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Almost every Monday I want to talk about how busy the weekend was, as if it were unusual. We all know by now that whenever I have a low-key weekend without a lot going on,
that is the anomaly.
I will say this: although I did attend a movie watch party, I did not see any movies in the theater all weekend. That part actually remains anomalous; more often than not, I go to the movies at least once over the weekend, even if it's a busy one. This weekend though, I attended the aforementioned movie watch party; went to Happy Hour with Laney (later joined by Jessica and her strikingly handsome boyfriend Mike); joined Shobhit for the Tasveer Film Festival Launch Party; and went to a local stage production of a
Titanic parody called
Titanish. We also watched the Emmy Awards last night.
I
already posted about the movie watch party on Friday, which was also Lea's 40th birthday celebration, two days after her actual birthday. (I think I forgot to
link to the 27-shot photo album I got from that party, which thus could be joined with her 35th birthday party photo album in 2019, for a 2-album "
Lea Birthday Parties" collection.)
So, that leaves . . .
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Happy Hour with Laney was on Saturday afternoon. We had a bit of back and forth about the timing, as it was on our calendars as 4:00, which I think at some point we were assuming was when Linda's Tavern, where we decided to go this time, opened. But, they are actually open for brunch on weekends, so I texted her to ask if she wanted to meet at 3:00.
She followed up that their
Happy Hour does not start until 4:00—oh. Duh. But, she suggested we still meet at her building at 3:00 and just have a drink until Happy Hour started at 4:00. I had suggested pushing it up because I was going to need to leave at least by 6:00 so I liked this idea.
It's kind of shocking that, in the full decade of regular monthly (and now twice monthly) Happy Hours Laney and I have been meeting for, we've never done Linda's Tavern, a longtime Capitol Hill institution—they've been open
since 1994—before this. I actually found a Yelp review I once posted in 2013 about it being a great place for brunch, so I had been there at least once before—in the year prior to Laney and me starting our regular Happy Hours. Oh, wait! I just checked my Google Calendar, and I've been there a couple of other times: once for brunch with Shobhit, Gina and Beth, in January 2017; and actually another time with Laney—just not part of our regularly scheduled Happy Hours—in July 2016. So I've actually been there a few times. It's still surprising Laney and I never went there for Happy Hour before now.
Here's what neither of us knew at all until recently: Linda's has an outdoor patio in the back! Laney is always intent on using an outdoor patio for safety reasons, always mitigating risk of infection even this long after the pandemic (which is technically still thriving, it's just nowhere near the lethal threat it once was). We had some concern about this on Saturday, with some light rain in the forecast.
We were delighted to discover, upon arrival, that several of the patio tables have umbrellas. How protective they are from rain is quite literally spotty—there were dry places to sit on only a few of the tables, and always when strategically sitting where the bench was most underneath the umbrella. No one else was on the patio and so we had our pick of where to sit, and we were at multiple tables before we really settled on one.
I was trying to share all the details of the deep dive into my 15-year-old experience with reparative therapy and its connection to the 1980 film
Friday the 13th that I wrore in detail about in the first half of
Saturday's blog post, which she had lots of questions about, but the entire conversation constantly got interrupted: to get the attention of the server; to ask if we could move because Laney's back needed something hard to lean back against; to find a place that was not too wet. In the end we finally found a table in a corner nearest the entrance back into the bar, with some
nice greenery behind Laney.
Also, Laney had told me Jessica may join us. She and her boyfriend Mike (they are the other two in the shot at the top of this post) would be on this side of Puget Sound because she was going to buy a used truck that was a specific model from the nineties she's wanted for ages. I think they later said they had driven from Edmonds over to Monroe. I think they stopped by to join us on their way back south, presumably later taking the ferry back over to Bremerton.
Laney and I decided to move inside a little while before they arrived, though. She had gotten the phone call confirming they would be coming, and she noted there was no way two more could join us without having to sit on wet portions of the chairs or benches. Laney had thought it was not too crowded inside, but when we moved to go back in, it must have been close to 5:00 and there were plenty of people in there. Here is where Laney, I think, is becoming more flexible: we found a booth over by the window, no one sitting right next to us, but much of the seating was still now filled with other diners. There wasn't the greatest amount of air circulation in there, but as long as we aren't surrounded too tightly by too many other people, Laney tends to be okay anymore.
Laney and I had already ordered food from the Happy Hour menu, each ordering either the nachos or the quesadilla, which we took a page out of the Shobhit playbook and split in half so we could each share both dishes. I'd ordered the margarita they have on top (not available on the Happy Hour menu), which was the drink I had when we first arrived at 3:00. When Happy Hour started at 4:00, we ordered the food and I ordered my second and final margarita.
