So my friends at the Portage Theater, who run the monthly old horror / sci-fi bills, tried a comic book / toy show for the first time. Knowing I had (way too many) longboxes full of (mostly worthless) comics, one of them invited me to spend the day there and try to sell some of them. This necessitated spending pretty much four straight days preparing some boxes, and of course I way underestimated how long it would take to board and price hundreds and hundreds of comics. Even then, I only got a bit under four boxes ready, and was again filled with despair at just how much crap I have shoved in my trailer.*
(*Speaking of: Rock, sorry not to get back to you on the VHS list. Coming soon.)
So that was all I was doing for much of the week. Then the weekend came, and I had made plans with some work friends to go see The Room at the historic Music Box Theatre, where Tommy Wiseau himself was making a personal appearance.
It was a trip.
The Room is clearly this generation’s Rocky Horror. I knew the film was a thing, but I had no idea. They had the whole routine down, the chanted lines, the cheers at certain points in the film, the ritual throwing of designated objects. In this case, it was plastic spoons. It took me a while to figure out why (partly because my hearing sucks), but it is triggered by a framed photo of a spoon that appears on the main set. At that point you yell “Spoon!” and unleash the plastic flatwear. The Tick would love it.
The place was sold out; in fact, the sell outs for all three of the Friday / Saturday night showings meant the Music Box had sold more tickets than any other theater in the country this weekend, according to the manager. I mean, the place is a barn (900 seats), and it was packed at $15 a pop. You can see why it’s worth flying Wiseau in whenever he’s available.
We were about the only people over 25 in the entire place. That’s an exaggeration, but not much of one. I’d say college and even high school students represented well over 90% of the patrons. And when did all these cute young women start attending these sorts of events? The place was packed with them.
There was the usual cosplayers (guys in tuxedos, women in red dresses ala the film’s heroine), and Wiseau was something. He reminded me of Dennis Hopper playing an old hippie; 90% peace and love and benign weirdness with a soupcan of madman wisdom tossed in, along with 10% of—I don’t know, off-putting weirdness. The sense that maybe this much strangeness might somehow have a malign underside to it.
The crowd treated him like a rock star, though, and Wiseau drank it all in and had the time of his life. The result of Christopher Walken and Fabio falling into the Brundlefly Machine, Wiseau is clearly riding this thing as far as it will take him, and it seems to be taking him pretty far, in a modest sort of way. And he returns the love, inviting people up on the stage with him and hugging people left and right. One guy (the most aggressvie of the tux wearers and football tossers) absolutely clung to Wiseau like three or four times, like he was the personal guru that saved his life.
One thing was that when they lined up people for a Q&A session (both before and after the film), he laid out some rules when the first guy asked a question. Wiseau doesn’t want a cold question, he demands you say hey, first, and ask how he’s doing. You know, have a little conversation with him.
The questions were often funny, and sometimes scarily informed, and occasionally tried to be a little too much hipster smarmy (it’s not about you, dude), and maybe twice came close to skirting the issue that The Room is an awful movie (if, admittedly, a bit of a work of genius nonetheless, as with Ed Wood, and I don’t make the comparison lightly). These heretics were roundly booed, however, and I really was half expected a mob scene. Don’t mess with Wiseau.
Anyway, I’m not going to write a whole thing about it; I’m sure you can find tons of such accounts on the web. Still, it was pretty hilarious. And unlike Rocky Horror, it’s a couple of times a year, so you don’t get that disconcerting sense that for some people this represents their entire life. It remains a lark, so the creepiness factor is much less. Also, fewer transvestites.
Unfortunately, that all meant I rolled in home after 1:30 AM. I slept far too short of a time, got up, loaded up the comics, and drove to the Portage early the next morning—same morning, really. And I stayed there until about 3:00 in the afternoon. Bone tired at that point, I headed back home.
I didn’t sell any of my big ticket stuff (a handful of classic old Thor issues in pretty decent shape), and the few things I did sell were no-brainers. You don’t earn Salesman of the Year for selling a complete run of mint Watchmen issues for $30, or $2.50 an issue. I made maybe a hundred bucks, but ended up taking nearly all my comics back home. Man, I’d rather than sold 100 one dollar comics. So not a disaster, but again, I could barely squeeze the boxes back in my very large (three bedroom) trailer. I really need to start cleaning things out more aggressively, but it’s hard when you don’t want to just chuck stuff out.
Am I insane for being TOTALLY HYPED about the All-Star run of Chopped starting next month? Oh, and new Amazing Race next Sunday. Wheeee!
Anyway, that was my weekend, how was yours?
