stranger than paradise
October 21, 2007
A few months ago, in an all-night café near Liverpool St. station, I ended up talking to a small group of people in interesting hats who were sitting at the next table. When they left, they gave me a flyer for their monthly cabaret, Stranger Than Paradise.
I’ve been a couple of times now and it’s among the best things I know of. Thank goodness for chance meetings in 24 hour cafés. The couple I’ve been to have featured fire-eating, harmonica beat-boxing, puppetry, burlesquery, contortionism, and a beautiful lady from the 1940s playing startling and brilliant covers of 90s rock songs, including “Creep” by Radiohead and Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box”, on the ukelele. Next Sunday it happens again, and I am already much looking forward to it.
Unfortunately, my memories of the last one were seriously marred by the fact that as we walked to get a bus in the wee small hours of Sunday morning, in the vicinity of London Bridge station, a young well-dressed, hair-gelled city type ran up to us, punched the friend I was with full-on in the face, breaking his nose, and then jogged off casually, without looking back or once uttering a single word. It was the most creepily inhuman thing I’ve ever seen a human being do, and I’m still completely at a loss when I think about it. Beware of People, is the only lesson I can draw from it.
