Paradise With Kitty

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Paradise With Kitty

This was supposed to be a concert review, of an all-girls Guns N’ Roses tribute band called Paradise Kitty.

See, my friend Kitty, whom I met in first grade, is also celebrating her Golden Jubilee year. She lives in Australia these days and we haven’t seen each other for seven years, which is – if my math is correct – 15.9% of our friendship. So when she let me know she was flying sans husband or daughter to spend a birthday week in LA, and hoped that a few of her friends would join her, I immediately booked my flights.

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Then I took it upon myself to research concerts we could go see while we were there, and saw that Paradise Kitty was playing at the Viper Room, and how do you say no to an all-girls Guns N’ Roses tribute band called Paradise Kitty when you are spending a girls’ weekend with your friend Kitty? You don’t, is the answer.

So I packed off to LA last Friday afternoon that was fixin’ to be the start of a rainy drought-busting weekend in NorCal, and emerged 90 minutes later to glorious SoCal sunshine.

This is what happens when you see a friend like Kitty after a seven-year visiting drought: you hug each other in the hotel lobby, say, “So anyway, as we were saying,” and you pick up the seven-year-old conversational thread as though one of you had just returned from the bathroom and not from Australia.

A friendship that formed in 1972 has a lot of well-worn ruts that barely need to be referenced as you pass through them. We refer to ex boyfriends by nicknames or geographic origins; we share hair product and lipstick without asking permission first; we remember each other’s stories, at this point, better than we remember our own. (“Remember how that thing happened to you that one time?” “IT DID?” “YES! Let me give you all the details.”) No one apologizes for burping or snoring or worse.

The entire 48 hours we were together was punctuated by: “So what do you hear of X?” and “Did I tell you I ran into Y?” and “OMG, Z friended me on Facebook, I about died,” as we walked down Sunset Boulevard or sat at a rooftop bar overlooking Los Angeles or took our shoes off to feel the sand of Venice Beach between our toes. As much as I love going to beautiful spots with my friends to catch up, I’m always struck afterward with the realization that we could have been sitting in a Motel 6 in Altoona PA and had just as much fun, because it’s never so much the setting as the conversation that makes a weekend like this memorable.

Kitty and I have shared a lot of common interests over the years – starting with our troll doll families and their vast wardrobes of homemade couture, moving on to goth new wave music, morphing into living overseas then moving back to America at the same time. But maybe more than any other friend who is so close to me, Kitty and I also have distinct areas of difference, spheres of our lives that we have always kept a little separate from each other. Our relationship has had plenty of room to breathe over the years.

So within the first 15 minutes of our reunion on Friday Kitty assured me that if, at any point, I needed a break from the weekend’s festivities – which the rest of her crew of very nice and very-much-more-energetic-than-me friends had organized – I should bow out at any time, no questions asked, she’d catch up with me later and by the way what had I heard lately about C? Did she still live in our hometown?

Which brings me to Paradise Kitty. The tickets said the doors of the Viper Room would open at 8 and when Kitty’s Coterie finally meandered down Sunset from our hotel at 10 pm, I squelched my silent worry that we’d missed the opener and Paradise Kitty was probably halfway done.

Hahahahhaah.

The ticket taker said, “The girls like to come on at about midnight, FYI.” Oh. Do they not understand that I wake up at 7 even when I’m on vacation? Should we ask their manager to tell them?

We headed up into the dank stank of the Viper Room in time to hear an amazing Aussie Iron Maiden tribute band whose name is lost to the ages unless someone here knows it and tells me. Then around 11:00 another band came on, pretty sure their name was “None More Loud, Turn It To Eleven” and that was also when the aromatics diffuser at the Viper Room was set to “Barf, Mixed with Pee and Stale Beer.” At about 11:30 pm, right after a bouncer shoved me off the wall with both hands and said, “Move, MOVE, MOVE!” like I’d been leaning there to bother him, I said, “Kit, gotta go, I’ll bring you your coffee in the morning, flat white with one sugar right?” and I left.

So I didn’t even see Paradise Kitty. But I can tell you I had a great weekend with Kitty in Paradise (well, Venice Beach with the sun shining when it was pouring five inches of rain at home.)

And it sure felt heavenly to catch up.

As a consolation prize for my non-review, let me introduce you to Aussie hip-hop band the Hilltop Hoods, with Kitty’s best regards.