Saturday, February 14, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Patrick took a nap. Watched Coraline in 3D at Century 20 Daly City using the gift card that Mom Ryan got us for Christmas. Thanks, Mom Ryan! We enjoyed Coraline even though the game resulting in the denouement was rather hokey. I thought the 3D was done particularly well. Stay through the credits for a little bonus at the very end. Afterwards we had lunch at Jitra Thai Cuisine followed by a chocolate dessert whose name we can't recall at Ambrosia Bakery. We hadn't been to Jitra in a long time, and we recalled with smiles a previous Valentine's Day upon which we had dined there. The leak in the closet is back. We had old towels on the floor still, just in case. I notified the landlord. Patrick did some house chores. I did some labeling of stuff and organizing. While installing VMware Tools for Fusion 2.0.2, I encountered an error saying that files were in use—Print Spooler and something called TP AutoConnect and TPAutoConnect. To resolve this problem, I ran services.msc and manually stopped these services then clicked Retry on the error dialog. VMware Tools proceeded, and several minutes later it appeared to finish successfully. Discovered what had been causing the Apple home page to appear empty of main images in Firefox 3.0.6 and Safari 3.2.1 for OS X: some weird cache problem. Clear the cache, quit the browser completely, restart it, problem solved. Printing fails to work in both Windows Vista and OS X on my iMac at home. It coincidentally happened after installing VMware Fusion 2.0.2, but I'm certain that Fusion is not the problem. More troubleshooting later. Patrick took a nap. Downloaded photos from the camera to the computer. Uploaded screenshots to Flickr. Fixed the printer—turning it off and then on again fixed it. Archived documents. Warm-up cardio, 20 minutes. Weight training: superslow tricep kickback, superslow lateral raise, crunch. Cool-down cardio, 5 minutes. Dinner at home with Patrick: steamed dumplings made by Simmone. Shower. Nap. Attended Marc Huestis and John Cameron Mitchell's "The Origin of Love" (Shortbus show). We arrived around 9:48 PM and were pleasantly surprised to learn that we were two of the first 40 ticket ticketholders which received priority admission to the theatre. (The ticket was gold, and I was disappointed to find that it didn't come with a chocolate bar.) There was only 1 pink ticket ticketholder in line, so we were first in the gold ticket ticketholder line. While we waited we chatted with a woman from Tampa, Florida who had flown to San Francisco just for these shows. She and her man friend were attending both tonight's Shortbus show and tomorrow's Hedwig show. Finally we were let in. The theatre was packed—sold out. We sat in the 2nd row in the center section on the stage left aisle. Anita Cocktail and the Lovers opened with an energetic performance of "Angry Inch." A short break. JCM took the stage, apologized for being slightly under the weather, and began by asking for jokes from the audience. The woman from Tampa sat in the front row and offered two hilarious and well-received jokes, one which asked, "What's the difference between Sarah Palin's lips and her vagina?" and another which asked, "What do caviar and Michael Jackson have in common?" JCM sang "My Funny Valentine" followed by "Wicked Little Town." He read a very short poem written by (a friend?), and the entire poem went something like this: "A poet can't change the world. But a poet can ruin your evening." He told the story of his visit to Russia to attend a screening of one of his films at a film festival. He finished the story with a short Russian lullaby. He performed "The Origin of Love." During this song, there's a quiet part in the middle, and some people who didn't know about that began clapping, thinking that the song was over. The music continued while JCM, deadpan, looked in their direction, smiled, and said something like, "Let that teach you a lesson," and continued the song right on cue. He has a cuteness, a charm, a humor that I found entrancing. I was watching someone who was so comfortable on stage that you could feel his inner peace radiate. Intermission. Two armchairs were brought on stage, JCM returned to the stage, invited Shortbus star Raphael Barker (Rob) to join him from the audience, and we watched Shortbus (2006) while they provided commentary. At my favorite part of the evening, JCM told a story about his encounter with a stranger who put a piece of paper in his hand while he was waiting at a train platform in (I believe he said) New York City—on the paper were the words, "Shortbus saved my life." He said he carries that slip of paper in his wallet.