BIRTHDAYS, BIKES AND BACK TO SCHOOL

Lola Love (left) and Miss Catwings were the latest participants in Nextdoor's ongoing lipsync battle TOM QUACH PHOTO

Lola Love (left) and Miss Catwings were the latest participants in Nextdoor’s ongoing lipsync battle TOM QUACH PHOTO

After coming back from New York City, I was pretty pooped. They call it the city that never sleeps, and so when I got back, that’s pretty much all I wanted to do.

But there were a couple of birthdays that I had to attend first. The midnight after my girlfriend picked me up from the airport marked the start of her birthday, and so, of course, we had to celebrate and met up with some of her friends to do so. I knew I had to gift her something, but I honestly did not have the time to buy her anything. So I kept it in the back of my mind to look for some cool birthday gifts ideas and get her something fun later on! Even though I was dead tired, I had to strap on a metaphorical party hat and pretend to be chipper and having fun. On her actual birthday, I was luckily able to catch up on some z’s because she had some stuff to do. Despite the extra rest during the day, I was still pretty tired by the time we finished dinner with her family at Monkeypod Kitchen at Ko Olina.

Luckily, there was a killer lipsync battle that night at Nextdoor that got us both having a blast and LOFAO. Two of Chinatown’s heaviest hitters in the burlesque scene, Lola Love and Miss Catwings, duked it out on stage in a most colorful diva competition. Miss Catwings’ half-man, half-woman costume, split down the middle, gave extra intensity to Bruno Mars’ Just The Way You Are as she would sing his lines facing sideways, showing the male side of the costume to the audience, then flip to show a girl’s giddy reaction during the song’s lyrical breaks. Lola Love turned up the heat with her performance of Peaches’ F*** The Pain Away, complete with two scantily clad back-up dancers and a surprise light-up LED crotch under her one-piece teddy with fishnets. Both performers were a sight to behold, and I couldn’t have picked between the two of them, so I’m glad I wasn’t judging.

Unfortunately, the birthdays didn’t stop there, so I had to go out even more last week. Notably, local hip-hop promoter Jus Bone of KTUH’s Got Rice Show had a birthday party at Nextdoor with rapper I.A., who also was celebrating a birthday, as well as the release of his Situations EP. The club was packed, and the drinks were flowing. Bone didn’t disappoint and performed his classic narcoleptic fall-asleep-in-the-club routine to let you know he had a really good time and was spent.

By the time Sunday rolled around, I was ready to relax and get ready for the first day of my second year of medical school. We’re diving into studying neurology and psychiatry, which surely will be fascinating.

In other news, I attended a City and County of Honolulu meeting that updated the community on plans to extend the protected bike lane to South Street, which will be great for my morning commute to Kakaako. After seeing the success of the bike infrastructure in NYC that had been installed during my absence, I’m very excited for Honolulu to become more bike friendly and am happy about the steps the city is taking in that direction, despite the steps being too small and too slow. It’s way faster to bike than to walk, and with the traffic we have, it’s often faster to bike than to drive.

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