Season's Best

Clutching a red rubber wristband and my new clickety ballpoint pen, these tokens are all that’s left of my $30 investment for one of the year’s first annual downtown galas, the Red Hot Turkey Trot benefiting the American Red Cross this past Tuesday, November 22^nd.

Whew. I sneak in my hurricane philanthropy after all.

On a brisk evening where I even score a free parking spot, walking to the Wachovia Atrium is becoming a tradition, considering a plethora of summer events and copycat parties following the same recipe of 1) mix in a few dozen dollars of your own cash, 2) drink unlimited sponsor beer & wine, and 3) enjoy adult contemporary band. 4) Repeat.

It works. On this evening, where Toys for Tots and 2^nd String Santa still beckon me to whip out my annual Christmas tie over the next couple of weeks, an estimated thousand patrons or so deck the halls for the good cause.

Frankly, if I would show up on time I would get my money’s worth, before the hordes deplete the available buffet and it would also give me time to slug back a few more complimentary Buds.

The Atrium events, or any downtown “festival” for that matter, are a textbook case of the dating scene, admittedly attracting the hottest clientele crowd in Charlotte on a regular basis.

“But all the good guys are married or gay,” observes a fellow friend Jen, who apparently was oblivious to the male gene pool available. I mean, is she aware of our adverse ratio?

The chilly air, the 40 foot lit tree, and ceiling ornaments kick off the holiday season in grand fashion, while I watch the band Liquid Pleasure’s dance floor flip from “Gold Digger” to “Rock Around the Clock” to the humiliating “Electric Slide.” Admittedly, I can do the latter, but only under intense interrogation.

The flyer says lights out at 11:00, but they roll up the carpets before then. No matter, as our holiday season is officially underway. Better start getting all those $20’s stacked up for admission.

Calendar dates: 12/2 Toys for Tots (South End Brewery), 12/3 Santa Bar Crawl (Dixie’s Tavern), 12/6 Second String Santa (Founders Hall), 12/8 Blitzen’s Holiday Bash (Morehead St. Tavern). More info: www.elevatecharlotte.com, www.lazyday.com, www.charlottesportsconnection.com.

Anyone have a good story from the party? String me.

Tailgate Tales

Rounding up some casual observations book-ended by two recent Panther Sundays on the beverage circuit:

• Getting the worst of it out of the way early, a sullen writer seeking solace from the afternoon’s embarrassment at Soldier Field was satisfied with an overdue trip to Fox & Hound downtown for billiards and booze. $2.75 Coors Lights, although not my preference, sure helped rinse clean the filth in my mouth that accumulated from four quarters of no offense.

A pesto pizza and the aforementioned coldies did not help the pool game, but my playing partners were worse.

• One week ago, the year’s lone 4:00 kickoff “burdened” our tailgate with six extra hours of revelry, but I’m hard pressed to find a better post game than Angry Ale’s, which presented not only a fantastic late-night assembly of fans but a jukebox of fun to make your own dance floor, wherever.

It is important to note that they produce the best plate of nachos in the country. Chips, individually dressed with your requested ingredients, simply annihilate any competition in this field.

• Renovations are complete at Uptown Cabaret; it’s good to know that your hard-earned dollars once spent there moved the back bar to the front. Extra seating would appear to be the benefit, and in the interests of retaining the column’s PG-13 rating, dare we say, the scenery is still the same.

Downtown’s lone gentleman’s establishment offers free cover with ticket stub, so keep yours or rummage the top layers of area garbage cans for discards.

• I passed on Efren Ramirez’s visit to Crush last Wednesday night. Napoleon Dynamite’s “Pedro,” the affable Latino vying for class president, guest-DJ’d the evening to a reported low turnout.

One, the club circuit is well represented by the Observer’s Tonya Jameson, freeing up this former class treasurer for efforts better spent elsewhere.

Two, what did you think you would see? A low-rent actor out of costume, selling out to a college night crowd in Charlotte for the obvious payday.

