#many weirdly shoe-horned in jokes
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There is suddenly someone spreading Christopher Hartley hate on Reddit, and I don’t know whether to bitterly sob or be proud— because the hate drew out just how much love there is for Chris on the subreddit. 😂 So many comments talking about his glowing good points. I am well FED on this day.
#honestly I take these things as an opportunity to politely explain why I enjoy him#I mean I do get if people have an issue with his dialogue#Supermassive games’ writers are really bad at making intentional jokes#it feels like the script read ‘have person make snappy remark here’#then the line feels manufactured and awkward#Chris sticks out a little bit in this regard because he’s meant to be a jokester#but it’s honestly everyone at some point or another#I’d argue Mike tends to feel most natural#Josh can get done really bad lines#Emily and Jess too#btw this is also a thing in The Quarry#many weirdly shoe-horned in jokes#but Jacob and Nick’s butter pop dance still amuses me#pls no quarry spoilers#I just started it with buddies#idk when I’ll get back to it
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that one kid!logan ask featuring the teenage sides in their adult bodies. like that anon radiates big brain energy. i'm just imagining Logan tracking one of them down, and their shock that oh he really was as old as he said he was, he wasn't joking. And they break down crying, because nothing makes sense anymore but at least Logan is still Logan, he's still his no nonsense logical self no matter what he looks or sounds like.
Back to the Future
Fandom: Thomas Sanders,Sanders Sides
Pairings: platonic LAMP
Word Count: 3444
Chapter Navigation: part 2
Masterlist Link
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Patton wakes up in a very strangeplace indeed.
Someone shakes him awake. He becomesimmediately aware that he’s sleeping at a desk.
“You’ve got to actually go homesometimes, Patton,” someone chides him lightheartedly.
“Wha-?” Patton breaks off in a yawnand stretches.
His back pops, and the sound seemsto snap him awake. He’s in an unfamiliar office. There are stacks of paperworkand folders and letters, everything kept in an organized disarray. A womanstands next to him, smiling yet slightly worried.
“Got your morning cup of joe,” shesays, sitting a Starbucks cup in front of him.
“Who’s Joe?” Patton says dumbly,still trying to process whether or not this is a dream.
The woman laughs and doesn’t givehim an actual answer. She lets herself out of the office. Patton blinks in thewake of her absence.
That’s when he realizes that beyondthe open doorway, there are more desks with more people. All of them adults andbusy working.
Patton takes his glasses off to rubat his eyes. He’s about to put them back on when he notices something thattwists his stomach.
These aren’t his glasses.
They’re a sleek black, rectangular.Unlike his usual round pair.
He puts them back on slowly.
They’re his prescription.
Confused, Patton looks down athimself.
Why is he wearing a watch? He neverwears a watch. Has he ever owned a watch?
And his clothes. He has poloshirts, but this isn’t one of his. And the pants and shoes. Wait, why is therea cardigan tied around his shoulders?
Patton hurriedly glances around theroom. The desk faces the door. Behind him is a window.
He catches sight of his reflectionin the glass. He looks like a dad. He looks like his dad.
“Holy moly,” Patton whispers,because past his reflection he can see the hustle and bustle of the big city.
They’re like a bajillion floors up.
Unnerved, Patton jumps to his feet.No amount of looking out the window can change what he sees. He attempts tomake sense of the desk he’d been sitting at. He eyes the coffee.
“I don’t like coffee,” he says tohimself, as if that’s the biggest thing wrong with this picture.
“Patton,” someone knocks on thedoor and he jerks his head up. “Meeting. Fifteen minutes.”
Patton stares at the man for longerthan what’s polite. He’s never met this man, but he could easily picture him asone of his dad’s fishing buddies. And yet, he knows Patton’s name.
“Meeting?” he echoes.
The man sighs. “You forgot again,didn’t you? Well, this is why I’m reminding you.” He goes to duck out butremembers something. “Oh, and uh, might wanna spruce up a little bit. Gottastop pulling the all-nighters. That’s my job, ha!”
“Right,” Patton smiles, rushing tofix his mess of hair. He waits for the man to leave before letting his smiledrop.
Just what has he gotten himselfinto?
*
Patton can’t do this.
Before he can try to slip out ofthe offices, the nice lady from before catches up to him. She redirects him tothe place of the meeting the man mentioned before.
“Honestly sir,” she shakes her headin exasperation, as if she’s done this a million times and Patton is just aforgetful puppy.
“Right, just got turned around!” heclaims. She doesn’t even look at him weirdly, just leaves him there by aconference type of room. And then the people inside are already trying to talkto him and he can’t just ignore them, so he goes inside and sits andsmiles and nods and panics on the inside.
The man who told him about themeeting is there. He’s apparently in charge and dives right into things,talking about circulation and how it’s down and they need to get it up, and whatdoes medical stuff have to do with anything?
But that isn’t the case at all. Ifnothing else, Patton is an excellent listener. In this room are journalists andwriters and editors, and this is a newspaper? These people work at a newspaper?They think Patton works at a newspaper?
With sweaty palms, Pattondesperately reaches into his pocket hoping to find his phone. He finds aphone at least. It’s … got to be his if it was in his pocket, right? Justlike with the strange glasses and different clothes. He also finds a wallet hedoesn’t recognize and opens it.
There’s his driver’s license. Thepicture is him, but … weird? Something’s really off about it. And the dates… the issue date is … in the future? And the address? That’s not hisaddress! That’s not even the right city!
“Patton?” someone says and suddenlythe room is staring at him all at once.
Patton tries to speak. He tries to keepingsmiling. He really, really tries.
“I can’t do this,” he gasps out. Hestands abruptly, almost knocking over his chair. Someone or multiple someone’scall after him, but he races out. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He justspeed walks down the halls, avoids eye contact with those he passes, and leapsinto the first elevator he spots.
He smashes the button for theground floor. He’s alone inside and there’s no pretty elevator music, andPatton’s breaths echo off the wall far too loudly.
“What’s going on?” Patton whimpersto no one, doing his best to hold it together. He’s not going to cry. He’s not.He just needs to—to try to call someone. Get back to familiar territory.
He pulls out the cellphone again,hoping that his gut feeling is right. The lock screen lights up, and withoutthinking he uses his regular passcode.
It works.
Patton doesn’t think past hisrelief. He struggles to find a contact’s list.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he whispers.
The doors ding open. There’s a lobbyarea with a couple of secretaries running a front desk. Patton can feel theireyes on him like pins pricking his skin. He smiles, trying not to cringe, andforces himself to leave the elevator and walk out the front doors. Rather thanstray too far, he wanders to the nearby parking lot.
Patton finds his parents’ numberson the list. Neither one of them pick up. He tries to call his older brother.No answer either. He even sees his little brother’s name, but since when didDee have a phone? He was only ten and their parents said he wasn’t allowed toget a cellphone until high school.
He tried anyway. No surprise, hedidn’t pick up.
“Just—somebody please,”Patton begs under his breath.
There are so many names in thecontact’s list, way more than what his usual phone has, and so many names thathe doesn’t know. He scrolls way down to the bottom, trying to find Virgil’sname. Virgil’s name isn’t there. Frustrated, Patton scrolls back to the top,searching for Logan’s name, but he double checks and that isn’t there either!
“I don’t like this, I don’t likethis,” Patton chants. He takes in a huge shaky breath, closing his eyes andcovering his mouth for a minute.
Why weren’t their names there? Whywouldn’t his parents pick up? Why did he wake up in a newspaper office?
“Roman,” Patton says, swallowingdown the lump in his throat. He brings the phone up to search again. “I haven’tchecked his name. There’s still Roman.”
Patton chokes out a relieved laughwhen he finds Roman’s name there. He quickly mashes the call button.
It rings forever and ever. His callis forwarded to voice mail.
“Can’t come to the phone right now,but if you’ll leave a message, my handsome self will get back to you,” the familiarvoice says. The phone beeps, signaling the message is being recorded.
“Ro?” Patton asks, one last sparkof hope that he’ll pick up. That he won’t be so painfully alone.
But no one’s coming to rescue himand get him out of this mess.
“Ro, kiddo … please, pleasecall me, okay? I—I think something’s happened, and it’d sure be great to hearfrom you. Alright kiddo. Love you. Bye-bye.”
He’s on his own.
*
Patton manages to calm down enoughto find his car. He has keys in his pocket, so there’s gotta be a car nearby,right?
He’s right and there it is, asunfamiliar as everything else. The headlights flare, the doors unlock, andPatton stares at the powder blue paint job.
“It’s not stealing if I have thekeys,” Patton firmly tells himself.
He opens the car door and slidesinside. There’s a half drank water bottle in the cupholder. Envelopes addressedto him sit in a small pile in the passenger’s seat. A colorful necklace hangsfrom the rearview mirror, a rainbow charm hanging off of it.
