a busy weekend

Friday was the huge Tango 10-Year Anniversary and Halloween Party. This turned out to be a huge event with the CUT cover band preforming and Amy cranking out lead vocals on several songs. Not only was her cover of Blondie's "One Way" awesome but Amy looked incredibly hot in her slightly modified Star Trek TNG uniform that we had thrown together with the sewing machine a couple of night prior with the idea of her cosume being "Jean-Luc Picard's personal assistant. Maybe there would have been a lot less confict across the galaxies if all the Star Trek females wore skirts and black knee-boots with big chunky heels. I chose the traditional doctors lab coat and stethescope over khakis, shirt and tie. Simple but effective. Amy really needs a nurse uniform. Eithter that or a classic Catwoman costume. Rowrrr.

After the late night and some serious sleepign in, to start off a busy Saturday, Amy and I headed over to the Texas Pinball Festival to play some pins. An entire banquet room at a local Holiday Inn had been turned into a giant pinball aracde featuring games from all eras put on display by local collectors and vendors. The games were set on free play, so after paying your initial entarnce fee, you could play as many games of pinball as you could stand. It's a great way to either play a number of games on a favorite machine or sample games on machines that one has never seen before. Over the course of a few hours during the afternoon, we played a ton of games on all sorts of machines from the classic Cyclone and standard Roller Coaster Tycoon to the latest high-tech and very involved Monopoly pinball game currently available from Stern, the only pinball maufacturer left in the business. Of special interest was the Shaq machine from 1995 that featured a basketball goal that moved about the playfield and you could actually shoot baskets by shooting the pinball over various ramps. The machine that Amy and I found to be the most intriguing was a game called Spectrum from 1982. The game did not feature the usual pinball layout and had automatic feeds to the flippers. The goal was to shoot the ball into a series of coloured targets in an attempt to guess a randomly generated colour sequence code (4 spaces with 4 colours for 256 combinations), sort of like playing Master Mind on a pinball machine. I don't think we ever got the hang of it but it was definately different and the example on display had beautiful artwork in great condition.

After pinball we grabbed dinner at Litte Caesar's Pizza on the way into downtown Fort Worth. I'm really digging this $5 fresh-hot-n-ready large pepperoni deal where you can just walk in without pre-ordering and grab a large pizza. Very convenient in situations like this one.

After dinner we made the quick trip down 7th Street to the Wreck Room to see our friend's band, Man Before Mars play. They have a new CD out, so this was sort of their EP release party. It was their first show in months and was a little shaky. Our friend Rodney managed to break various drum components on two separate occasions.

After the show we headed out to the Ridgmar Movie Tavern to catch the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For whatever reason, Amy is one of those people who is really in to Rocky Horror. She's never been part of a cast or anything, but she knows every line, and the floorwalker jokes that accompany them. She also hopes to have her own Columbia outfit someday. Tonight she had to settle for just wearing her Mickey Mouse club ears, which made her look uber-cute. The pre-show costume contest was rather interesting. Two girls dressed as angels thought they were a shoe-in to win when they started making out with each other. What they didn't consider was that one of the girls was dressed as a firefighter with nothing but the suspenders up top to cover her R-rated bits. When the girl-on-girl kissing threatened to win over the audience in the finals, those suspenders just happened to slip to the side to reveal all of the firefighter. Needless tosay she won the final vote in a landslide. Playing dirty perhaps but keeping with the spirit of the show. The show then commenced, rubber gloves were snapped and toilet paper was thrown. There was even a real-life time warp as we rolled the clock back an hour at the end of Daylight Savings Time in the middle of the show. It was a fun show and a perfect end to a busy pre-Halloween Saturday.