Dixieland Rock for Breakfast

When it came to the bacon, I did my best Elvis imitation, a feeble attempt to make up for never having seen one of his movies before.

Don't get me wrong, I've got some Elvis under my belt. I read "Last Train to Memphis," Peter Gurainick's excellent biography of Elvis' early years, I saw the VMFA's "Elvis at 21" exhibit (twice, once for a talk) and I'd seen the documentary "Elvis, '56," Fascinating, all.

But actually watch one of his more than 30 films? Nope, never had. So pelt me with peanut butter and bananas.

Fortunately, VCU's Southern Film Festival kicked off today with a breakfast/movie combo, a wise move if you ask me because it also kicked off at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m. and at, of all places, the bastion of hipsterdom, Sticky Rice.

But it was worth it to me, so I hoofed it over shortly after waking up and joined the throngs pitifully small crowd who'd come to see Elvis in "King Creole." Endless Lynyrd Skynyrd was playing overhead, so maybe that's what kept people from coming. Eventually, I did recognize three attendees from last night's movie.

I couldn't have been more surprised at the lack of a crowd. I've been to prior Saturday morning SFF breakfast events - "The Thrillbillies," "Thunder Road" - and they were packed. Where were the hungry Elvis fans?

Since I don't usually walk on an empty stomach, I was starving waiting for the breakfast buffet to be put out, but the others around me got right down to drinking. The King Creole cocktail created for today's soiree was especially popular (I heard something about coconut vodka and saw a lemon garnish), but I also saw beers and shots being served. Multiple rounds, even.

Viva Elvis in the morning.

Because we were about to see a movie set in New Orleans, a guy at the table next to me told a story of rolling into NOLA the day after Mardis Gras. "A bunch of us spilled out of the van about 10 a.m. and the full strength of the sun was just hitting all that leftover shit and baking it. God, the smell! It was like the bathroom at CBGB's, except not contained." His friends groaned.

It was visceral imagery for an empty stomach.

Finally, food was put out and I was first in line as we descended like vultures, loading up on bacon, eggs and pancakes. And this is where I matched The King strip for strip.

Of the many Richmond Elvis tales, none is more well-known than when he ate breakfast at the stately Jefferson Hotel here and mortified the restaurant manager by, gasp, eating his bacon with his fingers. Apparently in the '50s, there was another way. I'm here to say that in my entire lifetime, hand-held bacon is the only kind I ever knew.

Once everyone had a plate, a historian/musician got up to prime us for what we were about to see. It was only Elvis' third film, he'd been a tender 23 years old when he made it and the draft board had deferred his service for 60 days so he could finish it. Elvis always considered it his favorite role.

"He was at the height of his powers when he made this. Forget about the fat Elvis, the bloated Elvis dying on the toilet. This was the film that proved Elvis could act and he never had a script this good again," he told us.

Most surprising to me was that it was directed by Michael Curtiz, as in the director of "Casablanca." "Robin Hood" and "White Christmas." That alone speaks to Elvis' clout in 1958.

Since I was an Elvis movie virgin, I had nothing to compare it to, but as far as '50s film noirs go, it was spot on. Shot in black and white instead of color for a grittier feel, the movie was fascinating for its depiction of New Orleans during a simpler time.

I especially loved the roving vendors selling gumbo and seafood who roamed the streets singing and shouting to people to buy their wares. Even if NOLA was never really like that, it's charming to imagine it was. And, truly, the distinctive architecture, balconies and verandas, even Bourbon Street rang true. They'd actually shot on location on Lake Ponchatrain, which was very cool to see.

Satisfyingly, it had all the film noir requirements, too: rain-slicked streets, dark alleys, gangs, a "boss" who ran most of the businesses in town, fights, murders and molls. And hats, lots of men wearing hats, thus requiring hat check girls.

But mostly it was a typical late '50s cautionary tale about all the hot buttons of that era: juvenile delinquents, good girls and fallen women, the importance of finishing high school, finding a true profession (singing not being one) and, of course, the dangers of that new-fangled rock and roll music.

The smartest thing Elvis said was that he couldn't get involved with a girl because that would lead to marriage and kids and he needed to find out who he was first. Pretty revolutionary stuff for the Eisenhower era.

That, bacon and pancakes plus seeing Elvis sing and wiggle his hips to "Hard-Headed Woman" made getting up at the crack of 9 a.m. positively worth it.

Spoken like a true hard-headed woman.

A Criminally Fun Food Fight for Girls

It always comes down to music.

Sure, I could talk about the dinner I had at Lunch (where it was standing room only busy), the Wolftrap white blend, the French onion soup, the witty banter with a favorite recluse.

For that matter, I could  ramble on about "Farewell, My Queen," the French movie we saw afterwards, the opulence of the Versailles setting and costumes contrasted with the harsh reality of Marie Antoinette's time (dead rats, bug bites).

Favorite line: "Words are all I have. I wield them well."

But instead, I'll focus on the show.

Foodfight RVA was a stroke of brilliance - have a show of bands comprised only of people who work together at local restaurants and make it a benefit.

Come on, we all know most servers are really working to support their art or music habit, so it made perfect sense.

