Mika, Once, and the Tonys
Going to Texas in a day or two, so mainly just cleaning the apartment up. I don’t know what the compulsion is… like, it doesn’t seem to bother me when I haven’t vacuumed in a while or such when I’m living here. But, when I come home from a trip, I like the place to look great. Now, if it *always* looked great, then that would make it easier, no? Don’t get me wrong, it always looks good, just not great.
So, lot of activity on Saturday… had a wedding to go to in Carmel, and a concert that night in the city. Initially, I expected to be in NYC by now or, barring that, in Texas for my nephew’s third birthday. With all the confusion around my whereabouts, neither of which had me in SF this weekend, I said I would be unable to make my friend’s wedding reception, although i realized that I had never properly followed up and told her why, which would have been nice. I mean, otherwise, the invite is like, “We want you to share this special day with us…” and it’s just like, “Thanks, but… NO.” But whatever…
Since I didn’t know what was going on, I also bought tickets to see Mika that night at The Fillmore. I didn’t anticipate a problem selling them if it came to that.
When NYC fell through (I did post about that on here, didn’t I? In any case, the apartment swap didn’t pan out.), the gears switched to Texas. So, then it was like… eh, I have these Mika tickets… and well, he’s three and a birthday party for a three year old is just a large number of people I don’t know and have to make small talk with, and I hate small talk, and it’s not even his birthday until Thursday anyway…
So, the plan became: no NYC, Mika, Texas on Tuesday (cheapest fare), and I would be able to attend my friend’s wedding, but not the reception. This time sort of dictated by the fact that I had previously already RSVP’d as no, but see aforementioned references to Mika tickets and my lack of desire to make small talk in large groups of strangers.
So, I rented a car, drove to Carmel (2+ hours), had a vegan lunch in Santa Cruz en route, tried to do the 17-mile drive around Pebble Beach to kill time before the wedding (which almost made me late for the wedding, since I lack the “guy gene” that would have made me think that a one lane road through a golf course would have bottlenecks as cars slowed down to watch people tee off?! The mind still can’t grasp why watching strangers golf is any cause for applying the brakes.)
In church, I felt a bit like George Bush with all his signing statements. A lot of my “Lord Hear Our Prayer”s were followed by a mental asterisk, with which things I didn’t agree with, which things I wanted to further define, which things I thought the church should clear up, etc. Oddly enough, it is a strange thing to mentally footnote such things, because it seems to me that people who aren’t into religion are generally thought of as atheists or agnostics. I’m fine with spirituality, but think religion… eh, we can certainly do without it. Still, if you think that God and the Church are two separate things that are barely tangentially related, seems odd to give him notes on church stuff, no?
After church, just a straight shot back up to SF, picking Jeremy up on the peninsula and driving up to see Mika.
Mika was phenomenal live. Just a great entertainer. Seemed rather chuffed how many people in San Francisco, this being his first proper show here, knew all the words to his songs. The crowd was dancing and singing along, just a great party vibe. It almost seemed like the audience and performer were all in on the same secret of his music, surprised we were all in a room sharing it, and that so many people that will be hearing him live in the future don’t even know who he is yet.
He played all the killer cuts from the album, with covers of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of These)” by the Eurythmics, and “I Want You Back,” by the Jackson 5, both of which served his amazing falsetto well. Short show, given him having only one album, so I drove Jeremy back to the train station to catch the late train home. En route, I was thinking, there’s no way he’ll come out of the venue that fast, I should go back.
As Jeremy was getting out of the car, I said, you might want to leave your poster with me. I think I’m going to swing by The Fillmore and see about getting it signed. Again, I think Mika is just a massive talent, and this may be the easiest time to ever get his signature on something (I say this now just for how ironic will be when we’re dating at some point).
I get back to the Fillmore, and it looks pretty thinned out, but then I see about a dozen people standing around with posters. Score. Eventually, a road manager or someone comes out, says Mika is not feeling well, but will sign everything for us. He just won’t pose for posters or be able to talk. We can take photos as he’s signing, just no posing.
He comes out a few minutes later, with a grey sweatshirt hood over his head, still hot as hell, though (although the same look on Eminem looks tough… eh, not as much with Mika). I had chatted up the guy in line behind me, so he was going to snap pics of me and Mika and e-mail them to me, and says he’ll still try and get them.
