All posts by Matthew Callan

Holiday Triumphs 2010

Holiday Triumphs: The Pee-Wee Herman Show on Broadway

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

peeweeshow.jpgNo one’s ever asked me for life advice because, I mean, c’mon. But if they did, I’d say this: Spend your money on experiences, not things.

Things break. Things fade. Things fail. But experiences can not be replaced and can not be taken from you. I’ve regretted purchases of things (more than I care to admit), but I’ve never been sorry I spent money on an experience. Even if the experience itself wasn’t what I expected, or fell short in some way, I can always take something instructive from it. And when an experience meets or exceeds your expectations, there’s nothing better. Whether it’s comedy or music or theater or a vacation, if you can afford the money and the time, do it.

Still, when I heard that Pee-Wee Herman was doing a Broadway show, I debated whether I should spend the dough. Broadway ain’t cheap, to the point where I had to really consider if the money would be worth it. What pushed me over the edge was 1) a number of friends/relatives who went and said it was great, and 2) The Baby.

As I wrote about not too long ago, The Baby loves Pee-Wee. One night earlier this year, for reasons I can’t remember, I thought she might like to watch Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and I cued it up on Netflix Instant. She got as far as the bathtub fight with Francis and said “I don’t like this movie!” So I turned it off, cursing myself for showing it to her too soon, thinking I’d poisoned her against Pee-Wee forever. But the very next day, much to my surprise, she asked to watch it. This time, she sat all the way through and laughed like
crazy.

For the next month, she wanted to watch nothing but Pee-Wee. I showed her clips of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse on TV and she loved that, too. One of my brothers bought her the entire series on DVD for her birthday, and she’s been watching them incessantly. My cousin got her a Pee-Wee action figure from 1988 on eBay, still in the package. It killed me to open it up, but I did so anyway, and she hasn’t slept without it ever since.

So considering The Baby’s obsession with Pee-Wee, and considering that Paul Reubens has never done a Broadway show before and is unlikely to do one again, I bit the bullet and pulled the trigger on a pair of tickets for a Sunday matinee. I was fully aware that disaster was an option. After all, The Baby is only 4 years old, and it’s always possible she could have a meltdown in the theater, or have to go to the bathroom 800 times, or just be bored. But I’ve been on a winning streak of late (brag) and I counted on that streak to continue for this outing.

I didn’t tell The Baby about the show beforehand, because she has no concept of time and you can’t tell her you’re going to something in a day or a week or a month. If she hears about some upcoming event, she will assume–and demand–that said event start NOW. So all I told her was that we were going on a super special “mission” to The City. (She likes to pretend to be a spy when we go out. So do I.) The only clue she had was me suggesting she bring her Pee-Wee action figure along for the trip.

It was raining and intensely windy this day. All I had to protect us was an umbrella too big for her little hands but which she insisted on carrying anyway. As we walked up Seventh Avenue, the wind took a hold of her umbrella and blew it up the sidewalk at a furious pace. We ran after it, and only a stranger walking in the opposite direction saved it from flying out into traffic.

I wanted to take her to a diner off of Times Square I’d always gone to with my dad, but the weather meant walking around for too long was a really bad idea. So I decided we’d just get lunch at the Heartland Brewery across the street from the theater. We scurried down the block and hid under the restaurant’s awning, shaking off the rain. As we did so I pointed to the marquee across the street.

“Hey, who’s that?” I asked her. She, of course, yelled ecstatically that it was Pee-Wee. That’s when I told her that we were going to see Pee-Wee do an extra special show on a stage, not a movie or a TV show, but in person.

“You mean he’s gonna be real?” she asked. When I said “yes,” she literally jumped up and down with excitement.

During lunch, I instructed her on the basic rules of theater going. “You can laugh and you can clap,” I told her, “but you can’t talk. If you have to tell daddy something, you have to whisper it. And once the show starts, you can’t leave your seat. So if you have go to the bathroom, make sure to let me know before the show starts.” She listened to and completely understood all of these instructions, which is an extremely rare occurrence.

Once inside the theater, I was genuinely surprised/delighted by the large age range of the attendees. People much older than me and people much younger than me. Kids coming with their parents, older than The Baby but clearly not being dragged along–I mean, kids 8 to 18 who were just as excited as my kid to be there, bringing their own Pee-Wee dolls and tin foil balls. I also saw one grown man dressed exactly like Pee-Wee, which wouldn’t have been that weird except that he had this air about him of wanting very much to be noticed as The Guy Who Dresses Like Pee-Wee. If it’s possible to stand still conspicuously, he was doing it.

