Birthday Day 2: Birth Eve
Ie, yesterday (today being that actual... day)
Dragged carcass out of bed, went for a hangover brunch with no actual hangover while Bethan had a shower, and noodled with a couple of additional last-minute notes for le novelle which had come to me in the night while I was failing to sleep like a person.
Bethan went into town in search of crepes, leaving me to fuss over my costume, complain about life, catch up on things, and mend her dress, which got torn on Friday. After getting a text from Maud about people gathering early at a specific pub I summoned Bethan back early, which by Bethan time meant she arrived roughly around the time she'd originally claimed she would get back by - in her defence the trains were SHOOOOOOCKING bad all day Saturday.
Stared at pretty much continually all the way in to town, then couldn't find the pub because the borough had helpfully labelled the street with something other than its actual name, and then no one was there anyway, so we went for dinner at YO!Sushi. Or, we tried to, but were first prevented from this goal by AN UNCEASING CASCADE OF NIGHT-TIME ROLLERSKATERS IN HALLOWEEN COSTUMES
like
a marathon's worth of skaters
all in spoopy costumes (lots of Harley Quinns, zombies, psycho surgeons, and just general Hot Topic Weird), many of them illuminated, about three people in sports wheelchairs being pushed by friends also on skates, lots of light-up skate wheels, several people with boom box backpacks, on and on, hundreds, hundreds of them. Bizarre, and magical. No idea who they were or what they were in aid of, but we stood by the side of the road waiting for them to pass for a good five or more minutes.
THEN sushi (so many small children stopped to point me out to their parents).
dinner minus the nasu dish and the chahan. Anyway. Dinner.
costume. While Bethan was taking this a girl in her teens or twenties stopped to ask if she could take my photo too and if I was going as a character from Attack on Titan, which made me profoundly glad I did not also wear the harness I'd been planning to or MAN ahahah
uh
then we had some issues with the guest list which ... were not huge after the fact but for a while looked like Bethan might have to head back to mine due to venue incompetence (apparently they did this to A LOT OF PEOPLE? it was really bizarre), but in light of what happened later suggest a certain degree of hostility between the event and the venue, which is sad.
ANYWAY. Settled down, got a drink, Bethan found people with SNAKES AND LIZARDS, (this is winston). I began to collect up various friends and acquaintances and make new ones:
me: *immediately begins stroking a boa wrapped around someone's neck*
me: *realises that this is in fact somewhat invasive*
me: sorry mate, i just... kind of jumped in and started petting something really near your face - hypnotised by reptile
he: oh that's fine, they're great, aren't they? keep on petting my snake as much as you like
me: ... not on a first date, love.
that's me, setting the tone for the entire night, fyi.
(spotted a couple of people i fell out with many years ago. they didn't recognise me for MANY REASONS - the Genders, and the fact that my face paint rendered me unfamiliar to even suzy, who knows me very well - but i recognised them, which is always good because one is warned of the presence of AWFUL PEOPLE without them being made aware of one. AND they looked HAGGARD and BADLY GROOMED and MISERABLE and FRUMPY and i looked INCREDIBLY GREAT which SHIT LOADS OF TOTAL STRANGERS have been telling me ALL EVENING so muahahahhahahahahahhaahahhahahaha fuck you)
anyway having found joe sticking a chameleon up his nose, fred covered in red paint, met someone whose name i immediately forgot, taken the MOST JOYOUS PICTURE of suzy ever (suzy basically dressed as LESBIAN PINUP HOLTZMANN and then collapsed in paroxsyms of delight at having a snake draped on her and i managed to get a pic of it and i will treasure it forever), i dragged myself off to the stage to watch the show
... it tragically did not have an interval this time which means by the end of the final set i was about ready to do a murder or explode from wee ...
anyway, brief summary iirc:
+ amazing combination of dance, physical theatre, comedy, and classical string quartet, bo jangles
+ lady who did a unicorn strip tease and also hula hooping and hula hooping on fire
+ lady who did lots of strange spinny things using her feet, mostly in her underpants
+ lady doing excellent silk aerials dressed as a character from the fifth element, clearly aware of how perishingly elderly her audience skewed
+ gentleman doing terrifying silk aerials VERY CLOSE TO THE FLOOR AT ALARMING SPEEDS
+ several torch songs in the halloween theme by a very drunk and distracted dusty limits
+ one DEEPLY ANNOYING children's entertainment-style fucking act that is apparently manadatory at all caberet shows UGH (I tried to get a drink during this but the bar queues were. y'know. big. And i didn't want to miss the rest of the show).
