NYC, Trash Bar on Monday, March 08, 2010

Link to Venue

Damn. That was an extremely fun Cesspool show on Monday.

I spent most of the day making my costume. I bought a ton of paper in bright obnoxious colors and cut it into squares, which I stapled together to make a dress. Or I was going to make a dress, except it turns out that making a dress out of tiny paper squares takes fucking forever. So it ended up being a sort of paper miniskirt, which completely fell apart by our third song. Abe dressed as a robot anteater. Jared was the Phantom of the Opera. Alex was Axe Cop.

I assembled my costume while drinking a bottle that I had bought at a badass local wine shop. It was a drink-a-bottle-of-wine-before-you-even-show-up kind of show. It didn’t have to be – there’s nothing about Trash Bar that suggests a particularly punk/drunk performance. But Abe and I independently decided to treat the show that way, and I think I’m going to fucking keep treating shows that way because man it was great.

Our set was punk as hell. Abe’s distortion pedal mysteriously didn’t work. He almost had to play the whole set distortionless (imagine how goofy and neutered Soup De Do would have sounded), but he ended up semi-fixing it so that each song could be either distortionless or DISTORTED-ALL-THE-TIME. So, that was some shit, damn. But he handled it like a badass and really you could barely tell that anything was even wrong.

A few quick highlights:

• Abe brought balloons filled with candy! He passed them out into the crowd and Duncan Horst immediately did the best possible thing: violently threw candy at everybody. It caught on and soon people were chucking Smarties at us while we played. By the end of the night the club was trashed, with ground-up Smarties coating the floor. It was beautiful.
• We got back into our Emergenza-era habit of fighting while playing. Alex and I got violent (especially when I was too drunk to remember my parts). I guess at one point I must have scratched his neck up pretty bad, because he left the show with some serious marks. A lot of people at his job are going to see his neck and smirk to themselves.
• The afterparty was wonderful. Everyone danced like crazy, we danced a fucking conga line like it was some perverse alternate universe bar mitzvah. We duct taped Chris Caplinger to a pole. Duncan and I played chicken climbing up that pole while I held a beer in my mouth (not while Chris was taped there). Alcohol ended up everywhere, and at one point I remember pouring beer on the head of a girl who had been dragged to the show by my coworker. She got mad and left. Oops. Fucking whatever, I am absolutely not going to feel bad about pouring beer on a head at a Cesspool party.
• By 5:00, things had devolved to the point where everyone was either hooking up, competing to hook up, or having a soul-baring conversation that probably seemed honest and urgent and deep but would feel sort of insubstantial the next day. Alex and I kicked everyone out at 5:30, got some White Castle, and called it a night. The most fun I’ve had on a Monday in ages.

The next day, Gayle summed it up: “I want to take last night behind the middle school and get it pregnant.” Amen. Bruce took some photos and I’m sure they’re great, so those will be up as soon as they’re ready.