Free Bird

Okay, so Dallas’s Free Night of Theater program is this month. They did it a little different this year, rolling out a week’s worth of tickets at a time. So I’d pull up a week at a time and see if anything clicked. But between vacation and teenager-sitting and Halloween and RCPM and family stuff and friends stuff, I just never seemed to be able to make any of the shows that I was really interested in work. So a couple of weeks ago, I decided “Oh, well, maybe next year.”

But it was making me nuts. There was free stuff. And none of it was mine. Part of it is the hangover the poor college student mentality, in which any free food, alcohol or entertainment is irresistible. Pay for dinner theater where you’re served hot dogs, Miller Lite and watch drunk circus clowns hit each other over the head with tire irons? No. Of course not. But if it’s free . . . Well, that’s different. Why didn’t you say so? Two please.

Part of it is my heritage. I come from a frugal people. And what’s more frugal than free?

And there was free stuff going on at FNoT. And none of it was mine. I snapped. Come to me, free stuff. You must be mine.

So I found a one-day window that I could make work for a show. And low-and-behold, there was one show that fit. Hallelujah. Two for Talk Radio, please. Of course, I’m not really sure what the point of Talk Radio is without Eric Bogosian. [Sidebar: I have this total thing for Bogosian ever since they had the sub-plot on Law & Order: CI where he was dating the female medical examiner who is significantly older than 21. He always had that bad boy anti-charm. But playing alpha male with an age appropriate female? Mrowr. Works for me.] But, in the words of the poet, that which is free is necessarily good. Or something like that.