The Amazing Race

I had this idea when I woke up this morning, that I would do, not one, but two things today. In fact, I wanted to do four things. I wanted to watch The Edukators at the E Street. Normally, I can't stand the fact that E Street has the better selection of films, of it and Bethesda Row. Getting to E Street costs me money and time, mainly Metro fare and making multiple stops, which is what the Metro does. Getting to Bethesda means driving. I know. That too, costs me money and time, but I feel I have more control over the time, and the money, well, somehow I don't think about it,

Then, I decided I wanted to watch Take Me Out a second time, but this time, much closer up, which interestingly enough, costs less. On the one hand, close seats normally give you an odd view, which is why they're cheaper. The play is mean to be watched straight-forward, though certainly, directors pay attention to those sitting on the side. You see, the Mead Theater (there are two theaters in Studio Theater) has a stage that juts out, so that you can have seats to its left and right, which are much closer.

I must admit my reasons for being so close weren't made for artistic reasons, but for, ahem, other reasons. Even so, the proximity gave me more to think about. More about that in a moment.

I also wanted to get a haircut. My last haircut was at Rudy's on the Ave in Seattle, just to the edge of the UW campus. It's a trendy haircut place, and I liked it. It was nearly two months since I had been back there.

Finally, I wanted to get to the gym before it closed on its abnormally early hour of 9 PM. In the normal semesters, it runs til midnight.

I was up around 8:30, a bit earlier than I normally get up on the weekend, especially with no alarm set, and immediately decided to buy tickets to Take Me Out. On the one hand, it wasn't so good that it deserved a second chance, and yet, this wasn't a movie. There's more to watching a play, than a movie. I would go to the 2 PM showing. The final showing was 7 PM at night, and I didn't want to go to that. This reminded me of when I went to watch Rent in Toronto while visiting a friend for his wedding. I watched it the last weekend it was on as well.

At 10 AM, it was time to get ready to go. Jaime was up already, doing laundry. I think he thought about running, but the heat was stifling. There was little reason to be outside even at that time. Jaime went to watch the play with me yesterday, and discussed part of it, as well as Lost In Translation and Fallen Angels, which he walked out on. Jaime tends to prefer his films more straight-forward (ie, with a point, and a plot arc he follows), and this was something of an artsy exercise.

We're discussing this, and I know if I'm going to see The Edukators I'd have to say hi and bye quickly, but instead, as I am wont to do, I was caught up in the middle of the discussion. By the time I finally decide to say I have to go, it's twenty til 11. Now, the trip to Gallery Place is maybe twenty minutes, and that's once I get on the train. It's about another five minutes to walk the five blocks or so. Add to that the amount of time it takes just for the train to arrive, and I was looking at arriving maybe 11:15, probably 5 minutes into the film.

As I'm waiting for the train to arrive, I realize there's no real way I can watch this film without missing about ten minutes of it, so I begin to think, maybe I can watch something else. I had checked out the time earlier, and realized The Aristocrats was on. I had a mild headache, so I thought a comedy might be good. I had also wanted to see 9 Songs, but I had no idea when it was on.

Once I did arrive, it was 11:15, and I had to make a decision whether to catch The Edukators which I was about ten minutes late for, or The Aristocrats which would start at 11:45. I opted for the second. The Edukators lasts about 2 hours, but almost any comedy, even a documentary about something funny, would last 90 minutes. Fortunately, that was the case for The Arisocrats.

By this point, it was about 11:30, and I wanted to get something to eat and drink. The coffee at Landmark sucks, and there's no "real" food to speak of. So, I did something I haven't done in a while. I went to Starbucks. Being a liberal weenie, I'm supposed to be anti-Starbucks, which is the Walmart of coffee houses. But I'm not such a zealot not to break the rule from time to time. Plus, they had breakfast sandwiches.