+ Ghana Flying All Stars who. contortion, acrobatics, juggling, limbo, EVERYTHING ON FIRE, spinning everything, contortion on fire, all at incredibly high velocity and octane. Lovely. Highly happy. Definitely one of the topmost acts.
+ Tankus the Henge, whom, bless them, I only ever see at WM and will therefore probably never see again. Nice boys.
More confusion follows: immediately after a much-needed pee I was met outside the toilet by security guards demanding to know if "it" was for personal use or was I dealing: "if it's personal, just hand it over and we won't say anything else about it." (which is in retrospect a reasonable approach to drugs in London but: I was on nothing, and I had nothing). After several attempts to explain and offers to subject to being searched I ended up in THE SECURITY BASEMENT, where I was indeed repeatedly asked the same question, duly searched - I had basically fuck all of anything on me so this should not have taken very long, which turned into a fucking carnival of tiresome embarrassment when the pat-down revealed surgical undergarments:
"it's a surgical support garment. I've had surgery recently. You can look under it if you must."
"it's alright mate, calm down."
PAUSE, SQUEEZING MY FUCKING STP.
"what's this?"
"that would be my penis."
"???"
"it's a prothesis. I told you. I have just had surgery."
Eventually they said they'd had a description of someone like me and were obliged to follow it up, I said I understood this, pointed out that I wasn't exactly wearing an uncommon costume, they said I was free to go get back to the party, "no hard feelings"; I said "it is actually my birthday now, by the way, and this is definitely a birthday first". I was informed it was probably a rite of passage, and sent back to look for friends.
Spent QUITE SOME TIME trying to find Bethan (having uncovered Florence, who had been trying to find me to give me a can of red bull all the time I was BEING MANHANDLED which in other circumstances would have been rather more erotic and less frustrating than it was - thank GOD i got to pee before they got hold of me), found Ally heroically DJing while 8.5 months pregnant, LIKE A BADASS, found Maud and Fred pleasantly sloshed and informative about everything barring the whereabouts of Bethan, ended up by the reptiles again, and watched as people I knew slowly grativated and declared they were leaving. Winston the lizard delivered his party piece of an unexpected, idiotic leap at nothing, while his handler patiently explained that "he is utterly stupid. he does this when we take him to the natural history museum too. flings himself at the glass cases and then slides onto the floor. total moron."
Bethan was, as she had told me before that she would be, by the snakes.
dragged her upstairs for dancing as basically everyone else had left. spent a while cheerfully continuing to overdo it on the "moving far too much" front and eventually conceded defeat.
(a brief conversation with a drunk girl on the tube home revealed a reflection later: I notice now when i talk to women i don't know i automatically become more camp, a kind of behavioural signal that i'm Definitely Non-Threatening.)
Today: The single most thorough wash my face has had in a decade as i desperately try to remove the skull paint enough to make me look like a suitable member of clientele at a Quite Upmarket Fine Dining Establishment rather than the gutter-dwelling corpse impersonator I woke up looking like (using hairspray as make-up fixative is an old trick I learned when I was in Theatre at school but LORD IT MAKES YOUR FACE STIFFER THAN JOHN BARROWMAN'S POST-BOTOX).
dragged self, Linds, Bethan to the farmers market. Had a Köfte, hummus, and halloumi wrap. And that, my friends, is it. My actual birthday is today, I have a Pile of presents to open when I get back from early dinner & Jess is back from work, and early dinner awaits in an hour and a half.