Patton glances at his driver’slicense again, but the information remains unchanged.
“Guess there’s only one way to findout,” he mutters to himself as he pulls up gps on his phone. He types theaddress in and starts the car.
It’s the most stressful drive ofhis life, and yet it passes in a blur. There’s so much traffic, more than he’sever had to drive in before, and someone honks their horn on him when heaccidentally cuts them off.
“Sorry, sorry!” Patton says overand over again. He listens with absolute focus to the directions his phonetells him.
After a frantic twenty minutes andthree wrong turns, Patton makes it to a residential district. It’s a peacefulsuburban neighborhood, not entirely unlike the one he grew up in.
Patton drives slowly and reads themailboxes off as he goes. He finds ‘his’ house.
It’s … nice.
He pulls into the driveway. Theengine quiets as he turns the key.
He could see himself living there.That’s the scariest part.
Patton exits the car. He stares upat the house, the too big, too nice house that can’t be his.
This can’t be real.
“Patton!”
He startles and looks towards theneighbor’s house. There’s a woman, maybe around thirty? She’s taking out thetrash.
“Did you finally get a day off?”she laughs in greeting.
Patton rubs the back of his neckand tries to laugh too. “Oh, you know me.”
Yes he’s aware of how ironic hisstatement is.
He glances quickly at the woman,her yard, anything that might strike a memory. He draws a blank as he stares ata little kid’s bicycle parked by the porch steps.
“Uh, how are the kids?” Patton says.
They talk for far too long. Pattondraws on everything that he’s learned from Roman about acting.
In the back of his head he’sscreaming.
*
Patton sits on his living roomcouch.
It’s got to be his couch. This hasto be his house. All the mismatched furniture has to be his too.
Patton can see himself buying the house,having his friends over to help move in. He can hear Roman and Virgil arguingover Patton’s poor choice in décor, how they would squabble over how todecorate. Logan would be there too, giving his own input and worrying more overfunctionality than aesthetics.
Gosh Patton could really use a friendright now.
Earlier, as he’d snooped around, he’dfound pictures. Lots of pictures. Many of them with him in it. Lots of oneswith his family, with Roman.
There were hardly any with Virgil,and those were pretty much the ones he’d already seen before, the ones he knewhe had. Ones taken from high school with him and Ro.
There’s none at all with Logan.
Patton doesn’t know whether or notthat’s more concerning than the other thing he noticed about the pictures.
Everyone looks kinda … different.
Kinda older. Too old.
He saw a picture of his olderbrother and nearly didn’t recognize him. He saw one where Dee looked all grownup!
Patton stares down at his hands.They’re a little bigger than he remembers. A little rougher.
It’s like he’s woken up in adifferent world.
Maybe if he went to sleep, he’dwake up in the right place again?
Patton falls to the side, sinkinginto the cushions.
He closes his eyes and tries not tothink.
*
Patton wakes up to the sound ofbanging. He wipes at his face, sitting up with a groan.
It’s still daylight, but the sunhas shifted. It’s more afternoon now. The banging is coming from the frontdoor.
Patton’s still in his house that hedoesn’t remember buying.
Hopeless despair grips his hearttight, and he’s too tired to do anything other than accept it.
He rises to his feet. There’s nothingelse he can do. He might as well see who’s at the door.
He opens the front door to find asharply dressed man. He’s wearing a black polo with a blue-striped tie andslacks. His dark hair is a mess, like he’d rushed out the door withoutbothering to comb it down. He’s wearing glasses that look a lot like the ones Pattonwears now. The glasses do nothing to hide the wide brown eyes.
“Patton,” the man says, emphasizingthe name like it should mean something, like he was waiting for Patton toreact.
Patton cocks his head to the side.This is … this is …
“Salutations,” the man says and itall clicks into place.
“Logan?” Patton breathes out.
Logan sighs heavily, leaning intothe doorframe with slumped shoulders.
“It appears that we are in a complicatedsituation,” his friend says in a timbre far deeper than the little kid he onceknew.
Patton stops hesitating. He surgesforward and throws his arms around Logan.
“I was so scared,” Pattonsays, and he’s gone straight into crying. All of those built-up emotions areoverflowing now. “Logan, I—I woke up and there was—I wasn’t home, and therewere people, and they knew me but I didn’t know them. And I panicked andran away and—my driver’s license is weird! It said my address was here so I cameto check it out because nobody was picking up—I tried to call, nobody wouldpick up. Nobody would—”
“Patton, it is okay,” Logan reassureshim.
Patton can feel Logan’s armswrapped around him, a comforting hand resting on the back of his head to groundhim. It occurs to him that Logan must be an inch or two taller now.
“It’s okay,” he says again. “I’mhere now, and we will figure this out together.”
“Logan … what’s going on?” Pattonsniffs, his eyes burning and wet.
“… it appears that we are in thefuture.”
“Oh …” Patton says because that’sall he can say. “Oh … okay.”
He hugs Logan tighter.
*
“But how would this even happen?”Patton asks. He’s back to sitting in the living room. Logan’s pacing back andforth in front of him and it’s kind of distracting in a sense that Patton ismesmerized at seeing how much Logan has grown up. He’d always acted too maturefor his age, and now he looks it too!
Logan doesn’t break stride as heanswers, “You woke up like this, correct? There weren’t any inklings of the . .. ‘process’ that must have brought us here?”
“No—I mean, yes I woke up andsuddenly everything was different, but I don’t remember anything weird thathappened before that.”
“What do you remember beforethat?”
“I—” Patton goes to answer but he findshe can’t say for sure. “I … might have went to bed?”
“Might?”
“I don’t really remember.”
“You don’t remember what happenedyesterday.”
“Not really. I’m—I’m not sure whatI remember last actually. Logan, what does that mean? Did I hit my head?”
“If that’s the case, then I musthave hit mine as well.” Logan stops pacing and shakes his head to dismiss theidea. “No, I hypothesize that this is merely a side-affect to time travel.”
“Time travel … We really timetraveled.” Patton might still be struggling to process this.
“It would seem so,” Logan answers. “Idon’t have enough evidence to deduce our situation accurately, but from what I’vegathered I am not entirely sure that time traveling in one’s own body ispossible. Instead, our consciousness is what has traveled and arrived in ourself of the time we’ve landed in.”
“What?”
“What I’m saying is that it mightbe impossible to travel to the future and meet your future self. There is onlyone you at any given time, so instead your consciousness travels to the you ofthat time, possessing them as it were. That’s why we appear older in a future settingwithout any memory of the years in between.”
“That’s … a lot to take in.”
“Indeed.”
Patton’s back to staring at his hands.He feels the couch dip beside him, Logan sitting down.
“… you’re acting reallylevel-headed about this,” Patton observes.
“I suppose I am adept at compartmentalizing.”
“… Logan? Are you really fromthe future?”
And there it is. One of the theoriesthat he and Virgil and Roman had jokingly thought about Logan. Their strange littlegenius friend, too mature unlike any kid should be.
Somehow it all makes sense now.
“I think you already know theanswer, Patton,” Logan says, not hiding behind anything.
Patton looks at him. Really looksat him. The face might have changed a lot, but those guileless blue eyes arethe same as always.
“Is this what happened to you?”Patton asks. And oh, he can imagine it. Logan waking up as a little kid, scaredand confused and trying to make the most of it.
“Yes. I woke up much like this. Inever could remember exactly what happened to me previously. Time travel seemsto affect memory.”
“But why us? What did we do?”
“That I have no answer for. But asit started with me, I can only apologize if my presence in your life caused youto get caught up in this.”
“No, no kid—I mean, Logan. This isn’tyour fault. How can it be when you don’t even remember?”
“The fact that I can’t rememberdoes not absolve me. I could possibly have instigated this and simply bear nomemory of the fact.”
“But I know you wouldn’t doanything to hurt or scare me or anyone else.”
“There are too many variables,”Logan responds, a non-answer.
Patton reaches over to place a handon his forearm. He squeezed. “Logan, I trust you. We’ll figure this puzzle out,together.”
“Together …” Logan repeats in amumble. “If you’re here like this, it’s possible that we are not the only ones.”
Patton gasps, patting urgently atLogan’s arm. “I tried to call my family but they wouldn’t pick up. And then Icalled Roman, but he wasn’t there—but Logan! I don’t have Virgil’s number forsome reason. Or yours!”
“You don’t?”
“No! And come look at this!”
Patton drags him from the couch.They go look at the pictures on the wall.
Patton doesn’t need to tell Loganwhat’s wrong with them.
“Virgil doesn’t appear much at all,if in any, after high school. I myself am entirely absent from these.”
