Sunday was Oscars Day. Carrie slept late, but since I’m no longer able to sleep appropriately, I got up and went for a run and a walk, and read some, which was great. There’s this convenience store up the road from Carrie’s called the Zip-In, but it has a tire symbol between the z and the I, so it looks like ZOip-in, which I love. And they had diet root beer in funny barrel-shaped bottles, which I also loved. So I walked up there and bought that.
When I got back, Carrie and I went to breakfast at the Omlettry, which, like everywhere else in Austin, has Character. It’s pretty much everything a breakfast diner should be, down to individualized plasticine tabletops and fun omlet names. After that we drove around Downtown Austin some. We went to two record stores, one very indie and one less so. Carrie got a lot of CDs at the second place, because they had a large selection of used. We also saw the Whole Foods Market flagship store, which was amazing. This place is huge, welcoming, bright, very crowded, and smells incredible, all the way through. There are like seventeen prepared-food counters where you can buy delicious organic meals. I wished I were hosting a dinner party right then, so that I could buy food from there for it. As Carrie pointed out, though, the landscape design is less than lawsuit-safe, as it basically involves a large fissure filled with water right flush in the middle of the walkway up to the store. We didn’t see anyone falling in, though. Just lots of healthy-looking people playing with their kids and eating. After that, we visited Book People, which is a very large independent book store, kind of like Powell’s, only not with used books. They had a fortune teller on the second floor!
At this point, while pondering what to do, we realized that it was 4:15, and we’d promised to meet Mariam at 5 for the Oscars Party! We raced home and dressed.
I wore the dress that we’d found at the Top Drawer, with my mary jane heels. Carrie tried on several different vintage dresses that she owns, but finally settled on a super-cool multi-tiered black lace dress of her grandmother’s with her lace-up River boots. here’s what we eventually looked like. And here is Carrie on our way as we walked in Downtown Austin. You can see the edge of the Frost Bank building, which Carrie (and others) refer to as the Nosehair Clippers.
You can also see the sign for the Alamo Drafthouse, which is where the Oscars Party was. The Alamo Drafthouse is very cool. It’s movie theater – one of several, one of which is near Carrie’s house in North Austin – that does frequently interactive showings of offbeat or indie films while serving good food and alcohol. The Oscars part included a bingo game, a prediction worksheet, and fun specials like the bleeding heart special, where if someone used his or her speech as a platform for liberal issues you got $2 red wine, or the special where if there was a brokeback mountain joke you got cheap Lonestar beer.
Mariam, LT, and their male friend whose name I have forgotten were there when we got there. The show itself was a lot of fun, partially because the oscars were fun to watch – univeral fun, for instance, was made of Charlize Theron’s awful shoulder bow ("We all know how to undress you, Charlize," whispered the emcee) – but also because the crowd was so reactive. The gasp of shock and dismay, mingled with about five shouts of “YEEEEEAH,” when Crash won best picture was one of the group-watching experiences of a lifetime.
After the show, Carrie and I went to the Whisky bar for a while, which was cool, but had very loud music, even though for most of the time there was no one else in there. I felt very jetsetting, though, because I was at a hip Austin bar. And was tipsy. And drinking whisky. (I was! Jack and Coke.) Then we went to a very classy bar for a while, the San Jose Hotel. I would not have remembered its name, except that Carrie posted it, because I was quite drunk by this time. We talked about deep stuff. Or at least it seemed fairly deep at the time. And I drank some kind of texan beer. Or maybe it was Belgian. Anyway, eventually, after walking a little while in the opposite direction from the car, we went home. And slept. Deeply and drunkenly, in my case.
A side note. I'm not sure if this is also the night that we went into the hill country in the dark to look at Carrie's boss's neighborhood. I think maybe it is. Anyway, her boss lives in a gated community out in the authentic texan country known as the Hill Country, which I couldn't really see much because it was dark. In the dark, however, it looked a lot more like the Texas I had imagined -- low, rolling hills of sandy scrubland, wih lots of spiky plants. It was thrilling, in a dark, unseen, kind of way. I'd like to actually see it in the light. From the pictures I've looked at online, I think it's beautiful
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