When we moved inside, we were done with the food and so only had to carry in our drinks. I kind of felt bad for our server, as this was at least the third time we changed tables. When I later was by far the earlies to pay my bill, I did an unusual thing and gave her a 25% tip, just because she was so accommodating and never gave even a hint at being annoyed by it. Side note: Laney commented several times on how cute she thought the server was (never directly to her, for the record), even though she was probably a good 30 years younger. But hey, so what? Cute is cute!
Anyway, it was not long after we went inside that Jessica and Mike arrived. They all ordered meals to have for dinner, and so Laney did too. I was limiting my food intake as I knew there would be plenty of food at the event I was going to with Shobhit later in the evening, which was why I needed to leave by shortly after 6:00. I think I left at maybe 6:10, but not before Laney caught me to ask that I get a photo of the four of us together—I had already gotten a photo of just Laney and me at the table out on the patio.
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Speaking of cute people who are drastically younger than us, the event I went to with Shobhit was the
2024 Tasveer Film Festival & Market Launch Party. Predictably, it was catered—not with a huge spread, but more than plenty, and half of it conscientiously vegetarian. Although it was self-serve, they had a couple of volunteers standing behind the food tables, presumably to answer any questions about the food. One of them was a thin young man who looked like he could have been 19 years old. He asked how my evening was going as I passed by him, and I had to employ my multitasking skills by responding to him like a normal person while also thinking about how incredibly cute he was.
I wonder where the food actually came from. It was far from terrible but neither was it all that special, not really anything worth complaining about when we're talking about a catered event like this—the food is kind of an afterthought. It gave me something to do while I spent some time standing around like a wallflower while Shobhit schmoozed, though. And whoever made the food, I'll have to give some credit: the cauliflower dish was actually edible, and I usually hate cauliflower. I think Shobhit would have called it bland, and in this case actually fairly—there was no kick at all to any of the food—but just making cauliflower edible at all is impressive to me. There was also biriyani rice, and the other dish I much preferred, marinated paneer with bits of onion around it. I took way too much of that, kind of without thinking, but I still easily finished it.
There was also a chai station: options for both cardamom chai and masala chai. Shobhit and I both had several cups of it, although for the record they used super tiny cups to start, and later shifted to cups maybe twice as large and yet they were still small cups. I got the cardamom chai once and then switched to the masala chai, which I went for at least four times. I did not get a particularly deep sleep on Saturday night.
Later, after we went home, Shobhit had the last of the leftover chai I had made for Lea's party on Friday. "Our chai is better," Shobhit said. The chai at the party on Saturday wasn't bad, but he also certainly wasn't wrong about that. I make better chai!
Shobhit was attending this party in his capacity as board member of the
local SAG-AFTRA chapter. Apparently Shobhit had convinced them to make a small donation to Tasveer—a local South Asian social justice and arts organization, founded in 2002 and putting on their 19th film festival next month—which garnered him an invite to this event. (Shobhit has become a lot more active in local arts organizations over the past year or so, also gaining a seat on the
Theater Puget Sound board.) He's hoping to builder greater connections and thus perhaps get larger SAG-AFTRA support for Tasveer in the future.
For my part, I was kind of shocked there was a film festival of this sort for two solid decades and I had almost no familiarity with it. I was only at this event as Shobhit's spouse, but I took in a lot of the information about the film festival with great interest. One of the weekends I had considered for going to visit Scott in Phoenix was in October, but it had to be scratched because it overlapped with this film festival, for which Shobhit should get a pass. I won't likely buy a festival pass, but now there's a fair chance I will look into a few of the movies to buy tickets to. They played several trailers and a couple of them looked very compelling to me.
The invite to the event had suggested "festive dress," and so Shobhit wanted both him and me to wear one of the formal
kurta pajama outfits we have. I had a choice of the two we bought in Queens back in 2013, in anticipation of our wedding. I didn't really want to wear the same outfit I wore in the wedding, even though Shobhit happily did. Instead I wore the other, more solidly red outfit, and I can't even remember if I had ever worn it anywhere before. I sure got multiple compliments on it, though, which made me feel a little better about being not just one of maybe half the crowd in visibly South Asian-style clothing (the other half in jeans and shirts for the most part), but certainly the only White guy walking around in it. I was only slightly self-conscious about this, and I'm not sure I'd have been at all if Laney hadn't asked if I ever feel uncomfortable wearing cultural clothes like that as a White person. I told her I don't, as a general rule; when I'm in a South Asian crowd and dressed like that, it's very much understood that it's because I am married to a South Asian person. The things that made it slightly different here was that not even all the South Asians dressed in outfits in the design of their cultural heritage, and even among those who did, Shobhit's and mine were slightly more formal than most.
