REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
As we say goodbye to Arnold from Happy Days, the twue wuv of Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson, and the congressional career of convicted felon/GOP stalwart Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who represented the people of north San Diego so faithfully (if'n you don't count the bribes), I'm feeling a little blue. I'm remembering yesterday, and—cue that bitch Barbra Streisand—the way we were. Actually, it's not nostalgia for yesterday so much as it's nostalgia for last Thursday specifically, the day that shall live in infamy as the Traditional Thanksgiving Drink-All-Day of 2005. Commie Mom knows how to throw a fucking party.
1. Start by buying little, tiny bottles of gin.
2. Drink them.
There's a local columnist for another paper whose advice about entertaining always—but always—includes the instructions to cook only—but only—the main course yourself (have friends bring the rest), get commitments from friends to refurbish the tables and bus the dishes, and make those same friends clean up afterward.
Every time I read this woman, I end up positively spitting with rage. Do you have any idea what Miss Manners would say?
Neither do I! I could write to Manners and ask, but she's not getting any less old, and I don't want to be the letter writer who actually turns up her toes. I like Miss Manners! Why would I go and kill her like that?
Commie Mom not only doesn't make anyone help, but did I mention the little tiny bottles of gin?
Well, actually, I brought those, which we taste-tested, with delicate, ladylike sips (they were delicious sipping gins) that went steadily, all day, like a gin IV. But she let me!
Thanksgiving was one of those lovey, thankful days, with my gay, my mom's gays, Suparna the Rocket Scientist, my younger brother and my small buttercup of a son all gathered round the hearth being thankful and listening to Commie Mom's shocking secrets (I think it was the gin), except for my brother, who wasn't drinking and so was bitching about his car's lack of (a) a headlight and (b) tags combined with his (c) three warrants and whining that he was sure he would get popped by the dastardly fuzz, which he succeeded in doing later that night. So no Strapping Young Buck this week; he was going to write a review for us of the ElSegundo jail, but they wouldn't let him have a pen. I, for one, found visiting my little lovecake of a brother in jail for his 23rd birthday Sunday hilarious, but he wasn't so much in agreement. In fact, he was downright cranky.
Poor little sweetling. Here's hoping he's back soon, because otherwise I have to cover the nightlife beat, and, as y'all know, I'm crotchety and a bitch.
NIGHTLIFE
So. Nightlife.
Availing myself of Commie Mom's patented Elixir of Love (the secret to which she took only 32 years to get drunk and reveal), I headed down to the Gypsy Lounge Friday to enslave all the men and make them mine. (And it totally worked. Dudes are toast.)
With Chris Hanlin in town for the weekend, Long Beach supergroup The Dibs resupergrouped and hit the stage, playing an earnest and sincere but middling set lacking in their hits. (I know they're playing to the superfan with the rare material, but like I told Joni Mitchell: B-sides are B-sides for a reason.) Opening for them was Roger Moon, a sweet tot who had a self-pressed CD full of excellent originals and who in this set played excellent cover choices unplugged, from Springsteen's “I'm On Fire” to that U2 song where she is raging. You know the one. He also opened “I Want You (She's So Heavy)” with a perky, “This one is a Beatles song from Abbey Road. I hope you know it!”
See? Sweet!
Headlining was a band all my cool friends liked, and I tried to watch so Mary Reilly wouldn't be the only one in the office who knows the hip new bands while I just go see the same Long Beach supergroups (and all Long Beach groups are Long Beach supergroups) I've loved for years, but I was drunk and had already conquered all the men I wanted, so it was time to get gone.
A NOTE OF DISAPPOINTMENT IN ?YOU, MY READERS
When I was on vacation a couple weeks back, I kept hearing on the radio that California voters had overwhelmingly defeated Arnold Schwarzenegger's ballot measures. I was so proud of you—truly!—that you bothered to show up to what should have been a 4-percent-turnout election just to hand him his well-sculpted ass. But then I returned home and read that, in fact, OC voters overwhelmingly approved every last dastardly one of them, and I realized I'm completely full of shit. Every time I tell someone that OC doesn't actually fit the John Birch Society stereotype we've been living down all these years, that, sure, there's Barbara Coe and her nasty bigot society the CCIR (California Coalition for Immigration Reform), but they're always, always met with fun Mexican counterprotesters dancing joyously in a conga/picket line, well, every time I defend you, it turns out you're making me into a liar. You suck, you suck, you suck!
Not only that, but I was in LA this weekend for Suparna the Rocket Scientist's 30th birthday—girl is woman now, and I brought the gin—and they have a movie theater with drinks. If Orange County doesn't get a movie theater with drinks now, I'm fucking leaving, I swear to God! And while ArcLight gouges you on the tickets ($14 per), the bar is actually quite nice; I bought a round of four or five drinks for $27, and at least one of those was Absolut.
By the way, Johnny Cash? Not really a very good husband, and I didn't really get what June Carter saw in him, all sweaty and drug-addicted and a lying sack of shit. Still: Walk the Line? Pretty good flick, but it could set the women's movement back fierce. Everybody makes fun of you when you try to fix the bad boys, and then in sweep Reese Witherspoon and her Mother Maybelle's shotgun and turn the world's worst man into a loving husband of decades and beloved national patriarch? Fuck that noise! Y'all!
IN CONCLUSION
I said fuck that!
Christmas is coming. CommieGirlCollective.com.