“And that doesn’t sound like me atall.” Patton frowns. “I love taking pictures with people. I should have a bunchof all of my best friends.”
“Unless we’re not your friends.”
Patton stares at him, notcomprehending. For once Logan understands the shift of his mood. He lays a handon Patton’s shoulder.
“Much can happen over the years.People lose touch all the time, especially after the high school years.”
Patton shakes his head slowly indisbelief. “But—but I wouldn’t! Not with Virgil or you!”
“Yes, maybe with Virgil. If he’snot here in your pictures and you don’t have his number, then it is extremelylikely that you do not communicate seldomly if at all. As for me, I thinksomething different has occurred.”
Tears gather in Patton’s eyes. Hegrabs onto Logan’s wrist. “What do you mean? That we’re not friends in thefuture?”
“Not just that we aren’t friends,”Logan answers. “In this timeline, I don’t think we met at all.”
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Washed-Up Stucky MNF/Fic Writer Provides Endgame Opinions
I’m going to try to tackle this linearly, at least to begin with:
I am very much Team Bored With MCU Hawkeye, but I want to give sincere props for the cold open, which I think accomplished several things simultaneously: recapped the consequences of the last film (since, hey, it’s been a fuckin while), set the tone, and began Clint’s narrative arc.
That said, jesus, I’m still irritated by the shoe-horned family to begin with. First they were invented for convenience and narrative stakes, and then their final, ultimate reason for existence was to be temporarily fridged. Take a moment to imagine a world where Clint was the circus runaway loner he was supposed to be, who only had his coworkers as found family, who either responded to The Snap by throwing himself harder into his teamwork work OR went rogue because his sense of justice and agency was so fucking destroyed by what happened. He didn’t need a blood family to have the arc he had. And he didn’t even need the arc he had. But this is a bitchfest about a choice made many years ago, not made in this final movie.
The first third of that movie was rough. The whole thing had the narrative flow of “A Series of Related Short Stories Played One After the Other”, but the first third seems to be Failing To Establish the New World and then Clumsily Establishing The Emerging Situation.
The establishing shots and scenes to show the audience what The Snap’s consequences were worldwide were... lacking. It’s dark? No more baseball? People are relying on natural light instead of interior lighting, but this is also happening at Avengers HQ, where they clearly still have power and internet access to work their tech, so... was it just an aesthetic choice? I feel like the film tried to spend time showing us what the consequences were for the average New Yorker, but instead we get a weird Canonly Gay Russo Character who gave a good performance that tells us about the human loss but not about the mechanics of this new world. We get the ‘no baseball’ shot and all we get afterward are ‘people miss the missing people’. But restaurants still exist? Businesses are functioning? (Wouldn’t New York run kind of smoother if it wasn’t overpopulated?) I feel like we were invited to start thinking about how this dystopia works, but were never given answers. (There are so many interpretations of how things could go wrong if certain people just disappeared, and their knowledge/access were suddenly unavailable, and none of it was explored, even briefly, outside of establishing shots.)
The Garden Planet - it’s discovery, the traveling to it, the fight there - lacked emotional grounding in a way I find hard to explain. The audience was excited for Brie Larson being a fucking boss, and the quick execution of the grab-him-and-cut-his-arm-off plan was satisfying, but the twist and subsequent letdown was just a weird beat after a slog to get there, after waiting on a deep letdown beat from the last movie.
Last thing about flow and emotional beats, because I want to move on to character analysis, and this is a huge one for me: Clint’s fight in Tokyo and Steve’s fight with himself were some of the biggest missed opportunities in the entire film.
Not counting the football field brawl at the end, which I don’t count as a real fight scene, these are the two major fight scenes of the entire film and as far as I can tell, there was no effort made to make these showpieces. They went to the trouble of bringing Clint to Bladerunner Central, and pit him against the last bastion of aesthetic-obsessed mafia in the world. The panning camera in the interior as Hawkeye fought goons brushed past lazy fight scenes that only showed who was winning, not the brutality that Clint was supposedly falling into, not the grit of this new awful world, just... shapeless dark bodies getting thrown through windows? And on top of that, they could have made up (or picked from canon) any Big Bad to pit him against outside in the street, and we get an Orientalist sword fight that could have fit in nicely on a CW superhero show, and some of the most unnecessary exposition dialogue I have ever heard. Someone bothered to weave Clint’s arc in earlier, with Rhodey explaining to Natasha that Clint’s gone International and also Worryingly Dark. Why the fuck do we have the ‘I’ll give you anything you want’ line, on the rotten cherry on top of ‘stop being mean to the yakuza, we didn’t start it’? You already covered his motivations with the cold open.
And while Steve’s fight ended in a FABULOUSLY HEARTBREAKING WAY, the fight itself was nothing - you can pick little character details out like how they both ditched their shields almost immediately, and it was funny that Then-Steve mistook Now-Steve for Loki in the first place, but it was still a completely lost opportunity to get one true superhero battle in this three-hour slog. Both Steves could have gotten up and carried out the rest of the narrative after a decent brawl, but instead they fall a great distance after some blocked shots and it... was nothing? Missed opportunity for some cool shit.
Okay, skipping to character assessments now:
Clint’s character has been mishandled from the beginning and this seemed to be the “better late than never” eleventh hour arc. Except the end of the arc is unclear - it made sense for him to fall apart after losing his Shoehorn Family, but how did Natasha’s choice to fall do anything but fridge someone else, with more agency this time? It makes Natasha noble, which she already was, and it made her win against Clint, which I appreciate, but Natasha didn’t need salvation through death and Clint learns nothing by getting them back, just experiences relief.
Bruce. I want to say, first, that I love Hulk in a Cardigan. Cardihulk can stay. I want fanart, I want t-shirts, give me all of it. But Bruce’s explanation of “I scienced it so I could get the best of both worlds” only gives us half of the acceptance that Banner’s character is already working towards. As we saw most explicitly in Ragnarok, the Hulk isn’t just a physical form, he has his own separate consciousness, originally defined by rage but revealed to be more complicated. Bruce merging into Cardihulk seems to have... erased Hulk’s separate consciousness without merging it into himself? If there had been some acknowledgement of a second voice still within him that shot out opinions or demands for certain menu items in the diner, this would have been a much cleaner end to his arc, which has been equally messy between actor and narrative shifts.
Speaking of Ragnarok... it’s time! Are you ready? Have you read articles about the Gambit Gambit too? Are you fucking depressed that a fat suit was used for comedy gags in the year of our lord 2019? Because I was. The Russos seemed to... not struggle with what progress Ragnarok had put onto Bruce and Thor’s characters, but reject it. This movie’s Thor was anxious for laughs, was desperate for easy answers to a a feeling of lost heroism, and it didn’t feel like a familiar character. The time-travel scene with his mother wrapped it up very elegantly, and was well performed, but that scene didn’t need to follow a series of “chunky drunk in sweatpants” jokes to show us that Thor was struggling. Everyone in the film is fucking holding on by their fingernails, but only one is played for cheap laughs.
At least we get the bisexual Asgard lady king we deserved.
Tony got the right death. He got a hero’s death and Pepper’s last lines of “you can rest now” were exactly the right lines to wrap up an arc characterized by fear and a desire to protect and control at any cost. I knew the MCU was never going to really acknowledge that Tony’s The Problem, even with lines like ‘you should have let me do the fascist robot thing, that was gonna work fine’ thrown around pretty much as soon as he touches down on earth again.
I’m not sure if there’s much to say about Natasha. It was fitting that she was running HQ, that she was struggling, that she was rejecting emotional help from Steve but clearly still close with him. Seeing her break down after hearing the report on Clint felt right after, I think, being told by several directors (or making the personal acting choice? idk) to just be as flat and as decolletagey as possible. And again, while I feel like she would be self-sacrificing on that cliffisde if given the opportunity, and that she would win, the narrative choice to place her there and have that be her end didn’t really give her anything she didn’t already have. She had nothing to prove.
I have a hard time really laying out my thoughts on Steve without launching into the pregnant absence of Bucky, but I’m going to try. Chris Evans did a good job being the emotional heart of a really fractured story with a lot of conflicting pieces. Seeing him lead a talk therapy session after The Snap seemed very out of character for him until one realizes that Sam isn’t there to lead it himself. His scene offering help to Natasha was another good scene between them proving that not every m/f relationship has to be sexual to be interesting or add to the plot. His leadership speech during the Stupid Fucking Slow-Mo Heroes’ Walk to the platform was well done and makes me think of what could have been for the MCU, if they’d ever just let them be a cohesive found-family team for twenty minutes and let them fight some doom-bots or something. Fuck. Imagine.
Something weirdly satisfying about the deceitful ‘hail hydra’ line in the elevator. Yes? Yes.
