New Year’s Eve with K-Tel Hit Machine and Tosca Strings

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

WED., DEC. 27, 2006

This year, New Year’s Eve falls on the Lord’s Day, which is surely happy news for recidivist 12-stepping alcoholics, but for the rest of us, it requires an extra step of irksome planning. Part of the fun of New Year’s is that last-minute run to the liquor store to grab a frantic armload of hooch for the evening – liquors you purchase by color rather than label or name; those last remaining off-brand bottles distilled in tin-sheds by toothless hillbillies in remote hollers in Arkansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia; the kind of stuff you don’t take out of the paper bag until your friend screams incredulously between convulsive fits of projectile vomiting, “What was that shit?!” Of course, that’s only part of the fun, but if that’s the fun you’re into – that being a profound state of drunkenness nearly worth the wicked hangover – you’ll need to cross the threshold of a liquor store no later than 8:59pm Saturday night. Texas is God’s country, and God, according to Texas statutes, don’t roll on the Yom Rishon. He don’t get his drink on neither – except in certain counties like Travis, home of Austin, the “Sodom of the Southwest.” Bottom line is that if you procrastinate like most respectable alcoholics, you’re going to end up underserved come Sunday night. That ain’t right. You don’t want to be wearing the elastic banded cone paper party hat sober. You don’t want to blow the duck whistle without wetting your own. You can’t do justice to a garbled Gaelic clusterfuck of lyrics like “Auld Lang Syne” with a blood alcohol content less than .10, and you certainly won’t want to engage in a spirited tonsil hockey match with a total stranger at the stroke of midnight unless the booze has got your back. Roger? Of course, you could do all the preceding sober, but then the fun onus is on you. You’d have to dream up something pretty spectacular to wipe out the memory of being a designated driver. Chin up DD, the Drafthouse has something for you. New Year’s Eve they’re hosting a skate party at Playland featuring the K-Tel Hit Machine and Tosca Strings covering tunes from the Electric Light Orchestra. Skating goes from 9-11pm and a dance follows. Seventies disco attire is recommended, skating drunk is not, but oh, the memories.

Smokin’ Singles Night With the K-Tel Hit Machine

Luv Doc Writings, The Luv Doc Recommends

MON., JULY 24, 2006

All singles events are suspect. Any person/business/organization with a hard-on for playing Yentl probably has an ulterior motive. Know it. Own it. That way, if you should find yourself holding up the wallpaper at the Red Lion Inn cocktail lounge on a Saturday night with 20 or 30 other anxious looking people sporting business casual attire and name tags done up in red sharpie, you can’t claim ignorance. Take a look around you. Is this what it’s come to? Sometimes in your desperation to get laid you only end up fucking yourself. You know better than that. You don’t have to squint to read the signs that say you’re on the road to Squaresville. They’re usually written in bold print: “Singles Night!” And if you find yourself at Cool River, sharing an awkward lunch hour across the table from a cologne-soaked salesman in a Hawaiian print shirt, pleated khaki shorts and sockless loafers, just know that the chirpy ex-stewardess who you paid to set you up with Mr. Cell-phone-on-a-belt-clip maybe doesn’t have your long-term happiness on the top of her to-do list. Maybe the whole premise is jacked. The interesting thing about you isn’t the fact that you’re single and looking to hook up. Your availability is not your defining feature as a human being. If it is, maybe you shouldn’t breed at all. The interesting thing about you is that thing you’re really interested in. It doesn’t need to be much … you don’t have to be curing cancer or saving displaced war orphans. Maybe you do needlepoint, salsa dance, or fix up old cars, or maybe you’re just really fucking nuts about live music. If it’s the latter, then you are in a healthy mental state to attend this Friday’s Smokin’ Singles Night at La Zona Rosa. Yes, Smokin’ Singles Night. Kiss of death? Maybe not. This singles night has a really kickass cover band, the K-Tel Hit Machine that features A-List performers: Trish and Darin Murphy, Johnnie Goudy, Paul English, Mike Belile, Kyle Crusham, and Benjamin Hotchkiss as well as a sensational opening act, Billy Harvey. If you’re the kind of person who can free your inner dork and totally rock out to pop and rock classics from the Seventies and Eighties, this is your show, regardless of your singularity. Plus, it’s sponsored by Lovers Lane. We may be suspect, but we’d never intentionally steer you wrong.