Foppish fatcats milling about (Left) did not resemble typical Benny’s fans
Saturday night Verdon Road resident Malcolm Whitehead drove around downtown Richmond for 30 minutes trying to find a parking space, then wondered why so many of Richmond’s more well-healed residents seemed to be so interested in a gathering of doddering ex-punk rockers, then sat through an entire opera before realizing he had mistaken Centerstage’s grand opening for the Benny-Fit for Hospice, which was the real event he was looking for.
“As God is my witness, I thought this was the Benny-fit,” he said out front of the opulent former Carpenter Center, now called the Sammy Maudlin Center or something. “First of all, they said the Benny-Fit was 10 bucks. Some guy who looked like he just passed through the Doswell fart cloud, judging by his wrinkled nose and haughty demeanor, charged me $140 to get in – that should have raised a flag. Then I should have noticed when the opera started that those people – while dressed and acting strangely – still did not resemble or sound like the Orthotonics. Then the dulcet rounds of soothing, polite and subdued applause should also have been a dead giveaway. It wasn’t until I was leaving after the opera that I overheard some overly-tanned guy tell his super-skinny bejeweled trophy wife that they were going to “take the Benz to LeMaire for a Merlot nightcap” that I suspected something was horribly wrong.”
The Benny-Fit for Hospice was in fact a no-holds-barred reunion of the friends, musicians, hangers-on, burnouts and counter-culture casualties that frequented the popular nightspot in the early 1980s, all to raise money for hospice in Richmond. It is presumed the Centerstage opera was designed to raise money for Centerstage.
“By the time that stupid opera finally ground to a conclusion, and I was able to push my way through literally dozens of chattering penguin suits, cummerbunds, monocles, strapless evening gowns, fake boobs, spray-on tans, frosted hair, top hats, and suffocating perfumes, the Benny-Fit was almost over,” complained Whitehead as he raced his car out to the Playing Field, hoping to get in at the last minute and catch a set of one of the bands.
He was in luck – the Orthotonics were playing, and Whitehead still had two more bands to look forward to. “I missed the silent auction and seeing Dirty Secrets, the Diversions and the updated Good Guys, but I got to see White Cross, Beex and my old friends the Orthos,” he said as he cracked open a Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can, kept a drunk woman from falling and waved through a fogbank of cigarette smoke.
“This is it,” he said proudly at the top of his lungs, “I’m home!”
