SUCH A PERFECT DAY, YOU MADE ME FORGET MYSELF

Wow. What an amazing Friday. The slowness of the day's writing should have been an evil omen for my night to suck, but I made a smart decision to move my Saturday plan of a haircut and a movie to fit in before the Franz Ferdinand concert, and damn if it didn't work out.

It's been almost two months since my last haircut, and I had so much hair on my head, it was starting to hurt from the weight. (Oh, my fragile eggshell mind!) I was nervous about going and getting it cut, though. My stylist for the last two years, Jennifer Healy, retired to become a writer, and I was feeling very abandoned. I am not one to switch willy nilly, and I was afraid of the results. Still, it was something I could no longer ignore, so I shoved a copy of A Moveable Feast in my back pocket (it was a gift from Spookoo), and went down to the shop. I devoured around 40 pages while I waited. Hemingway makes me feel very small. He's just too good, and his portrayal of his writer's life serves up much good advice.

Thankfully, the haircut turned out just as well as my reading choice. The woman who did the job knew just when to be economical, just where to trim away. I wanted to say to her, "When you cut, cut one true thing, and that is all." But I did not.

I was finished just in time to catch the 7:00 pm show of John Waters' A Dirty Shame just up the street at Cinema 21. For anyone who has missed the no-holds-barred world of Waters, this movie delivers everything you've been longing for. It's silly and depraved, making good use of its NC-17 rating. Tracey Ullman sneers and snarls her way through a comically sexual performance, backed up by an appropriately swaggering Johnny Knoxville and Selma Blair having great fun with the massive mammaries Waters constructed for her. Nothing is off-limits in this film, and you can tell Waters had a blast putting in every filthy phrase he could think of, all in an effort to shock and amuse. And boy, does it do both!

Outside after the show, a pinched man with a three-inch long billy-goat beard was apparently staging a one-man protest, holding up a sign that said "God Hates Pornography" on one side and "NC-17=Evil" on the other. I walked over to him, leaned in, and said, "Actually, God hates bad beards." I think he expected to get some guff, but the nature of it threw him off a little. He tried to recover, saying, "You right, God does hate facial hair," but it was kind of a sad effort coming out of a mouth surrounded by his particularly foul chin sculpture.

From there, it was on to the final stop of the night: Franz Ferdinand playing a sold out show at the Crystal Ballroom. Part of me was dreading how packed it would be, but I planned to stay a bit to the back and try to stay out of the mess. I really wanted to see them, so I just had to suck it up and go.

Thank goodness I did! What an amazing show! They opened with "Cheating On You" and just lit the place up. They maintained a constant energy, keeping the crowd excited as they ran through most of their album, a couple of B-sides ("Love & Destroy," "Shopping for Blood"), and one new song ("This Boy"). Lead singer Alex is a cutie pie, slinking around the stage like a tailored panther. I was ready to surrender.

And surrender I did. I was bouncing on these old man knees! I even unbuttoned the top button of my shirt! (Well, the second to top button, as the top one is always unbuttoned.) Quel dangereuse! I danced the whole time, joined in the occasional clap-along, and was hauled into the mass frenzy of the unbelievably hyper version of "Take Me Out." The whole room began the song by jumping up-and-down all at once, but since it's a spring-loaded dance floor at the Crystal, we were soon scattered out of sync. One's dancing was dictated by which way the floor tossed him. It's a shame I didn't have room to do my little disco shuffle to the main guitar riff the way I do at home. The cat tells me it's quite smooth, and as we all know, if anyone is going to know smooth moves, it's a feline.

Current Soundtrack: Eminem, "Lose It;" Keane, "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore;" Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, "Nature Boy/She's Leaving You;" Franz Ferdinand, "Take Me Out (Morgan Geist Re-Version);" Iron & Wine, "Such Great Heights;" PJ Harvey iTunes performances

golightly@confessions123.com * The Website

[to leave comments, click on the time-stamp below, then scroll down on the new page] – All text (c) 2004 Jamie S. Rich