We had a super-brief trip to Seattle last weekend, with just enough time for a delicious brunch with Amanda, some wandering around the Saturday Market in Redmond, and a stateside wedding celebration for an old friend from high school Saturday night. Gavin and Heather got married in Korea last month, and three of his high school classmates joined the rest of his aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends to celebrate a little closer to home. It was a great evening, and it was a lot of fun to see Brent, whom I see every once in awhile, and Sam, whom I haven’t seen since 1993, and Gavin, whom I’ve only seen once in the past 14 years. I’m not sure why I’m the only one in a tie at this point in the evening, nor why it seems to be turned around, but I did attempt to keep up with Aimee on the dance floor, which may have had something to do with it.
I’m not a huge fan of The Big Lebowski, but I enjoy it enough to know I would really enjoy a gathering of hard-core devotees to the film, and that’s what I found myself in the middle of here in Hollywood the night before we left for Seattle. Brian from work was kind enough to take the extra ticket I had bought off my hands, and we made our way to the Knitting Factory, in that strange mall with the gym, the pharmacy, and the gutted remains of the failed “Hollywood Entertainment Museum,” not far from Scientology’s other Hollywood HQ.
It was a lot of fun, but I don’t know if I need to attend another Lebowski Fest, unless it has bowling; the part of the celebration we attended was day one of two, the book signing, Mexican line-dancing to songs by the Smiths, Led Zeppelin cover-band, White Russian-drinking part. Many of the folks who inspired the characters in the movie, including Jeff “The Dude” Dowd and Peter Exline, whose “rug really tied the room together,” were there, and if you weren’t meeting them or watching a Japanese camera crew film a bartender pouring one of a thousand White Russians made that night, you could go into the next room and watch Totally Radd!!, in their skin-tight black spandex suits with yellow fringes and giant pentagrams playing ridiculous heavy metal, led by a man playing the keytar. Wow. The highlight of the evening had to be meeting Robin Jones, who played the Ralphs Check-out Girl in the movie, in her Ralphs uniform, as we were heading out. My hand ended up in a picture of her someone posted on Flickr. Weird.
A few (poor) photos here.
