In 24 hours I was surprised with tickets from two different people.  The first was from Sam and the the second I’m told I’m not at liberty to talk about yet, but you’ll read all about it in three months.

Sam bought us tickets to L’effleur des Sens.  I couldn’t really figure out what it was, and even after watching it I still don’t know.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.  Before going to the show we ate Thai soup (?) at a Thai restaurant in ThaiTown.  I would tell you what the place is called, but the only English in the name were the words “Thai” and “Restaurant.”  The menu was flush with engrish, which I would normally bitch about, but in this case I think it is due to the fact that none of the clientele read the English part.  To me that said that the food was likely going to be very authentic.  Sam confirmed my suspicions when she said that this was the best Thai (fast) food in Los Angeles and she used to eat there every day… and not once looked at the English on the menu.

My suspicions were also confirmed when the duck broth came out and it was delicious.  Sam got her favorite which was some sort of meatball broth with blood in it.  I ordered mine with mild spices, which worked out well because I got the full sweetness of the duck.  The best thing about this, which is very similar to Pho (although I’m sure a Thai person would cringe at the comparison), is the ultra thin noodles that you can choose.  These noodles are about half the size of angel hair pasta.  One of my pet peeves about Italian restaurants is if they try to serve me spaghetti that looks like it is from a high school cafeteria.  You know what I’m talking about, the giant dread lock sized chewy wheat ropes that they pass off as “pasta.”  I can’t stand that stuff.  This was the complete opposite though, rice noodles so thin they looked more like a clump of fine hair swimming in my bowl.  I’m assuming it was made out of rice and not wheat, but at that size the texture is the thing, not the ingredients.

After that deceptively filling meal we headed to the La Luz De Jesus Gallery since it was only a mile or so down the street.  The main gallery was filled with Brian Cunningham pieces.  Although done with great attention to replicating the original Spanish art style (yeah I know, there is probably an exact word for it, but damned if I know what it is, our honkey art history classes in college didn’t cover latino art movements), none of it excited me in the slightest.  There were still some gems elsewhere in the gallery left over from past shows (click on photos for more information about the artist – when available):

There were also still at least five pieces up by JAW Cooper waiting to be sold as well as the “panda in a bathtub” painting I saw with Byron in March.

The cabaret show wasn’t to start until 9pm so we lingered around the Jesus bookstore for a while (I could spend days in there).

When we finally got to King King for the show the bouncer made us wait at the door for five minutes while more important people strolled right in.  When we went inside though it turned out the place was just a small bar.  Everything was reserved but the bar, so we hunkered down there.  the show was still an hour from beginning so Sam read from our Finance textbook on her kindle and I tore out some paper from a sketchpad she had in her trunk (I didn’t have my sketchbook with me) and got to work.

While I was sketching a guy sat down beside Sam and started talking to her about the Kindle.  Eventually he saw what I was doing and took a look at my sketch.  Now, I’m always reluctant to sketch in public because #1 I don’t think I’m that good and #2 I still feel a (probably entirely imagined) stigma of being an “art fag” when I do anything art-ish in public.  My paranoid brain at first imagined that this guy determined early on that I wasn’t a threat (I was Sam’s gay friend or something) and he could talk to her.  When this scenario started playing out I just chuckled and kept on drawing.  Of course this just shows my unrealistic paranoia still runs higher than a republican’s after Giuliani’s convention speech in 2004.  When the guy saw my sketch he loved it and ended up talking to me more than Sam.

This sketch was a lot like the astronaut sketches that I posted earlier, in that it evolved in a purely organic way.  I started off with shapes and then that was refined to a body (surprise surprise) and then that was refined further into some sort of narrative, which is then further refined and refined until eventually I think what I wanted to do here was make some sort of “ancient man looking into the future at the all powerful war mongering godman.  This wasn’t finished before the show started.  I tried to add that owl on his left hand, but I couldn’t remember exactly what an owl looked like.  I also wanted to add a tiger or something behind him but I REALLY couldn’t remember what that looked like.  The modern figure underneath is easier to understand if you flip the drawing around… he has a rambo-like weapon and bullets hanging from his chest with bombs/rockets/missiles coming to an apex above his head as he cries out.  I added arrows to the “native’s” hand which originally just had leaves falling out… as such these arrows don’t quite naturally fit into the hand.  oh well.