The Baby sat in her seat and eagerly awaited curtain time. As I sat next to her and checked my phone, she angrily insisted I had to watch the stage. “The show’s gonna start!” she yelled, and literally pulled my face toward the still-silent stage.

Ironically, after I worried about her bathroom needs, it was me who had to make an emergency run. With six minutes until the show started, I made the executive decision to go to the men’s room to forestall any discomfort during the performance. The Baby made me promise we wouldn’t miss anything, so I literally ran down the stairs to the lounge area, carrying her under one arm, took care of business, and ran back up to our seats. Elapsed time: 90 seconds.

When the lights went down and Pee-Wee came on stage, I knew the tickets were worth every penny. I’ve never seen The Baby with a look of such pure, delirious joy. “It’s Pee-Wee!” she squealed, because she could barely believe it. She held out her action figure throughout the show so “Pee-Wee” could watch Pee-Wee. I wish I could have taken pictures of her, and yet, I didn’t need to, because I will never forget the look on her face at that moment.

She lagged at times, as would any four-year-old forced to sit in a dark theater for 90 minutes, and she was even scared at one part of the show when the lights went out in Pee-Wee’s playhouse. But overall, she had an amazing time, and I am so grateful I could share that with her. And since I bought the tickets, I guess I’m grateful to me. Thanks, me! Oh, and Pee-Wee for doing the show, I guess.

The next morning, on the way to school, she said apropos of nothing. “I can’t believe we saw Pee-Wee!” She told all her friends and teachers about the show, but they had little idea of what she was talking about. “They didn’t know Pee-Wee,” she said, with the annoyed sigh of someone who’s a little too hip for the room.

It’s the best Christmas gift I’ve ever given to anyone: an experience that she’ll remember for a lifetime. And also, the ability to feel vaguely superior to her classmates.

Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: Anti-Egg Nog-ery

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

There’s lots of things I like about The New York Times, and there’s lots of things I don’t like about it. Most of the latter are perfectly encapsulated by their subscription commercials, which portray reading the Times as some sort of exclusive club that they will deign to let you poor slobs join for the low, low price of whatever.

In particular, their Trend Pieces drive me nuts, because they are so disconnected from life as it is truly lived. Nine times out of 10, these articles are based on something done/noticed/overheard by three friends of the 23-year-old fact checker, then reported on as if it is some fantastic new wave sweeping the city. And in their definition, the city exists between Canal and 96th Street, extends into certain parts of Brooklyn, and that’s it.

Not to mention that these pieces usually feature some of the worst, most clueless humans alive. Like the trust fund fucktard who told the Times you shouldn’t bother to have a party if you’re too poor to hire a bartender. (You get three guesses where this asswipe lives and your first clue is “Williamsburg”.)

edub_eggnog.jpgThe piece I’m going to discuss now is only tangentially related to such nonsense, but it is holiday related and it does involve a Totally Fake Trend perceived as real by roughly 12 people on the Upper East Side. Plus, it took a swipe at something near and dear to my holiday heart: egg nog.

First off, know this: I love egg nog. I loved it as a kid, and I still love it. I know it’s horrible for you and I could not give less of a shit about that. If egg nog was illegal, I’d make it in my bathtub. I will consume anything that even pretends to be egg nog-flavored: ice cream, milk shakes, lattes, laxatives. And I not only enjoy the mass-produced, completely fake, store-bought egg nog, I prefer it.

Do I understand why someone would not like egg nog? Of course. I’m an egg nog enthusiast, not an evangelist. To each his or her own. But I would prefer to not be judged for my noggy proclivities, as was done implicitly and explicitly in the Times last week.

The piece in question appeared in last Thursday’s edition, penned by Frank Bruni, and entitled “The Eggnog Resisters’ League.” Solidarity, comrade! Bruni has stormed the ramparts to combat the imperialistic advances of egg nog, a drink that he and only he has the guts to take on! Why does he hate it so?

It’s a dessert in drink drag, a single-cup, multi-egg sleigh ride to feeling overstuffed and overwhelmed right at the start of a party, when an unimaginative host foists it upon you — “we have eggnog!” — in place of a proper cocktail or respectable glass of wine or something, anything, that won’t spoil your appetite and erase three miles on the treadmill in three insanely rich sips.

It’s a calorie extravaganza, a cholesterol jubilee, ruling out any
possibility of pacing by hogging all the nutritional naughtiness that should rightly be spread across the breadth of a cold December evening.

