Two-faced Bastards...

or another version of "the grass is greener on the other side"!

Last night I was at a "play" that featured a stage with a curtain made up of blinds in the middle and the audience split in 2, on either side of the curtain, facing the stage. The audience had the choice of the side they wanted to be on, without the knowledge of which side was going to be featuring what. It was suggested that if you came with someone, to split and each watch a side of the play. 

My side of the stage started with 6 comedians sitting, facing the audience and a discussion among themselves about what it means to be a performer. One by one, they left their seat and went on the side to undress and get into their costume before going through the curtain to the other side of the stage and started to dance. We could catch what was going on on the other side when the blinds were moved, accidentally or on purpose

For the first part of the play, I had the distinct feeling that I was on the backstage side of the curtain and missing out on the dance on the other side. Therefore throughout the play, any glimpse of the other side was like a peek into a better performance and a guess of what the stage on the other side looked like! I would say my side was not bad, it was funny, we had a dance component, and the producer/choreographer was seated just behind me and HE was chuckling every now and then! Ah but the nagging feeling that the grass is greener on the other side....

After the performance, we gathered in the lobby with some people who have seen the play from the other side. Funnily enough, they also started by thinking they were seeing the backstage because for them the play started with 1 dancer warming up and barely hearing the discussion on the other side of the curtain. We then discussed the numerous times when we could hear distinct sounds but could not make out what was happening on the other side. It turned out that we had the more explanatory side of the curtain and they had the more obscure, more artistic side. Now depending on your personal taste, arguments can be made for either side. For sure though, a number of the audience walked out of there feeling they chose the wrong side to sit on....

Random chats

When I was a teen and the Internet was "new" to most people, there was IRC.
People my age, in my country, would spread through their peers which channel they were going to be on in the evening and sure enough, you would find the most popular kids on there (mind you, with ingenious nicknames). The excitement at the time was trying to figure out who is behind the nickname and to make friends in real life if we clicked on the net. Since I come from a relatively small country, that wouldn't be quite hard, most people were separated by 3 degrees at most. All conversations back then would start with the usual "a/s/l" (age/sex/location) question and go from there. That is how I discovered random chats.

This phase of my life didn't last very long, I quickly found it boring to be talking to people when you did not know what they looked like and hard to actually make friends with. The other day, I was watching NCIS and one of the characters in there was trying a "webcam chat roulette" site. Out of boredom, I googled it and signed up on the first website that came up in the search results.

Well now, apparently they are all pretty much the same...There's a button that allows you to jump to someone else if the one you are currently looking at does not please you. Both parties can "next" each other, so if you see a little shuffling going on, you KNOW you don't look good enough to be talked to...or rather, you have on too many clothes....Yes, unfortunately there is way too much nudity on that website. It seems to me that some people are just dying to expose themselves and these webcam-driven websites are just a field day for these exhibitionists!

This new experiment did not last long either for I do not take any kind of pleasure in looking at guys playing with themselves. I did however make a friend there. It also happened to be his first time on that website, which maybe explains why we were the only two fully clothed! We did exchange credentials to keep the conversation going and have learned to know each other through long w/end chats. Now is it creepy to meet people online? That's for another posting...soon hopefully!