Marche Macabre
Now Playing: Felix Mendelssohn--Nocturne from A Midsummer Night's Dream
This past weekend I took a little stroll through the worlds of the undead. My thighs still hurt.

Friday evening, Tracy and Dan held a zombie/medical themed party for the latter's birthday, and as an early celebration for Halloween.* I decided to go along, sans costume, having made a quiche provencale for the occasion (I don't know if anyone's used that name yet, but it's a quiche with Dijon mustard, Gruyere, and herbes de provence, so I'm running with it).** Their house lies across the Huron River to the north, an area of town I've been strangely negligent in exploring. I took the bus at first, and walked some way past their house into the further reaches of Jones Drive, set on a ridge above Plymouth Road and concealed by a thick range of trees that give the impression of some far-out suburb (complete with buckyball-style residence towering over the rest), rather than in an actual city. Tracy and Dan dressed up as, respectively, a zombie nurse and a mad scientist, and their house is at once a very well-done, muted celebration of kitsch and a comfortable zone for conversation, dining, and, as I found, partying. I was the only one with no costume, but I took advantage of my Inspector Gadget-style beige overcoat (thank you, Vince) to play the role of Doug's drug dealer (he was dressed as a mental patient, complete with stylized dribble down his shirt). Sara, Amy, and Maria were there (Sara dressed as an undead clown in hospital scrubs), as were several people I'd never met before, but it was a lovely time, and I stayed far longer than I intended. The walk back was very enjoyable, as once again, I'm not too familiar with that part of town, and it's always a treat to find somewhere genuinely new to walk in Ann Arbor. Jones Drive at night, bending towards its southern extremity, has a picturesque Maurice Sendak quality, with dimly-lit houses sparsely placed behind trees, that would probably vanish in daylight.

One of the reasons I hadn't come in costume and meant to leave early was to save my energies for Saturday, when Adam and Margot put the (First Annual?) Ann Arbor Zombie Pubcrawl into action. The idea was to dress up as zombies and hit about eighteen different bars in the downtown area, staying around twenty minutes in one spot and then moving on to the next. We ended up with nine people by the end of the night (Adam, Margot, Sara, Maria, Amy, Adam's friends John and Noelle, myself, and this guy John that Margot met at Babs'), which was something of a blessing considering some of the bars we visited (only eight of those, too, as the small number of people meant that we could better adjust to our collective stamina level). I took an old chef shirt of mine, gashed it in a few places with (fittingly) a server key, employed red marker in several strategic locations about my face and torso, wrote "I'm not your fucking server" on my undershirt, donned my chef pants and doo-rag, and probably thereby anticipated my eventual destiny. Everyone else's costumes were cooler, but I'm not really good at that sort of thing.

Starting at Casey's, we gradually worked our way south until hitting Leopold's later that evening, stopping at the /aut/bar, the Heidelberg, Grizzly Peak, the Old Town, the 8-Ball, and Babs'. It was a lot of fun--great conversation, good laughs, meat-and-potatoes style alcohol, an unexpected literary commission of sorts, and the presumed amusement of onlookers. Adam had put a lot of thought into it, bless him, and almost didn't deserve our occasional giggles as he tried to keep amending the schedule as we decided to cut various bars from our itinerary. The only dodgy part occurred when we entered Grizzly Peak at a sensitive moment in the Detroit-Oakland baseball game going on and got al these gimlet stares from the massed horde of sports fans at the tables. We found a relatively secluded spot towards the back and watched the game ourselves, only to be verbally assaulted (in a well-meaning fashion, I'm convinced), by this drunk woman who demanded to know from what sort of wedding we had escaped (I think; Margot was dressed as a blood-spattered bride and Adam was working serious Mr. Peanut mojo in top and tails). Unsatisfied with our answers, she went to pee, saving us a lot of embarrassment (I think). We relaxed afterward at the Old Town with some Stroh's, tasty gossip, and the effects of a lovely sunset visible through the window, the game forming a sort of audiovisual wallpaper in the background. I chatted with Amy and Maria (zombie lumberjack and lunchlady, respectively) at the 8-Ball while Adam and Sara (God knew what, really; she bore a slight resemblance to Clara Keller in The Sinful Dwarf--and no, you don't want to know what that means--except for "Sweetums," the open-brained, undead pooch with a slight resemblance of its own, this time to "Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog") played darts, all of us witnessing the game's glorious climax as Tiger batter Magglio Ordonez hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth, sending two more of his own across the plate and stealing the game from under the As' noses. I now like Babs'--it took a while for me to get used to the loss of the old dive on Liberty Street (now the lackluster Alley Bar; the fuckers didn't even bother to give it a name)--but the new place has its own kind of faux-sophisticate charm, and the happy hour apparently lasts all week. By Leopold's, I found my stamina flagging (heaven knows what would have happened had we decided to hit all eighteen original bars), and left after a glass of IPA, taking care to snag some of the delicious smoked Gouda on my way out.

I got home to find Ted and Gloria watching The Aviator and went to bed. The next day, Lou showed Abel Gance's Le Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936) at Cinema Guild, pretty much the epitome of the silly, self-important biopic--whenever Beethoven has some grandiose turning point, the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony play with a brutal lack of subtlety that I now find funny. If you just watch it for the visuals, it's pretty good. Harry Baur is terrific in the title role ("Beethoven," not the "grand amour") although the movie's nowhere near as good as Gance's earlier Napoleon (1927).

*I'm not sure how I'll be celebrating the actual holiday. I've no idea if trick-or-treaters come around my neighborhood. They'll all probably be at parent-approved, state-licensed candy-dispensing houses in the early afternoon run by religious organizations or Amway, but I'll still put out a jack-o'lantern.

** The full name is "Provencal Tart with Gruyere and Herbes de Provence," from Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audureau's Once Upon A Tart... Soups, Salads, Muffins, and More (New York: Knopf, 2003), a cookbook the people who lived on Spring Street before I did left behind.