Violently Relaxed
My final assessment of the Fog City Diner is that it was good; good enough that I’d be happy to go back and try something else. Nikki did enjoy her hamburger but for $11, I think she’d much rather just have Nation’s (and I can’t really blame her there) so I may need to find another person or group of people to dine with before I return. Or at least stop by a Carl’s Jr. on the way.
Anyway, after dinner we walked up Battery street to the Punchline where Nikki decided to pick a table right up against the edge of the stage. Granted it was stage right and back toward the wall, but it was still as close as you could get on that side to the stage without actually getting up on it and taking a seat. I wasn’t thrilled with this decision.
Let me briefly explain the conundrum of attention which plagues me. On one hand, I secretly desire to be noticed, to stand out in the crowd. I want people to recognize me and listen to the things I have to say, to say kind things about my wit and talent and give me pointless rewards and accolades I probably only thinly deserve. But on the other hand, I loathe being noticed. I abhor the thought of fame and typically feel that what I have to say is insipid or trite and that my witless displays of ineptitude are more likely to be pointed out than anything else. It’s this odd tug-of-war between warring sides of my personality, one being the self-assured extrovert and the other being the self-loathing introvert. Environment seems to be the determining factor over who wins: In comfortable settings I can be charming, funny and outgoing. In strange surroundings I revert to wallflower and either way I half hate myself during and afterward.
How this manifests itself in entertainment venues is that I absolutely cannot stand the thought of having attention drawn to me. For example, I love attending sports events, yet I always worry that I’ll be caught on camera, broadcast around the country with my finger two knuckles deep in my left nostril or something. Or that I’ll have a big glob of nacho cheese chilling on my chin or something. I spend the whole time in mild paranoia, trying to identify the various potential cameras and track their focus so as to avoid somehow becoming the next Internet phenomenon with a WMV file downloaded hundreds of times per second called “Nose Picking Nacho Cheese Guy” or something.
This is not a camera-shy thing only, either. The last thing I want in a crowded comedy club is for the comedian to start razzing me or asking me to come onstage for some kind of humiliating “demonstration.” Nikki didn’t think of these things ahead of time, so we sat in the front and I was jittery and nervous almost the whole time. At one point an opening act actually began ribbing the audience members across from us and front center, and Nik finally realized my points about the wisdom of her choice were valid and demanded to switch places with me. I feel a little bad for not doing it, but I can think of no worse idea to avoid notice than to start shuffling around in the middle of some joker’s act. I made her hold firm (a mild punishment for her putting us in the position to begin with, I admit) but we escaped unscathed.
The headliner, whom we were actually there to see, was Mike Birbiglia. He was as good as I’d hoped (although some of the funnier bits from his Comedy Central special were absent, at least they were replaced with equally funny new stuff) and though he digressed into an anti-Bush segment which, as expected, had mixed results he managed to be funny during so even rabid conservative Bush fans were still on the hook enough to come back when he moved on to less divisive subject matter. The opening acts were pretty dull, the first being spotty with a few really funny jokes but long stretches of snoozers and the second really just trying too hard and ultimately failing.
We had to fight some of the A’s/Giants game crowd on the way home, which we mostly managed to avoid with a clever ploy of getting on the wrong train, going up two stops and getting back on the correct train there, ahead of the game traffic so we got nice comfortable seats while the drunken sports fans stood or, more accurately, swayed.
Saturday I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai as part of my movie history lessons (a self-imposed revisitation of classic films I never saw which has been an enjoyable assignment). I liked the film, it is a nice change of pace from typical war films in that it doesn’t include a lot of arbitrary fight scenes and somehow manages to paint both main character from the British army and the main Japanese character as equally nuts. Which is to say the movie strangely lacks a traditional protagonist unless you count William Holden as Shears, which I don’t, exactly. I did think the film could have used some additional editing; a lot of the Shears subplots seemed unnecessary and distracting from the much more interesting clash of insanity between Col. Saito and Col. Nicholson. Once the mission to take out the bridge was underway it was better and appropriately suspenseful to build toward the climax. Still, a good movie and it was nice to see Alec Guiness as something other than Obi-Wan Kenobi.
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