Things that might be decidedly odd…

Dance in Fremont, Theater in F-Dub

For the past couple days, my friend Lisa has been in town on tour with Ultragypsy, a belly dance troop from San Francisco. Last night I saw their performance at ToST in Fremont, which was fun and a nice change from the usual stuff. She crashed on my futon last night and we got up this morning to grab brunch with her friend Nick over at the Bluwater in Leschi.

Afterwards, I met up with Bryan to see a matinée presentation of a musical called Robin Hood Continued at the Knutzen Family Theatre in Federal Way. Apparently, it’s a new show written by the creators of Annie. Basically, it’s a musical about Robin Hood’s hypothetical role in the signing of the Magna Carta (ya, it’s a pretty weird premis). Our mutual friend Chris was playing keyboard for the show, so he had a couple free tickets for us to use and this was the last show of the run. When we arrived and parked, I noticed a Porsche parked across two parking spaces:

I imagine the driver did this as a way to avoid getting his doors dinged, but it so aptly captured the stereotype of a red Porsche owner as a total asshole that I couldn’t help but take a picture.

The performance itself was corny but enjoyable. The show seemed to start out slow, but picked up especially towards the middle with regard to the music and story line. About a third of the way through, at least two dozen people lead by a couple nuns walked out of the show in the middle of a scene. It was so bizarre that I could hardly believe what was happening. For a while, it seemed like the entire theater was going to file out of the place. The play had some possibly lightly offensive material concerning gender roles (Robin Hood’s daughter pretends to be a man so that she can lead her own group of merry men) and religion (Friar Tuck is said to have had a son by giving into temptation once–per week with a woman).

After the show was over, Bryan’s car wouldn’t start due to a dead battery. Eventually, we got it started with a jump from Chris, then drove to Costco in Seattle to buy a new battery. After all of that, we were pretty hungry and grabbed some dinner up at Jamjuree on 15th. Whew, what a day!

Weekend of Visitors

Both my friend Chris from San Francisco and my parents were in town this weekend, which made for a pretty busy couple of days.

Chris came in on Thursday night and Robert and I met him at the airport. Without Robert, who had to work early the next morning, the two of us headed over to Neighbors for 80s night. On Friday, my parents arrived at their hotel south of the city after work. We grabbed dinner over at Fish Club (which I hadn’t been to since Nico and I ate there in 2005 when I was interviewing at Microsoft) then I drove them back to their hotel before going out with my friends. I met up with Chris, Jeff & Drew and Ben & Jeff at Purr but only briefly. From there, most of us went over to the War Room, which was having its weekly gay night. I enjoyed the music and found the crowd fairly novel (lots of hipsters, gay hipsters and gays).

Saturday morning, I got up early in order to go with my parents to Monroe to look at a place that makes barn building kits. It was a relatively painless drive out there, so we took the extra time to grab breakfast. The barn place was interesting–I had no idea so much went into the design of barns. From there, we drove to Redmond to drive through the Microsoft campus so that my parents could see the general surroundings of where I work. We then continued on to Snoqualmie Falls for some brief sightseeing. After that, they dropped me off at my place in Seattle before getting back on the road home.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon kicking back after the past couple of late nights and early mornings. Later, I met up with Jeff & Drew and Chris for Ethiopian food. Queen Sheba on Capitol Hill was super busy so instead we went to a more hole in the wall type place on Jefferson and 14th called Masob. The food was tasty and very affordable for Ethiopian.

The four of us then returned to Purr for the whole stand-and-model thing. When the time was right, we went over to Neighbors for a bit. Unfortunately, it was sort of a weird night over there. This woman kept grabbing me to dance with her and this guy. I don’t know if she was his hag or girlfriend or what, but I wanted nothing to do with her. I had to physically remove her hands from me twice and then dance elsewhere! The other guys were getting sick of this sort of nonsense too, so we decided to go to the Cuff instead. The Cuff was like the Cuff always is, which in this case was a good thing (no drunk grabby women). However, while there I did have some guy’s hag pry my arms off her fag. I found this slightly tacky as the guy really didn’t seem to mind my arm being around him.

Sunday, the four of us met up again for brunch. First we tried the Five Spot on Queen Anne, but it was packed so he headed to another place in Ballard whose name I can’t remember right now. Drew drove us all back to the hill where I parted ways with them so they could rest up briefly before taking Chris to the airport.

Whew, what a busy but fun weekend!