8 PM, SAT. JAN 5
CLASSICAL SPANISH/FLAMENCO GUITAR
Performed by Daniel Eggers
Live Music
Quick story. A young man walks into the shop. His name is Daniel. We start talking. He's 23. He's originally from Peru. He's heard we do events. After a few minutes of skinny chatter about the shop and our programming (which frequently includes live music), he goes out to his car and gets his guitar. I excavate an eagle claw-and-ball piano stool from a mound of newly arrived Lit Crit, and he sits down. He proceeds to play ten minutes of what is likely the most beautiful guitar music I've ever heard. Now, you can hear it too! FOR FREE! As you sip complimentary red wine from Rioja (known as the Spanish Napa Valley) and Manzilla Sherry, produced in the coastal district of Sanlucar (where the sea air gives the Sherry a slightly salty taste). Several songs will be accompanied by the djembe, a skin covered hand drum shaped like a giant goblet.
8 PM, FRI. JAN 11
THREE BANDS for the price of...FREE!
The Electro-Magnetic Thrills of
FUN MACHINE!!!
And the Seville Soulfulness of
SANDRA RUBIO!!!
With Special Guests!
The toxic air which envelopes the factory flanked corridor known as the New Jersey Turnpike causes some unfavorable side effects: toe-less babies, blind dogs, wingless geese, two headed snakes, fish with tiny pink mouse feet that leap up from the Meadowlands bog and scramble across the blacktop to drop with a plink in a fetid puddle on the opposite side. But from this unforgiving stretch of land, a balance was sought, and a techno-organic anomaly rose up in revolt against the noxious smog and its adverse affects upon the world. Their mission, to put smiles on the faces of groping, unsighted dogs and thoughts in the pea-sized brains of each of the snake's two heads, to get fingerless hands clapping and webbed feet stomping, continues with no end in sight. The parts which make up this Fun Machine have been electro-magnetically connected since their initial forging, many years ago, in a Woodbridge machine shop known as Freddy's Foundry. These parts are: Johnny, Wetzel, Colin, and Renee.
Sandra Rubio is a singer-songwriter from Seville, Spain. Now living in central Jersey, she performs with Hope, Star, & Browning (as well as on her own). In Spain, she was a member of the bands Senior Chinarra and Hebrides. She moves easily from Neil Young covers to original songs to traditional Spanish guitar and folk tunes. She is one of the friendliest human beings on the face of the Earth, and she also knows a really good joke about a fat bird, to which I forget the punchline. Ask her. I'm sure she'd be more than happy to tell it.
With Special Guest: TANGENTS
8 PM, SAT. JAN 26
84 CHARING CROSS ROAD
A Staged Reading
Featuring Jane Hardy and Laurence Mintz
With Full Set, Costumes & Theatrical Lighting!
The scene is New York, 1949. While searching for rare English books, Helene Hanff, a feisty, but struggling New York writer, sees an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature for an overseas shop that does mail order. She writes a letter to Marks and Company, a London bookstore run by reserved Briton Frank Doel, and so begins a special correspondence, an epistolary romance that spans several decades and two continents. Joined by a passion for literature, Hanff and Doel become lifelong friends but, though many visits are planned, they never actually meet. The model for this kind of bittersweet relationship is, of course, David Lean's Brief Encounter (from Noel Coward's play, Still Life). Based on a true story, 84 Charing Cross Road was famously adapted to the screen in 1987. In the film, Anne Bancroft played Hanff and Anthony Hopkins played Doel. FREE! With comp wine & crumpets!
8 PM, Fri. Feb 1
ED WOOD
Film Screening
George "The Animal" Steele is wrestling in Metuchen! To commemorate this incredible event, we're screening Ed Wood, which stars, along with Johnny Depp and Bill Murray, that's right, you guessed it: George "The Animal Steele" playing Wood reg Tor Johnson. To accommodate those wishing to see Mr. Steele eat a turnbuckle (such as yours truly), we're screening the film the night before the match. Directed by Sweeney Todd's Tim Burton, Ed Wood is a bio-pic of the life and work of the legendary "worst filmmaker of all time," Edward D.Wood, Jr. The film concentrates on the best-known period of his life in the 1950s, when he made Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space, and focuses on both his transvestism and his touching friendship with the once great but now ageing and unemployed horror star Bela Lugosi. FREE! With comp popcorn.
