How A Tranny And Other Things Shaped My Childhood

Recently I found out one of my favorite movies/stage shows, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" is coming to Broadway in Spring 2014 and Neil Patrick Harris is playing the lead.

If you have no idea WTF I'm talking about, you need to be exposed right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tgy9ODhwNI

I hope you enjoyed that. Now imagine Neil Patrick Harris is heels and that blonde wig. Doesn't that make you happy? Because it should.

Here's some more after the jump:

When I was a kid (in the chronological sense), I did all the usual 90's things like listen to the Backstreet Boys, freak over Pokemon, eat Oreo O's, and drink the Slimer Ecto Cooler juice box while yelling at the teams on "Legends of the Hidden Temple" like it's the World Series..... Good times.

But my parents also showed me that there are whoooooole other worlds. For example, they introduced me to music outside of Disney and the pop crap on the radio. Like Type O Negative:

A few years later, Type O Negative did a cover of the song "Angry Inch" and that is how we discovered the film version of Hedwig. And I'm pretty sure it made a big impact on my time in high school and shaping my mind into the warped little thing it is today. 

This article on buzzfeed sums it up well: http://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/how-hedwig-and-the-angry-inch-helped-you-find-yourself

 Strangely enough, my mother picked up a paper with Type O on the cover and found an article inside  saying they were staging Hedwig in Asbury Park at the Baronet Theatre.

And we just had to go. AND IT WAS AMAZING.

I've heard Asbury Park has cleaned up a bit but when I went it was still a glorious, dirty, ghetto, garbage town and it was beautiful. It was abandoned, decaying; a ghost town where the people were rats and the rats were most likely eaten by the homeless living under the piers. Asbury Park is where I saw my first "lady of the evening" too.

She was a dirty one. 

And this was the decrepit little theatre we saw it in. They had what were called "heating fans" inside. (Because it was April and Winter decided to stick around an extra week or two.)

It was also next to a shady looking bowling alley. The theatre was demolished in 2010. :' (

The show was hilarious, it had great music and cheap effects. They used power point to play the images on the projector behind the band.

For the sing-along part we had to "follow the bouncing nothing" on top of the lyrics.

The best part, and a moment in my life I and my friends will remember forever and hold dear to our hearts..... how my friend Vinny got carwashed by a man in drag.

So we got three people: Vinny, Jess, Me. Jess and I had watched the movie a few times now, but Vinny had no clue what to expect. There were also a few other factors that helped this specific moment happen.

1) I had seen the show with my parents the weekend prior. (Yes, that's our definition of a family outing. There was that other time arounf Christmas we were out til like 3am at a Twisted Sister Concert.)

2) It was open seating.

3) Vinny was rocking some facial hair that made him look older than he really was.

The show was going well. Jess and I were "wooing" after each song and I'm pretty sure Hedwig was eating our excitement up. We finally got to the song "Sugar Daddy". I could barely hold myself together, I may have peed a little. I had my phone ready at my side to snap a picture of what was to come. Vinny was on the aisle. He had facial hair. Everything was perfectly placed....

I was crying from laughing so much, Jess was practically dead in her seat and Vinny may have had an asthma attack.

We all calmed down after that and the show went on and that was pretty much it. Definitely one of those epic nights to remember.

And now I have a new goal to aim for: I need to go to NYC next spring, I need to bring a dude-friend. And I need to get those 2 seats in the house on the aisle so we can get carwashed by Neil Patrick Harris. Doesn't that sound epic? I mean sure, riding a dinosaur is epic and so is petting a Narwhal in space, but this is reality and we have to be realistic about things.

I'll just end this post with that statement then because everything else will just sound dull.

Get carwashed by Neil Patrick Harris in drag.