Last weekend’s highlights, in ultrareadable bullet-point format

My mother taught me that it was improper to write in bullet points instead of paragraphs, but I’m learning otherwise now that I’m writing Sociology for Dummies. I’m working with a “dummifier” who is helping me massage my prose into Dummies style, and her most frequent recommendation is more bullet points. To keep in practice, I’m issuing this weekend’s capsule reviews in convenient bullet-point format.

• A family wedding at St. Thomas More (East Campus). Larry Millett describes this church interior as “muscular.” I’m not sure that’s the word I would have chosen, but I was amused by the statue of St. Thomas that the wedding party had to detour around when they reached the midpoint of the center aisle. Maybe if it had been a gay wedding there would have been hurdles as well.

• Dark Horse Crooked Tree I.P.A. Not bad. Nothing special.

• Casper and the Cookies at the Nomad. Very entertaining—which was a good thing, since downpours rendered patio-sitting an unfeasible option for anyone who might have wanted to escape. (When the rain began, one hipster sitting near the fire grabbed his PBR tallboy and said, sarcastically, to the sky: “Thanks, nature.”) What do Casper and the Cookies look like? Two words: eyelash extensions. What do Casper and the Cookies sound like? Imagine the music of the 70s, minus the three main genres that defined the 70s. Take away disco, punk, and the singer-songwriter movement, and what do you have left? The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty, David Bowie…lots of good stuff.

• My first and only Fringe show. Sad but true. At least it was an entertaining one, with lots of fringe in the literal sense: Lili’s Burlesque Revue at the Rarig Center Proscenium. The self-described “broads in broad daylight” (the first pasties popped out at about 4:15 p.m.) put on a charming State-Fair-themed show, climaxing with a blue ribbon “pusstie.” My girlfriend and I decided that it must have been about as much excitement as the naval-attired guy in the painting on the wall (Cap’n Rarig?) had ever had.

• Dinner at Bedlam. The West Bank theater/bar/restaurant lived up to its designation as “Fringe central,” with the burlesquers arriving just a few minutes after us to hang out in the back room and quench their frequently stated thirst for a few drinks. Also on the scene were Bedlam chef Jim Bueche, personally taking orders and clearing plates in cut-off shorts, red socks, and practical black clogs; Bedlam co-artistic-director Maren Ward, grabbing a quick lunch before the evening performance of Bedlam’s Comedy of Errors; and Dayton’s Bluff Neighborhood Housing Services director Jim Erchul, sweating and sucking on a coconut pop after a shift volunteering in the Bedlam kitchen.

• Closing out happy hour at Bedlam made us late for Jon Ferguson’s Projectile Thinking—which was completely sold out anyway. Turning lemons into lemonade (of sorts), we toasted Ferguson with drinks on the very humid patio at Seven. The upside of the ridiculously high wine prices at Seven is that Martinis with blue-cheese-stuffed olives are a bargain ($10.50) by comparison. We then repaired to Eli’s, a cozy hole in the wall hidden on Hennepin between downtown and Uptown, and thence to The King and I Thai, where late night happy hour was just beginnng and which was populated mostly by people who looked like they had been there a while and would have been ill-advised to stick around for drink specials. The Pad Thai was very tasty, and in compensation for the fact that a dish ordered medium-hot was delivered with virtually no spice, we were given a nifty little caddy with three different options (powder, paste, and vinegar) for kicking it up a notch.

• In Bruges on DVD. Yet another Tarantino ripoff, with gunfights punctuated by debates about whether an “alcove” is the same thing as a “nook” or a “cranny,” but frequently amusing nonetheless. After visiting Bruges a few years ago, my mom said it was one of her favorite cities in Europe and that she could easily live there. I always assumed it was the quaint medieval architecture that won her heart, but now I wonder…maybe it was actually the ready availability of hard drugs and semiautomatic machine guns.

Image: Casper and the Cookies, as stylized by Matt Blanks.