![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Went yesterday afternoon to see Mysterious Skin with Ross, a loft neighbor; good movie, riveting, with awesome performances, and just the kind of small scale but intense indie movie I needed after the overblown depressing miasma that was War of the Worlds the day before. Also, it was very fun to see Michelle Trachtenberg, aka Dawn Summers, as a thoroughly Goth girl. Not that the movie is exactly fun, it's tough stuff, but it's very well done and worth seeing, tough stuff with humor and hope.
After, Ross wanted to stop at Charlie's, a gay bar that's been around for a very long time, to see a band that he likes play. I'd never been to Charlie's; it was the most bizarre cross-section of sub-culture I've ever come across. At first glance when you come in, it looks like a collection of good old boys and bubbas. Older guys with paunch and bald spots around a big, Cheers-style bar, and scattered about in the rest of the dim, heavy wood and aged atmosphere. But off to one side there's a side bar with two mostly naked men on it, dancing. And here and there are some women, with big breasts and country bar-styled hair, who were once men, and a few who are still men, but are definitely better in heels than I've ever been. Add to this that the band which is playing is kind of a country band, though not strictly--lots of strings, including mandolin and fiddle, which made it alright for me--and a man and a woman with beautiful voices singing. And that the place is done up with lots of red, white and blue and flags for the fourth. And the stripper/dancers (apparently Charlie's has amateur strip nights on Tuesdays...hmmm...) occassionally do a two-step together, while, down on the wooden dance floor, an aged white-haired gentleman and a trannie in an elegant red hat dance a graceful waltz when the band plays "Mr. Bojangles," the disco ball above scattering stars around them.
After, Ross wanted to stop at Charlie's, a gay bar that's been around for a very long time, to see a band that he likes play. I'd never been to Charlie's; it was the most bizarre cross-section of sub-culture I've ever come across. At first glance when you come in, it looks like a collection of good old boys and bubbas. Older guys with paunch and bald spots around a big, Cheers-style bar, and scattered about in the rest of the dim, heavy wood and aged atmosphere. But off to one side there's a side bar with two mostly naked men on it, dancing. And here and there are some women, with big breasts and country bar-styled hair, who were once men, and a few who are still men, but are definitely better in heels than I've ever been. Add to this that the band which is playing is kind of a country band, though not strictly--lots of strings, including mandolin and fiddle, which made it alright for me--and a man and a woman with beautiful voices singing. And that the place is done up with lots of red, white and blue and flags for the fourth. And the stripper/dancers (apparently Charlie's has amateur strip nights on Tuesdays...hmmm...) occassionally do a two-step together, while, down on the wooden dance floor, an aged white-haired gentleman and a trannie in an elegant red hat dance a graceful waltz when the band plays "Mr. Bojangles," the disco ball above scattering stars around them.
