Fundamental Event Elements; Big, Bad Ideas; and Being Open to The Experience
This year Halloween landed, for me, in the hiatus between (adult) vaccinations and new variants when I felt briefly okay-ish about going places, and so my sister and I went with our friend Lisa to a Halloween event billed as a “haunted cocktail soiree” in an old church, now event space, in Highland Park. The event combined interactive theater, performance art, and a scare maze, while being very much none of those things, and like so many places in Los Angeles, it also included a step and repeat (there was a step and repeat at the place Beatrice went to get her COVID shot). There was an overarching narrative (something about orphans, I think, or a haunted doll?) and a vaguely Slavic decorating scheme and most impressively, they combined all three Fundamental Event Elements—burlesque, aerialism, and overly fussy cocktails—into one. In an interior courtyard a beautiful woman in a sheer lace leotard dangled seductively from a length of blue silk. The idea was that she’d pour you a cocktail while suspended upside-down, but of course that isn’t possible, so instead you had to place your drink order with a regular old right-side-up bartender who would then relay it to the beautiful aerialist’s right-side up handler, who would hand you a coupe and the aerialist a bottle of gin, and then the aerialist, helplessly rotating, would slowly and sloppily fill your glass, and then you would take it back to the bartender to finish making the drink. Everyone involved seemed a little embarrassed, but the cocktails were good and strong and the price of admission included four drink tickets no one even bothered taking, as if in apology.
Inside the old church there were a lot of practical effects that only partly worked, or were clearly the good-enough implementations of grander visions. There was—is—always someone on stilts. A woman in an all-white flamenco dress sang Radiohead’s Creep as a torch song, there was some sort of big stuffed bear on stage wearing a bishop’s robes and mitre, I let an actress cut off a bit of my hair and place it inside a matryoshka doll, it was wonderful. I had the time of my life.
Now everything is closing again, for how long I don’t know, and I’m thinking fondly of all the events I’ve gone to over the years and how much I’ve enjoyed them all. The best of them were very good, smart and intimate and surprising, rooftop concerts and living room stand-up shows and community choruses and the best Chekhov performance I’ve ever seen, in a theater behind a laundromat. (In 2019 I took Arthur and Beatrice to see a comedy musical revue based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe that played to an audience of 15 people: me, the kids, and 12 others who were clearly friends of the actors on stage. Arthur, at the end of the show, “Do you think I could do something like this someday?” Me, looking around the nearly-empty, 45-seat theater in Studio City: “Yes, I do.”)
I remember the fad seven or eight years ago for—I”m not even sure what you’d call them. Experiences, I suppose, part escape room, part performance art, part ritual hazing, that involved submitting yourself to various challenging and uncomfortable situations in pursuit of self-knowledge. I did half a dozen and some were really quite good. My favorite involved walking naked through a series of trials meant to recall the experience of being born—assuming you were born in a former Domino’s Pizza in North Hollywood—and culminated in lying on a cot under a thin, scratchy blanket listening to Sufjan Stevens through headphones while watching black and white home movies of children frolicking on a rocky winter beach. The best of them taught me things about myself (all bad) and the worst were a useful exercise in holding space for other people’s earnestness.
So many of these events were bold, visionary, and so many of them were bad. I love a bad event as much, sometimes more, than a good one. I appreciate the ambition, the bravado, the big, bad idea. I will go to any live gaming demo that can’t connect to the wifi, any music festival with 25 food trucks and no bathrooms. I will go to any gimmicky restaurant, the more ridiculous the better. I was a food and wine critic in Shanghai in the early 2000s at the peak of that city’s love affair with novelty restaurants and how I loved them all: ice bars, silent restaurants, dark restaurants. I want to eat wearing a blindfold, lying in a hammock, submerged in a kiddie pool, I want to eat food delivered to me by pneumatic tubes, encased in amber, suspended in a helium balloon.
There is nothing I love more than when something that’s usually an inside thing is now an outside thing. Outdoor plays, outdoor movies, outdoor concerts! (I also enjoy when outdoor things are indoor things, but that just doesn’t happen as often as it should.) I am the perfect audience for outdoor movies in that I love drinking outside and I don’t particularly care for movies. Cult slasher film, nostalgic ‘90s romcom, indie masterpiece? I wouldn’t watch it at home for free, but I will absolutely drive to Long Beach with a trunk full of rosé and folding chairs for the experience of watching Legally Blonde projected onto the side of a barge.
I enjoy events that are genuinely independent and avant-garde, events that purport to be independent and avant-garde while actually being run by a multinational marketing group called something like AEX Entertainment with an opaque and vaguely menacing web presence, and events that purport to be run by a multinational marketing group while actually being run by two 24-year-old guys with a laptop from a table at Rubies+Diamonds. Not to mention public institutions and government entities of all sizes. I will bundle all five of my children into the car for Lego Night at the library, children’s matinees at the opera, guided nature tours and star-gazing and anything that involves free coloring sheets. LACMA hosts an array of children’s art workshops including one area called “the toddler tarp” that’s just a bunch of crayons thrown down on a tarp under a pop-up shade tent and you know what, it’s a lot of fun. Los Angeles-area parks and rec departments produce an entire roster of events based around trying to get as much mileage as possible from their public pools. Movie nights at the pool, singles’ nights at the pool, bring-your-dog nights, the city of Burbank hosts a floating Halloween pumpkin patch in a pool. Speaking of Halloween, I will go to the holiday version of any regular thing, the more nonsensical the better. Slushy temporary ice rinks, egg hunts at the aquarium, a guided walk past all the “spooky” animals at the zoo? I’m there.
Remember faux speakeasies? Remember pop-up dinner parties, adult dodgeball, goat yoga? It’s me, I did it, I’m the reason they all exist. Because I’ll drive 20 minutes and pay $15 to do pretty much anything.
Tonight we’re staying in for New Year’s Eve, making dinner at home, drinking Champagne on the sofa at midnight. I miss going out but I know it will be there someday, an inexhaustible well of circus artists and children’s librarians and club promoters with big ideas, and me with my Eventbrite login ready for the experience.
You Can Find Me
My first academic publication is out, a (very short) review of Ian P. Wei’s Thinking About Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals. It doesn’t seem super likely any of you will be picking up a copy of Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, but if you do, you will find me there.
What I Should Be Doing
Making some additions to a paper on Anne Bradstreet, proofreading hundreds of pages of John Donne’s sermons, reviewing Latin for my language exams
What I’m Actually Doing
Planting potatoes and tulips and peas, ordering seeds for spring, ordering chicks for spring, ordering bees for spring, physical therapy (boo), sending Christmas New Year’s Valentine’s Day cards, texting everyone photos of the thermometer to show how cold it is in our unheated house
Also, and most importantly, setting up a video camera to capture our cat secretly using the toilet like a person (really)
Also I'm Very Excited About
French breakfast radishes, my new cookbook, The Bright Ages, these truly amazing socks, buying books for spring semester, fake chicken nuggets with Mike’s Hot Honey, this incredibly warm robe I got for Christmas (it’s so cold in our house!)
The Fine Print
I have a Ko-Fi page that allows readers to send me small payments to support this newsletter and my writing in general. Remember, every dollar you send is A Vote For Halloween.