My Weekend

Friday night I watched the first act of the 1983 Broadway revival of Mame, with Angela Lansbury. very good video for its age. A really splendid production that only lasted for a month and sent Lansbury off to Cabot Cove. I also spent a lot of that evening chatting. I'm trying to not write about my adventures in that chat room for a few reasons: my handle there links directly to this blog and I keep forgetting to change that; it just doesn't seem right to reveal the activities of an invite-only chat room; and, most important, the more I write about it, the more seriously I take it and the more seriously I take it, the more embedded I become in that particular microcosm. And I fucking hate microcosms.

Anyway, my whole point for bringing the chatting up is that I'm having difficulty with other gay men who seem to be much better at adulthood than I am. It brings out my insecurities - not hard to do, granted - which have been really hitting me hard this week. And they flared up again on Friday night over some nonsense that I can't even remember today. I needed a friend and luckily Annika was home. We ended up giggling a lot. We do that sometimes.

Oh, I also referred to the fact that I watch Family Guy. A chatter made a snide comment about the fact that I watch television and I told him to bite my shiny metal ass. Later it occurred to me that people who don't watch TV are probably not going to understand Futurama references, but that's his problem.

Just sort of hung out on Saturday. Spent a lot of time cataloguing cast recordings. Finished watching Mame and realized that the second act really devolves into drag queen camp but is still enormously enjoyable. Had dinner with Josh, who is moving to Vega$. Got home and watched Chicago.

Somehow Chicago has acquired the reputation as one of the less-worthy Oscar winners. Bollocks to that. It was a brilliant fucking musical then and it remains so. It actually looks better in retrospect, considering the stage musical adaptations that have come since: Rent's problems began with most of its cast being way too fucking old, but certainly don't end there. Dreamgirls's book scenes were woefully lacking the energy present in the musical numbers. Sweeney Todd had Helena Bonham Carter acting brilliantly but singing in head voice. I was disappointed in Hairspray, which was a great deal of fun, watered down the racial context of the stage musical, which really watered it down from John Waters's original film. I think of all of those films as missed opportunities, which makes Chicago all the more remarkable, even with its occasional overzealous editing.

Yesterday was just lovely. My friend John split up with his partner earlier this year and they had season tickets to everything. So he took me to see Ain't Misbehavin' at the Goodman and it was outstanding. The original cast album of the show is easily the most played album in my entire collection, and that's saying something. I've listened to it hundreds of times and have never gotten sick of it. I brought it with me to work at the Alley and even they loved it.

John is the biggest stud I've ever met. I don't know anyone who gets laid as often as he does. It's mind-boggling. We couldn't do anything after the show because he had to go meet up with someone else. He's hooking up with two guys from Cypress tonight that he spent part of the weekend with. Crazy.

(And yes. We do.)