Hearsay

By Metro Weekly Contributor on October 30, 2002

· Hearsay does Reel Affirmations the right way, through a Absolut vodka-induced haze, and takes Strand to task for being lateÂ…
· The meaning of Apex is revealedÂ…

Hearsay wasn’t certain whether to laugh or cry at this year’s Reel Affirmations 12, so it did a little of both. Hearsay laughed as all the actors cried at the soggy finale of the opening film, Leaving Metropolis written and directed by Brad "Canadian Bacon" Fraser. And it laughed heartily again after the film, as the festival’s volunteer bartenders graciously added more Absolut Vodka to each pre-made Cosmos Hearsay ordered at the party in the theater tent. In no time at all, Hearsay was getting a little wobbly standing in line after line after line chowing down on the delicious concoctions of Chef Greggory "C’mon Baby Light My Fire" Hill, who normally feeds the masses at Gabriel Restaurant and at select Bat Mitzvahs. As Hearsay stumbled through the crowd, a stranger accosted Hearsay. "Trying to find Michael Henning from Washington. I am searching very long time already," he burbled. Hearsay shrugged and pointed the stranger to Chef Gabriel’s Devilled Eggs. "Yum. Eggs," said the stranger, suddenly all wide-eyed and drooly. Hearsay crept away and knelt at the Sapphic Alter of Festival Director Sarah Kellogg, pleading with her to name her favorite breakfast cereal. "Frosted Flakes with Pop Tarts crumbled on top," she said with a Cheshire Cat grin. What? Not Shredded Wheat? "No," she intoned. "That would be a Post cereal." Hearsay felt the chill and headed back for more vodka. The next night, a minor disaster struck the festival. According to various sources, some of them still kneeling in the Black Forest, Strand Releasing stranded the festival by sending the film reels of His Secret Life four hours late. FOUR HOURS LATE! Even Lena Lett isn’t four hours late for anything. (Her late record, for the record, is 3 hours, 59 minutes and 22 seconds.) As the audience impatiently awaited arrival of the film, Mark "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" Betchkal performed his world-famous imitation of the Andrews Sisters on Ice, following it with his renowned Middle Eastern Balloon Animals routine. Just as he was twisting the head of a camel, The Lady Kellogg emerged from the heavens and announced the film’s cancellation. Strand ought to be bitch-slapped for this. Flash forward several days to the closing night of the Festival, and many Absolut Pavilion visits later, the vodka flowing, the morning headaches ceaselessly throbbing. Hearsay hobnobbed with director Miles Swain, whose serio-comedy-relationship-wigs-throughout-history movie The Trip, had won the coveted The Audience Loved It but What Do Audiences Know About Film? prize. Seriously, Hearsay liked the film as well, and wishes Swain the best of luck on the sequel, The Vacation. Swilling back the vodka, Hearsay accosted several folks, including One In Ten’s always chipper Ex-Officio Executive Director Carlos "I’ll Take Potent Potables for $1,000" Arias, Rick "I Thought Activism Was a Video Game Maker" Rosendall, Matthew "I’m Writing As Fast As I Can" Cibellis, and One In Ten prez Larry Guillemette, who proceeded to defend, on the spot, the short short Piss, in which several men’s members make like a fountain of Mello Yello. "There’s lots of nuance in that film," said Guillemette. "The shape of the penis, how the guys take the penis out, how they wiggle the last drop out of it, how they put it back in." Hearsay was not convinced. Piss remains shit. Thankfully, much of the rest of the movies on display this year were not, and Hearsay looks forward to returning one year from now to the Absolut Pavilion for another thousand rounds of vodka and its annual chat with LarryÂ…

It’s official. Apex is not — unlike one of our readers suggested in a recent contest — a new designer drug. It is, in fact, the new club in the spot where Badlands once stood. If you’re reading this on Thursday, Oct. 31, this is the very last night you can enter Badlands as Badlands because tomorrow, Nov. 1, Badlands will be Apex and the gay clubbing landscape will forever be altered as we know it. What’s that old clichÃ©? Oh, yeah, stay tunedÂ…

