music-rosenThe Anger Management Tour, featuring the refined musical stylings of Limp Bizkit, Eminem and Cypress Hill, was held earlier on Nov. 21 at the Arrowhead Pond, and now the crowd was streaming across town toward the Galaxy Concert Theatre, which appeared hermetically sealed for the after-party. Velvet ropes, string, twine and strategically positioned bouncers created an elaborate maze leading to the entrance. Three bouncers formed a human barricade at the front of the maze, and there were swarms of security guards patrolling the parking lot.
The way we ended up at the Galaxy was by trying to go to the Coach House to see Shane MacGowan1. I called Lark, who works as a publicist for both venues. She said the Shane MacGowan show was completely sold out and she couldn't put me on the list2, but how would I like to go instead to the Galaxy for the Anger-Management Tour after-party because she could put me on the list for that show?3
And so it was that we were frisked and let in, but not before being told there was absolutely no way I could enter the club with the Advil and Sudafed4 in my purse, so I had to run back to the car to ditch the cache. Upon returning sans over-the-counter medication, I asked the woman doing the frisking if she was worried about problems. She said she was. Then because I'm paranoid, I asked if I should be worried. She said she hoped the human barricade5 would weed out any problems before they got in the club. I thought for a second about a little thing I'm fond of doing where I brain someone with a fast-acting Advil gelcap and mentally cursed that dastardly woman for thwarting my maniacal plan. Then I asked if there was some particular reason they were worried. “Not really,” she said, “just the type of music.” Oh.
“We're so out of our element,” said my friend, who was wearing normal-fitting guy pants and a Clash pin.
“I know,” I said sympathetically. We decided to take the edge off our white dorkiness by getting drunk. It didn't work, though, and we still felt out of place. “Damn these jeans! Damn this sweater! Damn this extremely cute jacket!” I said, cursing my outfit because the truth is that I'd wanted to wear a new and fabulous skirt but feared I'd be overdressed. I wouldn't have been. Of course, I still would have looked different from the rest of the big-haired hoochie-mama stripper girls stalking the place. It was amazing. I was in the room of a thousand Carmen Electras.
“Hey, look! They're sporting the Mariah Carey Look, where they rip off the top of their pants,” said my friend, pointing to the perfect denim-clad asses of two women in front of us. Then I tried to make him feel weird for knowing the Mariah Carey Look and actually referring to it as such. It didn't work, though, because he was already on to something else. “It would be funny to see how many girls I could strike out with tonight because I'm white and my pants fit,” he said. “But I think I'm too tired.”
I was disappointed because it sounded like a fun game, and I love fun games, but then I was kind of relieved because I began imagining this scenario in which we decide, yeah, let's see how many girls he can strike out with, and then he starts going up to these stripper girls, and instead of striking out, they all love him, and he hits it off with one of them and spends the rest of the night talking to her, and yeah, sure, at the beginning, he'd probably look over at me with a look on his face like “Can you believe this is really happening?” but then he'd soon forget about me, and I'd stand there alone in my extremely cute but not cute enough jacket while my date hits on and probably goes home with a stripper, and that wouldn't be a fun game at all—that would just be sad.
Then it turned out that my friend-or-is-he-my-date-or-is-he-my-friend-or-is-he-my-date and I had both been counting the number of times these two women had walked back and forth in front of us. It was up to something like nine, but by the end of the evening, we had hit 19. They were both wearing tight black wraparound shirts and black cocktail pants. One of them had a string of rhinestones attached to her pants. Then everyone else started looking like them, too, though, which made the counting difficult.
There was music, too. There were about a zillion rappers onstage when we arrived, but soon that ended, and there was a yawning gap where a performer should have been. Around the time we got ready to leave, which was pretty late, it seemed that someone was going to take the stage. We just didn't have it in us to stick around and see who it was. And so, like two kids who were invisible to most of the people there, who didn't fit in, who wore the wrong pants, and who needed some Advil, we left.
1. It wasn't me; it was my friend, actually, who wanted to see Shane MacGowan. “I can get us on the list,” I told him. I wish I hadn't said that.
2. “Did you say 'don't you know who I am?'” my friend asked me, jokingly, when I told him we'd gotten denied.
“That's the thing,” I said, defeated. “She does know who I am.”
3. Which, incidentally, she forgot to do. But they still let me in when I gave them my OC Weeklybusiness card, which makes me wonder if that would have worked at the Coach House. . . .
4. I was okay with the Advil and Sudafed being pulled out of my purse and scrutinized, but I was just standing there praying that she didn't find and make a big deal about the motherload of tampons stuffed into my purse because that would be a trifle embarrassing.
5. She didn't refer to them that way, of course.
