KevinSix.com

My Other Blog

Using a blog to promore another blog.  Boggeriffic! 

My wife and I often lie in bed laughing and wonder who would believe the things we come up in the privacy of our home and begroom.  Do you really want to know?  If so, folow our blog:

http://olson-six.blogspot.com/

Olson Six

The ongoing adventures of Kevin and Jennie Olson Six.

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Down With The Breakup Breakdown

Circle Circle dot dot.

Like it ir not, you're going to hear alot from this angry young theatre company.  Angry?  Fuck yes.

BTW, if you don't like the F-bomb don't see The Breakup Breakdown.  If you've ever broken up (and who hasn't) then you owe it to yourself to see this.  It will be fucking cathartic, y'all.

The show has everything including marital aids, guitars, angry lesbians, cat piss.. Too much?  Probably but go, you'll like it.

Standouts include Jacque Wilke as a long suffering sammich getter, Soroya Rowley as that woman you become after breaking up, and Sammantha Gin as the crazy chick you've all dated once (or more if you need help).  PS Sam Ginn can beat box better than anyone.

The guys were pretty darn good too; something for everyone including those who like rubenesque men in diapers.  I'm just going to leave it at that see this show and figure it out for yourself.

If Circle Circle dot dot could find a venue with 150 seats and a bar, this show would run forever. But as it stands, The Breakup Breakdown has to close on July 10th so do yourself a cathartic favor and see this fucker.

More info. at www.circle2dot2.com.

 

Surf Smart

 

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 Yesterday I took the Smart Car surfing.  Because it was a small day, I took the longboard.  There was a bit of a struggle to get the soft racks on Smartie but after that I was kitted out for surf.

Everything fits and, if I wanted to, I could have shared a parking spot with another Smart Car.  So Boom!

 

 

 

 

 

And here's Smartie ready to roll?

The Wedding Plan

Yes, the wedding is being planned.  As a control freak, I hate that it's not all written in stone.  As a director, I know that it will take many shapes before closing night, which is also opening. As a satirist, I want a stone to write "Nothing is written in stone" on.

We have the obligatory wedding website.  Who looks at these things?  Who looks at any blog, really?  Are we all just out there blogging away hoping someone will read this? 

But everyone's too busy blogging to read the blog I'm blogging.

Stop being so self centered that you can't see how self centered I am!

So the cake has changed from a sure thing (actually 300 sure cupcakes) to 150 cupcakes and a cake.  There's not going to be a rehearsal but there will be a reheaesal dinner, ehich is cool.  There are lists for everything and each is an animal that changes shape constantly. 

The song list is too 90s for my taste. 

I don't know what I'm wearing.

I've gone from lovingly detached to attached until I make a suggestion.  So I'm going to be the first man in history to do both.

There are a lot of things that won't be said to some of the people coming to the wedding.

At least seven important people can't make it.  Two of them are dead.

At the end of the evening -- after everyone is kicked out so we can get the deposit back -- I will be married. 

To the only person I'd ever go thought all this for.

Love.

Other People's Children

OK people, say what you want about other people's children.  Sometimes they're noisy, often they're misbehaved and sometimes it's even the parent's fault.  But, unless the child is being abused, you have no right to speak harshly to them or their parents.

This happened to me on Friday.  Twice.  One was an adult who yelled at children in Borders and another was a woman yelling at a mother at Stu Segal's Studio Diner.  Both adults were in the wrong, one of them got a serious dressing-down by me and the other deserved one but my girlfriend sat nearly on me in the restaurant to keep me in my seat.

First the asshole in Borders:

There were two moms with children eating and having drinks in the cafe off the magazine section in the Mission Valley Borders.  These kids were actually really cute.  They were rambunctious, a little loud and wandering away from their mothers but in no way were they disturbing anyone, including myself who had to dodge one of them on the way back from getting cream.

Out of the blue, this man stands up and says to the children, loudly and with frustration in his voice: "OK, that's enough; you need to settle down now!"  Then he got up and went to the counter.

I asked the women if this man was related to them or the children and, when they said no, I was already on my way to confront this asshole who had shut down two little girls for laughing and talking about a birthday they were going to attend.  Now, I wanted to speak calmly, forcefully and respectfully to this guy but it came out wrong.  So much so that I may have said a few words loudly enough for the children to hear.

