Friends With Money

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Gustavo Dudamel

We already had Friday night plans—BollWeevil at Mr. T’s Bowl, for the eminently affordable price of $5? “Attending”!—when Nathan Walpow called me, on my phone! Nathan had tickets, and remembered that I liked to take my son places, even though my son is now 15 and so declines even the most awesome invitations unless they come with seafood.

I was skeptical of Nathan’s offer, though; in what way would these purported “tickets” interfere with my plans to see BollWeevil for the eminently affordable price of $5? Well, it turned out they wouldn’t, because these “tickets” to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct the L.A. Phil in a dreamy version of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony (your previous links are both of two parts, you are welcome!) were for an 8 pm show that would be over by 9:30 tops, and 9:30 is when the rock show people are just finishing up their first line of breakfast cocaine and contemplating their wardrobes full of leggings. We now had the perfect evening on tap—highbrow followed by lowbrow followed by tequila. My boyfriend Paul agreed. My son encouraged us to have a good time from behind his dinner of eggs and the television airing professional wrestling. Tickets it was!

And the Schubert was marvelous, and Dudamel was marvelous—I assume. I am uneducated in what makes a conductor great and not okay or mediocre, and none of us can be experts in every field but must find those we trust to explain things to us kindly and patiently in third-grade language—or second-, if third still flies straight over our blank little faces. And so I trust Paul Krugman when it comes to economics, and I trust Al Gore when it comes to being awesome, and I trust Donna Perlmutter in matters of classical music, and Donna is all aboard the Dudamel freight train, and not just because of his sheyne punim. Oh, boychik. Such a pretty face.

And so here is my critical review of last Friday’s L.A. Phil performance at Disney Hall: Ooooh! Shiny!

We skipped happily over to Highland Park to Mr. T’s, our bellies full of culture and feeling mighty proud of us for liking it. Mr. T’s is a former bowling alley, dark and dingy and sodden and perfect, and when we arrived, the guy with the cashbox happened to be looking in a different direction and we refrained from eye contact and scurried into the bar. $10 saved! Screw the bands!

Every time we went to smoke, we would make a new friend. First there was Alex, who had dropped his teenage daughter at the teen danceclub down the block and had picked a nearby spot to wait patiently for her to text him for a ride home. What a good dad! Then there was Becca, who stopped traffic crossing mid-block and looking like a million bucks and was only too happy to hear us tell her so. Becca was nice! There was also a guy in the band after BollWeevil, and he and Paul talked about real estate in Echo Park, because Paul likes to embarrass me by being so fucking bourgie sometimes, and the guy was all “I own a house in Echo Park because I’m the coolest,” and I went inside to get beer. Whatever, that guy.

Soon BollWeevil started their sort of rootsy/alt-country-y musical stylings, and we stood happy at the front of the dance floor and bopped around a little bit, and then we turned around and not only were people perfectly motionless (like all boring L.A. people at any show ever), but they weren’t even standing. They were all sitting, on couches, with their fucking L.A. faces. Gah, L.A. people!

After our third trip past the cashbox guy to smoke, he timidly asked if we had stamps, and we explained that he’d been looking the other direction when we’d first entered, and so we’d declined to make ourselves known to him, because we are terrible citizens and screw the bands! Then we explained that we are both unemployed, and how about a special-two-for-one-unemployed-people special? And he agreed. Everyone is awesome! Except for the people, with their faces.

We gave the Echo Park house guy one half of one verse of his first song before we burned rubber getting out of there because he was terrible and we hated him. But hnmmm, we were hungry! Where could we eat food at one in the morning? I voted “taco truck,” but we ended up in Little Tokyo, and our favorite place (Haru Ulala) was still serving, and my boyfriend Tim the sushi chef was in his usual corner of the sushi bar, and we were happy again! (Paul doesn’t mind that Tim is my boyfriend. Paul knows he is not a sushi chef.)

And so we asked my boyfriend Tim what he recommended tonight, and he said, “Remember that scallop I made for you last time?” (Last time being a month before, and I looked triumphantly at Paul to remind him, triumphantly, that Tim loves me right back, and Paul, as he always does, understood, because Paul is the greatest, and should probably take some sushi lessons, so I can love him properly.)

And there we were eating our scallop, when the suuuperdrunk guy at the bar foghorned (loudly, on purpose, so we would all look at him), “I AM SO HORNY I WANT TO BUST A NUT INTO SOMEONE’S MOUTH.” There was no punctuation, either. It wasn’t “I’m so horny! I want to bust a nut into someone’s mouth!” It was a statement of how horny he was: so horny he wanted to bust a nut into someone’s mouth. All the nice Japanese people who worked there just looked at him—inscrutably!—and pretended they didn’t know what he was talking about.

 The next night our friends Jon and Deb pulled up at my house in a limo-zine, because they are liberals, and spirited us off to Yamashiro in the Hollywood Hills (they had a gift certificate for both from a grateful business friend whom Jon is now prepared to give just as much work as he would like), and when we arrived, customers waiting in the Yamashiro driveway actually smiled at us and made eye contact, because they thought we were important, and the whole thing was preposterous and ridiculous and decadent and the funnest night ever except for the one before. I complained endlessly about the “Himalayan Salt Plate” which came with the steak for an extra $30 (yeah, pay $30 for salt, L.A. assholes!), until the waitress explained it was a hot stone made of salt on which the steak was actually cooked, and then we naturally had to buy it, and that will teach me to make fun of the most expensive thing on the menu. Oooh! Shiny!

So I guess my point is, if you are my friend, you should probably give me tickets to something or take me somewhere, because it makes my life better, and I’m so much nicer that way, sometimes.

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