Last night the Lad and I went to see Duncan Sheik, but it gets weirder. We stood in a crowd of sensible shoes, expensive haircuts, bland sweaters and the whitest skins this side of England, people who had arrived in Saabs and cabs and would leave before the encore, wanting to get home and pay off the babysitter. At one point, one of the band members leaned into the mic and yelled “Who here likes death?”
“Yeaaaaaah!” yelled the middle management audience, buoyed by pints of imported beer.
Something was wrong. These people did not like death, really. They liked racing for a cure and watching the Rose Bowl on TV. Liking death was much too cool for this crowd. Were things really as they seemed? We began to examine the band. “Duncan’s lead guitarist looks like a hobbit,” the Lad whispered, “and the bassist looks like a vampire from Buffy.” He was right. The band was composed of fantasy film extras. What else was weird? I scanned the room, finding two long-lost college friends from Santa Cruz but otherwise nothing odd. Maybe we were wrong. Duncan sang a pretty, inoffensive ballad about a pretty, inoffensive literary character, the drummer removed his latex mask to reveal that he was actually Tom Cruise, and we all went home.