Of course this guy complimenting me on the sketch made things even more awkward because having this paranoid fear of getting laughed at for being “artsy” automatically braces me for harsh criticism (real or imagined),  so you can imagine what happens when I actually get a compliment from someone.  I have no idea what to say or do.  Things got even more awkward after the show when he drew something for me on a napkin and handed it to me.

It became apparent that he wanted to trade his drawing for mine, but I didn’t want to give mine up.  It was probably less awkward in real life than it was in my head, but I wasn’t sure what to say or do.  This is a character he’d been developing I guess.  He actually drew it during the show and left it on the table but the bartender threw it away – so he drew an identical one again and put it in his pocket (that is why it is crumpled).  I told him he should try painting it (it actually looks kind of like the cartoon paintings that I see a lot of these days, so not a bad thing) and he said “I don’t really know how to paint.”   “Neither do I” I said.

But anyway, all of that happened in the space before and after the show, a relatively short time period when compared to the entire night.

The show was a mix of a lot of things.  I didn’t know what cabaret was beforehand, and in a lot of ways I still don’t know.  If someone asked me to describe what I saw I’d say there was a lot of dancing with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) sexual overtones, with a gay MC that talked about straight sexual fantasies with female audience members while the cast was backstage changing.   Most of the show was made of costumed dance numbers lip synced to popular music from choice decades.  A few obvious ones were Nancy Sinatra’s original homage to high fashion footwear, and Tina Turner’s riverboat ride.  These dance numbers were often bookended with “talent show” pieces from individual performers.  One girl did an aerial artist performance (this was probably my favorite part).  Sam had actually bought the tickets because she thought the performance would give me ideas for paintings.  It turns out I’m painting a girl surrounded by ribbons/fabric right now, a sort of sequel to my original “ribbon dancer” piece from long ago.  Here is a little preview of what I’m working on:

Another girl showcased her tap dancing skills in the dark.  Gyrating around on stage while making (or lip syncing) sexual moans.  At one point she stopped and tapped out the beat to Wild Thing.  The least successful piece was a spiral staircase dance inspired by Anime.  The piece was introduced by a short montage of static anime images before the three dancers came out in full body tight silver jumpsuits.  There is a reason live action Anime movies fail – because when you dress like that in real life you look ridiculous, but I guess the producer of this show has never been to ComicCon (of course, neither have I, but I’ve seen the photos).

Another confusing (albeit also interesting) segment featured two blindfolded women and a man linked together in lingerie and office chairs scattering about the stage under a strobe light.

Even later a segment started and an audience member to my right who’d seen the show before said “this is the best part.”  In low green light a woman in a white swimsuit gyrated over metal chains hanging from what looked like two clothing racks welded together.  A fan was blowing from the ground so her hair would flutter up like a bad 80s metal video.  In fact, the whole segment could have replaced the Tawni Kitaen Jaguar dance.

I’m not sure whether this was a good show or a bad show, I have no frame of reference.  Everybody seemed pretty professional in all their performances, but I’m not sure the theme of sexual fantasy was entirely clear or even necessary.  If the MC hadn’t talked about the audience’s fantasies (and the website hadn’t described the show that way) it wouldn’t have been overly obvious that the show was about sex.  Except for the one dance that had all the girls in little girl bikinis reenacting a phone call from an old pervert to a young girl.  To introduce this segment the MC (in character… I hope…) said something about how his fantasies were only about underage Asian girls.  (umm…isn’t that a bizarre choice?  Don’t a lot of twenty something Asian girls still look underage anyway?)

Perhaps the gay guy stripping (yes, he did a strip show without getting entirely naked – thank god) was an attempt to put SOMETHING in the show for the women in the audience (that actually outnumbered the men).  However, after the first half hour I think there was some resentment in the male crowd when we realized that this french accented jerk (yes, I know, it’s an act) was going to go out in the audience every ten minutes and put our dates’ hands on his nuts while the female cast in the show was never going to leap off the stage and into our laps.

The show ended promptly at 10:30, which seemed a little short, but I had a long drive home so I suppose it was a good thing.