Oscar weekend adventures

This was going to be it! The weekend I grabbed life by the horns and LIVED! And then wrapped it all up with a neat little Hollywood ending.

Friday night: Leave work on time. Hit the gym. Head home to shower and shave things. Be at Sidetrack by 11 pm. Have sex with 37 oily bodybuilders before sunup.

At least that’s how it was scripted to play out in my turgid porn fantasies. In reality, I ended up working until 10 pm, gorging myself on some extremely mediocre takeout from PF Chang’s (ginger chicken my ASS—it was more like ginger ale chicken) and waddling home to sit through three hours of CSI on my TiVo. Woo-hoo! Par-tay!

Saturday: This time it was going to happen—only with thirty-NINE oily bodybuilders. (I figured the fates owed me a couple extras for what had happened on Friday.) I spent the day running last-minute vacation errands (I got everything done except finding one of those inflatable neck pillows that make it easier to sleep on transatlantic flights). Then I got the brilliant idea that Now! In February! In Chicago! Three days before I take a 10-day vacation in Europe! would be a great time to start my marathon training, so I headed out in Shorts! In the freezing cold! and got in a good mile and a half before I realized I was being a Moron!

After I came to my senses got home and thawed, I met Keith at 6:00 to choreograph a song we’re teaching on Tuesday, Jim met us for dinner afterward, I gorged myself once again—this time with delicious, realistically flavored Italian food—and once again I found myself with just enough social ambition to waddle home to watch three hours of CSI on my TiVo.

CSI: Shameless addiction or all-too-convenient replacement for actual human contact? Next Oprah.

Sunday: I woke up well-rested. So at least there was THAT. Then I was off to a fabulous gay brunch with Jim and Jeff and Keith. Then a tour of Jim and Jeff’s house renovation, which is going to kick ass when it’s done. In 2007. Then a two-hour dance rehearsal. Then the fabulous gay pre-Oscar party at Sidetrack. I was one of the trained monkeys singers who added ambience during the event. And I wore a sparkly shirt, so if you missed the party, you missed your opportunity to point and laugh admire the shredded-tin-woodsman collection from the House of Jake.

Singing at a bar is a hard gig. Everyone there is, after all, in a bar—and people in bars aren’t usually inclined to shut up and listen. But there was a small group standing around watching me, and there was a camera blasting my face on every freakin’ screen in the place. And when you’re singing and you see your face everywhere you look, you tend to focus on gosh, my nose looks big and I really should work on my posture instead of I’m singing a song here, so I need to make sure I don’t fuck up the notes and/or the words. It’s kind of disconcerting.

Oh, whom am I kidding? I was singing a belty solo in a packed bar with a turbocharged sound system and my big-nosed face everywhere anybody could look. For three minutes, I was a superstar! And then Beyoncé showed up with THREE solos—one of them in French, even—and totally stole my thunder. I’m gonna have to cut her.

And then Matthew—dear, sweet, kinda drunk Matthew—tried to play matchmaker between me and two totally hot muscledudes (key words: arms, pecs, glutes) who happened to wander in front of us at the wrong time. (For them, at least.) Three hours later, though, they were still standing with me, watching the Oscars and doing those accidentally-bumping-into-me things that guys do when they flirt. Which was giving me a total boner.

In between Chris Rock’s painful attempts at cheap-joke insults humor (am I the only one who thinks he really needs to work on his timing?) and the endless parade of pneumatic Hollywood breasts, we managed to discover our shared marathon experiences—though they (the muscledudes, not the pneumatic breasts) totally trumped me by also doing full-out triathlons. Lots of them. And though I’ve done two triathlons, they (the triathlons, not the pneumatic breasts) were kinda embarrassing so I don’t bring them up much.

Anyway, we had a great time chatting and flirting and bumping and grinding all through the telecast. (Don’t you just love the word telecast? I sure do.) And by the time we parted company, we’d managed to spend the evening as perfect gentlemen.

Depending, of course, on your definition of “perfect gentlemen.”

Let’s just say the abovementioned fates still owe me a pile of oily bodybuilders. 37 of them.