like air.

Though I have to say, I was particularly amused by the Tucan's mild enthusiasm for Cocoa Puffs.
They aren't that great afterall.

No More Cookies For This Monster

Yes, after a long, long hiatus I am back.

And what has awoken me from my non-publishing slumber? News that Cookie Monster will no longer be Cookie Monster.

According to NPR ,among other news sources, in the new season of Sesame Street, Cookie Monster will no longer be the cookie scarfing furry blue monster that we all grew up with. Apparently, parents, teachers, and TV programmers feel the need to blame the growing rates of child obesity on what is basically a hand puppet.

Bravo.

The time honored song "C Is For Cookie", a song that subtlely taught children that the letter "c" can sometimes sound like a "k", will be no more. In it's place he'll sing what I can only imagine will be a condescendingly pedantic new tune called "A Cookie is a sometimes food", since you only eat cookies "sometimes". Although I have not yet heard this marvelous new song, I have little faith in it's ability to enchant the way Cookie Monster's original theme song did.

I wonder if parents and TV programmers alike didn't stop and think of other solutions. Have generations of children watched Cookie Monster farcically shove mountains of chocolate chip cookies into his obviously fake mouth and believed that that is the proper diet to adopt as they grew up? Let's push aside the idea that maybe children are smarter than that and just see if there is another, better solution to the problem.

Not that I honestly believe that the C. Monster should bear the burden of the years of highly sugared cereals, snacks full of carbohydrates and corn syrup, and an overall sedentary lifestyle that do actually make a child obese, but let's just say for the sake of argument that you want to think that way. If parents are really so concerned about what their children are watching, then perhaps they should take a more active role in discussing the content of what their kids watch with them. Counteract the negative aspects of Cookie Monster's personality by making sure YOU tell your children that cookies aren't to be eaten 24-7; YOU show through example that foods such as fruits and vegetables can be just as delicious as that oreo cookie. Then, if the talks and examples don't work, then maybe it would be time to think about changing the hand puppet.

It was bad enough we had to suffer through the Conservatives ranting and raving that Bert and Ernie were living in sin. While we need to give kids the benefit of the doubt, we also need to acknowledge their innocence. Bert and Ernie were never some hot and sweaty homosexual twosome, but a couple of friends who shared an apartment and were always arguing over boring it was to collect bottlecaps. Cookie Monster has never been a role model for kids to look up to and copy by eating box upon box of cookies. He has been a silly monster whose crazy cookie-eating-antics were always funnier than they were admirable.

I say, deal with childhood obesity in the home and at school, and let our buddy Cookie Monster have his cookies and eat them too.