What kind of parties is Bruni going to where the host “foists” anything on you? Is he telling me that there are people who, if you ask for a martini or a beer, will hold you down and pour egg nog down your throat through funnel? This sounds like those totally BS stories about drug pushers. “First one’s free, kid!” You know what you do when you don’t like the drink someone offers you? You ask for something else. If they’re a good host, they’ll give it to you, judgment free. Crazy, I know!

I also love how Bruni equates serving egg nog with a lack of imagination, as if it is only served because of obligation or panic. Later in the article, he blames egg nog’s waning popularity (an assertion for which the evidence is circumstantial at best) with, among other things, “greater culinary sophistication.” So don’t serve egg nog this year, folks, unless you want your guests to mistake you for some shoeless hillbilly.

But because he wants a beverage that still evokes the holidays, Bruni consults some bartending friends who construct for him drinks that evoke egg nog-ery without being egg nog. Which is fine–by all means, experiment, innovate, and all that. Except even from these bartenders, there is an unspoken implication–and in some cases spoken–that these drinks are spiritually and culturally superior to actual egg nog, the holiday swill of philistine idiots.

To give you an idea of the lengths to which these bartenders go to make egg-not, one of the concoctions involves a pine-flavored liqueur. If everyone involved wasn’t so god damn sophisticated, I’d suspect they were all depraved alcoholics reduced to drinking household cleaners. Even Bruni admits that these egg nog alternatives don’t really capture what he’s looking for. But at least he’s not drinking egg nog, the moronic gruel sloughed down the grunting throats of troglodytes.

Is Bruni allowed to dislike egg nog? Of course he is. Just don’t act like you’re more highly evolved than the rest of us schmucks for a matter of pure taste, or that you’re the member of an oppressed minority. And don’t bend over backwards and ask bartenders to make
drinks based on coconut milk, mulled cider, and Pine-Sol just because you don’t feel like drinking it. Just have a chardonnay and shut the fuck up.

Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: Pokemon Christmas Medley

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

pokemonxmas.jpgWanna feel old? Kids now in college grew up with Pokemon. It’s been around long enough to cycle back into the area of nostalgia, just like G.I. Joe and Transformers have for folks of my generation. In Japan, I think Pikachu was elected to the Senate.

Though I’m too old to be in the Pokemon wheelhouse, I totally understand why it was so popular with younger young’uns. It has all the elements necessary to hit kids right where they live.

For starters, the hero of the show was a kid, which is the quickest shortcut to kids’ show success. It had an enormous universe full of characters and a vocabulary all its own, which capitalizes on kids’ obsessive tendencies. And the show itself was really just one arm of a multi-tiered assault of Pokemon related things to buy and do, like its Magic the Gathering-esque card game and roughly a bazillion licensed items from backpacks to differently sized backpacks.

But as I’ve said repeatedly on this site, you should never confuse nostalgia for quality. If you loved Pokemon as a kid, that’s fine, but seen with adult eyes, it’s a terrible show. Not any worse than the stuff I watched when I was seven, mind you, but still terrible.

Naturally, Pokemon produced a gaggle of Christmas-related fare, because the franchise churned out more junk per square inch than any toy line since Masters of the Universe. Just in time for Christmas 2001, they released Pokemon Christmas Bash! Because in a world still reeling from the attacks of September 11, we all needed something to help us heal and strengthen our resolve. And what better to unite us than an album of Pokemon-themed Christmas songs, with instrumentation from the finest keyboard technology 1987 had to offer?

Or, more accurately, Christmas-themed Pokemon songs, since the holiday was was dwarfed in most of the tunes by the importance of naming as many of the characters as possible. But it’s one thing to compose brand new songs about Pokemon that barely mention the holiday (like the immortal ballad “I’m Getting Santa Claus a Pikachu for Christmas”). It’s quite another to shove the names of your dumb characters into beloved carols, which is what they did with this Pokemon Christmas medley.

If you know nothing about Pokemon, this will sound like another language to you. Every third word is the name of a character or a move or something else Pokemon-universe-related. If you did grow up watching it, I’m guessing this will inspire in you some serious cringing. If you can listen to this more than 30 seconds at a time, you are a stronger person than I.

And if you find this grating, be aware that somewhere out there is a German-language version of this album (Pokemon Weihnachtparty!). I could not find any audio of that online, and it’s probably best I didn’t, as I’m pretty sure if I heard it I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a month afterward.