Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Last night, we had a rare evening out. We dropped Lucinda off with Aunt Maggi and then headed over to Hollywood to see Varla Jean Merman’s new show, “I’m Not Paying For This!”.

We first went to dinner at the French Market Place in West Hollywood. We had a nice dinner and browsed a bit at our favorite gay gift shop, Dorothy’s Surrender. Then we headed over to the Renberg Theater at the L.A. Gay Center.

“I’m Not Paying For This!” is Varla’s new show, and it’s her tribute to the Seven Deadly Sins. She had a song for each, and it was very entertaining.

According to Varla, Lust leads to “guilt, a fractured tailbone, and a soiled clown suit”.

Varla also displayed a new talent, playing the theme from “Star Trek” on the theremin.

At the end of the show, she did one encore, singing “Girl With a Pearl Necklace” and also her “Schoolhouse Rock” medley.

Afterwards, we bought her new CD and she signed it for us. Overall, it was a very fun evening.

Her show runs through February 5.

Yup. It’s time for another tattoo convention. This time it’s the winter edition of the giant Body Art Expo at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds. Today was a perfect day for it. The sun was out and it was warm.

When I got to the Fairplex, they were having the Easyriders bike show and an RV show, too. So the parking was packed. But that’s normal for any event that’s held there. There’s always something else going on.

When I got there, I saw my friend Stormy and her dog Nakai. Nakai is a service dog in training, so she get to go places where ordinary dogs don’t. She was also very cute and smart.

When I got inside, I saw David and his friend Justice. Justice recently moved back to L.A. after moving away after the Northridge Earthquake, and she had some concerns about Los Angeles and earthquakes. Since I’m in the earthquake business, I did my best to allay her fears.

A bit later, Mandy and Rob showed up. They were my ‘straight friends’ for the afternoon, since they don’t really fit the freak mold. But it was nice to see Mandy again.

I saw Rick at the Mermaid’s Tale booth.

Anna was at here Anagram Fine Art booth again, so we had to visit and take a picture.

They had a fashion show, which was amusing. The outfits were from the Folter booth, and they were very nice. Brought out lots of cameras. The funniest bit was the first two girls who came out and posed. Then they turned around and flipped up their short schoolgirl skirts to show us their panties that said “PERV” on the back. Sadly, I was not able to capture that moment, due to digital camera lag.

There was also a booth for Utilikilts. I stopped in to just say hello. (waves to KarlElvis) And while I was there, two of the girls from the Folter show stopped by.

So it was a fun afternoon. All the pictures are here:

http://www.1134.org/stan/tattoos/gallery/bodyartexpo2006jan

Last spring, Cathy had some trouble with her car. We ended up spending close to $2000 on fixing it. Our hope was that this would buy us another two years before having to replace it.

Sadly, this was not to be. After 129,000 miles, it was time.

So we bought Cathy a new car today. It’s a Toyota Matrix XR.

The amazing thing was, this wasn’t a horrible experience.

We started out looking at used cars. Cathy wanted something with a higher crash safety rating than her old Honda Civic. She liked the look of the Matrix, but being short, she needed to sit in it to be sure she could drive it.

Cathy contacted AAA and they referred her to Longo Toyota in El Monte. We went down there and had a look.

In the end, we found a used Matrix that had all the features Cathy wanted, but a new one with the same features was only $1,500 more. So we bought that.

Now this was a very weird, but still pleasant experience. Apparently, Longo fired all their car salesmen and replaced them with human beings. Everyone we dealt with there was pleasant, helpful, and knowledgeable. We thought we’d stepped into some weird Bizarro World where car buying doesn’t involve high pressure sales tactics, bodily-function deprivation, and being locked in a room with “The Closer”. It was all right.

And on a completely unrelated note, this weekend my car rolled over 100,000 miles. With the miles I drive, I probably won’t be able to keep it for more than another 15-20 years.

Today we went to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown Los Angeles to see “Dressing a Galaxy: The Costumes of Star Wars“. This was an exhibit of costumes and props from all six movies. Most of the exhibits were costumes, but there were some other things, including Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader’s light sabers from the original movie, and an X-wing fighter parked in the courtyard.

There was an entire side of one gallery devoted to Natalie Portman’s costumes. I suppose we’ll have to rent those movies some day to see why she needed so many outfits.

We also saw the complete Darth Vader outfit used in Episode III, as well as a couple of wookie suits. Also, they had various other alien beings on display. I’m not enough of a geek to be able to name them.

It was great fun seeing this stuff up close. In particular, seeing Darth Vader’s light saber ranked right up there with the time I saw Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. And after seeing this, Lucinda says we have to rent the movies so she can see them.

Today is our 17th anniversary. It’s the actual day and everything. So after we dropped Lucinda off at Aunt Maggi’s house, we went up to Long Beach.

On the way, we stopped off at Westminster Mall. Cathy used to work at the Republic Federal Savings branch there, so we wanted to see what had moved in to that space. We were surprised to see that the space looked almost unchanged, even though it is now the ‘City Hall at the Mall’ for the city of Westminster. The vault was even still there. It was a fun little trip down Memory Lane.

