A Little Red Velvet from G:TB's Cultural Attaché

As I enter middle age, I've started to draw some generalized conclusions about the world based on my decades of accumulated wisdom. Such as: some things are better experienced live. Like pro sports. I enjoy pro sports much more when I'm there, in the flesh, watching the game unfold while sitting cheek by jowl with the great unwashed (e.g., TR). I think it's because I've seen everything that could happen, happen. Maybe some things just don't hold my attention in two dimensions anymore. For instance, regular season baseball is almost unwatchable on TV at this point in my life.

Music is better live too, at least for some bands or genres. I never sit down and listen to classical music at home, but I used to take advantage of free tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra with some regularity.

Sex is better live too. As opposed to a magazine or movie. I mean with a live woman. I never did it with a dead woman. And I mean being the person having the sex with the live woman. Not watching someone else be the person. I never did that either.

I guess I just really appreciate being there experiencing someone do their thing at a very high level, regardless of what their thing is.

Another conclusion: New York City is a preposterous place to live. Taxes are insane. Housing is offensively expensive. Groceries are stupidly dear. I can't find a decent barber. Getting east-west is nearly impossible. But the food is fantastic. And there are plenty of opportunities to watch live sports and live music.

You may have reached some of these conclusions on your own. But you likely haven't synthesized them into one idea for a weekend outing. I have. Combine NYC with an interest in live entertainment, and a live-in ladyfriend, and blammo: Broadway. It turns out that watching really good actors live is better than watching them on your TV or a movie screen.

I'm sure you'll say this is corny, cheesey, or some other pejorative food analogy. I even expect a ghey call or two. I don't care. The Z-woman and I go every other month or so and it's fun. I saw "A Behanding in Spokane" this weekend. It features Sam Rockwell, the guy Morgan Freeman beat up in "Million Dollar Baby," and some little blonde girl with disarmingly big feet. It's a dark comedy about a guy who had his hand cut off and who now wanders the country looking for it.


Christopher Walken plays the lead. He is hands down (get it?) the eeriest guy in the world. He was 100 feet away from me and I was still skeeved out by him. I knew it was a comedy going in, so I laughed at a lot of his creepy shit. Remember his maniacally funny soliloquies from "Pulp Fiction" and "True Romance"? He had about five of those. And his insulting repartees from "Biloxie Blues"? He had two or three of those too. No one can be as simultaneously funny and discomforting as Walken. But if you walked in off the street and didn't know it was a comedy, you'd find his character scary as hell, like Nick at the end of "The Deer Hunter." Dude's a freak. An incredibly gifted actor, but a freak nonetheless.

I encourage you to get out and watch people do something that they are really good at and that's fun and impressive to behold: go check out some live theater. I don't like musicals, but if you went to one you could combine live acting and live music, and your lady will probably dig it so you might end up making real live love. The trifecta! Or roll like me, avoid the troika and look for actors you like in regular plays with no singing and dancing. And then on the ride home when your lady says "That was really great, I had no idea you were so cultured" you can say "Babygirl, my shit is deeper than Atlantis" and then turn up the volume on your Whitefield Brothers CD, and unless she reads this blog she'll think she has herself a true man of the world.