Dragged carcass out of bed, went for a hangover brunch with no actual hangover while Bethan had a shower, and noodled with a couple of additional last-minute notes for le novelle which had come to me in the night while I was failing to sleep like a person.
Bethan went into town in search of crepes, leaving me to fuss over my costume, complain about life, catch up on things, and mend her dress, which got torn on Friday. After getting a text from Maud about people gathering early at a specific pub I summoned Bethan back early, which by Bethan time meant she arrived roughly around the time she'd originally claimed she would get back by - in her defence the trains were SHOOOOOOCKING bad all day Saturday.
Stared at pretty much continually all the way in to town, then couldn't find the pub because the borough had helpfully labelled the street with something other than its actual name, and then no one was there anyway, so we went for dinner at YO!Sushi. Or, we tried to, but were first prevented from this goal by AN UNCEASING CASCADE OF NIGHT-TIME ROLLERSKATERS IN HALLOWEEN COSTUMES
like
a marathon's worth of skaters
all in spoopy costumes (lots of Harley Quinns, zombies, psycho surgeons, and just general Hot Topic Weird), many of them illuminated, about three people in sports wheelchairs being pushed by friends also on skates, lots of light-up skate wheels, several people with boom box backpacks, on and on, hundreds, hundreds of them. Bizarre, and magical. No idea who they were or what they were in aid of, but we stood by the side of the road waiting for them to pass for a good five or more minutes.
THEN sushi (so many small children stopped to point me out to their parents).
dinner minus the nasu dish and the chahan. Anyway. Dinner.
costume. While Bethan was taking this a girl in her teens or twenties stopped to ask if she could take my photo too and if I was going as a character from Attack on Titan, which made me profoundly glad I did not also wear the harness I'd been planning to or MAN ahahah
uh
then we had some issues with the guest list which ... were not huge after the fact but for a while looked like Bethan might have to head back to mine due to venue incompetence (apparently they did this to A LOT OF PEOPLE? it was really bizarre), but in light of what happened later suggest a certain degree of hostility between the event and the venue, which is sad.
ANYWAY. Settled down, got a drink, Bethan found people with SNAKES AND LIZARDS, (this is winston). I began to collect up various friends and acquaintances and make new ones:
me: *immediately begins stroking a boa wrapped around someone's neck*
me: *realises that this is in fact somewhat invasive*
me: sorry mate, i just... kind of jumped in and started petting something really near your face - hypnotised by reptile
he: oh that's fine, they're great, aren't they? keep on petting my snake as much as you like
me: ... not on a first date, love.
that's me, setting the tone for the entire night, fyi.
(spotted a couple of people i fell out with many years ago. they didn't recognise me for MANY REASONS - the Genders, and the fact that my face paint rendered me unfamiliar to even suzy, who knows me very well - but i recognised them, which is always good because one is warned of the presence of AWFUL PEOPLE without them being made aware of one. AND they looked HAGGARD and BADLY GROOMED and MISERABLE and FRUMPY and i looked INCREDIBLY GREAT which SHIT LOADS OF TOTAL STRANGERS have been telling me ALL EVENING so muahahahhahahahahahhaahahhahahaha fuck you)
anyway having found joe sticking a chameleon up his nose, fred covered in red paint, met someone whose name i immediately forgot, taken the MOST JOYOUS PICTURE of suzy ever (suzy basically dressed as LESBIAN PINUP HOLTZMANN and then collapsed in paroxsyms of delight at having a snake draped on her and i managed to get a pic of it and i will treasure it forever), i dragged myself off to the stage to watch the show
... it tragically did not have an interval this time which means by the end of the final set i was about ready to do a murder or explode from wee ...
anyway, brief summary iirc:
+ amazing combination of dance, physical theatre, comedy, and classical string quartet, bo jangles
+ lady who did a unicorn strip tease and also hula hooping and hula hooping on fire
+ lady who did lots of strange spinny things using her feet, mostly in her underpants
+ lady doing excellent silk aerials dressed as a character from the fifth element, clearly aware of how perishingly elderly her audience skewed
+ gentleman doing terrifying silk aerials VERY CLOSE TO THE FLOOR AT ALARMING SPEEDS
+ several torch songs in the halloween theme by a very drunk and distracted dusty limits
+ one DEEPLY ANNOYING children's entertainment-style fucking act that is apparently manadatory at all caberet shows UGH (I tried to get a drink during this but the bar queues were. y'know. big. And i didn't want to miss the rest of the show).
