Because The Night, Belongs To Lovers, Because The Night, Belongs to Butt

We went to the Orchestra this past Thursday. I don’t know a lot about music in general, and the orchestra in specific (perfect sentence construction, btw). I did learn a couple interesting facts, which, as a non-Orchestrian, I will share for your enlightenment:

--you can get drinks: I mean, you technically cannot drink during the music, which is what separates the Orchestra from awesome. Nonetheless, you can get a decent glass of whisky for a semi-reasonable price both before the show and during halftime. (Sidenote: the Orchestra doesn’t call it halftime.) If you go find one of the bar-tenders who looks like a hipcat and somehow signal to him that you are also a hipcat, not one of the squares who makes up the regular audience, I think you can get him to pour you what is essentially a double. At least it seemed that way.

--it’s hard to figure out what to watch: maybe this is not true if you know a lot about music. For many of the songs I had no idea what was going on. I mean, I can tell when the tuba goes off and the cymbals are hard to confuse. But seriously, there are like 40 people on the stage, which makes it hard to tell what is being featured at the time. Katie pointed out to me that a bunch of the old people close their eyes, which is a lot like wearing a wet suit into the hot-tub as far as I can tell. I decided to just sort of follow whatever I found was interesting. By far the most interesting part, when certain guys really get going on the violin, it looks like they are engaging in an activity which is totally inappropriate for the Orchestra stage.

--the drummer is faking it: the guy who stands by the tympani, specifically. I would say “the guy who plays the tympani” but the problem is that he doesn’t, play it that is. He just moves a couple of padded sticks as if he were going to play the tympani. Katie tried to excuse this behavior by saying that because the tympani is so powerful he just sort of needs to lightly touch, almost brush the drum. That, however, is obviously crap. If you had a tympani you would smack it, cuz that’s how you play the freaking drums. Seriously, this guy just gestured towards the drum in a rhythm he found interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good gig if you can get it, but the Larry David look-alike in the penguin suit has nothing over me when it comes to rocking out Orchestra style on the air-tympani.

--if you hide them in your coat, you can get away with eating chocolate covered peanuts during the show: nothing really to add to this one. Just don’t let the ushers see you, cuz they look like the meanest set of volunteers ever.

We are watching ice dancing, which is sad and funny in and of itself I know, but even more notable, is the fact that there is apparently something during this second free program called “The Twizzle Section.” I think they should adopt this for baseball as well, cuz I would be way more excited if they changed “The Bottom of the Fifth” to “The Twizzle Section.” Plus Joe Buck would be hilarious. Dick Button also complained that the Ukrainian pair did not seem to be “oozing Latin flavor.” I’m not gonna comment about what that means for ice-dancing’s validity as a sport, but merely to indicate that I’m no more surprised about the Ukrainian lack of Latin flavor than I am about Ethiopian cuisine’s lack of Beluga caviar.

Hippo sez that if I am going to talk about caviar then I really need to get her some more kitty food, cuz gourmet stuff like that really makes her purr.

Peace,

MB-K