The hammer scene was satisfying to me without being too gratuitous, but I’ll acknowledge that some people weren’t into it. Having paid more attention to Steve’s arc than most, I’ll argue that he earned it several times over.
His ending - that is, the secret life he alludes to but doesn’t explicitly reveal to Sam - is earned too. I’ve read at least one thing saying that Steve’s arc was all about him learning to let go, but that’s... never what Steve does. Not at the end of any arc, of any comic story, does Steve let go. Not of his principles, not of the people he loves, he is always “Thinking... Thinking About Bucky!” and getting in fights he can’t necessarily win. So I don’t think his final ending is ever Learning to Let Go. I think it’s fair that it’s Just Once, Just This One Time, Getting What You Want And Getting To Enjoy It.
And now I’m backtracking to Bucky. I’ve read one article already that theorizes that Steve’s arc, which was highly prioritized, included literally as little direct interaction with Bucky as possible because... the MCU? the Russos? Marvel?... is aware that Steve/Bucky is the most popular same-sex ship in the MCU. And that’s tiresome as fuck but I think there’s some truth to it. I wonder if, like in Civil War, we’ll hear later from the actors that a lot of contextual one-on-one scenes were shot and then mysteriously cut from the final edit.
I will say that in my head, Bucky is relaxed when Steve goes back in time for the final time, and lets Sam goes to talk with Steve one-on-one at the bench, because Bucky is not worried if Steve will come back, and does not feel a need to check on Steve on the bench. Because, like Peggy, Bucky has been getting secret visits too. Maybe as far back as during his time in Wakanda, but certainly since the final fight with Thanos. Bucky was calm because he already knew. He didn’t miss Steve because Steve hadn’t given him an opportunity to do so.
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A Love Letter to Señor Frog's, A Wild, Boozy Wonderland I Miss
Here's a memory I'm shocked I can remember so vividly, because of my sobriety level at that moment, which was zero: It was 1999 and I was 15 years old. My cousin Raquel leaned in close as Spanish pop dance remixes blasted all around us; a nearby server wearing shot glasses in bullet belts across his chest like a Party Rambo blew this whistle while pouring a tequila shot down a girl's mouth and giving her head a shake. "Do you wanna get really fucked up?" Raquel asked. It was the kind of peer pressure-driven dare that only works on teens desperately trying to prove they can hang. Naturally, I said yes, and Raquel handed me a Cucaracha—a flaming combination of añejo Tequila and Kahlua. And that is the story of how I ended up vomiting all over a table and eventually asleep next to a toilet at the Tijuana Señor Frog's.
Since 1989, when it was founded in Mazatlán, Mexico, Señor Frog's has prided itself on Mexican-themed debauchery—a scene where the party never dies and the shots flow like the Rio Grande, no matter the day or time. The website proudly and prominently declares the restaurant/bar/nightclub an "infamous party scene." Along with its sister bars, Carlos'n Charlie's and El Squid Roe, the chain has earned a reputation as the prime party destination for white spring breakers heading to Cancún or Cabo. However, for many Latinx people—Mexicans in particular—Señor Frog's has operated more as a constant in their social lives, a space that reflected the absurd and fun aspects of their culture and gave them exactly what teenagers are looking for on a Saturday night: somewhere to rage among the corny signs; servers shaking their asses against old ladies; sombreros, maracas, and other Mexican tchotchkes covering the walls; and, in the case of my hometown franchise, a framed photo of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson drinking in one of the booths. (No one thought to take it down at the Tijuana location, which has since closed.)
Natalia F. is a 41-year-old Brooklynite who works in public media and grew up in the eponymous capital city of Puebla in Mexico. The city boasts a high number of universities and is a major tourist spot for Mexicans, and Natalia spent much of her adolescence partying at the Señor Frog's in her hometown and even dated one of its servers, which is how she ended up in possession of a stunning Señor Frog's branded denim jacket worn often in her teen years. "When I was growing up, that Señor Frog's was always the cool place to go, and the place that we would go out, mostly [during] junior high and high school," she told VICE.
Like Natalia, I spent many nights in my teens dancing and drinking at Señor Frog's, which was conveniently located across the road from my family's house in Tijuana. At night, the sounds of Whigfield's "Saturday Night" and Paradisio's "Bailando" (again, it was the late 90s/early 00s) wafted through my bedroom window, joining the cacophony of honking cars waiting in line to cross into the United States. It was where we had countless family dinners and parties, especially on nights they held their taquizas. My parents, entrusting me in the care of my cousin, allowed me to go party even though I wasn't yet 18, the legal drinking age in Mexico. As much as I was a massive dweeb, taking five AP classes and box-stepping in my high school production of Oliver!, I was also what we affectionately call a desmadrosa—wild, and a bit of a troublemaker. Once, when a doorman wouldn't let me in the club, my dad drove down and bribed him with a tenner. A lot of things could have gone wrong on those nights out, and there is certainly an atmosphere of sexual inappropriateness that permeates the space that creates the possibility of bad things happening, both then and now. Thankfully, all I ever left with was a hangover and, on one occasion, a missing shoe. Growing up in a city famous for its nightlife, with Señor Frog's as the backdrop for much of my coming of age, had its lasting impacts on my way of life. That desmadrosa energy has never left me, even if it's mostly dormant now.
"I was a little desmadrosa party girl growing up, too," said Natalia. "It set the standard for how I would party forever."
Frog's was the space that not just allowed that wild, reckless abandon to run free, but enabled it. "Towards the end of the night, it would become raucous and you'd start dancing on the tables and dancing on the bars, dancing [on] whatever surface was available," said Natalia. Where else will an employee of any club or bar help hoist you up onto a speaker so you can shake it to La Bouche? "The [servers] would start grabbing people and dancing, being kind of like animators for the party," said Natalia. "And so that always guaranteed that people would be riled up to some degree."
Indeed, Señor Frog's served as a rite of passage for many, regardless of whether they enjoyed the experience or not. Araceli Cruz, a Mexican American producer originally from Montebello, California, who now lives in Savannah, remembers the allure that Señor Frog's had on her as a young girl. On trips to Mexico with her family, Cruz was only allowed in the gift shop by her strict parents. "It felt like this forbidden strip club or something," she said.
It wasn't until the infamous Times Square Señor Frog's opened in New York City that she was finally able to step inside the famed but verboten establishment. In a notorious New York Times one-star review, critic Pete Wells described the restaurant as "a scripted theater of the inane with random outbreaks of mediocre Tex-Mex," adding, "Señor Frog's' brand of fun is so mindless that it’s embarrassing to give in to at first, but eventually everybody I brought there did give in, maybe because we’re all so desperate to let go a little bit." The Times was not wrong in its assessment of the beauty of this completely stupid and yet sacred space. When Cruz finally made her way there, she said it was "as cheesy and terrible as I always dreamed it was."
"It felt like a thrill to finally partake in this hyped-up buzz that I had told myself about that place," she said. "Finally being inside felt like a rite of passage. But it wasn't that much fun inside. It was crazy loud and crowded." Dining and dashing was the highlight of her first-time at Frog's. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
What has always felt interesting about Señor Frog's is the way in which it reflects Mexican culture onto its clientele—not with a whisper, but bellowed out of a megaphone accompanied by bull horns and whistles. Natalia sees it as a "heightened reflection" of Mexican culture, heavy on the kitsch and with the lack of subtlety that is intrinsic to our humor and style of partying. (After all, grown ass adult dressed as children—drawn-on freckles and all—making weirdly sexual jokes on variety shows are standard entertainment in Latinx media.) As a result, the brand also made the space palatable to tourists, amplifying the stereotypes of the culture and allowing them to partake in the amusement. "It felt touristy to me for sure but I don't recall one single white person there ever," said Aidee Escalante, a 33-year-old veterinary technician from San Diego and Tijuana. If anything, Señor Frog's blurs the line between paying homage to Mexican culture and ridiculing it. But in the end, it was never meant to be taken seriously. Overthinking it, as I'm doing now, is not its ethos.
For Cruz, Señor Frog's came to represent her struggle with her identity as a Mexican in America—the sense of being ni de aqui, ni de alla; not from here nor there. She was an outsider, entering a place she knew was part of her culture but where she didn't quite fit in. "In essence, Señor Frog's reminds me of my trips to Mexico as a kid," she said. But the party horns and tequila shots beckoned, and she doesn't regret her jaunt at the now defunct Times Square location. In fact, she felt like she owed it to herself to step through its doors and be one with the Day-Glo madness.
"The weird thing," she says, "is when it opened in NYC, it felt like a part of my culture was here."
Alex Zaragoza is a senior staff writer at VICE.
