General Life Updates: Running Week 21 and LIZA LIZA LIZA

So I haven’t been getting as much running in as I would have liked while in New York, what with all the drinking, Mets games, friends, drinking, my mother, and general stress, but today I decided I would go for an epically long run to make up for it. I set out, and as soon as I am as far away from home as I can possibly get, these sickly green and black rain clouds start to gather in the distance. I decide to turn back. I’m four miles from home when it starts drizzling, I pick up the pace. Then it starts to rain harder. I’m feeling great. The water is cooling off my skin and I’m feeling like I could go forever. I start running faster. I muse over the idea that my running always goes better when I feel like I’m being chased by something. I vaguely consider hiring someone to run behind me in a Godzilla suit yelling “RARRRRR!” at the half-marathon in September. Thunder starts overpowering my ipod. It’s getting a bit cold, but the new weather experience hasn’t lost the novelty yet. Usually I wear basketball-style shorts to run, but today I had decided to wear a pair of light blue little satiny running shorts. They’re turning navy with the water and sticking to my thighs. I look down at the fabric clinging to muscle and think “Holy crap, I’m really sexy! I look like a fucking athlete! This is the BEST!” And that… is when the heavens opened up and started dumping buckets on my head. I’m trying to make it home, but my shoes are making squishy, sloshy noises, my hat is soaked and just allowing water to flow into my eyes, I can feel blisters taking shape on my toes, there’s mud and twigs stuck to my calves, and, here’s the kicker – I don’t know what happened, if the last time I washed those shorts I didn’t get out all the detergent, or if suntan lotion was reacting with acid rain and friction or what, but my shorts started to get sudsy. My previously sexy shorts of awesomeness are now riding up uncomfortably and foaming some sort of white substance. I’m still far away from home so I head to Dunkin Donuts instead. And so that was the end of my run – standing around, soaking wet in Dunkin Donuts with a frothy crotch. Yes. Very sexy, that. But! I ran 8.33 miles at a record 10:38 minutes per mile pace. So maybe I should run in the rain more often. Just in different shorts.

What else? Oh, Stark has been very excited to hear about the free Liza concert I saw on August 7th.

Every year, Brooklyn hosts a series of free outdoor concerts at Coney Island. Last year Liza played and I was DEPRESSED that I missed out. But apparently Liza had so much fun playing the show that this year she showed up again. My mother got me, Gen, and my friend Alex and her husband Nick, seats. We show up early and sit down amongst a large group of crotchety old ladies who shush us every time we laugh. Marty Markowitz is on stage doing his stand up routine. Marty Markowitz has been the Borough President of Brooklyn for about several hundred decades. I think at this point he’s been elected to a life sentence as no one actually knows what the Brooklyn Borough President does besides show up at charity events and fund raisers and high school graduations and act enthusiastic. And Marty Markowitz is great at being enthusiastic – he’s sort of like a cross between a Borscht Belt comedian, the Penguin from campy Batman comics, and the Living Embodiment of Brooklyn – and so everyone just votes for him come election time. The man was on stage in a white sports jacket and a pink carnation doing his regular Marty routine for three hours before the show began. He introduced all the other politicians, thanked all the sponsors, listed all the other shows that would be part of the series including his favorite Salsa band and Jill Scott, discussed the past thirty years of the concert series, mused about the future of Coney Island, listed all the holidays Brooklynites would be celebrating in the future and wished everyone a good time at those events, told jokes, did some soft shoe… the man is incredible.

Then, finally Liza must have arrived or been ready or whatever, so he introduced the spokesperson for Con Edison, one of the event’s sponsors. This woman comes on stage in a flowery summer dress and a bright blue Con Ed hardhat. The audience immediately starts booing. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Con Ed, but let’s just say that every summer in New York, something blows up because Con Ed hasn’t maintained it correctly. A transformer implodes, everyone thinks there’s been a terrorist attack or something, the power goes out across the entire city, and Con Ed immediately starts passing the buck, blaming it on everyone but themselves. Then the power goes back on in Manhattan, but they just forget to put it back on in Brooklyn, because we’re second class citizens. So that is Con Ed for you. Apparently the Con Ed spokesperson was booed off the stage last year, too. I don’t know how they choose the sucker that will go on stage each year, maybe it’s whoever forgot to put in money for the break room coffee machine or something. But this chick was clearly not going to let some booing and hissing and cursing and violent threats get her off the stage. No, she started heckling back. Every time someone would boo, she would just open her arms up like “WHAT?” and yell “Show the love!” and then go back on her speech about how if the city would give Con Ed more money for infrastructure, they wouldn’t be having all these problems. This theory did not go over well with the crowd and finally Marty Markowitz pushed her off the stage while she continued to yell “SHOW THE LOVE! SHOW THE LOVE!!!!” Hah! Oh Brooklyn, I love you.

