Tom Tuerff's Glob -- er, Blog, or something

Hello, all:

As I mentioned last week, my wife and I attended the fifth annual Evening of Experimental Middle Eastern Dance performance at a place called the Electric Lodge in Venice, California. We left for the coast at about 5 a.m. Saturday and arrived after stopping for food and an emergency stop at a mall on the way to relieve myself, getting in at about 11:30 or so.

Once we found the hotel, which we did with great ease thanks to Mapquest, we decided to see if the directions to the Electric Lodge from the hotel were just as good as the directions to the hotel in the first place.

Good thing we went early. Mapquest's directions across four hundred miles were great; Mapquest's attempts at tracing a simple six-mile trip SUCKED TO HIGH HEAVEN. I finally had to ask an English-deprived member of the 7-11 family of store employees for directions; she had no idea what I was talking about, but thankfully somebody waiting in line did. Turns out Mapquest put us on the right street, but about two miles south of where we really wanted to be.

Once we found it, we realized we were moments from Venice Beach, a place I'd always heard about but had never been, so we went. Venice is where all the hippies went to die. It is a bizarre collection of new-age souvnirs, muslim clothing and trendy places to eat, with street performers to rival San Francisco. Bought a CD from a guy named Harry Perry, who's been playing his electric guitar and roller skating up and down Venice Beach for 25 years. It's pretty good. The only thing about these street performers is that they know they're odd and they want money for even the privilege of taking their picture. Fair enough, I guess.

Then it was time to dump Adam and Brendan back at the hotel and head for the show, since we now knew where it was. I got better directions on how to get back to the hotel than Mapquest had given me, and we were off.

The show's venue, Electric Lodge, is a very unique building. Open to anyone who wants to rent it, the building has a dance studio with a wooden floor and a multi-purpose presentation room with a cement floor, which is where our show was. It was "tape" night, so there were cameras about but they didn't distract. And get this: the building is ENTIRELY solar powered. They like to boast that they have collected more electricity than any show performed there will ever need. You can check it out at http://www.electriclodge.org/

The show consisted of ten or twelve presentations of various lengths by various troupes to various types of music. Everything from traditional belly dance rhythms to The Clash would be heard that night.

There were funny ones. The best of those featured three women in full belly dance regalia with their backs to the audience. Their silver skirts were remarkably sheer but you didn't notice this at first. Then the music starts: "Dueling Banjos." The ladies "duel" by flexing their buttocks to the notes of "Dueling Banjos." The woman in the middle kind of served as a referee and co-participant. It was an absolute riot, and you never saw the dancer's faces until the chord at the end of the song, when they did a "Ta-dah" move to the audience before the lights went down.

Also, a group of two ladies called "Tandemonium" appeared in two pieces, one dressed as a sultan and one as a crusader. In the first half of the show, they "fought" with "swords" to the strains of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" by They Might Be Giants. In the second half of the show (after a particularly intense performance which I'll get to in a minute), the two "enemies" returned to the strains of "Rock the Casbah" by The Clash.

As far as "Experimental Middle Eastern Dance" goes, some of these things were very experimental and verged on modern dance with bellydance overtones. Which was okay. Also, there seemed to be a running theme of "tell a story" or "folklore" or whatever. Two of the acts verged on "Twilight Zone" intensity. Most impressive was a presentation called "The Drowners," about a group of Muse-like temptresses of the sea who seduce a man on the shore to join them in the water before pulling him to a watery grave. It was very well done and scary as hell and about eight feet from where we were sitting.

Another sketch dealt with two marionettes (these girls were fantastic) who come to life after two human sisters have a little too much sadistic fun with them and then decide to take a nap. Bad idea. Great dance, though, and fantastic makeup.

Demon posession, either intentional or not, was also a theme for two different dances; a woman literally shimmies herself from the fires of hell into tantric bliss (at least I THINK that's what they were trying to get across) and the finale, performed by a group called Desert Sin, featured fairies and elves minding their own business until a nasty troll lures the elven king into becoming one of them, thus causing most (but not all) of the attendees to dance and debauch until the good queen comes back to save the day.

But the most impressive dance we saw, for sheer chutzpah, was a solo by a dancer (from Desert Sin) who performed a "dance on broken glass" bit. The scene opened with her dressed (from the waist down, anyway) as a mermaid. She's admiring herself with a mirror, which she smashes in frustration when she realizes that, from the waist down, she wants to be human. She tosses the shards ashore into a larger pile of glass, which we assume she's been compiling for quite awhile. Finally, she pulls her legs out of the fish half (in an interesting bit of makeup, her legs appear blood-stained, as if she actually detached herself from the fish body) and she goes ashore. She performs a nearly nude bellydance on the pile of glass, then finally sits down in the pile and then begins to roll around in it. We could hear the shards breaking and it was fascinating, erotic and surprising.

Finally, although no one in the audience made a sound (save a couple of "ewwws"), you could HEAR what what people were thinking when she rolled onto her naked chest and her nipples rolled across the broken glass: OH GOD! OUCH! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, HOW DOES SHE DO THAT!

Needless to say, it gave everybody something to talk about at intermission.

It was a great show; we plan to go back next year, too.

On Sunday, we went to Santa Monica. I love that place. The pier, the open-air mall, the ever-changing array of athletic practitioners and plastic people. (Janice says that in Santa Monica, you get two years to make yourself beautiful, or you're traded to Oregon.) Plus, the Hooters there serves chicken wings the size of boat oars. Which is important when you have teenage boys with you.

We stayed till about four and hit the road. Took our time getting back, stopping at the same mall we'd been to the day before so Adam and Brendan could check out an anime store.

Also, the hotel we stayed at, the LA Airport Sheraton, was nice, comfy, and cheap. Booked it through Hotels.com and got a great deal. I shall use that service again.

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Fiddlers Dream, where I'm on the board, has booked legendary folk performer Tom Chapin for two shows on September 24-25. He's doing an all-ages show on Friday night, then a kids show the afternoon of the 25th. Adult tickets should be $20; tickets for the kids' show (and for kids) will be a bit cheaper. Please show up! I guarantee you will enjoy this guy.

If you're my age, you probably knew about Tom Chapin before you knew about his more famous brother, Harry. Tom was the host of ABC's "Make A Wish" on Sunday mornings for about five years in the 70's. It was a well-written educational show that was literally a half-hour play on words. I never got tired of it (even though I was 17 when the show left the air) and I would imagine that I've probably picked up some of my sense of humor from the bizarre jokes that regularly populated the show.

If you have little kids, you probably know Tom Chapin because he's recorded about a bajillion kids albums over the last 20 years and every damn one of them is still in print. I remember when my kids were little, we had a sampler with one of Tom's tunes, "Billy the Squid," on it. It was funny. I liked it!

Getting Tom to play here was partly my doing, and to do so I had to move a gig of my own. I was going to do a "double-up" with Nancy Freeman on the 24th. We've now moved that to Friday, December 17th. I will be doing my usual set on Saturday night, Sept. 25th at Fiddlers' Dream in the third slot.

That's all for now until I think of something else.