Monday, June 28, 2010

Cheech & Chong Live in "Concert"

Someone gave my son-in-law Chris two complimentary tickets to see the Cheech & Chong "concert" on Saturday night. Chris and Kristy weren't going to use the tickets (they also had box-seat tickets for an Isotopes baseball game that evening), so, knowing that I was a C&C fan, they gave them to me as a late Father's Day present. I invited Darren along, and we drove out to the Sandia Casino at the appointed hour, not really knowing what to expect but hoping, somewhat naively, that C&C's performance wouldn't be totally gross and obscene. Well, whereas I have what I acknowledge to be a fairly crude sense of humor (at least for an active Mormon), most of the performance was totally gross and obscene even by my standards, which reminded me (a) why I never bought any of C&C's albums beyond the first two, and (b) why I never saw any of their movies after the first two came out. Still, I enjoyed spending the evening with Darren -- I hope he wasn't too offended -- and I got a few laughs out of the show, particularly from (a) Cheech's reprise of his lip-synched performance of the "Earache My Eye" song, in a pink tutu, from the film Up In Smoke (his exit from the stage afterward, using a bright-yellow walker, was an especially funny embellishment), and (b) Chong's comment on why he decided against being homosexual ("But then I thought to myself, 'There's poop in there!'"). I remember reading somewhere, possibly in People magazine, that Tommy Chong complained for years that Cheech Marin would no longer tour with him; it's apparent that concert tours are now so lucrative -- whereas sales of CDs and other media are so depressed -- that Cheech could no longer turn him down.

Anyway, I guess I can mark "See Cheech & Chong perform live" off my list of things to do before I die -- and Darren is gone now, having left today to go back to Provo.