+ Ghana Flying All Stars who. contortion, acrobatics, juggling, limbo, EVERYTHING ON FIRE, spinning everything, contortion on fire, all at incredibly high velocity and octane. Lovely. Highly happy. Definitely one of the topmost acts.
+ Tankus the Henge, whom, bless them, I only ever see at WM and will therefore probably never see again. Nice boys.
More confusion follows: immediately after a much-needed pee I was met outside the toilet by security guards demanding to know if "it" was for personal use or was I dealing: "if it's personal, just hand it over and we won't say anything else about it." (which is in retrospect a reasonable approach to drugs in London but: I was on nothing, and I had nothing). After several attempts to explain and offers to subject to being searched I ended up in THE SECURITY BASEMENT, where I was indeed repeatedly asked the same question, duly searched - I had basically fuck all of anything on me so this should not have taken very long, which turned into a fucking carnival of tiresome embarrassment when the pat-down revealed surgical undergarments:
"it's a surgical support garment. I've had surgery recently. You can look under it if you must."
"it's alright mate, calm down."
PAUSE, SQUEEZING MY FUCKING STP.
"what's this?"
"that would be my penis."
"???"
"it's a prothesis. I told you. I have just had surgery."
Eventually they said they'd had a description of someone like me and were obliged to follow it up, I said I understood this, pointed out that I wasn't exactly wearing an uncommon costume, they said I was free to go get back to the party, "no hard feelings"; I said "it is actually my birthday now, by the way, and this is definitely a birthday first". I was informed it was probably a rite of passage, and sent back to look for friends.
Spent QUITE SOME TIME trying to find Bethan (having uncovered Florence, who had been trying to find me to give me a can of red bull all the time I was BEING MANHANDLED which in other circumstances would have been rather more erotic and less frustrating than it was - thank GOD i got to pee before they got hold of me), found Ally heroically DJing while 8.5 months pregnant, LIKE A BADASS, found Maud and Fred pleasantly sloshed and informative about everything barring the whereabouts of Bethan, ended up by the reptiles again, and watched as people I knew slowly grativated and declared they were leaving. Winston the lizard delivered his party piece of an unexpected, idiotic leap at nothing, while his handler patiently explained that "he is utterly stupid. he does this when we take him to the natural history museum too. flings himself at the glass cases and then slides onto the floor. total moron."
Bethan was, as she had told me before that she would be, by the snakes.
dragged her upstairs for dancing as basically everyone else had left. spent a while cheerfully continuing to overdo it on the "moving far too much" front and eventually conceded defeat.
(a brief conversation with a drunk girl on the tube home revealed a reflection later: I notice now when i talk to women i don't know i automatically become more camp, a kind of behavioural signal that i'm Definitely Non-Threatening.)
Today: The single most thorough wash my face has had in a decade as i desperately try to remove the skull paint enough to make me look like a suitable member of clientele at a Quite Upmarket Fine Dining Establishment rather than the gutter-dwelling corpse impersonator I woke up looking like (using hairspray as make-up fixative is an old trick I learned when I was in Theatre at school but LORD IT MAKES YOUR FACE STIFFER THAN JOHN BARROWMAN'S POST-BOTOX).
dragged self, Linds, Bethan to the farmers market. Had a Köfte, hummus, and halloumi wrap. And that, my friends, is it. My actual birthday is today, I have a Pile of presents to open when I get back from early dinner & Jess is back from work, and early dinner awaits in an hour and a half.