What I really wanted to eat was waffles. I knew there was a waffle place nearbly, and one reason I like going to Starbucks is that someone in there usually knows directions. That's a pet rule of mine. If lost, go to a Starbucks. Surely, they've hired someone snooty enough to know some directions. While this one Indian (I think) fellow did not, another African-American woman did, and gave me the directions three times, each time with more detail. She was fighting asthma while giving me these directions, giving me flashbacks to Malcolm in the Middle where one of Malcolm's friends is in a wheelchair, and is severely asthmatic.

I made a decision befitting of my brother. At 11:40, five minutes after eating a quick Starbucks breakfast, I headed to the Waffle Place which is on 10th and F, across the street from the Ford Theater. Yes, that Ford Theater.

Now the waffle place is a bit odd. The counters are in a serpentine fashion so most of the inside is counters. This allows easy access for the wait staff to meet you. I sat down on a stool. I quickly eyed the hand-written menus, and picked the Waffle Special, which is one waffle, eggs any style, and meat. Scrambled and bacon. It was 11:42 when I made the order, but the movie would have previews til at least 11:50 if not a few minutes after that.

Eggs and bacon were ready by 11:45. I ate those, and paid ahead of time, so I could leave immediately after I ate. Waffle came at 11:47. I was out of there at 11:52. Went back to the theater around the corner, and watched The Aristocrats.

Did I tell you it was hot? It was damn hot. What was I doing?

A little background. The Aristocrats is a joke known among comedians as the dirtiest joke told. Apparently, it's an old joke, but each comedian adds its own spin to the joke. The idea is to make it as offensive as possible. The joke usually starts off something like "A family goes to a talent agent, and the father says 'Have I got an act for you. It's a family act with me, my wife, my son, my daughter and my dog'" and the punchline is "The agent then says, 'That's quite an act. What do you call it?' and they reply 'The Aristocrats'". Everything in the middle is quite disgusting.

The documentary would be boring if it were just telling the joke again and again, and it isn't a terribly substantive film, to be sure, nor even terribly funny. It is funny in parts, but it would have to be. A series of comedians discuss the joke. The idea is to see how offensive you can be. Yet, these days, it's hard to offend people, at least, it's hard to offend me. The best telling of the joke I can recall is the one by Cartman, from South Park.

It's not so funny because the joke is funny, but because of the reaction of everyone else, who stands gape mouthed, and offended. Kyle keeps wanting Cartman to stop, and he keeps saying, wait, wait, he needs to complete the telling of the joke, and that is itself quite hilarious.

It's arguable whether the punchline "We call it 'The Arisocrats'" is funny or not. In fact, the documentary says it isn't, but the reason for its humor becomes more obvious when you do the inverse joke, telling a clean family act, and giving it an obscene name.

The joke is fascinating because it's an inside joke for comedians, often told by and especially for, other comedians. Comedians, at one point, had a crisis. Shortly after 9/11, comedians were wondering how best to deal with the situation. Most comedians stopped telling jokes of sorts for about a few weeks, but at some point, people needed to start joking about even this horrible situation.

Gilbert Gottfried gets invited to a roast for Hugh Hefner a few weeks after 9/11, and decides to tell the Aristocrats joke. While telling it, Rob Schneider, of SNL, who had preceeded him, and done somewhat poorly, was on the floor. He could not believe Gottfried was telling this joke. He's milking it for all it's worth, and all the other comedians are laughing because they couldn't believe the cojones it took. Yet, yet, yet. It wasn't that funny. Too much hype, I suppose.

Film ends at 1:22, and now I need to get back on the Metro, go 6 blocks to catch a 2 PM showing of Take Me Out. I rush to the Metro, which is 5 blocks away, and have to wait about 6 minutes to get on the train, and so by the time I arrive, 3 stops later at U-Street Cardozo, I have maybe ten minutes to get to theater, which should be plenty of time, because they don't start on time either.

Realize I'm now watching this play for the second time in less than 24 hours. My seat is just one row behind the stage on the left side. I am way, way, way up front, so I'm going to get a good view, a much better view than the previous night, but off at a severe angle. Still, this is something you just couldn't do in a movie theater. All the perspectives changes. I'm in really close, and now all of a sudden, I'm somewhat less involved with the story.

