Chaos Attraction

Weird Strange Bizarre + Bling

2019-04-13, 7:56 p.m.

It was a day of theater. I first saw Aladdin (Broadway version) and that is the BLINGIEST show I think I’ve ever seen. The Cave of Wonders in particular is awesome. As is the carpet-flying scene, very starry. Very bright costumes. The guy playing the Genie was having a very good time. Jasmine gets to be more feminist, which is great, and she even figures out on her own that Ali is Aladdin, or at least it was the same guy. Aladdin also has three bros he pals around with in this movie, so that’s a new thing. Jasmine gets a song about wanting to leave the palace, which I approve of. “Proud Of Your Boy” is played three times, about three times too many because man, it’s not memorable or pulling my heartstrings when Aladdin’s mom isn’t even in this.

Anyway, good show, it was what Mom was looking forward to for months.

Fun facts:
* They sent 10 trucks a week ago and then another 15 trucks this week.
* There are 20 tons worth of sets.
* Costumes were custom-made by hand by more than 350 people in almost 30 different costume shops.
* 337 costumes in the show, 108 costume changes that take place in less than one minute.

Mauricio had been saying for literally months that he wanted to get together the next time I was in the Bay Area, and of course he did a flake and bail on that one. He said he was too busy getting ready to go to Costa Rica again.

I found out later that Mom threw a fit because Mauricio wanted to bring other friends along--”why am I never enough?” Sigh. I also wanted to tell him in person that I got into a play, but Mom already did it. Sigh again.

Anyway, I’d said that if we did get together with Mauricio for dinner (yeah right) I’d probably spend the night, but if not I’d leave. She called me before I left to ask if she should bother to clean off half the bed or not--when I’m not there there’s an avalanche of shit on the bed--and when I said yes, clean it off, I got there and she hadn’t bothered.

Well, at least I didn’t spend the night there or have to spend much time in the house. (And she skipped off to her boyfriend’s after I left.) Instead I slogged off to Sacramento through hours in the traffic to try to catch some of the Weird Strange Bizarre festival at the Comedy Spot. I wish I could have caught all of it, but...already had tickets to Aladdin.

Anyway, the shows I did get to see were:

* You Laugh, You Lose: whoever laughs loses, unless they get someone else to laugh within fifteen minutes. This had eight contestants and two of them eventually tied for the win. When told they could laugh again, one of them was all, “I’m dead inside.”

* A Perfect Score: This was improv done while different instrumental types were playing in the background. (I thought it was going to be music with words, which would have been more interesting to me.) It turned into a whole Shakespeare/Kit Marlowe/Ben Johnson thing going on, with Billy Shakespeare at one point hanging himself with the last words, “To sleep, perchance to cream!”

* Strip-Prov: Strip-Prov is always a delight. One girl (Adrienne) themed her entire wardrobe around wolf costumes and wolf T-shirts. This being the second time I’ve seen this, I can’t help but think that some of them are just deliberately making mistakes (you have to take off an item of clothing every 5 minutes + every time you make an improv “mistake” like asking a question) so they can get as much clothing off as possible. Like the guy who had on three thongs and then ended up hiding in the curtains for legal reasons. Or Michelle getting down to her pasties once again. Hmmmmm to this. At a certain point you have to stop jumping into scenes before you start breaking the law.

* Cypher-A-Long: Some random people I hadn’t seen before had 15 minutes of song jamming of some kind. Not quite what I was expecting there.

* Mystery Meat: This was a lot better than I expected. Chris (wearing a meat shirt) and Corky as the Lunch Lady were feeding Sam and Sarah some random meats while they were blindfolded and answering meat-related trivia questions. Sam was not enjoying the eating of it but got more questions, Sarah actually seemed to be into the meat but answered less. It turns out you don’t want to win this game, because at the end Sam was put into a plastic trash bag while Sarah got to feed him the meat and was all “you’re lucky you can’t see this.” The random meats were Vienna sausage, oysters and chicken (from soup?).

Also, some guy yelled out the answers TWICE and Chris threatened to kick him out for that.

I also got randomly whacked in the head with a guy’s backpack and he blamed it on a girl in a wheelchair.

When I came back home, Picnic Day partying was still going on, so I tried to ignore it all. At least it wasn’t the apartment right above me this year.


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