High-Maintenance? Or Just High?

Tonight I was reminded of why I haven't been to a Teddy and Marge show in a awhile.

"I like their music, and it's a really fun scene," I commented to Margie's friend Eric, who was sitting next to me on the concrete parking lot. "But none of the guys are cute."

"I know, right?" he said.

That's about all we agreed on, because I tend to prefer bearded, intellectual, white-collar guys who bathe frequently; and he likes the rebel type - guys who look as if they could be a little dangerous, he told me.

The girls at these shows, on the other hand, are natural beauties, assuming the ink is more or less organic. They're all wearing comfortable shoes. "One of Katie's friends was a little alarmed by your pit hair," I told Margie conversationally, before she started setting up for the show. "She went on and on about it."

Margie laughed. "I never even think about it anymore," she said.

"Do you shave?" Grady asked me - he's the "Teddy" in "Teddy and Marge," and Margie's boyfriend.

Hello! I'm wearing heels here!

So I always feel like a bit of a misfit at their shows.

Like most of the other people there, I bike to work, I get all my clothes from thrift stores, and I like the funky alternative music scene, aside from the cigarette smoke. But I think the biggest distinction between Margie and her friends and me isn't the tats, body hair, vegetarianism, or chain-smoking. It's the fact that they have no objection to using the restroom at the Opera House, even though it only has an old screen door with some tattered purple satin fabric covering most of the screening, and a hook and a nail in the doorjamb to hold it shut.

It's not that I'm too prissy to swill large quantities of Lone Star, honest. It's just that if I end up having to use the facilities, I'm going home.

How the Other Half Lives

Leaning on the railing of a balcony overlooking the pool and yard of a multi-million-dollar Westlake Hills mansion yesterday evening, I realized that Austin has an aristocracy. And the people who keep Austin weird aren't hippies, or garage band members, or Chronicle staffers, or art car drivers, or even, say, Leslie. Not that these people don't do a lot. But they're labor, not management. Without the blessings, programs, and campaigns of the moneyed ruling classes, all these feathers in the weird Austin cap would be just so much underground-movement riffraff.

"How do you know Scott?" I was asked several times over the course of yesterday evening. "Oh, he represented my sister's ex-boyfriend on a DWI charge," I didn't say.

The full story is that the band Margie's in plays at parties for Scott, who really is an extremely nice guy - certainly he has at least 300 close friends - as payment in kind for his services. The upper classes can be indulgent: certainly he had no difficulty affording a "real" band, an excellent professional bluesy roadhouse combo whose name I didn't catch. Teddy and Marge are not such a band. They typically play for exposure, not money, in any case.

There were two kegs of good beer by the front door, two more on the back patio, and a third pair at a drink station in the yard. There was a full bar in the wood-paneled den, better stocked than some restaurant bars I've seen. There were margarita machines and limitless bottles of wine. So Scott, being as I've mentioned a DWI attorney, rented out the parking lot of the nearby high school and hired a fleet of golf carts to shuttle guests back and forth from his house all night. Guests who had too much to drink could then easily be prevented from leaving.

Margie's ex-boyfriend, Bill, befriended Kay over barbecue. She's from Dallas and took an instant dislike to him. "How did you come to be here," she asked, "did you find a flyer on the street somewhere?"

I have never liked Dallas.

But Bill, who works for Waterloo, has been respectably outfitting Scott with vinyl for years, apparently. Scott is a connoisseur, and has a small room just off the entrance hall dedicated to his record collection. Bill is too good-natured to bristle. Kay became friendlier, asking how she might best dispose of her ex-husband's record collection, which she doesn't know anything about, except that he had loved it and supposedly had several rare and valuable items in it.

"Why did you get it, then?" Bill inquired.

Kay laughed. "Oh, I got everything!" she said. "Except the dog."

After we had eaten, Teddy and Marge relieved the roadhouse combo to do a set by the pool. I was apprehensive. "This is not the right scene," I whispered to Bill. "These people are going to hate this."

He laughed. "It doesn't matter," he told me.

We were both right, though at least Scott said he enjoyed the set. I did, too. And the aristocracy of Austin is too well-bred to be openly hostile. Afterwards we tore down and loaded up the trailer, and Grady (that's the Teddy of Teddy and Marge) capped the show by stripping down and leaping, splay-legged, hooting and naked, into the pool. Nobody batted an eye. I don't think they expected anything less from someone who had just played what they had just listened to him playing.

With gratitude to our generous and indulgent host, then, we headed out to Clementine's to hear Grady's girlfriend Lauren play accordion with the Seas, which was totally awesome, then back to the little eastside art co-op where Bill lives.

Money's nice and all, but I think the riffraff have more fun.