I start to notice unusual things, such as the sweat on people's face, the spit as they utter lines, the way they must turn to various parts of the audience so our close in seats aren't at bad angles all the time. I suspect it's slightly better to sit on the right side of the stage, though the left side isn't so bad either.

Again, I began to think about the play.

I remember reading Ebert's review of Under Siege, which is a Steven Seagal film, also starring Tommy Lee Jones (not Tommy Lee), who plays a guy that takes over a military vessel. A friend of mine, who's dad was in the Pakistani military, claims there's no way the ship could have been taken over in the way it was done in the movie. Ebert loved the film. At least, he was entertained.

However, when he reviewed I Love Trouble, which he hated, and there's at least one reason he disliked it so much. It didn't portray the newspaper business accurately, and he, being a newspaper man, couldn't deal with that. This is even addressed in The Full Monty. Factory workmen are out of a job and decide they only way they can make money is to strip. But unlike the Chippendales who only strip to G strings, they'll do the "full monty". To learn how to dance, they decide to check out Flashdance. You remember this movie. Welder by day. Dancer by night. Except the first thing they point out is "what a lousy weld" she's making.

Point is, the more you know about something, the more holes you can poke at something for failing to be accurate. This brings me back to Take Me Out.

Take Me Out is not really a film about baseball, as it is a film about the love of baseball. It seems to be about superstardom, but doesn't deal with it really. It seems to be about being gay, but doesn't deal with it really. And I suppose there's some issue about race, but it really doesn't deal with race, except in epithets.

I want to ask you an odd question, before I go on. Suppose you see a picture. The color is great. The costume is great. The background is great. It's imaginitively set up. But the picture is Snoopy, drawn as Schulz drew him. Many things are great, but the picture itself is ordinary.

Take Me Out isn't about baseball, at least, the kind of baseball that is played today. It isn't about the agents, the media, the grind of day to day travel. Bull Durham probably captured that as well as any baseball film. It is about a kind of fantasy that a fan might have. He wants to be friends with a superstar player.

Originally, I thought Mason Marzac, who is Darren Lemming's agent, was Richard Greenberg's alter ego. Greenberg had been indifferent to baseball, until one day, he was swept up with Yankee-mania. What would he, as a fan, want to do? Be best friends with, say, Derek Jeter? At one point, people were questioning Jeter's sexuality. What would it be like if Jeter were lonely and remote, and needed someone to talk to.

But it's not just Mason. It's Kippy too. Kippy serves as the narrator, but also as Darren's best friend on the team. Yet, the play does not do an adequate job of demonstrating this friendship. In fact, Darren is so aloof as to not have any friends. Is Davey his best friend? Come on! Darren doesn't know that Davey is so religious that he would object to Darren's sexuality? How could he be that blind.

Kippy spends more time with Darren than Davey, and yet, he puts Darren on a pedestal. He's also the only person on the team that is Darren's intellectual peer. And this, to me, also represents Greenberg's alter-ego. If he were on the team, he'd be the sensitive guy, the intelligent guy, the guy who is close to Darren. Darren says he has few friends, and really, this allows Mason to be a friend, and Kippy, and to a far less extent, Davey. If Darren had many friends, how could he lean on Mason in times of need. It's also especially important to keep Darren single, so Mason can be a friend for him.

To add much realism to the proceedings would detract from what the play is about, and it's about three or four things. It's about the love of baseball that Mason has, and what it means to baseball fans everywhere. It's a wish fulfillment to be friends a great player, through Mason and Kippy. It is far less about what it would be like to be the first gay man in baseball, because that issue is really not addressed at all. Everyone accepts it, except Mungitt, who may not even know what it means to accept it or not.

The only intellectually interesting part of the play is whether Mungitt's character represents a slap at PC correctness. Everyone's willing to support Darren. He's black. He's gay. Mungitt is shown to be a man of low IQ. When he makes racial and homophobic slurs, everyone is against him. In effect, he becomes like the first black man to play in an all-white sport, yet, where that was seen as a step forward for basic human behavior, is rejection of people who don't know any better an improvement?

