Alloween

Halloween is over, but I still have some spooky stuff to write about. Last Saturday, Beth and I went to Deno's Wonder Wheel Park on Coney Island, as it was the last weekend in the year the rides were running. We went on the Wonder Wheel, the Spook-A-Rama, and the Phoenix, the last of which is a small, slow roller coaster. They did have some Halloween decorations up, including a building entrance shaped like a zombie head.

I also always enjoy when rides have murals with seemingly random things in them. Like, this was what was in the back of the bumper car enclosure.

I get the cars and the car model, but a football player, Captain America, and the Statue of Liberty? If it's a patriotic thing, then why does the Statue look like she's been injured?


In the evening, we saw Weird Al at Carnegie Hall, with Emo Philips opening. This was the first time I'd ever been there, and I didn't even practice, just took the subway. It was the same kind of tour as the last time we saw him, with Al and his band playing mostly his original songs. They pulled out a few unexpected ones, like "Velvet Elvis" and "Good Old Days." When introducing "One More Minute," Al talked about how they performed it on network TV back in 1986, and the network insisted on censoring the line "I'd rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue," which already doesn't make sense, but then they made it much worse by just bleeping the word "tongue." "Skipper Dan" is based on a time when the guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland mentioned his failed acting career, but Beth wondered after the show that it might have been awkward for Weird Al to just go on rides without being hassled. Maybe he went in disguise. For "Nature Trail to Hell," an appropriate choice for Halloween, he did the organ part on a midi accordion. Both "Craigslist" and "Albuquerque" were extended, the former including a long bit of free-form nonsense in the part about his being on a phone call with his mother. I know there was something about the snakes rising up, a phrase Al has used before. "Albuquerque" not only had more kinds of doughnuts and the band playing the beginning of the song again after the part about the narrator losing his train of thought, but also an apology for using the word "hermaphrodite." He said that, in that context, it was just a medical term. While Al generally manages to avoid problematic humor, he does have a tendency to use some mildly offensive words presumably just because they sound silly, particularly "midget" and "albino." And in the song, a later line refers to the hermaphroditic person as a man. "Dare to Be Stupid" was performed with a lounge arrangement. For the encore, there was a cover of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," then a mostly-acoustic medley of "Amish Paradise," "Smells Like Nirvana," "White & Nerdy," "Word Crimes," and "Yoda," the latter including the chant. This is the best of the pictures I was able to take from our seats in the back row.


We visited Tavie and Sean on Sunday, and watched some Halloween stuff, or actually rewatched it in my case. You can see my thoughts on revisits to The Halloween That Almost Wasn't and Return to Oz here. After that, we looked at a house in Flatbush that really went all out on Halloween decorations (well, I guess the owner went all out, not the house itself, although you never know during the spooky season).

We didn't do much on actual Halloween, aside from watch a few other things. We voted yesterday, and today we saw The Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theatre.

It's closing soon, so Beth bought tickets for it. She saw it before years ago, but I've only seen the 2004 movie version, although I did hear my dad's CD of selections from it a lot as a kid. It's a very impressive show, complete with a lot of lighting tricks and pyrotechnics. Although it wasn't really intentional that we saw it on Halloween week, I guess it's sort of appropriate, even if the version of the Phantom in the musical is much less monstrous in appearance than in other takes on the character. He's presumably somewhat supernatural as well, although I guess that's kind of ambiguous. A lot of his tricks are based on mechanics and stealth, but he did curse Carlotta. Or maybe that was psychosomatic. Still, if he has the ability to control minds to some extent, maybe Christine wasn't entirely in control of herself when she went down into the sewer with him. Otherwise, she comes across as kind of absurdly naive. I've heard, probably mostly from Beth, that there's a certain contingent who think Christine should have gotten into a relationship with the Phantom and who don't like Raoul. What did Raoul even do, aside from being upper class? She compared it to people who hate Cosette in Les Miserables, although it's not like Eponine was a serial killer. I remember reading a quote from Terry Pratchett, who wrote the Discworld equivalent of the story in Maskerade, that the message of the musical is that you can get away with murder if you're charming. I might have to read the original book; I understand it's not very long. If I do, I'll probably do a bit of comparison and contrast.

Speaking of spooky music, there's one short piece that I've heard over and over again in different contexts, but never knew what it was called or the original source. For instance, I remember hearing it in elementary school music class with the lyrics "We are here to scare you-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo." Anyway, it's called "Mysterioso Pizzicato," and it was originally used in silent film scores as a theme for villains. I thought of it recently because I was looking up the music to Wizards & Warriors, which uses it as the boss theme.

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