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A Love Letter to Señor Frog's, A Wild, Boozy Wonderland I Miss
Here's a memory I'm shocked I can remember so vividly, because of my sobriety level at that moment, which was zero: It was 1999 and I was 15 years old. My cousin Raquel leaned in close as Spanish pop dance remixes blasted all around us; a nearby server wearing shot glasses in bullet belts across his chest like a Party Rambo blew this whistle while pouring a tequila shot down a girl's mouth and giving her head a shake. "Do you wanna get really fucked up?" Raquel asked. It was the kind of peer pressure-driven dare that only works on teens desperately trying to prove they can hang. Naturally, I said yes, and Raquel handed me a Cucaracha—a flaming combination of añejo Tequila and Kahlua. And that is the story of how I ended up vomiting all over a table and eventually asleep next to a toilet at the Tijuana Señor Frog's.
Since 1989, when it was founded in Mazatlán, Mexico, Señor Frog's has prided itself on Mexican-themed debauchery—a scene where the party never dies and the shots flow like the Rio Grande, no matter the day or time. The website proudly and prominently declares the restaurant/bar/nightclub an "infamous party scene." Along with its sister bars, Carlos'n Charlie's and El Squid Roe, the chain has earned a reputation as the prime party destination for white spring breakers heading to Cancún or Cabo. However, for many Latinx people—Mexicans in particular—Señor Frog's has operated more as a constant in their social lives, a space that reflected the absurd and fun aspects of their culture and gave them exactly what teenagers are looking for on a Saturday night: somewhere to rage among the corny signs; servers shaking their asses against old ladies; sombreros, maracas, and other Mexican tchotchkes covering the walls; and, in the case of my hometown franchise, a framed photo of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson drinking in one of the booths. (No one thought to take it down at the Tijuana location, which has since closed.)
Natalia F. is a 41-year-old Brooklynite who works in public media and grew up in the eponymous capital city of Puebla in Mexico. The city boasts a high number of universities and is a major tourist spot for Mexicans, and Natalia spent much of her adolescence partying at the Señor Frog's in her hometown and even dated one of its servers, which is how she ended up in possession of a stunning Señor Frog's branded denim jacket worn often in her teen years. "When I was growing up, that Señor Frog's was always the cool place to go, and the place that we would go out, mostly [during] junior high and high school," she told VICE.
Like Natalia, I spent many nights in my teens dancing and drinking at Señor Frog's, which was conveniently located across the road from my family's house in Tijuana. At night, the sounds of Whigfield's "Saturday Night" and Paradisio's "Bailando" (again, it was the late 90s/early 00s) wafted through my bedroom window, joining the cacophony of honking cars waiting in line to cross into the United States. It was where we had countless family dinners and parties, especially on nights they held their taquizas. My parents, entrusting me in the care of my cousin, allowed me to go party even though I wasn't yet 18, the legal drinking age in Mexico. As much as I was a massive dweeb, taking five AP classes and box-stepping in my high school production of Oliver!, I was also what we affectionately call a desmadrosa—wild, and a bit of a troublemaker. Once, when a doorman wouldn't let me in the club, my dad drove down and bribed him with a tenner. A lot of things could have gone wrong on those nights out, and there is certainly an atmosphere of sexual inappropriateness that permeates the space that creates the possibility of bad things happening, both then and now. Thankfully, all I ever left with was a hangover and, on one occasion, a missing shoe. Growing up in a city famous for its nightlife, with Señor Frog's as the backdrop for much of my coming of age, had its lasting impacts on my way of life. That desmadrosa energy has never left me, even if it's mostly dormant now.
"I was a little desmadrosa party girl growing up, too," said Natalia. "It set the standard for how I would party forever."
Frog's was the space that not just allowed that wild, reckless abandon to run free, but enabled it. "Towards the end of the night, it would become raucous and you'd start dancing on the tables and dancing on the bars, dancing [on] whatever surface was available," said Natalia. Where else will an employee of any club or bar help hoist you up onto a speaker so you can shake it to La Bouche? "The [servers] would start grabbing people and dancing, being kind of like animators for the party," said Natalia. "And so that always guaranteed that people would be riled up to some degree."
Indeed, Señor Frog's served as a rite of passage for many, regardless of whether they enjoyed the experience or not. Araceli Cruz, a Mexican American producer originally from Montebello, California, who now lives in Savannah, remembers the allure that Señor Frog's had on her as a young girl. On trips to Mexico with her family, Cruz was only allowed in the gift shop by her strict parents. "It felt like this forbidden strip club or something," she said.
It wasn't until the infamous Times Square Señor Frog's opened in New York City that she was finally able to step inside the famed but verboten establishment. In a notorious New York Times one-star review, critic Pete Wells described the restaurant as "a scripted theater of the inane with random outbreaks of mediocre Tex-Mex," adding, "Señor Frog's' brand of fun is so mindless that it’s embarrassing to give in to at first, but eventually everybody I brought there did give in, maybe because we’re all so desperate to let go a little bit." The Times was not wrong in its assessment of the beauty of this completely stupid and yet sacred space. When Cruz finally made her way there, she said it was "as cheesy and terrible as I always dreamed it was."
"It felt like a thrill to finally partake in this hyped-up buzz that I had told myself about that place," she said. "Finally being inside felt like a rite of passage. But it wasn't that much fun inside. It was crazy loud and crowded." Dining and dashing was the highlight of her first-time at Frog's. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
What has always felt interesting about Señor Frog's is the way in which it reflects Mexican culture onto its clientele—not with a whisper, but bellowed out of a megaphone accompanied by bull horns and whistles. Natalia sees it as a "heightened reflection" of Mexican culture, heavy on the kitsch and with the lack of subtlety that is intrinsic to our humor and style of partying. (After all, grown ass adult dressed as children—drawn-on freckles and all—making weirdly sexual jokes on variety shows are standard entertainment in Latinx media.) As a result, the brand also made the space palatable to tourists, amplifying the stereotypes of the culture and allowing them to partake in the amusement. "It felt touristy to me for sure but I don't recall one single white person there ever," said Aidee Escalante, a 33-year-old veterinary technician from San Diego and Tijuana. If anything, Señor Frog's blurs the line between paying homage to Mexican culture and ridiculing it. But in the end, it was never meant to be taken seriously. Overthinking it, as I'm doing now, is not its ethos.
For Cruz, Señor Frog's came to represent her struggle with her identity as a Mexican in America—the sense of being ni de aqui, ni de alla; not from here nor there. She was an outsider, entering a place she knew was part of her culture but where she didn't quite fit in. "In essence, Señor Frog's reminds me of my trips to Mexico as a kid," she said. But the party horns and tequila shots beckoned, and she doesn't regret her jaunt at the now defunct Times Square location. In fact, she felt like she owed it to herself to step through its doors and be one with the Day-Glo madness.
"The weird thing," she says, "is when it opened in NYC, it felt like a part of my culture was here."
Alex Zaragoza is a senior staff writer at VICE.
via VICE US - Munchies VICE US - Munchies
via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network
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Text
A Love Letter to Señor Frog's, A Wild, Boozy Wonderland I Miss
Here's a memory I'm shocked I can remember so vividly, because of my sobriety level at that moment, which was zero: It was 1999 and I was 15 years old. My cousin Raquel leaned in close as Spanish pop dance remixes blasted all around us; a nearby server wearing shot glasses in bullet belts across his chest like a Party Rambo blew this whistle while pouring a tequila shot down a girl's mouth and giving her head a shake. "Do you wanna get really fucked up?" Raquel asked. It was the kind of peer pressure-driven dare that only works on teens desperately trying to prove they can hang. Naturally, I said yes, and Raquel handed me a Cucaracha—a flaming combination of añejo Tequila and Kahlua. And that is the story of how I ended up vomiting all over a table and eventually asleep next to a toilet at the Tijuana Señor Frog's.
Since 1989, when it was founded in Mazatlán, Mexico, Señor Frog's has prided itself on Mexican-themed debauchery—a scene where the party never dies and the shots flow like the Rio Grande, no matter the day or time. The website proudly and prominently declares the restaurant/bar/nightclub an "infamous party scene." Along with its sister bars, Carlos'n Charlie's and El Squid Roe, the chain has earned a reputation as the prime party destination for white spring breakers heading to Cancún or Cabo. However, for many Latinx people—Mexicans in particular—Señor Frog's has operated more as a constant in their social lives, a space that reflected the absurd and fun aspects of their culture and gave them exactly what teenagers are looking for on a Saturday night: somewhere to rage among the corny signs; servers shaking their asses against old ladies; sombreros, maracas, and other Mexican tchotchkes covering the walls; and, in the case of my hometown franchise, a framed photo of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson drinking in one of the booths. (No one thought to take it down at the Tijuana location, which has since closed.)
