You: Street preacher, ragged white t-shirt, jeans, shrill voice, obnoxious megaphone. Screaming damnation and brimstone at the metro-bound commuters. Your rhetoric was smooth and polished like a stone worn under water; your steely eyes boring a hole in me from a distance.

Me: Metro-bound pedestrian without a care in the world, nice pants, messenger bag, iPod. My ears could just barely make you out underneath the cone of silence that is my Bose Headphones. Instead of your ranting, I got Mozart’s Requiem, movement six, Confutatis. Its brilliant fear-inspiring sonority far outweighs your meek shouting.

You can come hear it Friday night at 8 at The Falls Church (Episcopal) on Broad Street. Tickets are available at the door: $25 for general admission, $20 for students with ID.

If you live in a city long enough you can literally travel through your past in a weekend.

I began at the 9:30 Club, and ended at the old one.

Friday we started off watching a friend perform on a stage where I’ve seen so many kicked-up and diverse shows through the years. Every time I go to the 9:30 Club it’s like time morphs and all the shows merge into one great moment – Einsturzende Neubauten, Negativland, Catherine Wheel, Dresden Dolls, etc… From there we headed up to Adams Morgan, one of the first neighborhoods I lived in DC after college, to a bar literally a molotov cocktail throw from my old apartment. Two friends dj a chill Britpop night there at a bar that looks like somebody’s fun basement. It has one of the best bartenders in DC, a man I hold personally responsible for our drunken crawl down the street to El Tamarindo at 3:30am. How many nights have ended there?

Saturday night we continued our trip back in time by impulsively dying my husband’s hair with Manic Panic (“Wildfire! Glows in Black Light!!”) and heading to Chiaroscuro. It’s located in a space close to the dearly departed Tracks, where we met as crazy clubkids. It’s nice to see the Industrial/Goth scene is still going on (like some deranged Energizer Bunny), though that area of Southeast is fast becoming a government office park. Somehow the night fast-forwards until we’re finishing off a bottle of icewine (note to self: icewine is just not appropriate to drink at 5am) while chowing down on Yum’s dumplings. How many nights have ended with those ridiculously evil dumplings??

Sunday we decide to dry out and go for a bit of culture by seeing the closing film of AFI’s Silverdocs. As luck would have it, it’s a documentary on the old 9:30 club – 930 F Street. The montages of old posters, footage from raw concerts, and interviews with Fugazi legend Ian MacKaye and various instantly recognizable 9:30 employees/regulars all add to the increasingly nostalgic feel of the weekend. We end the night excitedly sharing stories of concerts past, the old club’s quirky appeal (that smell! those rats!), and its place in a certain time in our lives – newly arrived college kids in DC searching for an alternative scene and relieved when we found not one, but several.

Meet Jack

Originally uploaded by tjbax.

This is Jack. Tom and I adopted him on Saturday from Last Chance Animal Rescue, via the Petsmart Luv-A-Pet Adoption Center at Petsmart’s Alexandria store.

It’s springtime, which means shelters are being inundated with huge numbers of kittens and puppies, sometimes faster than they can find new homes for them.

If you have a pet, be sure it’s spayed or neutered. And if you don’t have one, or if you’ve got room for one more, consider adopting one from any of the DC area’s myriad animal shelters and rescues. In addition to Last Chance, you can find an extensive list of shelters online. Or you can do what we did and head to your closest Petco or Petsmart on a Saturday afternoon- both chains actively support the work of local rescues.

When we adopted Jack through Petsmart, they gave us tons of coupons for pet supplies, a free visit to the Banfield vet office, and a free 30 days of pet health insurance.

And so starts The Aristocrats, definitely not to be confused with the lovely children’s film “The Aristocats.”

“The Aristocrats” is a comedy documentary, the brainchild of Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, screened during the American Film Institute’s Silver Docs program last weekend.

It’s obscene, but it’s funny. Sara Silverman alone is worth the price of admission. Over 100 stand up comedians and writers participate either in telling the joke or talking about it. You’d think that everyone telling the same joke over and over throughout the film would get boring, but it’s definitely “the singer, not the song.”

