We were waiting for popcorn at the marveilleuse Lido Theater on the Balboa Peninsula. Air kisses were being perpetrated in the general vicinity of the cheeks of artists and musicians and flacks and ad execs and people in Janet Jackson headsets and magazine publishers and B-movie queen Jeanne Carmenand people dressed like Divine. Santa Ana portrait painter Skeith DeWine returned from the men's room in a dither. “There was coke on top of the toilet paper dispenser!” he gossiped gleefully. He tested it to make sure. O, Newport! Your 20-foot stretches of white sandy beach roped off from the wretched masses! Your gangs of roving stockbrokers going slowly to fat! Your gaggles of bored and blonded housewives! Your eagerness to call der Polizei should Dennis Rodman so much as fart! Your entitled fashion snobs knocking people down left and right! Your coke on top of T.P. dispensers! How I love thee, Newport Beach!
We were there, of course, for the Newport Beach International Film Festival and its screening of John Waters' legendary Polyester. Shockingly, the flick was not close to sold-out, despite the fact that Waters himself was in the house to be feted and adored by all the bold-faced people who weren't busy feting and adoring one another. The film itself was terribly sweet, and I was pleased to discover how charming and fuck-all funny Divine was before going and dying. (By the way, Mary from Rancho Santa Margarita, could we please refrain from the nasty letters about how I'm a pathetic, cat-feces-sniffing fraud for never before having seen Polyester? I was seven when it came out. M'kay? Also, please note that I'm not claiming I “discovered” Divine, but rather made a discovery for myself. Claro?)
After the show, just about everyone who'd been at the Lido was eager to carry on the schmoozing (which turned out to be impossible, as the techno was far too loud) at the Hard Rock Caf, for the OC Weekly afterparty featuring Waters doing his vaudeville act, which went a little something like this: “Back then, 'art' was something dirty. . . . And that's the way it should be!” Ba-dum-bum!
Waters, in fact, was funny and charming, with many delightful anecdotes about each of his many, many films and his many, many bizarre stars. But 40 minutes is too long to expect a standing audience to remain rapturously silent. Just ask Chris Ziegler! The Weekly music writer and three friends got 86ed from the party for standing front and center and yammering happily (and drunkenly) to one another about how glad they were to see John Waters, even after Waters asked them at least four times to shut up. Enter security! Ziegler, who was bewildered about being escorted out, says he doesn't remember any of it; he was worried they'd done something terrible, like trying to stage-dive. “That's the first time I've ever been thrown out of a place!” he exclaimed. “I've been way more out of control at other things, throwing drinks on the band, or unplugging them, and nobody cared.” Chris and his buddies will be playing at The Stone in Hollywood this Friday as Cherry Temple and the Sex Crimes. Do go and throw some drinks at them!
Stanton's website proclaims that the city is a place “Where you know more people than you think.” It also prominently features a graffiti hot line and the number for the city yard. Now, I'm not here to bag on Stanton—its plethora of pawn shops makes for great Christmas shopping! And anyway, I'd much rather bag on Newport Beach. So when my friend and personal piercer Ricki the Puppet Guy suggested we hit a Stanton nudie bar, I was all for it. Yay! A nudie bar! I didn't realize this unnamed bar would make Captain Cream look like a bright, shiny penny.
Now, I like watching strippers. They smell really good, and they're purty, and they usually pay a lot of attention to any women in the place, so you feel good-smelling and purty yourself. (They smelled like a mix of coconut and Astro Glide.) However. I generally like it only when they actually dance. A woman writhing in big, stupid shoes generally doesn't cut it for me, no matter how preposterously huge her boob job is.
At this bar, nobody dances. What they do is lie on the stage and finger their punanis. Look! Here is my finger, gliding around my shaved feminine core, with its ridiculously flat and toned labia! Do they have exercises for that? Then they jiggle their monstrous boobs a little bit. Then they finger themselves some more. As for the table dances? For $50, they'd better be doing something illegal!
Our favorite was a blonde named Barbie who sat up onstage and laughed at people. “Oooh, you're in a strip club,” she said, mocking the pained-looking guys next to us. “Better not have any fun!” Even though she had a silly boob job, we liked her because she was sort of fat. She had big thighs, and a big belly with stretch marks, and a big, nice ass. She looked fun!
Our least favorite was a girl with a black-tar smile and a baseball-sized bruise on her thigh. Let's speak no more of her. She made us sad.
Commie Girl recommends:
•Tustin's Swinging Door, which was most aptly described by Ricki as “a boys' bar where girls go to get laid.” The friendly, brightly lit place has a good cross-section of man, from Alabama to frat boy to stockbroker, and a couple of pool tables.
•Human Nature, which features vaginas that are neither intimidatingly perfect nor terrifyingly hairless.
And the fourchette, a grotesque piercing that you shouldn't really want, but if you do, by all means call Ricki at Rif Raf Body Piercing in Newport Beach. The piercing stretches through the area of skin between the anus and the genitals. For women, it's $150; for men, $200 (not including jewelry). Why the differential? Men fart during the ordeal. “Women will hold it in until they're dead,” Ricki explains, “but men just can't help it.”
Co**********@ho*****.com">Co**********@ho*****.com. Thank you.