No matter what though, we looked great. Shobhit wanted to get our photo taken on the mini red carpet photo op setup they had, and a lady happily volunteered to take our photo.
I didn't even start taking many photos until the event was dying down, after a pretty lengthy presentation in a theater room we all filed into after a period of mingling. Once I started taking photos, though, I decided to look for interesting things to take photos of, so I could greate
a dedicated photo album for this event. I only got 10 shots out of it, but it still works.
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So that brings us to yesterday, when Shobhit and I went to see the play
Titanish.
I can't recall whether or not I had ever seen a production at Seattle Public Theater, a small venue—an usher told us she thinks it seats 168—in a dedicated building right on
the north side of Green Lake. This would mean I've certainly walked past it enough times over the years.
Shobhit has long loved the movie
Titanic, so when he discovered there was a local stage parody of it, he had an unusual interest in seeing a stage play happening in town. We looked up tickets a couple of weeks ago, having heard there was a limited number of $10 tickets, but predictably those were all sold out. He wasn't so interested in paying $30, and at the time his interest seemed so petered out that I just took it off my calendar.
But, by this weekend, his interest renewed, especially when we discovered we could get in line early in the hopes of getting rush tickets on the day of the show. So that's what we did yesterday, arriving about an hour and 15 minutes before showtime, and discovering just one woman ahead of us. I was really afraid we'd get screwed by even that one woman ahead of us, but in the end we got tickets fine: they took down names for the rush tickets list at 2:00—one hour before showtime—and then began selling those at 2:45. Kind of amazingly, we wound up with two seats together right in the center of the front row (of three) that face the stage, as opposed to the seating to the sides. We could not possibly have asked for better seats, and the tickets cost $20 each this way.
Between 2:00 and about 2:30, Shobhit and I started walking around the lake. At first we thought maybe we'd walk over to the Greenlake Village PCC, not realizing that it was a good third of the way around the lake, and a two-mile walk round-trip would take too long. (The PCC on Aurora, we only realized later, is far closer to Seattle Public Theater—less than half a mile from there.) So, we turned around after a bit, and then found a nearby Zeek's Pizza where we split a large slice of cheese pizza.
Once we were ticketed and seated, we were both kind of excited: we managed to get discounted tickets to a show we were really interested in seeing after all. We considered and then passed on the $10 add-on for champaign that gets passed out to the "first class passengers" sitting in the front row. In retrospect I think this would have been more fun than we realized; we didn't know the drinks actually get passed out by a person in character during the show.
The parts were rather well cast, especially
Kooper Campbell as Jack. I can't imagine the production finding a better choice among local talent to fill in for a young Leonardo DiCaprio; he looked more like the original person in the part than anyone else in the cast. Runner-up would be
Justine Stillwell as Rose, although the red wing she wore did a lot of the work, in terms of physical similarity (she was just as good a performer). I was also partial to (I think?) Bo Mellinger in dual parts, playing both the Bill Paxton role and the role of Jack's Italian friend. Misty Doty was also pretty funny as the elderly, over-the-top horny Rose; she doubled in the part of Molly Brown, a one-joke part I kind of wish they'd done more with.
Anyway. The play was fun. B+.
We drove home, started watching the Emmy Awards on VOD we had set to record it, as we got home about an hour after it started. Shobhit also had to call Geico because of a pretty minor fendor bender we got in on the way home, where three different cops meandered over to us because we pulled in right next to a State Trooper car inside the parking garage at the fire station on Roanoke. Side note: one of those cops was also really cute. Except for the mustache. Get rid of your mustaches, people!
I got a call from Gabriel during the Emmy Awards. He and Lea had tickets to the women's soccer game tonight but she's "not feeling up to snuff" so he was looking for a replacement person to go with him. I think I was fairly far down on his list, for obvious reasons: why would I go to a soccer game? Well, to hang out with Gabriel! That was his argument, anyway. And it was persuasive enough and I have the evening free so, what the hell. I'll go hang out with Gabriel in a sea of lesbian fans.
That'll add a fourth day in a row of me going to events I do not typically go to. I'm seeing a movie with Laney tomorrow so that'll be my return to form for the week.
— पांच हजार छह सौ पचहत्तर —
[posted 12:29 pm]
