Home of the rash, outraged and twee

[I'd better take advantage of this brief interval of minimal symptoms to update. This flu has been a dilly. The amount of scrip our saintly nurse practitioner sent me home with yesterday is just one sign of how big a dilly it is, and I've been spending the last couple of days enjoying ever so many pills, inhalants, syrups and the always popular "plenty of rest and liquids." Yawn. I get a little restless reading about other people's maladies, especially the mundane cold and flu season variety, so I'll leave the rest to your imagination. It's just no fun.]

[So last Friday, after being served our "traditional English breakfast" (the taste of these breakfast sausages actually rang a bell in my 25-years-gone memory bank - this is what England tastes like) by our surly Russian waitress (by the end of the trip, we became rather fond of Svetlana, or whatever her name was), John and I lit out for the West End to see what other trouble we could stir up. We were expecting our roommate, one Daveorama (yes, he called himself that; some of these queens were way too into Bananarama for their own good), but were unsure of the time. After enduring pointless torture in a half-price ticket queue in Leicester Square, we gave up and just ante'd up the full price for tickets to Boy George's new play, got tickets for the Mario Testino show at the National Portrait Gallery, and strolled around the Chinese and gay ghettos of Soho. After kicking back a Grolsch at a gay bar in Old Compton Street (shouldn't all these 19 year olds be at work or school on a Friday early afternoon?), we saw the Testino exhibit (interesting, but not six quid's worth), picked up our tix to the next night's Bananarama show, and headed back to Bloomsbury to try to catch up with Daveorama.]

[D. was asleep in the room when we got back, but he roused himself, and I think we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting. (Guess the subject...I was already getting sick of Keren, Sara, Siobhan, and Jacquie, and it was 36 hours until they were due to hit the stage.) At some point we must have met our Chilean neighbors, in town also for the concert, but the next thing I remember, we headed out again, to drop Daveorama in Piccadilly Circus to do some CD shopping, and for John and me to grab some truly dire Chinese in Wardour Street and hit Taboo.]

[The play was a high point of the trip. It helped that I've slogged thru George's autobiography, Take It Like A Man, but I think I would've loved it anyway (you may have guessed by now that I'm a fan of the era.) It's an old fashioned musical, really: like South Pacific, or The Sound of Music, we get a personal (melo)drama (boy from the suburbs meets girl with Siouxsie Sioux hair, love's found, lost, and found again) set against historical events (punk and New Wave London of the late 70s and early 80s). It had lots to say about professional jealousy, friendships, art, and AIDS, and even though I could see the play wasn't a perfect work of art, it's still buzzing in my head a week later. Hope it makes it across the pond; it would be a smash in San Francisco.]

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