Photo by Jack GouldThe Orange County Museum of Art was filled with mobsters and lunatics on Oct. 28. You would think this would make for a great party. You would be mostly right. With Super Cheez playing “the hits”—never “covers”—a veritable mob of young professionals (and some professionals who think they're young—the definition, like “Young American for Freedom” and “Young Professionals Against Cancer,” is elastic with rising income) got down and dirty. But while lead singer Helvis may have looked adorably retro as Cher in her paisley gown and hot, itchy wig (the rest of the band came as Sonny, the Captain and a very ugly Tenille), there's only so much even a great band can do for a party if the partiers in question are not very nice.
Hundreds had turned out in support of South Coast Repertory, Opera Pacific, the Performing Arts Center and the museum itself, marking themselves as the next generation of goddamn philanthropists. Many were lawyers, like a gorgeous Tori Spelling double (and no, that's not necessarily an oxymoron), resplendent in red, who hung out with me most of the night, booming about how much the party sucked and (loudly) how much she hated lawyers. Did she mention that the party sucked?
Meanwhile, some nutcase decked out in enough hot pink to clothe a Dayton, Ohio, Barbie convention kept going up to random strangers and talking at them in a thick drawl that she said was originally Nashville, although she now hailed “from the great state of Las Vegas” and was just down for the weekend to do a little shopping. What did she do? “I am proud to call myself a homemaker,” chirped Cherie, although she has a Mexican girl—Consuela—who comes every morning to cook and clean. “But I have to watch her every second while she's working to show her spots she's missed,” Cherie continued before nattering uncontrollably about her “special friend, Vincent,” who is “72 years young.” Mostly, Cherie said, she had a lot of lunch, usually at such places as The Bellagio, although now that they've sold it to those Jew bastards at the MGM Grand, it's going to go downhill. “Jews really know how to cheap a place up, you know?” she trilled at cornered partygoers, most of whom ignored her studiously even though she was extremely friendly and very attractive for a woman with such big hair. “Goldwyn? Mayer? Need I say more?” Well, aren't you just a big lump of sugar?
From there, sadly—and just when people were getting a couple of drinks in them and loosening up—it was off to Long Beach's now-legal (with permits and everything!) artist/musician co-op The Space in a creepy part of the warehouses around the port, where I never even bothered to go inside because all SnoopTown's resident hipster bartenders and sushi waitresses were keepin' it real on the porch, which is where the bar was anyway, and I was knocking back vodka tonics like they were vodka tonics. It had been far too long since I'd spent the night naked on my bathroom floor, vomiting for my life. You know? It's good to have goals.
The Cramps show at the Galaxy Concert Theatre on Oct. 27 was three hours of pure stardust—Ziggy Stardust. The gender-bending psychobilly legends are about a thousand years old, but you wouldn't have known it to look at guitarist Poison Ivy's frilly Bo-Peep panties, sneering mug and toned bod. Her male cohorts both wore pumps, though sweaty singer Lux Interior's were of the low, seventh-grader-wearing-pumps-for-the-first-time variety while the corpsey, Ziggy bassist jumped around in a velvet-appliqud bolero and high gold heels fit for a Riverside stripper.
Opening band The Lords of Altamont were perfect Factory-circa-1972, but without the heroin. Big-thighed, leather-clad go-go dancers in Greek fishermen's caps shook what their mamas gave them while the singer lit his keys on fire—a move I haven't seen since The Toilet Boys, but then I don't get out much.
Meanwhile, in an audience I haven't yet seen matched at the Galaxy, a nice young man named Kurt asked if I was going to finish my potato. Then he stuffed it in his mouth in one bite. I offered him my chicken and flatware, but he declined the utensils. “Hands are so much more real, you know?” said he before taking Arrissia Owen's plate of rice, holding it up to his mouth, and sweeping the rice into his mouth with the palm of his hand. Had he only been cute, I probably would have thought it was “sensual.”
After the show, we hit up Alex's Barfly because I'd heard the crowd had changed and no Dub All-Stars would try to fight me. Within two minutes, we'd been picked out of the crowd by Opie, the lead singer, who made friends with us. Then we patched things up with Ras. Then Opie got mad at us for having been mean to Ras previously. Opie stayed mad. Ras stayed friendly. We're going to need a flow chart to figure out with which All-Stars we're feuding and when. You know why? Because they're crazy.
The Lords of Altamont were at Alex's, too, but they didn't light anything on fire. Well, aren't they just a teaspoon of honey?
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