Who did you take to a drive-in porno?
(or, why it’s best to forget conversations you have at bars)

Here’s what I wrote on the back of a receipt last night:

Sunset Drive-In Porn
Ode to Wendy of Poundy.com (Towanda)

[scribbled sketch of Ampeg logo]

Beanie Nacho
Go to Nacho Mama

555-5555 Maura

   I wish I could pretend this was a cryptic product of my excesses. Unfortunately, I was not so drunk that I can’t remember what all these things mean:

1. The first two are song topic ideas. I was reminiscing about Durango’s drive-in The Rocket. Lawson said that the only drive-in movies he’d seen were pornos. The now defunct Sunset Drive-In used to show them. I was fascinated: ‘Can’t you usually see what’s on a drive-in screen when you’re passing it on the highway? How did they get around that?’ I asked. He told us they had enormous floodlights facing out specifically to prevent this. ‘Who did you take to a drive-in porno?’ we all asked. He was silent on this matter. For some reason I thought this would be a good starting point for a song. Fifteen hours later, I no longer think that.

2. While watching the opening band, I found myself giggling over Wendy of Poundy.com’s disparagement of the comic strip ‘Cathy’. Everyone I know has a comic strip he or she particularly despises. My friend Liz hated ‘Fred Bassett’. My father hates ‘Marmaduke’. Russell hates ‘Luanne’. I have always been especially disgusted by ‘Dennis the Menace’. I used to read the comics daily when I lived at home, and I couldn’t not read the ‘Dennis the Menace. I’d try to read around it, but it was like a daily car wreck there in the upper right of the page. Gack. Ugh. I read it every time. These days I do not read the comics at all, and when I accidentally do, I am depressed for several minutes afterwards.
   But would any of this make a good song topic? No.
   The ‘Towanda’ in parentheses is something I mean to look up. Writing ‘to Wendy’ made me think of the bumper stickers saying ‘Towanda’ I have seen from time to time on the cars of lesbians. I do not know to what this refers.

3. Lawson and I were sitting on the upper deck of Hunter Gatherer and couldn’t make out what kind of amp the cellist had. I could see but not read the logo, so I tried to draw it for him, hoping we might recognize the shape, at least. It didn’t work; we had to go downstairs to look.

4 & 5. Maura was excited about Nacho Mama, the new…get this…nacho restaurant in town. She told us to go there. Then Mike suggested Lawson’s other band change their name from Cuatro Mono to Cuatro Nacho. Each member could be named after a nacho ingredient. I decided Lawson would be Beanie Nacho, and the band could set up a nacho bar at the front of the stage between their monitors. Hilarious though this idea was last night, it too has lost something in the intervening hours.

6. Maura asked me to go dancing with her and a friend tonight. Though I knew in my heart that this would never, ever come to pass, I took down her phone number anyway and promised to call.

   I always regret forgetting to take a pen with when I go out, but perhaps it’s best that I leave it at home.