Luv Doc Recommends: First Annual Texas Travesty Film Festival

What a great weekend to be a smoker. Finally being banished to face the elements for your post-appetizer, midmeal nic fix isn’t such a bad thing after all. No more huddling on a cold, damp, windswept patio sucking down a Marlboro so fast that it’s glowing like an afterburner on an F-16. It’s springtime, at least for the next few weeks, so you should take full advantage: long, languid draws punctuated by perfectly formed smoke rings that hang happily in the fresh springtime air like little vertical halos. What a pleasure it is to add a thing of beauty into the world, even if deep in your heart you know it’s composed of a staggering array of toxins and carcinogens that may someday turn your lungs into ashy bags of liquid, forcing you to drag around an oxygen canister just so you can summon enough wind to shuffle to the kitchen and take your painkillers – but you’ve already dealt with that prospect, and there’s plenty of time to quit once the weather turns shitty, right? For the time being you’re the prince of the patio, the sultan of smoke, the lord of the rings. You may want to keep them tight however, because, like it or not, there will be plenty of other people out there with you as well. It’s not only a great weekend to be a smoker; it’s a great weekend to be a nudist, a golfer, a farmworker, or a homeless person. In fact, you can pretty much bet that everyone who has a respectable excuse to be outside will be outside this weekend … along with nearly everybody else. Not only that, but it’s mating season for nearly every phylum and genus up to and including homo. That’s right, you can expect lots of hot, steamy outdoor action this weekend. There’s the Swamp Romp down on Sixth Street, the Rattlesnake Roundup in Taylor, and the SPAMARAMA down at Waterloo Park just to name a few. All will be teeming with sweaty folks on the make, but since this is an alternative publication, here’s an alternate suggestion: Check out the first Texas Travesty Film Festival at the Texas Union Theatre. In case you never get in from the suburbs, the Texas Travesty is the student humor publication at UT, and this film festival is a collection of humorous shorts made by both students and locals. It may seem like a travesty to waste a beautiful spring evening holed up in a dark theatre with a bunch of pasty-faced college kids watching silly film shorts, but it starts late so you can eat SPAM, dance the zydeco, get bitten by a rattlesnake, and still make it to this deal in plenty of time. If you’re still unsure, maybe you should go outside, have a long, slow cigarette, and think about it.