Natalia F. is a 41-year-old Brooklynite who works in public media and grew up in the eponymous capital city of Puebla in Mexico. The city boasts a high number of universities and is a major tourist spot for Mexicans, and Natalia spent much of her adolescence partying at the Señor Frog's in her hometown and even dated one of its servers, which is how she ended up in possession of a stunning Señor Frog's branded denim jacket worn often in her teen years. "When I was growing up, that Señor Frog's was always the cool place to go, and the place that we would go out, mostly [during] junior high and high school," she told VICE.
Like Natalia, I spent many nights in my teens dancing and drinking at Señor Frog's, which was conveniently located across the road from my family's house in Tijuana. At night, the sounds of Whigfield's "Saturday Night" and Paradisio's "Bailando" (again, it was the late 90s/early 00s) wafted through my bedroom window, joining the cacophony of honking cars waiting in line to cross into the United States. It was where we had countless family dinners and parties, especially on nights they held their taquizas. My parents, entrusting me in the care of my cousin, allowed me to go party even though I wasn't yet 18, the legal drinking age in Mexico. As much as I was a massive dweeb, taking five AP classes and box-stepping in my high school production of Oliver!, I was also what we affectionately call a desmadrosa—wild, and a bit of a troublemaker. Once, when a doorman wouldn't let me in the club, my dad drove down and bribed him with a tenner. A lot of things could have gone wrong on those nights out, and there is certainly an atmosphere of sexual inappropriateness that permeates the space that creates the possibility of bad things happening, both then and now. Thankfully, all I ever left with was a hangover and, on one occasion, a missing shoe. Growing up in a city famous for its nightlife, with Señor Frog's as the backdrop for much of my coming of age, had its lasting impacts on my way of life. That desmadrosa energy has never left me, even if it's mostly dormant now.
"I was a little desmadrosa party girl growing up, too," said Natalia. "It set the standard for how I would party forever."
Frog's was the space that not just allowed that wild, reckless abandon to run free, but enabled it. "Towards the end of the night, it would become raucous and you'd start dancing on the tables and dancing on the bars, dancing [on] whatever surface was available," said Natalia. Where else will an employee of any club or bar help hoist you up onto a speaker so you can shake it to La Bouche? "The [servers] would start grabbing people and dancing, being kind of like animators for the party," said Natalia. "And so that always guaranteed that people would be riled up to some degree."
Indeed, Señor Frog's served as a rite of passage for many, regardless of whether they enjoyed the experience or not. Araceli Cruz, a Mexican American producer originally from Montebello, California, who now lives in Savannah, remembers the allure that Señor Frog's had on her as a young girl. On trips to Mexico with her family, Cruz was only allowed in the gift shop by her strict parents. "It felt like this forbidden strip club or something," she said.
It wasn't until the infamous Times Square Señor Frog's opened in New York City that she was finally able to step inside the famed but verboten establishment. In a notorious New York Times one-star review, critic Pete Wells described the restaurant as "a scripted theater of the inane with random outbreaks of mediocre Tex-Mex," adding, "Señor Frog's' brand of fun is so mindless that it’s embarrassing to give in to at first, but eventually everybody I brought there did give in, maybe because we’re all so desperate to let go a little bit." The Times was not wrong in its assessment of the beauty of this completely stupid and yet sacred space. When Cruz finally made her way there, she said it was "as cheesy and terrible as I always dreamed it was."
"It felt like a thrill to finally partake in this hyped-up buzz that I had told myself about that place," she said. "Finally being inside felt like a rite of passage. But it wasn't that much fun inside. It was crazy loud and crowded." Dining and dashing was the highlight of her first-time at Frog's. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
What has always felt interesting about Señor Frog's is the way in which it reflects Mexican culture onto its clientele—not with a whisper, but bellowed out of a megaphone accompanied by bull horns and whistles. Natalia sees it as a "heightened reflection" of Mexican culture, heavy on the kitsch and with the lack of subtlety that is intrinsic to our humor and style of partying. (After all, grown ass adult dressed as children—drawn-on freckles and all—making weirdly sexual jokes on variety shows are standard entertainment in Latinx media.) As a result, the brand also made the space palatable to tourists, amplifying the stereotypes of the culture and allowing them to partake in the amusement. "It felt touristy to me for sure but I don't recall one single white person there ever," said Aidee Escalante, a 33-year-old veterinary technician from San Diego and Tijuana. If anything, Señor Frog's blurs the line between paying homage to Mexican culture and ridiculing it. But in the end, it was never meant to be taken seriously. Overthinking it, as I'm doing now, is not its ethos.
For Cruz, Señor Frog's came to represent her struggle with her identity as a Mexican in America—the sense of being ni de aqui, ni de alla; not from here nor there. She was an outsider, entering a place she knew was part of her culture but where she didn't quite fit in. "In essence, Señor Frog's reminds me of my trips to Mexico as a kid," she said. But the party horns and tequila shots beckoned, and she doesn't regret her jaunt at the now defunct Times Square location. In fact, she felt like she owed it to herself to step through its doors and be one with the Day-Glo madness.
"The weird thing," she says, "is when it opened in NYC, it felt like a part of my culture was here."
Alex Zaragoza is a senior staff writer at VICE.
via VICE US - Munchies VICE US - Munchies
via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network
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Text
A Love Letter to Señor Frog's, A Wild, Boozy Wonderland I Miss
Here's a memory I'm shocked I can remember so vividly, because of my sobriety level at that moment, which was zero: It was 1999 and I was 15 years old. My cousin Raquel leaned in close as Spanish pop dance remixes blasted all around us; a nearby server wearing shot glasses in bullet belts across his chest like a Party Rambo blew this whistle while pouring a tequila shot down a girl's mouth and giving her head a shake. "Do you wanna get really fucked up?" Raquel asked. It was the kind of peer pressure-driven dare that only works on teens desperately trying to prove they can hang. Naturally, I said yes, and Raquel handed me a Cucaracha—a flaming combination of añejo Tequila and Kahlua. And that is the story of how I ended up vomiting all over a table and eventually asleep next to a toilet at the Tijuana Señor Frog's.
Since 1989, when it was founded in Mazatlán, Mexico, Señor Frog's has prided itself on Mexican-themed debauchery—a scene where the party never dies and the shots flow like the Rio Grande, no matter the day or time. The website proudly and prominently declares the restaurant/bar/nightclub an "infamous party scene." Along with its sister bars, Carlos'n Charlie's and El Squid Roe, the chain has earned a reputation as the prime party destination for white spring breakers heading to Cancún or Cabo. However, for many Latinx people—Mexicans in particular—Señor Frog's has operated more as a constant in their social lives, a space that reflected the absurd and fun aspects of their culture and gave them exactly what teenagers are looking for on a Saturday night: somewhere to rage among the corny signs; servers shaking their asses against old ladies; sombreros, maracas, and other Mexican tchotchkes covering the walls; and, in the case of my hometown franchise, a framed photo of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson drinking in one of the booths. (No one thought to take it down at the Tijuana location, which has since closed.)
Natalia F. is a 41-year-old Brooklynite who works in public media and grew up in the eponymous capital city of Puebla in Mexico. The city boasts a high number of universities and is a major tourist spot for Mexicans, and Natalia spent much of her adolescence partying at the Señor Frog's in her hometown and even dated one of its servers, which is how she ended up in possession of a stunning Señor Frog's branded denim jacket worn often in her teen years. "When I was growing up, that Señor Frog's was always the cool place to go, and the place that we would go out, mostly [during] junior high and high school," she told VICE.
Like Natalia, I spent many nights in my teens dancing and drinking at Señor Frog's, which was conveniently located across the road from my family's house in Tijuana. At night, the sounds of Whigfield's "Saturday Night" and Paradisio's "Bailando" (again, it was the late 90s/early 00s) wafted through my bedroom window, joining the cacophony of honking cars waiting in line to cross into the United States. It was where we had countless family dinners and parties, especially on nights they held their taquizas. My parents, entrusting me in the care of my cousin, allowed me to go party even though I wasn't yet 18, the legal drinking age in Mexico. As much as I was a massive dweeb, taking five AP classes and box-stepping in my high school production of Oliver!, I was also what we affectionately call a desmadrosa—wild, and a bit of a troublemaker. Once, when a doorman wouldn't let me in the club, my dad drove down and bribed him with a tenner. A lot of things could have gone wrong on those nights out, and there is certainly an atmosphere of sexual inappropriateness that permeates the space that creates the possibility of bad things happening, both then and now. Thankfully, all I ever left with was a hangover and, on one occasion, a missing shoe. Growing up in a city famous for its nightlife, with Señor Frog's as the backdrop for much of my coming of age, had its lasting impacts on my way of life. That desmadrosa energy has never left me, even if it's mostly dormant now.
