If our weekend wasn’t great enough with the brunch and psychic energy, Saturday night got better. After a meal of wood-roasted chicken, pork and beef with kale, squash and lots of taters (not all in one entree, Lulu’s serves family style), we headed off to a real live theater show.
The company was great, including Kevin, who has the dubious honor of being the person I know on either coast who has known me almost as long as my own family. Our birthdays are a few days apart, plus the year that he is older than me, which was true back at Central Junior High School. I like to consider the cycle of Pisces in the calendar as a full-on month of birthday celebrating for me and M., and I’m happy to include Kevin in the festival.
The real live “play” we saw was more of a theatrical experience — The SF cast of “Point Break Live.”
Here’s something that might not be my finest trait, I loves me a Patrick Swayze movie. Far as I’m concerned any afternoon or night with a remote control is enhanced by a chance encounter with Point Break or Roadhouse. Nobody did muscle-bound, soft-spoken quasi-philosopher better than Patrick. Add some cheesy dialog and over the top (or in Keanu’s case in Point Break under the top), I’m done for a couple of hours.
The Metreon in SF is one of our usual places to see new movies. From where we now live, it’s about the same distance away as the suburban movie houses, but there’s more food and fun to be had in the big city, plus it’s an IMAX theater. The last two or three times we went to see a flick, I saw the flyers and then the lobby advertising “Point Break Live.” I was becoming a bit obsessed, which was heightened when I caught 3/4 of the movie on late night cable recently. The frequency of my calling M. “dude” had been increasing. Then Kathryn Bigelow won some Oscars.
So we lived my dream.
From the minute I grabbed a can of PBR and sat on a metal bench inside a clear plastic poncho inside a dingy little theater, I felt at home. The grimy black box with stage wings created by homemade curtains and the rowdy crowd of fairly hip looking 20- and 30-somethings reminded me of the gritty fun of sipping a cheap beer in the back of the old ImprovBoston Theater waiting for the “Great and Secret Show” to start. I was disappointed from that feeling as the night wore on and the show unfurled.
The cast was great. The hook of a new Johnny Utah chosen every show worked better than Keanu’s performance. It was much funnier than I thought it might be.
The downside was the playing up of the homo-erotic closeness of the surfer boy gang. It was played broadly and for laughs, which meant an edge that teetered between homophobia and comic eroticism. However, that played out well for my creepy old lady thrills. At one point when the surfers are introduced sans their “Ex-Presidents” masks, they stand and lie and lounge along the side of the stage, including having one cast member draped on the laps of the audience. They rearranged our seating order to make sure that he was on top of women only, and there I was with a cluster of young, muscled boys surrounding me. The one on my lap with hard pecs and pierced nipples grabbed my hand to rub the suntan lotion they were smearing around into his flesh.
I was an incidental and unintended cougar with a PBR in one hand and a young man in the other. I cooperated for the sake of art.
Between the show, the dinner and the psychic, not to mention the pedicure and massage M. decided that we needed before heading out for the evening, I almost forgot to hate this weekend. It takes a lot to mellow me out during the hell that is Daylight Saving Time.
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