Words like "you asshole" and "bust you in the chops".  If I had it to do over again I'd have told the guy that children have the right to have fun even in a cafe; people who don't like children should not go to cafes at 10:30 a.m.; and, most importantly, no one has the right to take away a child's happiness.

That was breakfast.  At dinner, there was a child screaming in Studio Diner.  The whole exchange lasted about two minutes.  The mother was the asshole in this case but it was one of the other diners I wanted to throttle.  The mother said, "all right that's enough, we’re going," and didn’t respond after the child tearfully, sobbingly and heart-breakingly apologized seven times - each apology louder than the first.

Then a purple-faced, irate woman tromped over to the table where the woman, her mother and two children were getting ready to leave and yelled: "Your children are ridiculous!  This is ridiculous!  I teach preschool for 23 children and none of them act this bad."  She said a few more things but I was too busy trying not to bolt out of my seat to hear them.

Then the mother followed the purple-faced, irate woman back to her table, where the irate woman sat with the parents who, ostensibly, taught her it was OK to behave like this in public and said: "My children are not ridiculous.  They are two and three and we're having a bad day.  You know nothing about my life and what I'm going through." Then all hell broke loose.

The purple-faced irate woman and her parents all shouted at the same time.  A couple of elderly sour-faced women also took up the cause of children being loud in restaurants.

I was dying to stand in the center of this and, with my trained voice rising above all the idiots in the room, say" "Attention intolerant people!  If you don't like children making noise in restaurants, do not go to a diner at 7 PM!"  But it was just as I was having this thought that Jennie decided to sit by me.

A woman who teaches preschool talks like that to the mother of two toddlers?  In front of those kids and their grandmother?  I was dying to find out the name of the preschool and the teacher who, if she spoke with 1% of the animosity to any of the parents there, would be fired from that preschool.

The parents of the purple-faced, loud, irate woman yelling in support of their horrible daughter?

Two old ladies who wagged their fingers at the manager and finagled free desserts?

People!  Children are loud.  The one kid screamed and apologized.  It took two minutes!  Get over it! 

Mother of that child: Accept your child's apology and speak soothingly to him.

Irate woman with purple face: you are lucky indeed that I did not type a letter to your supervisor and every parent of the preschool that made the mistake of hiring you.

Irate woman's parents:  Rally?  You deserve the daughter you have and all the hell that follows.

Cranky old ladies: If I were the manager, I would have picked up the check, comped your meal and asked you to leave and never return.  Same with the irate woman and her parents.

Guy in the coffee shop: It would have been my distinct pleasure to punch you.  Four or five times.  You are lucky indeed that I was whisked out of the Borders before you could say anything stupid.

Everyone else in the world: Children make noise.  Deal with it.  Children are allowed to have fun and be loud about it.  People who yell at their children are bad but people who yell other people's children are worse.  And people who yell at parents in front of children are the worst of all.

Let's all just let the children be loud for the time it takes the parents to get them out of the way. 

Oh, and if you are someone doing horrible things to children in front of me (and Jennie's not around), please note that I am left-handed and that's most likely where the slap you so richly deserve might come from.

Thank you.

 

Things I'm Thankful For:

1. Being able to buy quality big-ticket items NEW!
2. A home with four insulated walls
3. Friends who don't judge.
4. More love than I can handle
5. The understanding that the excesws love gets moved along the contunuoum
6. Good, healthy, tasty food
7. Plays and musicals (and even films) PRODUCED!
8. A life of surfing, trapeze, acting -- and I MAKE MONEY doing them!
9. People to look up to (do you know who you are?)
10. My odd little immediate family

Thank you to all who made this and everything else possible.  Do I know who you are?

I rarely Yelp, But When I do...

Kevin S.'s Review: The Living Room in Old Town Sucks on ice!

Kevin S.

San Diego, CA

4/20/2010

I used to love the Living Room.  Now, I believe it is under new management/ownership and, from what I know of the new owner/manager, rudeness is the order of the day.  Mind you, the coffee was good and the cheesecake wasn't bad but the rudeness...  Are you seeing a theme develop?

I left my phone there.  It fell out of my bag and ended up under the seat I was in.  I came back and asked if they had found a phone and "Vijay" (I heard but didn't read his name so I don't know how it's spelled) said "No."