"I was a little desmadrosa party girl growing up, too," said Natalia. "It set the standard for how I would party forever."
Frog's was the space that not just allowed that wild, reckless abandon to run free, but enabled it. "Towards the end of the night, it would become raucous and you'd start dancing on the tables and dancing on the bars, dancing [on] whatever surface was available," said Natalia. Where else will an employee of any club or bar help hoist you up onto a speaker so you can shake it to La Bouche? "The [servers] would start grabbing people and dancing, being kind of like animators for the party," said Natalia. "And so that always guaranteed that people would be riled up to some degree."
Indeed, Señor Frog's served as a rite of passage for many, regardless of whether they enjoyed the experience or not. Araceli Cruz, a Mexican American producer originally from Montebello, California, who now lives in Savannah, remembers the allure that Señor Frog's had on her as a young girl. On trips to Mexico with her family, Cruz was only allowed in the gift shop by her strict parents. "It felt like this forbidden strip club or something," she said.
It wasn't until the infamous Times Square Señor Frog's opened in New York City that she was finally able to step inside the famed but verboten establishment. In a notorious New York Times one-star review, critic Pete Wells described the restaurant as "a scripted theater of the inane with random outbreaks of mediocre Tex-Mex," adding, "Señor Frog's' brand of fun is so mindless that it’s embarrassing to give in to at first, but eventually everybody I brought there did give in, maybe because we’re all so desperate to let go a little bit." The Times was not wrong in its assessment of the beauty of this completely stupid and yet sacred space. When Cruz finally made her way there, she said it was "as cheesy and terrible as I always dreamed it was."
"It felt like a thrill to finally partake in this hyped-up buzz that I had told myself about that place," she said. "Finally being inside felt like a rite of passage. But it wasn't that much fun inside. It was crazy loud and crowded." Dining and dashing was the highlight of her first-time at Frog's. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
What has always felt interesting about Señor Frog's is the way in which it reflects Mexican culture onto its clientele—not with a whisper, but bellowed out of a megaphone accompanied by bull horns and whistles. Natalia sees it as a "heightened reflection" of Mexican culture, heavy on the kitsch and with the lack of subtlety that is intrinsic to our humor and style of partying. (After all, grown ass adult dressed as children—drawn-on freckles and all—making weirdly sexual jokes on variety shows are standard entertainment in Latinx media.) As a result, the brand also made the space palatable to tourists, amplifying the stereotypes of the culture and allowing them to partake in the amusement. "It felt touristy to me for sure but I don't recall one single white person there ever," said Aidee Escalante, a 33-year-old veterinary technician from San Diego and Tijuana. If anything, Señor Frog's blurs the line between paying homage to Mexican culture and ridiculing it. But in the end, it was never meant to be taken seriously. Overthinking it, as I'm doing now, is not its ethos.
For Cruz, Señor Frog's came to represent her struggle with her identity as a Mexican in America—the sense of being ni de aqui, ni de alla; not from here nor there. She was an outsider, entering a place she knew was part of her culture but where she didn't quite fit in. "In essence, Señor Frog's reminds me of my trips to Mexico as a kid," she said. But the party horns and tequila shots beckoned, and she doesn't regret her jaunt at the now defunct Times Square location. In fact, she felt like she owed it to herself to step through its doors and be one with the Day-Glo madness.
"The weird thing," she says, "is when it opened in NYC, it felt like a part of my culture was here."
Alex Zaragoza is a senior staff writer at VICE.
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A Love Letter to Señor Frog's, A Wild, Boozy Wonderland I Miss
Here's a memory I'm shocked I can remember so vividly, because of my sobriety level at that moment, which was zero: It was 1999 and I was 15 years old. My cousin Raquel leaned in close as Spanish pop dance remixes blasted all around us; a nearby server wearing shot glasses in bullet belts across his chest like a Party Rambo blew this whistle while pouring a tequila shot down a girl's mouth and giving her head a shake. "Do you wanna get really fucked up?" Raquel asked. It was the kind of peer pressure-driven dare that only works on teens desperately trying to prove they can hang. Naturally, I said yes, and Raquel handed me a Cucaracha—a flaming combination of añejo Tequila and Kahlua. And that is the story of how I ended up vomiting all over a table and eventually asleep next to a toilet at the Tijuana Señor Frog's.
Since 1989, when it was founded in Mazatlán, Mexico, Señor Frog's has prided itself on Mexican-themed debauchery—a scene where the party never dies and the shots flow like the Rio Grande, no matter the day or time. The website proudly and prominently declares the restaurant/bar/nightclub an "infamous party scene." Along with its sister bars, Carlos'n Charlie's and El Squid Roe, the chain has earned a reputation as the prime party destination for white spring breakers heading to Cancún or Cabo. However, for many Latinx people—Mexicans in particular—Señor Frog's has operated more as a constant in their social lives, a space that reflected the absurd and fun aspects of their culture and gave them exactly what teenagers are looking for on a Saturday night: somewhere to rage among the corny signs; servers shaking their asses against old ladies; sombreros, maracas, and other Mexican tchotchkes covering the walls; and, in the case of my hometown franchise, a framed photo of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson drinking in one of the booths. (No one thought to take it down at the Tijuana location, which has since closed.)
Natalia F. is a 41-year-old Brooklynite who works in public media and grew up in the eponymous capital city of Puebla in Mexico. The city boasts a high number of universities and is a major tourist spot for Mexicans, and Natalia spent much of her adolescence partying at the Señor Frog's in her hometown and even dated one of its servers, which is how she ended up in possession of a stunning Señor Frog's branded denim jacket worn often in her teen years. "When I was growing up, that Señor Frog's was always the cool place to go, and the place that we would go out, mostly [during] junior high and high school," she told VICE.
Like Natalia, I spent many nights in my teens dancing and drinking at Señor Frog's, which was conveniently located across the road from my family's house in Tijuana. At night, the sounds of Whigfield's "Saturday Night" and Paradisio's "Bailando" (again, it was the late 90s/early 00s) wafted through my bedroom window, joining the cacophony of honking cars waiting in line to cross into the United States. It was where we had countless family dinners and parties, especially on nights they held their taquizas. My parents, entrusting me in the care of my cousin, allowed me to go party even though I wasn't yet 18, the legal drinking age in Mexico. As much as I was a massive dweeb, taking five AP classes and box-stepping in my high school production of Oliver!, I was also what we affectionately call a desmadrosa—wild, and a bit of a troublemaker. Once, when a doorman wouldn't let me in the club, my dad drove down and bribed him with a tenner. A lot of things could have gone wrong on those nights out, and there is certainly an atmosphere of sexual inappropriateness that permeates the space that creates the possibility of bad things happening, both then and now. Thankfully, all I ever left with was a hangover and, on one occasion, a missing shoe. Growing up in a city famous for its nightlife, with Señor Frog's as the backdrop for much of my coming of age, had its lasting impacts on my way of life. That desmadrosa energy has never left me, even if it's mostly dormant now.
"I was a little desmadrosa party girl growing up, too," said Natalia. "It set the standard for how I would party forever."
Frog's was the space that not just allowed that wild, reckless abandon to run free, but enabled it. "Towards the end of the night, it would become raucous and you'd start dancing on the tables and dancing on the bars, dancing [on] whatever surface was available," said Natalia. Where else will an employee of any club or bar help hoist you up onto a speaker so you can shake it to La Bouche? "The [servers] would start grabbing people and dancing, being kind of like animators for the party," said Natalia. "And so that always guaranteed that people would be riled up to some degree."
Indeed, Señor Frog's served as a rite of passage for many, regardless of whether they enjoyed the experience or not. Araceli Cruz, a Mexican American producer originally from Montebello, California, who now lives in Savannah, remembers the allure that Señor Frog's had on her as a young girl. On trips to Mexico with her family, Cruz was only allowed in the gift shop by her strict parents. "It felt like this forbidden strip club or something," she said.
It wasn't until the infamous Times Square Señor Frog's opened in New York City that she was finally able to step inside the famed but verboten establishment. In a notorious New York Times one-star review, critic Pete Wells described the restaurant as "a scripted theater of the inane with random outbreaks of mediocre Tex-Mex," adding, "Señor Frog's' brand of fun is so mindless that it’s embarrassing to give in to at first, but eventually everybody I brought there did give in, maybe because we’re all so desperate to let go a little bit." The Times was not wrong in its assessment of the beauty of this completely stupid and yet sacred space. When Cruz finally made her way there, she said it was "as cheesy and terrible as I always dreamed it was."
