Monday, August 04, 2008

Weekend Entertainment

I grew up a big fan of the TV series, "Monty Python's Flying Circus," which aired many decades ago on public TV here in the States. Consequently, after hearing a segment on NPR about Eric Idle's "Not the Messiah (He's a very naughty boy)," performing live last weekend at the Hollywood Bowl, I just had to place a bid on eBay for a pair of tix.

It was a fun show, with reminiscences of Life of Brian and, I think, Meaning of Life as well. The reason I'm confused about the latter is that Eric Idle came out for a planned encore and sang what I think is the closing song for Meaning of Life, with lyrics about earth and the planets in the universe.

Monty Python has so infected my life that I even watched the TV series "Fawlty Towers" starring John Cleese for a while, and completely loved Michael Palin's travel series, particularly his "Hemingway Adventures" where he visited all of the author's famous haunts in Europe and Cuba. In one episode, he sat in Hemingway's chair at the bar and got completely inebriated on double Margaritas, then wobbled down the street, cameras rolling, to another bar where he consumed double Mojitos until he blacked out. The very next morning, Palin continued the documentary while hung over and nauseated. It was hilarious!

Two summers ago, after dating my wife-to-be for 3 weeks, we went on a quick jaunt to New York to catch "Spamalot" at the Shubert Theatre where, to my delight, I found out that my wife was a big fan of the movie Monty Python & The Holy Grail.

It's my wife's birthday this week, and the Hollywood Bowl was sort of an early surprise celebration. We picked up sandwiches from Blue Dahlia and brought a chilled bottle of La Crema Pinot Noir for a makeshift picnic dinner.

On Sunday night, we went to Shane Sato's photography studio for a sushi party where I got to indulge my fantasy of being a sushi chef. Shane goes fishing for all sorts of good stuff during the summer, so my fantasy often gets extended and occasionally abused to the point where I feel like I'm working instead of indulging. But, ah, that's another story.

Now, it would've been a fantastic weekend if it weren't for the fact that I had rented Spider-man 3, which is probably the worst superhero movie I have ever seen. What possessed me and the wife to watch the bloopers reel in the Special Features, I have no idea. But man, that was like adding turpentine to an already throbbing and pus-ing wound.

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