He said this in such a way as to cause me to doubt that I did indeed have my phone in my bag as I entered the cafe and didn't have the phone in my bag when I entered.  So it is with bullies.

After going all the way home and ransacking bag, car and home, I concluded that my phone was indeed somewhere under the table.  So I instant-messaged a few friends, two of whom called the cafe.

One of the people who called is a licensed, practicing minister and she indicated that the help she got was just little less than polite.  Translation from the Reverend: they were rude.

I am not a licensed anything so I don't feel right calling Vijay and his staff anything more than cretins.

I told them as much 1/2 hour later as I entered the establishment and, before anyone knew I was there, had asked the nice man who was sitting in my seat if I could look under the table.  I found my phone, mentioned the cretinism (which rhymed with casserole when it exited my mouth) and went home to write this review.

Never again will I doubt my own memory.  Never again will I let someone's "No" stop me in my tracks and never again will I darken the door of The Living Room Cafe and Bistro in Old Town.

Enter at your own risk.

How It Will Be

There are lots of people writing for money now and even more just writing that novel.  The problem with writing in English is that 300 million or more people can do it too.  So there's some competition, zall I'm sayn.

I recently read a Saturday Evening Post from 1972 with a fantastic short story by Kurt Vonnegut in it.  Which current magazines let you read fantastic short stories by the best writers of the day?  I can't think of even one.

And now with the death of print...

But here's How It Will Be:

People will slowly begin to be creeped out by social media.  It has to do with all social media being commandeered by companies. Then extremists on both sides. Pretty soon you're gonna feel like you spilled Pepsi on yourself and stepped in Taco Bell when you roam the social landscape.

Then something cooler than facebook will come.  People you know who are cooler than you have already joined this movement -- it's not a social networking sight, it's a movement.  That's how cool it is.

And they aren't telling you about it yet because you're so, well, facebook.

All the photo- and video-sharing sights will be replaced with software that can etch images onto the retinas of people who sign up online.  That and a message about "the real thing".  Yes, talk about branding.  Your cornea will momentarily become a billboard for one.  You.  You are that cool.

But then something strange will happen.  All those odd people who work at sandwich shops and coffee carts who support the Steam Punk movement will become incredibly cool.  It all has to do with Brad Pitt playing someone with a handlebar mustache, a bowler and lots of girlfriends.  And, get this!  He reads.

Books.

The best part?  The film comes out not in 3d, not in HD, not in Dolby but... in Nickelodeon.  Not the TV network, the actual early film experiment where thousands of pictures are strapped to a wheel and you pay a nickle to crank it once.  You have to view literally hundreds of these to get the whole story: Brad trimming his mustache, Brad driving his Pennyfarthing (you know, the bike with the big front wheel) to work, Brad working some infernal machine, and, finally, Brad rollerskating with a beautiful actress with cupie-bow lips and bid doe-y eyes.  The experience is so radical, so far fetched that it's months before everyone figures out that they've spent one hundred nickels for a production that cost just over 100 thousand dollars.

Soon Sean Penn is directing Nickelodeon films.  Nickelodeons are found in every store in every building in every city on Earth.  There is a run in American nickels.  Canada makes them cheaper.

There is a whole trend backward.

And then?  And then?  And then!

People read again.  Not just the subtitles in Nickelodeons, either.  People discover they want newspapers back.  Books too. And! Finally!  Magazines that you can get great short stories in.  And then, I'll become a published short story writer and, because short stories are all anyone can think of, because each Nickelodeon film is about five minutes long, I'll become rich and famous.

But I will resist growing a handlebar mustache.

And this is how it will be!

What a Crock

So I have this Crock Pot.  It sucks!  I put the stuff in over an hour ago and the top is still cold! These things were not invented for the work-at-home set. 

I keep looking over there and NOTHING IS HAPPENING!  There isn't even any good smell emanating.  I'm making chili.

If you think the crock pot was hard, try soaking beans.  At least I went to sleep and woke up to soaked beans.  Now, I have to put in eight more hours before I get chili?  Who invented this, Satan?

Actually, it's a good idea.  For the Electric Company.
Here's the do-nothing damned crock pot now.  It isn't even made of crockery.  God I'm hungry!

Recipe:
Throw in a bunch of really good, tasty stuff.
Wait until you die of hunger!
Serve at your funeral.

Someone please bring me a burger!