Silence!

Tonight I went to see Silence! a musical parody of The Silence Of The Lambs, which I laughed at for two hours. Which is remarkable as I don't remember ever actually watching or reading The Silence Of The Lambs, so it's strange that I could keep up with the plot.

Well, that's unfair; I've seen the first five minutes and the last ten minutes of the film, plus countless pastiches and parodies in popular culture (often without realising - eg in Clerks 2) so it turns out that the constant self-consumption of pop culture is actually really helpful at times like this.

Anyways, it has a particularly obscene song sung by Hannibal Lecter, it has ludicrous song and dance routines complete with plies, splits and somersaults, and it has a terrifying descent into night vision (rendered with a green filter on a lamp - what's not to like?). Whether you've seen Silence Of The Lambs or not, it's grrrreat.

Because my wife and friends hadn't seen the film, and possibly because they lack my filter-feeding ability to absorb culture, they went to see Avenue Q instead, which is also a fine piece of work, although now Gary Coleman is dead, it's a bit odd that he's still a character in the play. But it's not like they could change the script, is it?

Or is it?

Hmm.

We finished the night in my favourite New York bar, Jimmy's Corner, run by an ex-boxer and hidden away, one block from Times Square.

Times Square itself is a neon horrorshow, where it appears all the world has congregated to gawp, buy terrible caricatures of itself, and get in the way as we tried to battle our way to booze. Jimmy's Corner is a squalid dive with very few places to sit, but it still has staff that will bring you drinks, a vaguely improbable state of affairs for those of us born and raised in England. But I was glad for a tiny bit of squalor, and lots of pictures of boxers hitting one another in the face.

Got back home drunk at 1am, and they're still dropping bowling balls on the floor of the room above us. I have to admire their stamina.