After the stop at the mall, we went to the old McDonnell Douglas plant down the street so I could recreate the picture from my going-away party there, back in 1984.

When we got to Long Beach, our plan was to have dinner at Hamburger Henry. While this may seem an odd choice, it has great sentimental value for us. Our wedding was in Long Beach, and Cathy spent most of the evening visiting with relatives and friends there. So she never had a chance to eat her dinner. And when it was all over, she was hungry. So we headed out at 1:00AM looking for something to eat. We ended up at Hamburger Henry.

While we were there, we noticed that a lot of the people there were dressed in costumes. Then we realized that it was the Saturday night before Halloween. In all the wedding planning, that had never occurred to us. And we said that maybe we shouldn’t have changed before going there. We would have fit right in, dressed as a bride and groom.

So we got there, but there was something else there. We asked at some of the neighboring stores, and they told us that Hamburger Henry had been gone for something like eight years. The land was just too valuable to use for just selling hamburgers, so the owner had leased it to a developer and the old place was gone.

We ended up having our burgers at another place nearby. It was still a fun evening. And we got to meet a hot-pink dog while we were there.

Today we took Lucinda down to Orange County so she could spend the night at her Aunt Maggi’s house. On the way, we stopped off in Huntington Beach so we could visit my mother’s grave. When I was a kid, my mother used to talk about how she was looking forward to the day when I was grown and would have grandchildren for her to dote on. Sadly, she never got the chance. She died in 1994, five years before Lucinda was born.

I’ve told Lucinda about her, and since we were going to be passing near the cemetery, we stopped off so that she could meet her other grandma. She said that she felt sad that she never met her grandma. I told her about how excited and happy her grandma would have been if she’d had a chance to meet Lucinda.

It’s our 17th anniversary. Wait – no, it’s not. That’s not until next Saturday. But Lucinda is going to her aunt’s house for the weekend, so we decided to do our official big night out tonight so she could come along. She wanted to go to “the restaurant with the moving floor” – L.A. Prime at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Doesn’t everyone let their six-year-old choose how they are going to celebrate their anniversary?

So we made a reservation and headed down there. We’ve gone there for New Year’s Eve before, but I think this was the first time we’d gotten there before dark. Just outside on the street we saw the remnants of a day of filming. There was a rack of odd-looking mopeds and lots of strange-looking potted plants on the sidewalk. The hotel people told us that it was for “Mission: Impossible III”. Since I doubt we’ll see that, we will probably never know if they were right or not.

Once we got inside, we headed for the restaurant. As always, the food and service were superb. The view was only so-so this time, since it was a foggy evening in L.A. But Lucinda still had a fun time going around looking out the windows. And after dinner we all headed to the revolving lounge to look at the moving floor.

Overall, it was a fun evening

Today we took Lucinda and her friend Lucy to the California Science Center for the Magic Exhibit.

We saw the ‘disembodied head’ illusion, the ‘heavy crate’ illusion, the ‘levitating chair’ illusion, and a whole host of card tricks. It was a fun time. There are more pictures in Lucinda’s photo album.

Today we went to see Sandra Tsing Loh’s new show, “Mother on Fire“.

Sandra Tsing Loh and I have similar backgrounds. We’re both half Chinese and half German. We both got degrees in Physics from major universities. We both spent some time working in the aerospace gulag of Hughes Aircraft. But then she went off into performing arts and writing, while I became a computer nerd.

Her latest show is about parenthood, and particularly about the travails of trying to get her daughter into a good school in Los Angeles. Having just been through that particular crucible last year, we were primed for a good time. And she did not disappoint. The show was a hoot, with stories about the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the kids eat candy and are stalked by an obese mountain lion in the hallways, to a bidding war over a house in La Cañada and talk of moving to Utah. It was hugely entertaining and tremendously funny.

If you’re in Los Angeles, go see this show.

It’s September, which means it’s time for the Inkslingers’ Ball. This is easily the best tattoo convention in Los Angeles, and it’s my sentimental favorite. We’ve been going to it since ’95, and it’s always great fun.

I went on Friday night and also on Saturday. Cathy joined me for Saturday night. I have a whole circle of friends that I know from these events that I never see anywhere else, so it’s always a fun time to see them and catch up.

When Cathy got there, we went and had dinner at Fabioulus Cafe, which is just down the street from The Palladium where the convention is held. After that, we went back and wandered around, visiting with our friends there. We saw Erica, who has a whole tattoo sleeve of My Little Pony. We also ran into our old friend Lisa, who has lots of nice tattoos and is also a very interesting intellectual. We got to visit with Roberta and Hurley, who we’ve known for almost 20 years now. Also, we did some shopping there. We bought a set of ‘Vacation in Hell’ refrigerator magnets, and Cathy bought a couple of new shirts.

Overall, it was a very fun time. The pictures are here.