Monday, 06 September 2004 | Vampires

Dan is the god of light for Dracula, the musical. He sits in a perch on stage right and presses buttons, producing lightning, making the ground look swimmy during the dream sequences, and illuminating the actors' faces as they belt out notes. He gives his friends free tickets for the show (or at least he did in this case).

It had gotten bad reviews, but I don't really understand why. It seems like such a giant undertaking, making it all come together for an audience; the set alone would've been enough to entertain me. I suppose it's something like the Olympics, when you see an incredible diver and the commentator says something inscrutable about the extra splash, despite the diver having just performed an almost inhuman airborne maneuver. Maybe Dracula is like that diver.

I was more fascinated with the special effects than I was the story (which surprised me, since the opposite is true in movies). I wanted the stage to be transparent, so that I could see the people running around like little elves beneath it, seeing what they do to make it all happen. After the show, Dan answered some of my questions by taking us through the set and explaining how it worked, and (even better) telling us stories about when it didn't work so well.

We continued our conversation in a long, skinny dive owned by a former boxer. It was filled with framed pictures (many of the owner, posing with Muhammad Ali) and the deep laughter of a man straight out of a Scorsese film.

***

On Thursday I found myself sort of by accident in a bar in Soho that was hosting a Battleship tournament. The bar had opened up the wall facing the street, and its patrons dotted the sidewalk, some of them wearing combat helmets. If you listened carefully, you could hear battlefield noises roar in the distance.

I didn't know anyone there, and I'd come alone, but somehow I ended up on the American team (which consisted of two other people, one of whom didn't actually participate). We played Japan, which was a unit of four stylish Japanese girls sitting on the other side of the bar, clustered around a tiny table. They announced their targets with cute accents, laughing like Dracula into their microphone whenever they were successful, which made the patrons (including me) collectively smile. The whole game, which was dominated by Japan, went something like this:

Japan: B-4.
US: Hit.
Japan: Hah. hah. hah.
US: G-5.
Japan: Meece. Hah. hah. hah.

I had to leave before the game was over, but I'm pretty sure we lost, due in no small part to the vampire mind tricks played by the opposition.