Four years ago or so, my family and I took an extended vacation to the New York area, traveling from Niagara Falls down to Manhattan, and though I look back on it with very fond memories, I often felt claustrophobic during. Not that my family and I don't travel well together--it's just that I am a very particular traveler and need some semblance of control over my itinerary., of which I had very little on that trip. My dad, as excited as a boy on Christmas morning, packed as much as he could into the time we had.
I did, however, manage to work in one night in Manhattan to myself, and I chose to spend it at Splash Bar, a popular, touristy gay bar just off of Union Square. Because of my stellar planning, I went on a Monday night, when Splash holds what they call "Musical Mondays," an entire evening of video clips from various Broadway performances, Tony Awards, and movie musicals. In other words, my Mothership.
As soon as I walked in, I saw three giant screens at the front of the bar playing the Tony Awards' performance of "It Sucks to be Me," from Avenue Q. I didn't even notice any of the muscular and shirtless (as well as pantsless, for that matter) bartenders until the song ended.
I spent the next three hours in the midst of a crowd who knew every word of every song, every nuance of every singer, dancing along with modified Fosse moves and raising their fists to the sky at the power ballad that is "Defying Gravity." A girl named Rani adopted me into her group, mostly of theater people and gay men, and I learned that I was an amateur Broadway lover compared to these people.
I left the bar that night with not a drink in my body, yet I buzzed all the way back to the hotel on an irrepressible high. I fully expected to have a great time when I went in search for Splash on a Musical Monday, and it did not disappoint, but imagine how awesome it would have been if I just stumbled upon it, had no idea "Musical Mondays" existed at Splash and discovered it in person. Imagine the purity of my excitement, then, stepping in with no idea or expectations, and you will pretty much have a picture of what happened to me and Sam last night at Toucans in Palm Springs, a welcoming but somewhat tacky little gay tiki bar.
By the time Sam got a drink and we found a table, Dolly Parton's "9 to 5," The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas' "A Lil' Ole Bitty Pissant Country Place," and "Maybe This Time," from Cabaret, had all just finished playing in succession, and when Glee's version of "Don't Rain on My Parade" came on next, I reached my conclusion that we had inadvertently stumbled upon some unofficial "Showtune Saturday" at Toucans. I couldn't believe our good fortune. I looked at Sam with a healthy dose of awe in my eyes. He responded by rolling his and saying, "Guess I'll get to have another drink."
The unexpectedness of it all only enhanced what already would have been an awesome evening of entertainment.
And about an hour and a dozen Broadway clips later, Showtune Saturdays came to an end, but not before finding out that another gay bar in town does a Broadway happy hour on Monday evenings, our last night in town. I can't think of a better way to close out what is already shaping up to be a great weekend in a beautiful desert city.
It's Wednesday and there's no new post. Where's your stick-to-it-iveness?
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