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Hearsay

By Metro Weekly Contributor on October 9, 2002

Lizard Lounge slithers into an alternate universeÂ…
Feint caters to the indie rock queer boyÂ…
Who was that spotted at The Crew Club?Â…

Faced with an Empire Video late fee of $2,106.45 for The English Patient and Young Guns 3: Cocked and Loaded, both checked out June 5, 1992, Hearsay slunk like a misbehaved mutt back to Miss Lena Lett, dispenser of wisdom in this mag’s advice column Truly Yours, to try to set up an installment plan. In response, Miss Lena put the proverbial smack down and told Hearsay to come up with the dough. OR ELSE. Left with only one reasonable option, Hearsay set out for every sperm/egg donation clinic in town. After being gently but firmly rejected by each one (who knew they don’t accept hard-boiled eggs?), Hearsay signed up as a test subject for The WeHo Project, a government plan to kill terrorists with high-decibel Mandy Moore deep house remixes via microchip brain implant. After 39 straight hours of "Turn the Clock Around," Hearsay considered hari kiri but decided instead to check out Feint, an indie rawwwk party for queers that debuted last Sunday at Staccato (right next door to the Duplex Diner). With its Black Catter boys and girls all dressed in the thriftiest, ironickest indiewear, and its perfect blend of Siouxsie, Thom, Belle, Sebastian, and Luscious, Feint was a veritable antiMandy antidote. Hearsay, made suddenly nostalgic for its angsty adolescent years spent listening to New Order (oh alright, Joy Division. Happy?) tried to slamdance with a few patrons but ended up alienated and deemed not sufficiently jaded. Hearsay decided it was time for more reptilian environs and so dashed on over to the ever-popular Lizard Lounge at The Saint only to find that Lizard Lounge was nowhere to be found. Could it be? Had Mark "Onward and Upward" Lee sallied forth to greener pastures in another city? A bigger, better city with 24-hour public transit and a more efficient DMV? Hearsay felt soÂ… betrayed. Hearsay was wandering the cold city streets in a daze, feeling cruelly deceived, when suddenly a warm light beckoned, glowing beneath a word that Hearsay couldn’t pronounce. MCCXXIII? Hearsay had never seen such a word. Perhaps Hearsay had stepped through a tear in the ether and landed in a far away universe. Hearsay crept closer and saw a doorman with — could it be? Yes! — a lizard affixed to his shoulder! And suddenly, with an epiphany that struck like a gong, Hearsay realized what had happened and felt foolish for taking so long to figure it out. This was Lizard Lounge, silly rabbit, but in another dimension, a dimension where words are unpronounceable and the party is even bigger and more fabulous than before! Hearsay must have time-warped or worm-holed or something and ended up in a parallel, alternate reality. The rest of the city looked the same, but in this version of Washington, DC, Lizard Lounge had two levels and more couches and bigger bars and even more people than in the Lizard Lounge back on Earth. The whole experience was so Twilight Zone. Resident DJ "Welcome to Planet" Kostas spun heavenly tunes for an absolutely writhing, churning dance floor, while the couch crashers knocked back a complimentary cocktail (one drink free with entry in this world!). Hearsay was so impressed and empowered by this alternate dimension that the very next day, Hearsay marched right into Empire Video and told Miss Lena in no uncertain terms that that late fee was not going to be paid. The always-multidimensional Lena then made Hearsay see — in no uncertain terms — why it would be very wise to pay that late fee. No need to get into details, but her methods involved a Mandy Moore CD, a pair of Coby headphones and a large tub of glue. Parallel universe or not, Hearsay learned, that’s one queen that you just don’t fuck withÂ…

What two "actors" in a hit "play" have been spotted working out at the Crew Club, every day, like clockwork, at 2 p.m.? And following one of their workouts, the "thespians" stopped by Hamburger Mary’s where, reports have it, they found the hamburgers big, meaty and juicy, just like their work in the "film" world. Maybe Glenn "Would You Like Salsa on That?" Mlaker will have them autograph "head" shots for display in HM’s Men’s Bathroom wallsÂ…

