how i spent my winter vacation
In between lounging around my apartment and lounging around my dad’s house and lounging around AK’s house, I took in a fair amount of culture, which I will now review in People Magazine-style “bottom line” bullets:
The Queen: Pretty exciting and emotional for a movie about two reserved Brits exchanging polite phone calls, one gently urging the other to make a polite, reserved speech on TV. As a part-Brit, I felt like I got in touch with my polite, reserved roots.
All-Jew Revue at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre: AK and I celebrated our own merry little Christmas by enjoying a smorgasbord (I don’t think that’s a Yiddish word, but it sounds like one, doesn’t it?) of Jewish comedy that included four very funny ladies and one belligerent man who kept trying to make the show all about him. As a part-Jew, I felt like I got in touch with my feminist roots.
Edward Scissorhands at the Ahmanson Theatre: This was AK’s Christmas present to me. Just being at the Music Center on a chilly evening reminiscing about my theater-going college years would have been enough, but the Matthew Bou
Children of Men: Beautifully detailed, post-apocalyptic story with a strong director, great actors and interesting ideas that becomes, unfortunately, a really long chase scene with guns.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn: The premise of this memoir is inherently interesting—man who works in homeless shelter meets his long-lost father when he shows up as a “guest” one night—but the structure is even more so, as the father and son’s narratives slowly converge. It’s not the story of a do-gooder son and destitute father that it might be, but rather a portrait of two people just barely on either side of blurry line: the father who drinks himself into insanity and the son who does a lot of drugs but eventually gets sober; the father who talks a lot about writing a book no one ever actually sees and the son who writes one about his father.
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