And the worthy beneficiary was Girls Rock RVA, the non-profit that holds a week-long empowerment camp every summer to teach girls 8-14 how to play an instrument, write a song and perform it.

Presenting the show was Quickness, the local delivery service that will bring food from a number of restaurants directly to your door.

And they were the first band up.

Just the Tip was a straight-ahead punk band, thrashing hard as they played a song called "Ophelia" about "a lady in Church Hill who always orders barbecue from Alamo and wears a turban."

Just another customer immortalized.

Black Sheep's band was Angry Chef and the Lowboys, a trio in chef coats and aprons all on acoustic guitars (and harmonica).

They got points for clever songwriting, singing "We Got the Kitchen Blues," "86 Bacon" (a dire situation if ever there was one) and perhaps the funniest, "Fry, Baby, Fry."

As you might guess, it sounded a lot like the Beatles "Cry, Baby, Cry" except it had lyrics like, "Kevin's in the kitchen cooking food for the people" and the customer lament, "They want switches and everything on the side."

Some of the women who'd led Girls Rock RVA this year performed next, doing the camp's theme song, but only after informing the crowd what Girls Rock was about.

This year's attendance was 44 (double the first year's) and their final performance was at the Hippodrome.

Hearing about their success made me glad I'd made a donation at the door.

Lamplighter's six-piece Funky Crumpets were next and they introduced themselves as, "We're those dudes who take way too long to make your sandwich."

The crowd laughed. "But they taste real good, don't they?" Much cheering and applause followed because they do.

They got off to a slow start but the guitarist locked into a groove and the singer (who'd said beforehand that she had no idea what she was going to sing) let loose and before long the crowd shut up and took note.

Ipanema's band turned out to be only Jonathan who said his missing band mates were "either working or already playing."

With typical Ips ingenuity, he proceeded to play guitar, loop it, get up and go play drums, loop that and return to guitar.

In other words, he filled in for everybody else, getting an A for effort alone.

Sticky Rice's trio Bonsai were energetic and melodic and especially appropriate for the evening's theme, given they had a female guitarist and drummer.

Duo Fat Side Up came from Alamo Barbecue and they played covers, one from Sublime and another from Fiona Apple ("Criminal").

For their last song, the singer announced he had brought ribs to eat as he sang, and he also waved bones over his head as he finished each one.

Returning from the bathroom mid-show, I ran into a favorite guitarist/server who sweatily informed me, "I'm too old for this shit. I used to do these shows and I remember how they smell."

It was more than a tad warm in Strange Matter tonight, but then a good percentage of the restaurant world was in the house.

Favorite t-shirt: "It's a lifestyle, not a fad."

Selba's Pregenators had a front man who was dying to show off his moves.

Dressed in low-slung jeans, an open black vest and medallion, he showed off his best pelvic thrusts while singing to a bass and drums.

The show closed with the Roosevelt's quartet (who got my vote for best band name), A Consensual Evening with Winston Stablock.

With a smoke machine obliterating bartender and drummer T, they pulled off two well-crafted R & B songs (written by Josh, natch) with him and fellow server Brandon singing back up.

And while I'd heard Mark singing along in the kitchen of the Roosevelt before, I had no idea he had it in him to be a rock star.

Favorite lyric: "I couldn't have you, I had to get you."

After a whole lot of applause, Mark closed by saying, "One more time for the smoke machine" and don't you know the crowd gave it up for the machine.

The audience had thinned considerably by the time the judges got up to award prizes.

The rib-eating Fat Side Up took third place (accepting, the singer said, "I'll bring more ribs next year"), Angry Chef and the Lowboys took second (no doubt for their clever lyrics and only acoustic guitars) and Bonsai took first (maybe being two thirds female helped their odds).

Personally, I'd have also given awards to the two people who had never been on stage before and totally won over the audience.

The guitarist for Funky Crumpets and the singer for A Consensual Evening were both playing their first shows ever.

So, like the aspiring musicians of Girls Rock RVA, they'd practiced, screwed up their nerve and taken the stage only to impress strangers and friends alike.

Because, let's face it, if you want to get good at music (or cooking or anything), you gotta make it a lifestyle, not a fad.

That's the only way I got so good at eating and going to shows.

Un/Fortunately, it's Pass/Fail

Best to begin with the highbrow portion of the evening and degenerate from there.

So we started at Firehouse for "You Don't Know Me: A Trio of  One Acts," part of the Acts of Faith Festival.

And, yes, I'm a heathen but they let anybody in, probably hoping to make converts.

The plays were all about those most impolitic of topics, namely race, religion and redemption.

"What Strong Fences Make" and "Beirut Rocks," both  by Israel Horovitz, dealt with Arab/Israeli issues and were separated by an interpretive dance piece done first in silence and then to Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime."

In the second piece about Jewish and Arab prejudices, Audra Honaker was especially strong as the Arab girl with a good reason to hate Jews, even as her reaction crossed the line.

I appreciated a scene in that play where the Jewish guy chided his new roommate for sloppy language. "I'm a Lit major, Jake," he shouted, ""Words are inspirational to me,"

In other words, choose your words carefully and say what you mean.

