Thursday, August 1, 2002
Breakfast at The Abbey. Patrick and I went to Universal Studios with free tickets generously provided by Champagne, who works at a radio station. Some spoilers of the rides follow, so if you don't want to read them, skip to the sentence beginning, "We'd been driving through Silverlake..." We had a fun time and spent most of the day there. However, by the end of the day, we had grown tired of the identical, cheesy plotlines among many of the rides, and we were simply too exhausted to save the world a fourth and fifth time. The Mummy Returns: Chamber of Doom "ride" was really just an overproduce Halloween haunted house which they run all year 'round. It was fun for perhaps the first 30 seconds. After that, every corner was the same kind of thing—arms reaching out and grabbing you from the dark. Mostly disappointing. The studio tour tram ride was fun. I hadn't been on it since I was a kid. They've long taken out the rotating ice cave used in the Six Million Dollar Man and the giant foam boulders rolling down the cliff at you and the Battlestar Galactica encounter and the A-Team/Miami Vice Stunt Show. They kept Jaws and claimed to have "enhanced" it by adding gas pipes and lighting the ends on fire, but it's still as boring as it ever was. The flash flood is still my favorite part of this ride—it seemed mostly the same as before, but I think they built new barriers in front of the tram so that the water would splash more right in front of you. Patrick enjoyed learning about the sets of the fake cities. The Terminator 2 3D ride was really cheesy but entertaining in its way. The E.T. Ride was mostly forgettable, but I think Patrick liked the part where we're riding bicycles over the nighttime cityscape. (This didn't impress me, since it's clear they stole this from Disneyland's Peter Pan ride.) My favorite part was the policewoman standing by her police car with the C.B. transmitter in her hand and her arm was broken at the wrist so the C.B. transmitter, perhaps supported by a wire somewhere, was floating in the air in front of her face. Her hand was amputated, but yet she still stuck to her duties. It's hard to find that kind of dedication in amusement park rides. We also wandered into the Lucille Ball Tribute room, which had a slew of artifacts from her career—nicely done. The Back to the Future Ride won "favorite ride" from both of us. The lines weren't bad—about 15 to 20 minutes per ride. We skipped the Spider-Man Rocks! "NEW Rock 'n' Roll Musical", Water World, Animal Planet Live!, Backdraft, Jurassic Park Summer Splash, and a Special Effects show. Although we didn't ride every ride, we felt like we'd had a full day and gotten our money's worth.—We'd been driving through Silverlake because it is one of the smaller gay communities within L.A. and we wanted to see if it was someplace we might like to live. Of Silverlake, Patrick says, "It was more urban poverty than I expected. I guess I expected it to be more like Haight Street." We wished that we'd had a tour guide who could show us the parts of Silverlake that interested us. While on our driving tour of Silverlake, we discovered a week-old Indian restaurant called Tantra (3705 West Sunset Blvd, Silverlake, 323-663-8268), which was a pleasant surprise. The decor was high ceilings, dark red walls, fine furnishings. A combination of classiness and cultural sensitivity that I found refreshing compared to other cities in which I'd lived. What seemed to be Indian television was playing on a plasma TV in the bar. Patrick had a chocolate martini, and I had my usual, a Smith and Wesson. Though we neglected to write down exactly what we ate, our dinners were delicious. Service was particularly attentive except at the end, when they took a long time bringing and returning our bill. After returning to the hotel to nap, we checked out gay bars on Santa Monica Boulevard: Micky's, Rage, and Dudes. We liked the upper outdoor patio at Dudes, but it was almost completely empty, so we left. We spent most of our time at Micky's, where we danced to some nelly song about it being really hot in here and taking off all your clothes and other songs like that. This was also the first time we'd seen gay boys dancing to hip hop. We watched young guys dance inside a shower and big-muscled gogo dancers get tips from oglers. The DJ (we don't remember his name) was bad: mixes were sloppy and one record skipped.