captainsblog | ♫One Concert, One Bomb, No Jeers♫

(This first section, written right before the beginning of the second event, is a rewrite of roughly the first third of this post, dictated in the car on the way to Rochester before my phone decided to be a shit and ate the whole thing. I am determined to be no further behind that I was when I finished that part.)

I had a long- planned event for Sunday afternoon: an annual midsummer barbecue at the home of some Rochester area friends, which in the past few years has also come to include a pop-up comedy open mic. I had originally planned to meet a client at my office there at the end of the afternoon Thursday, who cannot make it to an appointment earlier in the day. I decided to change that, though, after being reminded of another opportunity to get out with Eleanor to an event on Buffalo's Elmwood Avenue late Thursday afternoon, so I rescheduled the client for Sunday, well in advance of the afternoon's festivities beginning a little before 4. She couldn't meet me any later than noon yesterday, so, What to do with the time in between?

I figured, Hey! Let’s watch a couple of bombs blow up! So I’m finishing this segment from the parking lot of Tinseltown USA, a Rochester multiplex I have never been to before.

This cinema, close to where I was meeting the client, had the best in-between time to see Oppenheimer, the three hour spectacle that I knew Eleanor would not have an interest in seeing in a reclining seat and without a pause button.

We'll return to that experience, but first, back in time to what we did wind up going to at the end of the day Thursday.

We had previously seen this performer opening for a band featuring two friends of ours over the winter, but this was our first chance to see Curtis Lovell doing a solo performance, in the same atrium of the Albright Knox where we saw the performance piece the previous week.

Two things you need to know about Curtis by way of introduction: they go by they/them, and the last name’s pronounced Lo-VELL. They perform backed only by a couple of self-operated keyboards, which control the mix of volume and electronic tracks of percussion and Curtis's pre-recorded voice, which only serve to back up the incredible live vocal created in your presence.

They played for the full scheduled two hours with a short break. There was an appreciative audience, if smaller than it really should’ve been for the talent that was on display. We got to meet Curtis, whose name Siri insists on spelling with a K, both at the break and again after the performance to pick up the two available CDs of their prior recordings, one of them done live about five years ago. I listened to both during my travels on Sunday, and the music has evolved somewhat but it’s still definitely unique to their upbringing and style.

After a relatively quiet Friday workday and a very rainy Saturday, I got to my next day of traveling Sunday morning. The client who could not meet me earlier on Thursday lives on the west side of Rochester, and I wound up meeting her at a Timmy's in that area, one that I used to meet her late husband at fairly regularly. As I was sitting there, in an AHL playoff t-shirt, a Barenaked Ladies song came on their sound system. I didn’t think I could possibly get any more Canadian without having to renounce US citizenship.

That left the expected three hours before the outdoor event at our friends house was scheduled to begin. Short of going to the office and putting in three hours of time on Sunday afternoon, the only other thing I could think of to do in Rochester for three hours, especially since the baseball team was not at home, was to keep my intended plan to see a very long film:

That's me in the back row, away from the bright light. All those other X'd seats were already taken for a 1:35 matinee on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. I knew the basic story- one of my Cornell classes included a biography of his, at a time after his initial fame had long worn off and his subsequent shaming hadn't been removed- and the recent New Yorker review (paired with one of Barbie) gave me some background into how Nolan constructed the narrative. I'm often too impatient to finish even a 45-minute series episode, so what would three hours do and without subtitles?, I wondered.

Nothing to wonder or worry about. Those 180 minutes fly by, aided immensely by the switches between color and black-and-white to highlight the different hearings and points of view of the two main characters. For yes, despite the title and Cillian Murphy's deserved top billing, Robert Downey Jr.'s character is equally important and is just as much "on trial" from the first to the final moments. He is unrecognizable- visually, vocally and in his presence- from his decade of Tony Starking it up in all those Marvel movies. The other supporting actors, over a dozen A-listers from bit parts to major turns, are equally impressive. The message of the horror of this technology comes through intensely.

There are months to go before nominations close, but Oscar's going to have a hard time ignoring much if any of this work.

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A change of pace was needed and received after that. Our friends' street was packed with earlier arrivers, and I snagged a parking space on Brighton's Elmwood Avenue, at a charging station in the town library's parking lot. Pepper did not come with, as she had in a couple of previous years, but the house pup was there-

- coiled and ready to pounce on any leavings from the grill. Her much mellower cousin, recent rescue by Scott's sister Julie-

- just reveled in his scritches. And our host, a paid radio geek, put a mic in front of him-

- before opening it up to a dozen or so of us to do comedy in their back yard.

Yes, us. For the first time ever, I signed up for standup, and did an open mic with an actual mic. Six went before me, including this guy who included his dog in the routine-

A fairly strict five-minute limit was announced, and signaled at about the four minute mark. I knew I wanted to do my "Crossing the Streams" poem from the previous week's poetry event, and timed it out pretty well to get in some good bits about Eleanor's experiences with knee replacement and crappy power tools. They laughed as much as they did for just about anyone else, and in theory I might be asked back or even to join them in September at a Real Boy performance at a local festival. If not, though, I still broke through, didn't get gonged or yanked off the stage, and left after the final half dozen comics who followed to a yard full of fireflies, a near full moon and a gorgeous sunset on the way home.

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Today brought good moments and frustrating ones connected to work, but the latter got worked out eventually with a trip to a bank to let a gem of a human being solve a problem their lesser minions completely fucked up. I also came upon two stories of branding fails and a wonderful one of how a MAGA idiot created a Streisand effect among millions of her most fabulous fans.

All of which will wait for further reporting- and for even more than three hours.