Don't think too much, just clear your schedule: Our Tuck of the Town drag-scene columnist Steven LeMay hosts a drunken craft night/screening of Young Frankenstein in his vintage clothing/faux hair/custom t-shirt shop, Retro Fit, tomorrow.
News Fix editor Jon Brooks quotes Claudia Lehan, one of four people who run the Red Vic, as saying, "We're near the end. We sure don't want to close but we're financially strapped. We're hoping for a miracle. But it's not looking good."
The theater's office line went unanswered Wednesday afternoon, and a message left by SF Weekly had not yet been returned as of this posting.
San Francisco: City Lights Books, birthplace of a literary revolution
Certain San Francisco landmarks and tourist attractions undoubtedly fade into the background for people who've lived here a while. The cable cars might be one of those things. They're reduced to Friday night annoyance while trying to cross Powell Street, or a "How nice for them" moment when thinking about the tourists crammed onto the pretty little archaic crawlers. But one sight that always floors us when we walk past is City Lights Books, the bookstore and publishing house founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the 1950s that was a center of the Beat movement that included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Carolyn Cassady, among others. Apparently in agreement are Pop Pilgrims, a band of wanderers working for The A.V. Club, which is published by The Onion. They stopped by recently and posted the above video.
Here's a mystery: What urgent message did august important person John Updike impart to a very young Conan O'Brien way back in 1984?
Before getting to O'Brien's surprise cameo in an early '90s literary essay, let's do some background. Long before he had his own show, or his other own show, or came up with that Saturday Night Live sketch that traumatized America with its reckless use of the word "penis," or wrote the single greatest episode of The Simpsons, Conan O'Brien was already sort of a big deal -- and already adept at chatting up famous folks.
Recently, SF Weekly discovered evidence of O'Brien's precocity in pretty much the least likely place you would expect: on page 160 of U and I, novelist Nicholson Baker's unorthodox 1991 consideration of the work of John Updike. Updike, you certainly know, wrote the great Rabbit books, once memorialized in verse "The Beautiful Bowel Movement," and actually penned the line "She had dear little nipples like rabbit noses."
This week I'm handing my column over to my Padawan and comedy daughter, stand-up comic Janine Brito, to give you some perspective on something I have long since lost perspective on. Take it away, Janey ...