In these days of increasing hysteria over media content, I applaud AFI’s decision to include this film in the Silver Docs festival. Think Film is releasing the movie, unrated, on July 29th. Go see it, but don’t be surprised by the content – there’s no nudity, no violence, but it is absolutely vulgar. And after you see the movie, you can go to the web site to add your own version of the joke for possible inclusion on the DVD.

Enjoy!

Really, how can you? I drove to Charlottesville this weekend for a triathlon, and it took me two hours just to get to Fredericksburg on I-95. It would’ve taken me two more hours had I not jumped into the HOV lane. Coming back, I went to Korea Town in Annandale for tasty treats but almost rammed a freak that took 20 minutes to park.

Thank goodness that I don’t have a car (rented this one) and don’t usually drive anywhere. If I had to deal with all those red taillights on a daily basis or the whole parking thing – damn, just shoot me! How can you stay trapped at the speed of the guy in front of you? How can you have the patience for red lights or 35 mph zones?

Give me bike or foot, bus or metro even, just not gridlock. No red lights on a bike, no waiting when walking, no worries at all on the bus – this is freedom, not a car. I can’t wait to return this albatross and give that entire suburbia back to the fools across the river.

Long live car-free DC!

And then there were two.

Vincent Orange, councilman for Ward 5, has announced his candidacy for mayor, joining councilman Adrian Fenty (Ward 4)as candidates for next fall’s primary. Right, we’re 15 months out, still. 15 months. And we’ve got two candidates for mayor. Of course, Orange seems to be doing it against the wishes of the people, which I find fairly amusing. Of course, declaring candidacies 15 months out for an office that is not the President of the United States seems pretty silly to me, as well.

I went out to shake my booty at Right Round last night. It’s a little bit outside the sort of socializing I ordinarily do, but I’m all about broadening my horizons, and besides, lil’ e assured me before my first outing that I wouldn’t be out of place, there’s all kinds of people there, and I should come get down.

So I went by myself last night, and was reminded of why I usually don’t. The music was great, lil’ e knows how to read a room, and the promised diverse mix of people was definitely in evidence. But there was this guy….

I was standing against one of the pillars in the Black Cat’s backstage room, looking through the door to see if a friend of mine was coming, and there’s this guy standing right near me. And when I say “near,” I mean, 4 inches from my face, which I have to get over at Right Round because it easily draws 250 people into what is not all that large a room.

But he’s staring at me. He’s about 40ish, heavy set, balding and graying, wearing khakis and a bluish button-down shirt.

I know he’s staring at me, because I’m standing against a wall and he can’t be looking past me at anyone else. So he’s clearly staring, and I’m very studiously avoiding eye contact with him.

Finally, he speaks. “Wanna dance?”

I don’t, really, at least not with him. But I had just been thinking about how dorky I feel dancing by myself, and maybe this guy just feels as out of place as I do and is trying to make the best of it.

So I shrug and say, “Sure.”

I was a little put off by how excited he looked as he went to put his drink down. I was wondering what I had just gotten myself into with Starey McEyeball when he returned, grabbed my hand, and led me out onto the dance floor.

We started to dance. Or at least, I started to dance. He stood about 5 inches from me put his feet about four feet apart, and started swinging his pelvis at me.
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Has anyone else noticed the preponderance of the Day Lilies? They are thick as thieves in my neighborhood, their orange blooms towering over the rest of the groundcover. Along 395, there are fields and fields of them, looking like little traffic cones on the receiving end of some terrorist action.

I do love a good spring flower season, this much is for sure.

Little points of yellow light are popping up in my yard tonight, dancing in the twilight. The little bugs are dancing their mating ritual, not entirely like the folks in the clubs and bars of DC. The signs of summer are multiplying, the sidewalk cafes, the teeming masses of tour buses and tourists, the increasing humidity and now the fireflies.

I grew up in the West, where fireflies are a storybook tale, not the joyous indicator of the impending summmer. This is one thing I would miss back home.

La Dolce Vita. The sweet life. It’s the summertime, when culinary thoughts lean toward the decadent and rich choices we are offered when the dessert menus are passed around at the restaurant. Give these choices a look, they’re our favorites.
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