My turn arrives, and I mentioned that I wrote a great review of his album and have been giving him lots of love on my gay youth website. He smiles. I tell him that I initially was going to interview him, but decided that since it is a gay youth site, I didn’t want yet another version of that same interview he has to give on that topic. (Now, I thought this was a bit of a slam, since I don’t want to interview him in Oasis because he’s not openly gay, and the point of the site is providing role models to kids).
But Mika turns around what I say and makes it sounds supportive. “So, you’re just focusing on the music and not all of the rest… sounds great.”
On the sexuality front, I also mentioned that I took one shot at him in the review. He wanted to know what I wrote, very playful, though. He didn’t seem bothered by it at all. So, I told him that if someone wants to change themselves, and their first go-to is Grace Kelly and their fallback is Freddie Mercury, well… would you even have to wonder if they’re gay. He just smiled, as he’s gotten a lot worse from reviewers, heh.
I see the guy snapping photos of us talking, and tell him I’ll probably post the pic of us on Oasis, so he goes into PR mode and poses with me for one pic (didn’t get it yet, we’ll see what it looks like). I’m the only person to get a picture taken with him outside, though.
As he was leaving, I told him it’s the best debut album I’ve heard in a long, long time, just killer stuff and that he’s so talented. I told him I’ll be pushing him on Oasis with everything he does. We shook hands, and that was that.
I was a bit hyped up/tired from the Mika/all-day driving thing, I guess, because I woke up early to return the car… and then seemingly took a 3+ hour nap after lunch. With the Tonys looming on TV, I decided it would be best to see a movie, so that I’d be out of the house when the awards were happening live on the east coast, as I have too many people on IM who would be following it, and a lot of the sites I visit would have news about it, etc. So, I decided to finally see Once. My pick was thinking I should see it before Texas in case it disappears, but now I’m thinking that might become the sleeper hit of the summer and be around for a while. But my sensibility doesn’t often translate into commercial fruition, so we’ll see.
Once is about a busker who meets a girl that plays piano. They start making music together. And it’s just this little precious gem of a movie about their lives intersecting. It is just so magical. The music works well, and it has the feeling of a musical without being one, since they are songwriters. It is also interesting to see them bring emotional material mined from their previous relationships into their lyrics, work on it together, and still get a sense that it is bringing them closer together. Such a delicate thing, pulled off masterfully. One of the few movies I’ve seen this year (if not the first) where I know I’ll own the DVD.
So, I get home, and start watching the TIVO’d Tonys. As much as I love Broadway, I’ll be the first to admit that all awards shows are a bit… eh. Of course, given the circle jerk that is the Oscars, there seems to be a lot more of the talent and love of theater on display here. There’s just some things that the Oscar montage can’t capture, and it is the delicate balance of people singing, dancing and acting together onstage. Even the winners were so reflective of their love of the craft and discipline of it all.
David Hyde Pierce thanked his partner of 25 years from the stage, only recently naming him in the press and coming out as a result. Funny story. I’ve known he was gay for years. At one point, I had called the Frasier offices, when he was Niles on the show, and mentioned wanting to interview him for Oasis, nd that I had heard he was openly gay.
Now, you have to imagine that this could never happen in the Perez Hilton/TMZ world we now live in, the publicist tells me, “Hmm, I know he’s gay… let me check with him and see if he talks about that with the press.” Again, this is so old school, closets-are-safe Hollywood, which I thought went out of fashion long before me cold-calling people. Anyway, a little while later, she calls back and tells me that he doesn’t talk about it publicly. Again confirming it. So funny.
But for how much these three-hour shows seems stilted, any three hour show that has live performed medleys from Chorus Line (the camera barely found the one guy I know in the cast, oh well), Curtains, 100 in the Shade, Mary Poppins, and Spring Awakening, well… how bad can it be?
Spring Awakening was the leader on the awards front. Best musical, book, score, and a few others, including beat featured actor for Jon Gallagher Jr., who I wrote up as the highlight of the show in my review of the show on Oasis after seeing it over the holidays. It was interesting watching them work “Totally Fucked,” into their medley, rather than change some lyrics as they did with other excerpts. The cast just put their hands over their mouths for every Fuck and just made it part of the fun.
And that about wraps this post up…