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Hearsay

By Metro Weekly Contributor on October 2, 2002

A ramble by any other name is a ramble that begins at Ziegfeld’s, travels to Chaos, bounces back to Velvet and then BodySmith, before winding up at Making PornÂ…

Almost the very instant Hearsay reported the winner of the Miss Ziegfeld’s 2003 pageant, it got a call from the club’s manager, Jon "Flower Power" Parks who alerted Hearsay to two errors in need of correcting. Hearsay’s first mistake: Pageant-winner Cricket isn’t just Cricket, but Cricket Farrington, and she wasn’t the first runner-up the year before but the second runner up, and although her bosom is big it’s not as big as it used to be because the well-candied lady has undergone breast reduction surgery so now they’re plump as two fresh plums. Not too plump, though, but just plump enough. That’s a great word, don’t you think? Plump. Try saying it out loud a few times. Hearsay doesn’t regret the errors it made, because Hearsay regrets few things in life. And speaking of life, one of the city’s most popular (and humble) and beautiful (and luscious) and plump-lipped (and vibrant) and talented dragatainers, GiGi Couture, celebrated several years of life on this planet last Tuesday, October 1, during her regular Bingo stint at Chaos. Despite using techniques it learned from watching the evil dentist on Alias on Chaos owner Carlos "Drill Me, Baby" Aguilar, Hearsay was unable to extract the exact number of years GiGi has spent wandering this great blue planet in search of the perfect lip gloss. And speaking of lip gloss, Hearsay doesn’t want to gloss over last Saturday’s Drag-A-Palooza at VelvetNation. Linda "Ass-shakin’" Carrerro STOLE the show, giving a performance that was so good it put the F back in Fierce and set the audience’s head on spin dry, whatever that means. The always incomparable Lena "Ask Me Anything" Lett, stunning in her dragon-spangled gown, was similarly stellar. Ashton "Miss Omega, Miss Gay DC, Miss Am I Missing Any Titles?" Taylor did her best to destroy any eardrums within hearing distance of her big wooden shoes. "It’s a little too loud," one observer remarked to Hearsay of Taylor’s trademarked clogging. "It sounds like a drive-by gone bad." Also present and accounted for: Aubrey and Cookie "All U Can Eat" Buffet, who lit up the evening in her Billion Points of Lights dress. The evening’s disappointment: Lady "Rabbit Ears" Bunny, who seemed to be a little too tipsy for her own good. One backstage insider put it best: "That bitch is liquored out of her head!" Hiccup. All in a Saturday night. And speaking of Saturday night, Hearsay managed a drop by the Grand Opening Party of the new BodySmith on 14th Street (between Corcoran and R Streets), a lavish two-floor personal training studio and private gym owned by Stuart "Faux Homo" Smith. Hearsay bumped into all manner of old friends, including Brad "That’s Mormon!" Harris, co-publisher of the exceptionally handy annual, The Other Pages, Brent "Chili Time" Beemer, and Matthew "I’m No Saint" Borkowski. Hearsay also spotted one of the city’s Gay Demonic Ten, a list so incredibly hush-hush that only Hearsay and its secretary, Sweet Charlotte, knows whose names it contains. Anyway, reports the blond-frosted Smith, the new BodySmith will be open for biz "verrrrry soon, within the next two weeks." And speaking of the next two weeks, that should be about the time that Hearsay takes off for its annual adventure in Guam, where it attends the John Guare Spirit Gum Festival. But before it departs, Hearsay will get to the bottom of a question plaguing Washington’s gay clubland for several weeks now: What the hell is Apex? If you think you know, write Hearsay at Hearsay@metroweekly.net and offer up your hypothesis. All hypotheses received via EMAIL ONLY no later than 6 p.m. next Tuesday, October 8, will be entered into a random drawing to win one pair of tickets to the October 12th (that’s NEXT FRIDAY, girls) performance of Making Porn, starring a couple of big, beefy, interchangeable porn stars in roles requiring them to recite lines longer than, "Yeah, I got a girlfriend. Wanna fuck my ass?" The winner will be notified via email with instructions on how to retrieve his (or, God forbid, her) tickets. And so the ramble comes to an end until the next ramble beginsÂ…