. . . and a Long Tale

Saturday morning, I went to the caucuses. I caucused. I participated in the most weird and confusing element of our weird and confusing system. I listened while aging hippies in sweaters and young, fresh-faced go-getters festooned with Dean stickers gave speeches at each other. Or is it "festooned in"? How exactly does one festoon things?

Whoops. Got a little off-track there. I blame the word "festoon." It's a funny word. But we have no time for funny words (like "festoon"); I've got a story to tell about how I spent my Saturday Night.

Okay, this might take some explaining. See, there was a release party for this thing called the Book of Erotic Fantasy. It's a role-playing book about sex. Like, let's say you play D&D or something. And you want more sex in your game, right? Because all that troll-slaying can get sort of wearying. This is a book that contains rules for sex. Lots of rules. Like, can a Centaur crossbreed with a Dragon? According to this chart, the answer is "yes".

The book is an interesting mix of the geeky and the kinky. Without going into too many details, I'll just say that the "Magical Items" section is more interesting than you usually get in this sort of book. Also, the pictures tend more to the "topless gothic girl in bondage" than is typical for RPG source material.

Now, although the book was put out by a company different from the one I work for, I know some of the people that worked on it. So I was interested in seeing the book, right? Plus, there aren't that many RPG books that get a big release party. So I went to the Catwalk, the gothic dance club where the party was at.

So you might be thinking that the club would be full of some kind of weird mix of goths and geeks. But you'd be missing the secret shame of most goths: they're already geeks. So really it just looked like any other night: lots of men in top hats and lots of women in latex dresses. There were a lot of the models from the book signing their pictures, but since they were mostly the same people that show up every Saturday night, it wasn't that big a change.

There was live entertainment, including a "burlesque show". It was not what I think of as burlesque, because there were no incredibly lame jokes. It was really just five or six young ladies taking their clothes off until they were slightly less exposed than Janet Jackson. They did it to music, but the music seemed completely disconnected from them. I don't know who decided that Rob Zombie and the Velvet Underground were good stripping music anyway. Oh, and the dancers (who, frankly, weren't "dancing" so much as "walking back and forth while waving their arms") had a distressing tendency to wear pointy ears and fairy wings. Some of them were attractive, but on the whole it wasn't that good a show. I liked their name, though: Glitzkrieg.

There were also two bands, who suffered from the same problem as most live bands in small clubs: all I could hear was the drumming and the bass. There were guitarists and keyboardists and even a flautist, but they might as well have been at the bar for all the good they did. Also, while the singers seemed to believe that their lyrics were particularly meaningful, they were completely incomprehensible, since, again, all I could hear was the bass. It was all rumbly.

So that was my Saturday. Morning: democracy. Evening: scantily-clad women in elf wings selling role-playing supplements. It was kind of odd. I mean, it's not often that I buy something that comes with both a character sheet and a 10% off coupon at the local leather-underwear emporium.