Round about this time last year, a few people wrote in begging us to tell them more about the life of Commie Mom. Our editor, on the other hand, thinks people do not want to hear constantly about our family and friends—fascinating though they may be. Since it's our editor who pays our rent—and not you, our faithful readers, who managed to chip in only $18 and three Chuck E. Cheese's tokens for the Commie Girl Tax Relief Fund—we've decided to oblige him and not spend a column on our wonderful, dear old mom.
Commie Mom would not have enjoyed herself at Cinco de Mayo's Henry Rollins Band show at the Galaxy Concert Theatre. It was devastatingly loud, even with earplugs, and Commie Mom does not like loud “punker” music. Also, she tends to go to bed early, after a pleasant evening of C-SPAN and The Food Network. Bam! But the Galaxy and The Coach House's local booker, the 24-year-old blond beauty Sally, brought her mom. They're also going to the Metallica show together. Isn't that sweet? You should take your mom to the Metallica show, too.
Since Commie Mom would probably sooner take a couple toots with George W. Bush than attend such a screamy concert, we went instead as the date of the Galaxy's bitchen violet-maned publicist, Lark. Was Lark jonesing hard for Mr. Rollins? She was. But Lark, being the classy and cultured young woman she is, steadfastly refused to remove her shirt, unlike the drunk at one of the tables on the second tier. Everyone watched for a while as the lady in question writhed in her beige bra. But when she went to unfasten her boulder holder, security stepped in. The barefoot Rollins, as usual, ignored her, concentrating instead on emitting actual clouds of sweat while a clean-cut (but clearly ready to take out a McDonald's) man in the audience concentrated on singing all the words to all the songs, and when that wasn't enough to draw Mr. Rollins' approbation, screaming them, and when that wasn't enough, rolling his eyes back into his head in creepy Dionysian ecstasy. Meanwhile, the hillbilly guitarist concentrated on making the kind of obscene rock faces usually seen only on drummers. He looked positively developmentally disabled!
But while Henry Rollins may not have been putting out (for all we know, he's still on that bizarre celibacy kick), he showed the sweet side that anyone who's seen his gentle spoken-word tour has come to expect: in the middle of some raging song or other, he took several minutes to listen to what an obese girl in the front of the pit was trying to tell him. At the end, he stroked her hair. We probably would have started weeping with the tender hopelessness of it all, but we were busy keeping watch over the nudist.
On May 3, we hit the Galaxy for Element 17 (who were moody and good and are written up lovingly in the current Mean Street) and KROQ kids The Flys, who pulled a Corey Hart and wore their sunglasses at night. People look very stupid wearing sunglasses at night. Commie Mom would probably have told them so. She's like that.
OC critics tend to ooze all kinds of love juice over the teeny li'l country crooner Jann Browne. And we're not one to buck the status quo. Quite simply, the skinny, gorgeous blonde (she looks like the good-twin version of our dad's girlfriend, Julie, who also looks like Commie Mom, if Commie Mom tweaked) is the best thing to hit country music since the universally beloved Miss Dolly Parton donned her big wig and let her tiny voice fly.
Browne and a backing band that included Laguna Beach painter Jorg Dubin and a guitarist who looked just like John Cougar played heart-rending Merle Haggard covers to an almost empty bar Saturday—and that's just the way it should be. You don't want a bunch of yahoos hanging around when you're trying to catch immortality. The show went down at The Oaks, an oddly earthy place in the middle of what may be the world's foremost gated community, Coto de Caza.
Coto de Caza is the kind of rural community where there are no streetlights and roads meander forever—and yet, despite the richness and breadth of Coto's open space, million-dollar homes are plopped 20 feet from one another. Aren't rich people strange?
We got lost on our way to the Oaks, and that was fine with us: it allowed us to cruise slowly past subdivisions like “Stonehedge” and “Greystone Village.” In our cult compound —oops! We mean “gated community”—there would be a yellow brick road lined with giant lollipops connecting the houses in Ladybug Valley (where only lesbians and children would be allowed) with the ammo cached on Butterfly Ridge, and giant monarch butterflies would give the children rides. The butterflies would never go bad and swoop away with the children; they would only give them rides for fun. And the houses (which would look like ladybugs, duh) would have at least 75 feet between them. Oh, yes, and there would be horsies and puppies that never grow old and 24-hour free daycare available, with lots of papier-mâché crafts.
Of course, if you'd rather live in Coto de Caza than Butterfly Hill, they'll be having a “New Neighborhood Opening” the weekend of May 20-21. Residents who are “golfers, know about schools, have horses, or have a solid knowledge of Coto to share” will volunteer from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. to impart to you the magnificence that is Coto de Caza.
We and Commie Mom will be on our commune, thank you.
Call your mother! And e-mail Commie Girl at co**********@ho*****.com">Co**********@ho*****.com.
