I dragged myself out of the house last night and went to a play. Or should I say I went to a musical comedy? Or an extended live-action cartoon with real animation thrown in for good measure? Or a clown show? Or a classic Greek or Roman farce?
Well, it was all of those things, a revival of Crimes Against Nature: A Love Story, a show first produced in 2008 at the Backyard Ballroom on St. Claude Avenue. Now it’s running for three weeks at the Allways Lounge and Theatre where it’s bigger than it was before, and everybody in town should go see it. It’s the kind of show New Orleanians love: raucous, sexy (sexy? no, say downright pornographic), funny as hell, and kind of heartbreaking.
There’s a story behind it, but it’s not required that you know it to enjoy the spectacle. The music is by Ratty Scurvics, and I hope he puts together a cast album. The songs are keepers. The show itself, written by downtown legend Otter, is well-built and sturdy. It even answered my nagging question: Why is that woman wearing shoes that are way too big for her feet?
The cast consists of Otter (when you write the script, you get to pick your part) as Gaye Daye. Dennis Monn directed and doubles as Happy Daye. They are supported by Dahktur Sick (an evil clown, meant to terrify the child in all of us, and he did me), Thugsy DaClown (a classic clown, which means he is very funny and also poignant), and Veronica Belletto (who gives me the distinctly guilty [and damp] pleasure of conjuring in my mind the specter of Myra Breckenridge—I’ve begun having dreams of the tortures she could put me through...if only).
Don’t let any of them scare you though. They’re the sweetest kind of people you would ever want to meet offstage.
So get off your butts and go see ‘em.
They’re running the show for three weeks with performances on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays, 8:00 PM sharp. Tickets are $15 on the weekends and $10 on the Mondays, so you can’t say you can’t afford it.
Support New Orleans’ alternative theatre. It’s where the action is.
Bobby and I went out to our neighborhood bar yesterday afternoon to wish the bartender, a friend of ours, a happy birthday. I was going to write about how our little watering hole has changed into a tawdry tourist joint, catering to the worst proclivities of our world-travelling visitors.
I was going to write about ordinary men and women getting sloppy drunk on cheap booze at rock-bottom prices and carrying on in ways that would get them arrested if they did these things at home.
I was going to write about how they get loud and pushy, and how they circle the bar so no locals can belly up to it to buy a drink, and about how their perfumes and colognes dry my throat and nasal passages, forcing me to honk like the Aflac duck.
I was going to write about all that, but by the time we got home, there was something real to think about.
It seems a gunman opened fire on a crowd second-lining in celebration of Mother’s Day.
The shitass wounded nineteen people, two of them children ten years old. This is fucked up.
Almost immediately, the police were on television discussing statistics that illustrate the area where this shooting occurred is a high crime area. “Nothing to see here, keep moving on.” The implication being that my French Quarter neighborhood is safe, that the Uptown neighborhoods are safe, that Mid-city is safe, that the Lakefront is safe.
This is bullshit.
Nobody is safe when one person has to walk the streets in jeopardy.
The city government has become a money-grubbing corporation, insensitive to the life-sustaining needs of its indigenous population. “You got money? Throw me some, mister, and we’ll all live together on Easy Street.” The police force is made to proactively issue citations instead of preventing crime. They might investigate a beating, a knifing, or a shooting after the injury or death has occurred, but they are not present and visible to give pause to a thug, except maybe in that area encompassing the first seven blocks of Bourbon Street so sacred to tourists with money to piss away.
Citizens are beginning to fight back against their attackers and are being hailed as heroes. But how long will it take before one of these “heroes” gets taken down himself and dies in a pool of blood on a city sidewalk?
And, in keeping with the times we live in, here’s a video of the crime as it occurred:
It used to said if there were only two people left in New Orleans, they would have a parade. One would march, the other one would run behind, shouting, “Throw me something, mister!”
Today, if there were only two people left standing in New Orleans, they would still get together and throw a parade. One would march. The other would shoot him.
