Photo by Eric Rodriguez “I'm just waiting for the old bags to leave,” the hipster girl told me sotto voce, indicating the seated trio of biddies. “I mean, they're not gonna stay till 2!“
Oh, but you're wrong, little hipster girl! You underestimated the grit and gumption of old bags (particularly when they have seats)—and you, fresh-faced and bright-eyed and with the stamina of youth, left hours before they did. They did, in fact, stay till 2, and you never did score their table.
I'd waited in line at Costa Mesa's La Cave for half an hour Friday night, having to pee the whole time. Behind me, a man plaintively asked his girlfriend, “Are you sure you want to go here?” “Now I do,” she retorted, “since they won't let me in!”
Like the rest of us, they waited. Glumly. When I finally got downstairs and bellied up to the bar, I could hear from the next room strains of . . . Bryan Adams? What happened to the French lounge music they were supposed to be spinning? What the hell was I doing in a place that was playing Bryan Adams?
I crammed my way in to see it with my own disbelieving eyes: prancing about in his tight leather pants (we could see his package from 20 feet) was the King of Lounge, Phil Shane.
Now, I adore Phil Shane. I do. And not like the jaded, ironic lounge kids do. But I'm damned if I'd wait half an hour to see him when any night of the week I can cram myself into the Fling and get groped by 70-year-olds in the bargain.
My dolor was short-lived, however, as Shane made three separate birthday girls take seats at the front for the birthday classic “Stroke it to the east; stroke it to the west,” during which he gently glided his hand within millimeters of his ding dong and then wagged said ding dong in the girls' crimson-but-eager faces.
Shane sang and thrust for hours without taking a break. He blew a fuse thrice, as all his lights and amps and karaoke machines were plugged into one anemic power strip. But it never stopped him for long; soon he was on to his original songs, with such lines as “I'm your Big Daddy/Give me the squeeze,” which was kind of gross because he didn't just intimate that the song might be about his penis; instead, he actually mimed squeezing it. Ewww! Then there was “Love on the Internet,“ with the lines “It's a scary place/Like outer space!” and “She says I'm cool/She's still in school!” The rhymes weren't “good,” but they were catchy nonetheless. Soon he was back to the more traditional numbers, like “Sweet Caroline,“ which he sang three times because the madding crowd just wouldn't stop screaming for it. Love was everywhere; even, perhaps, on the Internet.
After three and a half years of painstaking refurbishing, the guys behind Fullerton coffeehouse The Hub have finally opened their swank Continental Loungeon an industrial stretch of Santa Fe. How swank is it? There's a button in each booth; press it and a light goes on to summon the stewardess. It's that swank! And the owners did it all by hand. Saturday night featured the groovy stylings of 00 Soul's R. Scott on keys, accompanied only by a magnificent drummer. Empty at 9, the club was packed by 10 with Fullerton's finest—and, in some cases, Fullerton's Finest, as two cops were overheard in the men's room applauding the club's fine makeover. Most of the people were happy and low-key, with the exception of a pretty blonde with big knockers who came to be known as Babushka (the blonde, not her knockers). She and her trite friends somehow took over our booth (and its stewardess button!), where they held excruciating 10-minute conversations about the Gucci glasses that had been found at work, but they were broken in the middle, but . . .
You should go to the Continental, absolutely. But if you see a blonde with really great cans, take my advice: duck and cover.
Well, you'll all be thrilled to know that I finally found Todd Spitzer. I stood on the smoking patio at the Sutton Place Hotel on Election Night, hanging out with wannabe Watergate burglars like former Young American for Freedom Brian Park, while right inside the glass doors, under the glare of a KCBS light, OC Supervisor Spitzer readied himself for his closeup. He checked his tie. He wet his lips. He cocked his eyebrows. He lowered them. He smiled. He stopped smiling. He looked the interviewer straight in the eye. Sober. Serious. Whatever. I'll give him this: the man knows his way around a camera. Later, someone cut a gnarly one in the hall outside District Attorney Tony Rackauckas' hospitality suite, and Democratic state Senator Joe Dunn (a fine, upstanding liberal) crashed the party to get funky and bipartisan. As far as the rest of Election Night goes, I'll remark only on this: 28 percent of California voters against the constitutional right to have one's legally cast vote counted. People are rad!
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