True in context, true in real life.

The final play was one I'd seen a bit of at the Acts of Faith Preview and dealt with racial prejudice at a predominantly white college in Ohio in 1949 .

The subject matter (illegitimate children, unmarried sex and bias against blacks in the early '50s) was strong, a worthy match for Katrinah Carol Lewis' performance as the author who had to live through it all.

The premise of the play was, you want to hear why there's s much violence in the author's books? Listen to her life story.

And we did.

After our culture fix,we headed for dinner around the corner at Cellar Door (where the sandwich board said they were open for lunch and dinner every day but closed for Superbowl), where I immediately ran into a bartender friend.

"You missed a good show last night," he grinned.

I also missed oysters and dinner with an Italian winemaker last night, but as far as I can tell, I can only be in one place at a time.

Goodness knows I try to prove otherwise.

We ended up having a fine supper (Prosciutto-wrapped scallops in beurre blanc, Peruvian chicken and roasted corn salad for me) with reduced price Malbec (always a treat to find happy hour on a weekend).

The final stop of the day was at Sticky Rice (I know, right?) for the final round of their Iron Man chef competition, pitting the Richmond chef against the Baltimore and D.C. chefs.

A Sticky Rice face off, so to speak.

Since I hadn't been in Sticky Rice for years, there was some adjustment period while I took in the crowd, the music, and the vibe before the smoke machine started up and the three finalists came through the front door to music.

It was pretty hysterical and the whole thing was being filmed and broadcast throughout the restaurant.

Don't let anyone tell you there's no good entertainment in RVA on a Sunday night.

My partner in crime and I found a bar stool and claimed it, with me ordering a Hornitos to transition to where we were.

Which was a very noisy bar with a (for all intents and purposes) meaningless competition going on while a comedian made loud jokes with the judges and some people snapped pictures.

No, really.

Although we stayed through the first round of tastings by the judges, the winner wasn't announced, so we may never know which Sticky Rice chef took home the trophy.

On the other hand, we'd revisited a place once recommended in an out-of-state newspaper as a hip place for a visitor to go.

No, really, let's not send our out-of-town guests to Sticky Rice as a representation of who we are.


Even for the Tater Tots.

But all experiences are good conversational fodder and this one was no exception.

We made up stories about the high maintenance-looking blond talking to the guys next to us.

We watched the two cameramen all but trip over each other trying to film the Ironman no one was paying attention to.

The funniest exchange of the evening involved a past event.

"Remember what you said the other day?"

A puzzled look. "Give me the footnotes."

My advice? Take notes if you have to.

No one said it was going to be easy to keep up.

The fun is in trying.

Yes, Sir, No, Suh

The Southern gentleman next to me wanted to talk about public nudity.

At tonight's opening performance of Firehouse Theater's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," I had the pleasure of a man with a delightful drawl sitting next to me.

The first thing he explained to me after introducing himself was that he was not in his usual seat.

Not that it was any of my business.

He and his partner, who was tonight seated directly in front of him, had been asked to move.

So the happy couple didn't get to sit next to each other, but I had unexpectedly charming company.

We talked about the upcoming play, which actors we'd seen before and how tickled he was to see his partner drinking a PBR can.

He even shared with me what he'd made for a pre-theater supper ("Salad with everything in it, even chicken. And ham biscuits!").

And then chuckling, he said he'd just learned about San Francisco's nudity laws and did I know about them.

Why no, but I'm always eager to learn.

"You know you have to put a towel down when you sit in a public place," he told me. Made sense to me.

"And if you get an erection, you have to leave!" he shared, as if it was a punch line.

And on that note, Tennessee Williams' play about repressed homosexuality and dysfunctional families began.

It wasn't my first time seeing COAHTF produced and the last time had been with an all-black cast, so I was eager to see it in its pure form.

Although the cat of the title is Maggie, the play was most alive when Big Daddy, played by Alan Sader, was on stage.

Last seen in Richmond Shakespeare's "King Lear," he was just as magnificent here as he'd been in that.

The play is long, two and a half hours with two ten-minute intermissions (we joked that the Brick character needed two bathroom breaks because of all the "whiskey" he was drinking onstage), but it moves along with so much dramatic dialog that the audience never loses interest.

One comment that I heard from several people during intermissions was about some of the actors' Southern accents.

Sader handled his admirably, but the accents of a few others left some of the Southerners in the audience cold.

"It's like they're trying too hard to sound Southern," the guy behind me said. He also said he was from Southside.

My very Southern seatmate agreed in his effortless Southern accent, but, like me, was thoroughly enjoying the drama and insightful wit of the story.

Because it was opening night, there was a party afterwards; since it had been catered by Sticky Rice, there were many people eating with their fingers rather than attempting chopstick usage standing up.

And because it was Sticky Rice, there was a big bowl of Tater Tots, amazing some of the attendees not familiar with the sushi place's trademark dish.

Brave (foolish?) soul that I am, I balanced a paper plate and used chopsticks as I chatted with strangers about the play.

Even the Southern-accented agreed that it had been an enjoyable night of theater.

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?
Just stayin' on it, I guess, long as she can.