Saturday: Cotton Eye Joe

Well, not exactly a bunch of drunken rednecks, but close. The evening starts with a get together at Chris’s place. Light drinking there by some and then car pooling down to the Lincoln. Through the rain of course. And that’s where the normality stopped. We paid our five bucks to get in and were immediately accosted by the folks from Marlboro. Why can’t someone cool, and not deadly, be sponsoring things?

We shuffle in and step up to the bar, where immediately the men are separated from the (typical) women. That’s because the bar had SportsCenter on. So even though all of us just paid five bucks to see a live band, most of the guys are actually standing there watching TV. And reruns at that, if you think about it. Still, sports is sports. Of course now we’re hitting the bathroom trail. Yet another awkward restroom (last night’s venue had more mirrors than one should have. Specifically, the one right next to the urinal couldn’t have been decided on by sober people). This one had the 2-man trough. Ugh. Which is at least not as bad the the urinals at East Village, where there are obviously discriminating against short people by having them at about eye level.

Surviving that, we made our way out to the main area. Looks to be an old theater. This was actually cool because that meant the high ceilings would prevent death by smoke cloud. Fr those not in the NC area, this is a serious situation. Out here in tabacki-land, you can’t help but run across this everywhere; in resturaunts, bathrooms, outdoor events, bar, phone booths, whatever. Further, all the open air also helps keep down the reverb problem and total loudness. Among all the other ills those cancer sticks bring, deafness is clearly one as well. I have never been to any live musical performance in a building in NC where I could actually hear. Anything. I think instead of trying to have us listen to the sounds through our ear canals (where sounds is transferred via the hair into signal), these bands are trying to skip the middle man and just get out inner ear bones vibrating straight off. Ugh.

Nonetheless, I could hear these bands (for the most part). I think because of this new and strange phenomenon, being able to hear the singer, people did strange things. Like tried to dance. This was an activity most, if not all, of these people should have avoided. And yet, if that had happened, we would not have had so much fun. A people watcher by nature, this was like a bonanza. ‘The Clarks’ was the first band we saw (we were ‘late’ of course). Pretty good. But their music seemed to start something. Jumping. I don’t know why. At first it was only the drunk soldier friends of one of the band members, but later more people started doing it. At this point it was only men. This made sense, because men can’t dance.

Now, we are standing on a ramp right above the main dance venue. This is actually playing havoc on my hurt foot, but what the hell. At some point during the show we look over and down and see Big Dave, Mezei and Needham. Hmm. Seems they always turn us down when we invite them places, yet here they are. So we decide to have a little fun with them. Knowing their wallflower status and that they don’t know some of the women we brought, we had the ladies go dance in front of them. This got more amusing when suddenly the women turned around and started talking to the guys. You’d think they’d been shot. Confused and bewildered by this sudden feminine attention, they were like deer in headlights.

Oh yeah, we were laughing. Apparently the girls tried to let them know what the deal was, but it took them quite a bit of time to get it though to them. Sad. Of course, this wasn’t the only women dancing with strangers activities we had lined up. One of our girls, bored and irritated from waiting for her fiancee to come back from Germany (via Newark – which one is more foreign?), who was already 4hrs late and not scheduled to arrive for another hour or so (didn’t actually get in until 4:30am), took on the infamous ‘Triple Dog Dare’ to go dance with Mr Stiff, not to be confused with ‘Mr Stiffy’, which is a whole new game.

Except someone else was playing the Mr Stiffy game right next to us. I am absolutely certain Blue Pimp Shirt Guy beside us "had sexual relations with that woman!" She was grinding on him all night, there was obvious boob grabbing, and at one point some of us some her putting his belt back on. Not good. But back to Mr Stiff. Like Barry Sanders through the Redskins’ secondary, Liz is instantly through the crowd and marking her target. That poor bastard never knew it was coming. After talking with him a bit, Liz had to let him off the hook since they weren’t playing any real fast songs. Oh well.

Tune in later for: The Changing of the Bands