"It felt like a thrill to finally partake in this hyped-up buzz that I had told myself about that place," she said. "Finally being inside felt like a rite of passage. But it wasn't that much fun inside. It was crazy loud and crowded." Dining and dashing was the highlight of her first-time at Frog's. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
What has always felt interesting about Señor Frog's is the way in which it reflects Mexican culture onto its clientele—not with a whisper, but bellowed out of a megaphone accompanied by bull horns and whistles. Natalia sees it as a "heightened reflection" of Mexican culture, heavy on the kitsch and with the lack of subtlety that is intrinsic to our humor and style of partying. (After all, grown ass adult dressed as children—drawn-on freckles and all—making weirdly sexual jokes on variety shows are standard entertainment in Latinx media.) As a result, the brand also made the space palatable to tourists, amplifying the stereotypes of the culture and allowing them to partake in the amusement. "It felt touristy to me for sure but I don't recall one single white person there ever," said Aidee Escalante, a 33-year-old veterinary technician from San Diego and Tijuana. If anything, Señor Frog's blurs the line between paying homage to Mexican culture and ridiculing it. But in the end, it was never meant to be taken seriously. Overthinking it, as I'm doing now, is not its ethos.
For Cruz, Señor Frog's came to represent her struggle with her identity as a Mexican in America—the sense of being ni de aqui, ni de alla; not from here nor there. She was an outsider, entering a place she knew was part of her culture but where she didn't quite fit in. "In essence, Señor Frog's reminds me of my trips to Mexico as a kid," she said. But the party horns and tequila shots beckoned, and she doesn't regret her jaunt at the now defunct Times Square location. In fact, she felt like she owed it to herself to step through its doors and be one with the Day-Glo madness.
"The weird thing," she says, "is when it opened in NYC, it felt like a part of my culture was here."
Alex Zaragoza is a senior staff writer at VICE.
via VICE US - Munchies VICE US - Munchies
via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network
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Text
A Love Letter to Señor Frog's, A Wild, Boozy Wonderland I Miss
Here's a memory I'm shocked I can remember so vividly, because of my sobriety level at that moment, which was zero: It was 1999 and I was 15 years old. My cousin Raquel leaned in close as Spanish pop dance remixes blasted all around us; a nearby server wearing shot glasses in bullet belts across his chest like a Party Rambo blew this whistle while pouring a tequila shot down a girl's mouth and giving her head a shake. "Do you wanna get really fucked up?" Raquel asked. It was the kind of peer pressure-driven dare that only works on teens desperately trying to prove they can hang. Naturally, I said yes, and Raquel handed me a Cucaracha—a flaming combination of añejo Tequila and Kahlua. And that is the story of how I ended up vomiting all over a table and eventually asleep next to a toilet at the Tijuana Señor Frog's.
Since 1989, when it was founded in Mazatlán, Mexico, Señor Frog's has prided itself on Mexican-themed debauchery—a scene where the party never dies and the shots flow like the Rio Grande, no matter the day or time. The website proudly and prominently declares the restaurant/bar/nightclub an "infamous party scene." Along with its sister bars, Carlos'n Charlie's and El Squid Roe, the chain has earned a reputation as the prime party destination for white spring breakers heading to Cancún or Cabo. However, for many Latinx people—Mexicans in particular—Señor Frog's has operated more as a constant in their social lives, a space that reflected the absurd and fun aspects of their culture and gave them exactly what teenagers are looking for on a Saturday night: somewhere to rage among the corny signs; servers shaking their asses against old ladies; sombreros, maracas, and other Mexican tchotchkes covering the walls; and, in the case of my hometown franchise, a framed photo of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson drinking in one of the booths. (No one thought to take it down at the Tijuana location, which has since closed.)
Natalia F. is a 41-year-old Brooklynite who works in public media and grew up in the eponymous capital city of Puebla in Mexico. The city boasts a high number of universities and is a major tourist spot for Mexicans, and Natalia spent much of her adolescence partying at the Señor Frog's in her hometown and even dated one of its servers, which is how she ended up in possession of a stunning Señor Frog's branded denim jacket worn often in her teen years. "When I was growing up, that Señor Frog's was always the cool place to go, and the place that we would go out, mostly [during] junior high and high school," she told VICE.
Like Natalia, I spent many nights in my teens dancing and drinking at Señor Frog's, which was conveniently located across the road from my family's house in Tijuana. At night, the sounds of Whigfield's "Saturday Night" and Paradisio's "Bailando" (again, it was the late 90s/early 00s) wafted through my bedroom window, joining the cacophony of honking cars waiting in line to cross into the United States. It was where we had countless family dinners and parties, especially on nights they held their taquizas. My parents, entrusting me in the care of my cousin, allowed me to go party even though I wasn't yet 18, the legal drinking age in Mexico. As much as I was a massive dweeb, taking five AP classes and box-stepping in my high school production of Oliver!, I was also what we affectionately call a desmadrosa—wild, and a bit of a troublemaker. Once, when a doorman wouldn't let me in the club, my dad drove down and bribed him with a tenner. A lot of things could have gone wrong on those nights out, and there is certainly an atmosphere of sexual inappropriateness that permeates the space that creates the possibility of bad things happening, both then and now. Thankfully, all I ever left with was a hangover and, on one occasion, a missing shoe. Growing up in a city famous for its nightlife, with Señor Frog's as the backdrop for much of my coming of age, had its lasting impacts on my way of life. That desmadrosa energy has never left me, even if it's mostly dormant now.
"I was a little desmadrosa party girl growing up, too," said Natalia. "It set the standard for how I would party forever."
Frog's was the space that not just allowed that wild, reckless abandon to run free, but enabled it. "Towards the end of the night, it would become raucous and you'd start dancing on the tables and dancing on the bars, dancing [on] whatever surface was available," said Natalia. Where else will an employee of any club or bar help hoist you up onto a speaker so you can shake it to La Bouche? "The [servers] would start grabbing people and dancing, being kind of like animators for the party," said Natalia. "And so that always guaranteed that people would be riled up to some degree."
Indeed, Señor Frog's served as a rite of passage for many, regardless of whether they enjoyed the experience or not. Araceli Cruz, a Mexican American producer originally from Montebello, California, who now lives in Savannah, remembers the allure that Señor Frog's had on her as a young girl. On trips to Mexico with her family, Cruz was only allowed in the gift shop by her strict parents. "It felt like this forbidden strip club or something," she said.
It wasn't until the infamous Times Square Señor Frog's opened in New York City that she was finally able to step inside the famed but verboten establishment. In a notorious New York Times one-star review, critic Pete Wells described the restaurant as "a scripted theater of the inane with random outbreaks of mediocre Tex-Mex," adding, "Señor Frog's' brand of fun is so mindless that it’s embarrassing to give in to at first, but eventually everybody I brought there did give in, maybe because we’re all so desperate to let go a little bit." The Times was not wrong in its assessment of the beauty of this completely stupid and yet sacred space. When Cruz finally made her way there, she said it was "as cheesy and terrible as I always dreamed it was."
"It felt like a thrill to finally partake in this hyped-up buzz that I had told myself about that place," she said. "Finally being inside felt like a rite of passage. But it wasn't that much fun inside. It was crazy loud and crowded." Dining and dashing was the highlight of her first-time at Frog's. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
What has always felt interesting about Señor Frog's is the way in which it reflects Mexican culture onto its clientele—not with a whisper, but bellowed out of a megaphone accompanied by bull horns and whistles. Natalia sees it as a "heightened reflection" of Mexican culture, heavy on the kitsch and with the lack of subtlety that is intrinsic to our humor and style of partying. (After all, grown ass adult dressed as children—drawn-on freckles and all—making weirdly sexual jokes on variety shows are standard entertainment in Latinx media.) As a result, the brand also made the space palatable to tourists, amplifying the stereotypes of the culture and allowing them to partake in the amusement. "It felt touristy to me for sure but I don't recall one single white person there ever," said Aidee Escalante, a 33-year-old veterinary technician from San Diego and Tijuana. If anything, Señor Frog's blurs the line between paying homage to Mexican culture and ridiculing it. But in the end, it was never meant to be taken seriously. Overthinking it, as I'm doing now, is not its ethos.
For Cruz, Señor Frog's came to represent her struggle with her identity as a Mexican in America—the sense of being ni de aqui, ni de alla; not from here nor there. She was an outsider, entering a place she knew was part of her culture but where she didn't quite fit in. "In essence, Señor Frog's reminds me of my trips to Mexico as a kid," she said. But the party horns and tequila shots beckoned, and she doesn't regret her jaunt at the now defunct Times Square location. In fact, she felt like she owed it to herself to step through its doors and be one with the Day-Glo madness.
"The weird thing," she says, "is when it opened in NYC, it felt like a part of my culture was here."
Alex Zaragoza is a senior staff writer at VICE.
via VICE US - Munchies VICE US - Munchies
via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network
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