Blue Velvet Trumped by Beer Day

What do you mean it's National Beer Day?

As I approached Capital Ale House, there were boisterous people practically hanging out the front windows and bluegrass was blaring from within.

What the...?

I was there to meet a friend to see Blue Velvet and have an evening of surrealistic film noir.

Who were these people and how had beer replaced a cult classic?

The guy at the front sheepishly admitted that Blue Velvet had been bumped for Beer Day, but said it would hopefully be rescheduled (although he admitted that sometimes when a film gets bumped, it never gets shown).

Not a good way to build a following for your weekly movie series, my friends, but we all know beer rules at Cap Ale.

Seeing my disappointment, he at least had the decency to apologize repeatedly, as if he had let me down personally.

My friend said we should punish them by going elsewhere for dinner, but I'm guessing they got over the loss pretty quickly.

For something completely different, we went to Akida where we over-ordered and stuffed ourselves.

We got spicy seafood salad, spider rolls, dragon phoenix rolls, avocado rolls and a special of rice balls.

They were made of spicy tuna, crab meat, tobiko, cream cheese and rice, deep-fried with eel sauce, a wonderfully sweet complement to the balls.

I loved the spider rolls, with their soft-shell crab parts sticking out of the rolls. We took home almost as much as we ate.

Not that we weren't stuffed to the gills, but with nothing but time, we went over to Carytown for dessert.

The line at Bev's was long considering they closed in less than a half hour, but we waited patiently, watching the stressed faces of the counter people who probably aren't used to a run on ice cream in early April.

We both got hot fudge sundaes and strolled Cary Street as we ate.

And while there were your typical surreal Carytown moments - children on leashes, groups of beautiful young Czech girls admiring each other, studded traveler kids asking us for change for $2, a jocular Mideastern clerk at 7-11 insisting to the other clerk that I had not paid for my Washington Post - it couldn't really compare to severed ears and sadomasochism.

Still, it wasn't a bad showing for Richmond.

Or, as Jeffrey Beaumont says in Blue Velvet, "It's a strange world."