Still, Greenberg can't quite resolve this. Mungitt's character is eventually made out to be as racist and homophobic as he was protrayed, in a rantfest that sorta doesn't make sense. Mungitt ends up being something of a device to get Darren to question his superstardom (which also isn't very well addressed), but more importantly, to lean on his friends.

Even though this film appears to be about baseball and appears to be about being gay in baseball, it ends up being, I think quite deliberately, neither.

Several things I noticed the second time around. The actors have said their lines so much that even some grammatical errors are left in. They are able to reproduce body gestures and tones to an incredible degree.

Also, actors stand in a particular location to allow all of the audience the best view. Even though I was on the side, I could see the actors. In general, they don't block one another. I also found I had to move my head more from the front of the stage to the back to follow converstaions, which I didn't have to do the previous time.

There are logistical things that are fascinating too. For example, in one of the nude scenes, a soap bar is supposed to fly across about two players, in a shower with six players. Instead, it skids nearly all the way to the last player. The last player has to move the soap with his feet, and eventually position it so they can continue the play as written. Of course, they could have just moved it to him. It's one of those things where they must think "Oh god, I kicked that soap way too far!".

In another scene, a chair is flung, quite masterfully, I must add. Also, balls are thrown and towels are thrown, with remarkable accuracy. Towels also have to be worn so they don't fall off as actors move around (though, by a certain
point, you've seen it all).

I also noticed the actor Davey flubbing part of his lines. Even though he's done it hundreds of times by now, I'm sure that it's tough to always get it right. I mean, this show is on twice a day on weekends, and every evening, which means these actors have been doing this every day for like three or four months.

Finally, it was easier to notice how many stereotypes were used. The simple Southerner with a good heart. The Italian guy, who's also not so bright. The Latino players who don't speak English, and basically do their Spanish thing. The stoic Japanese player. Really, the only intelligent lines are being uttered by Darren, Kippy, Mason, and Davey, and they are the only ones that aren't stereotypes (well, Mason is). In fact, Darren and Kippy are so anti-stereotypical as to not resemble real athletes (except both are in great shape).

If I have all these complaints, then why does it work? There are plenty of funny lines in the film, many uttered by Mason. He really has some key observations about baseball. Plays can create intensity that movies sometimes can not. It's done by proximity and the fact that these people are right there. It's the best kind of 3D film ever. At times, you feel a kinship with the actors, even if really, they are actors, and live in a different world.

This play had me thinking very much like Greenberg did when he began to follow baseball. What would it be like to be a friend of an actor on stage? Yet, the gay theme wouldn't work there, because let's face it, there are plenty of gays in theater.

And very unlike a movie, the actors will sometimes mingle with the audience. I didn't really get to talk to any of them at all, since they seemed engaged in talking to the fans that were with them right there and then, and eventually, due to some disgreement with some worker, I left, and walked in the miserable heat back to the Metro.

OK, still two more things. I wanted to get a haircut, and it's 5 PM when I leave. Does the hair place close at 5 or 6? Lucky for me, it's 6 PM. I arrive at the newly renovated hair cuttery (at least the second renovation in my ten years of being there). I have to wait as my usual barber (er, stylist) is taking care of two customers, and must wait til 6 PM before I get the haircut. I head home, after that.

Gym closes at 9 PM, and I'm exhausted, and now it's 6:30 PM. If I sleep til 7:30 PM, I can still get an hour at the gym. However, I don't nap til 7 PM, and then get up at 7:40. Dave is back by then, but he doesn't want to head to the gym, as he realize he's filthy and wants to shower off. So I head to the gym, read another 40 pages or so of Season on the Brink, Feinstein's fantastic book about Bobby Knight, and then shower, head back, and begin to blog. It's 11 PM now, and it's taken me an hour thirty to blog this.

If I were only paid by the word.