DOWN WITH PANTS!

I am broke. I had to pay $300 to fix my car this week, I bought a train ticket to Washington, my landlord cashed my check a week earlier than normal and I don't get paid for a week. Boo fucking hoo, right?

Well, seeing that I am broke I left it up to Death? to plan the weekend's activities and boy did she ever do a number on me. Not that I mind, I actually enjoyed myself, but it was definitely not The Weekend of Brandon.

The weekend started with a choice. Godspell in Oxnard or Urinetown in Simi Valley? Community theater in the 'Nard or Suburb City USA? After some deliberation the choice was made to go see Urinetown in Simi.

Community theater scares the shit out of me ever since I was dragged to Bainbridge Island to see the absolute worst performance of any play ever, the neuter version of The Fantasticks. It was so incredibly bad, words cannot describe. The memory of that play is so painful, so gut-wrenching, that even thinking about community theater for a few years made me feel sick.

So Urinetown in Simi had me ready to recoil in horror. Luckily, they had a very good cast and they tried their damnedest to put on a good show and did. The show struggled a bit because of a very small stage and a ton of characters and some bad directing, but the kids could really sing these musical numbers making fun of other musical numbers. It was quite a bit of fun for an amateur, community production and we will probably be back to see another show sometime in the future.

Saturday, the wife decided that she wanted to see Les Miserables at The Pantages in Hollywood. So we got dressed up and drove on down there without any tickets to the sold out matinee. Despite feeling gross from buying from some punk kid (15 tops, but it is good to see a kid learning a trade) we got a great deal paying less than face value for tickets in the fourth row. The show was, as expected, great. Being a choir geek in high school, I had to sing Les Mis a couple times, so it was great to see it live.

By the way, I feel extremely dirty going to any LA event anymore. It seems like no matter what you do, you are only making money for the wrong people. Whether it be the parking lot owners, Ticketmaster, The Dodgers, Disney, or, in this case, shady ticket brokers (scalpers).

We then headed to The Farmers Market for some grub and, most importantly for Death?, a trip to American Girls Place. If you don't know what an American Girls store entails let me just give you an example of the craziest thing I saw. If little miss spoiled's American Girl dolly somehow breaks or gets messed up, you can bring it to the store's hospital and they will fix it and put it in a wheelchair and give it a cast and balloons and everything. It's two floors of puke inducing pink, little girls foaming at the mouth, and shell and sticker-shocked men. It's crazy!

We also had the best milkshakes in the world at the Disney Soda Fountain next to El Capitan Theater. We saw Cars and it was awesome, personally ranked right up there with any other Pixar feature. And today we went Geocaching for the first time in months.

Any time the wife has Saturday and Sunday completely off I count myself very lucky, even if it means doing a massive amount of girly things. What can I say, I just love spending time with her. Joking about how if we have girls they can never find out about American Girls or haggling with a scalper or shedding a tear at the end of "Bring Him Home" with her. I guess it really was The Weekend of Brandon after all.