Marty introduced the opening act, Christopher Cross, who he kept calling Chris Cross, which led Gen to believe that that awful hip-hop act with the jump around song and the backwards clothes would be there. Alas, no, that would have been more entertaining than Mr. Light FM himself. Christopher Cross is who you get when James Taylor or Jimmy Buffet are busy or too expensive. He’s an overweight bald man with a soul patch and a penchant for really ugly Hawaiian shirts. All his songs have five minute Kenny G style soprano sax solos and have been used in some crapass movie or TV show, which he is actually PROUD OF. His biggest song was from the movie “Arthur.” It’s that “If you get caught between the moon and New York City” piece of cheese, and it annoys the hell out of me. The only way those lyrics would make sense is if it was used in an “Apollo 13″ Tom Hanks/Ed Harris fan video. He announced another song as his most romantic and he was very proud that people played it at their weddings or when they were “just in heat” and then he mentioned that it was also sold to the “Growing Pains” Hawaiian TV movie special. Gross. The one thing I don’t want to think about when I am in “heat” is that Jesus freak Kirk Cameron. Then he announced his song “Laura,” which he originally wrote for his friend who died tragically young, but he then sold to “General Hospital” because they had a character named Laura. Who is proud of things like that? Ugh. Finally he went away.

Then there was a bit of waiting before Liza came out. We scrutinized the Playbill, including Liza’s bio, which was bizarre and I think she wrote it herself. It had the awesome typo, in the part about her triumphant victory over encephalitis, where “She was told she would never walk, talk, dance, or sign again.” Seriously Liza, check your spelling. Sometimes Word won’t catch everything. Here is some fun that was had while we waited for Liza:

Finally, Liza arrived and she wasn’t wearing any pants. Seriously. The woman was wearing nothing but a sheer sparkly shirt. It was AWESOME. She looked great. Apparently she lost a lot of weight on Jenny Craig. She mentioned this in her preface to the song “Sara Lee,” which is an amazing near-pornographic ode to Sara Lee dessert products. But yeah, so she said she lost weight on Jenny Craig, and she wasn’t being paid to say this, but Jenny was one of the most admirable women of all time, and then listed off a bizarre collection of other women that she would include on this list, one of whom was Nancy Reagan after her husband died and… someone else. Oh yes, Sara Lee. So Liza’s list of THE GREATEST WOMEN OF ALL TIME includes Jenny Craig, Sara Lee, and Nancy Reagan. I’m not even sure if Jenny or Sara are real. But whatever, then she sang the song and it was awesome. I am all for listening to Liza describe chocolate cake while grabbing her crotch in excitement. Liza is definitely on my list of THE GREATEST WOMEN OF ALL TIME.

What else? Oh yes, Liza tells the best stories between songs. I mean, the woman has lived life to the fullest, let’s just say. She’ll just stop singing, let out her hoarse little Liza chuckle and then launch into some amazing story about the time she saw Lotte Lenya as the landlady in the original staging of “Cabaret.” Then she just morphs into the character of the landlady and sings “So What?” She doesn’t just sing the songs, she acts them all out. It was truly a sight to see. She told the story of when she took over the part of Roxy Hart from Gwen Verdon for two weeks, and then described the plot of “Chicago” as follows: “Chicago is a musical about women who have gone to jail for killing their husbands. I really can understand that impulse.” Hahahah. Then she morphed into Roxy Hart and sang “I Am My Own Best Friend.” AWESOME, LIZA. Why are you not my cool aunt who buys me booze and tells me raunchy stories about the Seventies in New York?? WHY??

Liza doesn’t seem to even have a set list. She just asks the audience what they want to hear. The woman feeds off the crowd and you can really see how much she loves performing. The crowd howled for “Ring Them Bells,” so she picked up some dorky glasses, picked up a Brooklyn accent, and sang the song, stopping in the middle ’cause she messed it up, and then going back again. It was AWESOME. Just like this, but without the backup dancers:

So then she disappeared off for a costume change. She came back in a red glitter pants suit and sang “New York, New York” as her encore. She was really tired, jetlagged, and clearly suffering from a bad cold. She had spent the whole show pulling out this canvas chair to rest in during slower songs, which just shows you what an awesome person she is – would that diva Babs move her own chair and joke about feedback or play a free concert after flying in from London and suffering from a cold? I think not. So anyway, Liza was clearly sick, but she did the song anyway. That’s not an easy song to sing with a chest cold! She would stop, cough a bit, and everyone would scream and cheer and she would just gather up the energy to belt out the big choruses and hit all the notes. Fantastic. The woman is just… my hero. You can see photos of the concert on my friend Alex’s blog.

So that is the story of my free Liza concert in Brooklyn. Now, off to work!