Hopefully he did some really sweet spins.

Sticking around for the Turkey Day weekend? Post your recommendations in a thread, or tell me you found better nachos somewhere.

Overtime & Overspent

The Bobcats' home sophomoric effort, albeit a Monday diversion from the NFL's AFC premier matchup of the Pats-Colts, yielded yet another disappointing loss in overtime, sagging our home court disadvantage back to 1-1 in the coliseum's inaugural season.

In classic fashion, it was a typical NBA snoozefest for three periods, eclipsed by a fourth quarter comeback worthy of the team's young talent.

But an announced attendance of 14,872 that looked a lot closer to 60-70% of that figure demonstrated an early week's difficulty in attracting any semblance of a nightlife buzz; blame a Panthers hangover if you want.

The average fan, and casual Crawl reader, simply finds the Bobcat option as an unattractive cauldron of our disposable income. My immediate observations, which are destined to boil away in a similar fate:

• My gratuitous upper level seat, aligned with the courtside baseline, is forty bucks a game. Adopt my old Hornets' philosophy: If it's free, you can count on me! Make friends with rich people, or bank employees.
  
• Give the smokers a break. Their halftime addiction, while shoehorned on the terrace patio, deserves at least an outside beer tub, some heat, and a television.
  
• The Rockin' Roof Top bar area, emulating the pro outdoor parks with an open-aired lounge area for pedestrian traffic, offers a ridiculous hightop counter and backsplash that completely obstructs the court unless you lean forward in your barstool...the entire game.
• $5.75 and $6.75 beer prices discourage tipping, a respectful practice amongst drinking professionals. Value for the price, an obvious hurdle, is not even worth the printed argument.
• Beer-adverse? Ask Santa for a flask.
• $10 parking, the area's current going rate, now infects the rest of downtown for those not even attending a game. Thanks to the coliseum, which the majority of Charlotte voted against, thirty-nine more hoops dates will have suburban partiers thinking twice about the commute.

Bobcats' owner Bob Johnson may "love [him] some Charlotte," but will we love him back? Only overtime will tell.

Urban Whatever

Creative Loafing's November 2, 2005 issue introduced a new feature by Jared Neumark, a homeless Chicago carpetbagger set to prowl the Center City under a column ironically titled the Urban Explorer.

Sound familiar? I take no creative credit, having retitled this Nightlife column the Urban Crawl in early October (the 10th, to be exact) and converting to a blog, but I'll be happy to waive any intellectual property rights associated with CL's debut. I was a fan of Timothy C. Davis' "Scene & Herd" although I never met the fella.

So Crawl vs. Explorer? Which carries the superior weight? One definition of an explorer, after all, is a "person aged 14-20 who is a participant in the exploring program of the Boy Scouts of America (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)." Now, seems to me that while the kid's got his housing struggles, the boy can't be taking his first photo sporting a smirk and a brew in front of Dixie's as a late teen.

I say that he fancies himself as an investigator, and as a Charlotte rook, will undoubtedly consider everything as fresh as that baby's bottom he once had diapered. Coming from Chicago, it may not be a fair fight, although we do have two Morton's now.

A crawl, by definition, is to creep, of which I only play one on TV. Envisioning the weekly prowl in some version of a combat technique seems much more appropriate, considering the space of our suburban sprawl. Besides, I thankfully passed on the Explorer title as an option. Too vanilla, I say, and reminiscent of that overbought SUV.

On the contrary, the Crawl could also play to my juvenile behavior, which is entirely accurate. I'm only thirty-something years from infancy, having adopted my college nickname "Junior," and still despising anything with eggs in it.

So do we have an issue with the new guy on the block? Absolutely not. In fact, I embrace the return of the local mag's drinking hunt in continued tribute to a prior comment of mine that our nightlife is actually newsworthy.

So welcome aboard, Jared. We're tired of your Subway commercials and hopefully the low carb beers you slug will keep the pounds off. Good luck, bro.