In September, I was walking through Greenwich Village with a friend. We were chatting away as we passed by the IFC movie theater. Suddenly he noticed that I was no longer talking, and that, in fact, I had stopped several paces behind him. I had been dumbstruck by the theater marquee which said “Buffy singalong”.

Those of you that know me are probably aware of my once-overwhelming obsession with Buffy. So the idea that a theater was doing a singalong to the musical episode of Buffy was really just too awesome for words. I went over and asked about it, and they were doing a midnight showing. I called a few friends, and managed to convince a couple people to come with me to it. We got there at 11:45. There was a line of a couple hundred people on the sidewalk. We went to get tickets. It was sold out. I was denied!

However, they said they would be doing it again in November and that tickets would go on sale the following week. I stopped by the following week and bought six tickets, and then even managed to scare up five people to go with me.

Last night was the long-awaited (by me, at least) second Buffy singalong in New York. We already had tickets (fortunately, as it had sold out earlier in the week), but showed up at 11:20 or so to get in line for seats; there were about sixty people already there by that point. I was not even close to being the biggest Buffy geek in line. I don’t own the musical episode DVD (I recorded it off the air) or the soundtrack CD. I’d probably watched it fewer than ten times (although I did watch it on Friday night to remind myself, and then printed out the lyrics). After hanging out in line, we finally got to go in at midnight.

The show itself was a blast. In light of it being November, they showed Pangs, the Thanksgiving episode from season 4, as the warmup act. Much funnier than I remember it being, or maybe that was an effect of watching it with a crowd of other psyched people. They also had a Spike trivia quiz, which I did embarrassingly poorly on – I only got something like 4 out of 10 right. I’ll have to study up if I go again.

As far as the musical episode itself, they’re trying to jump-start a Rocky Horror-like cult movement, so they had people acting out the various parts on stage, and passed out goodie bags to use as props. They prompted people to yell things at the screen (“Shut up, Dawn!”), throw things at appropriate times, use their cellphones as lighters during Giles’s power ballad, etc. I had been worried that people wouldn’t actually sing along but they did, so I got to sing out and enjoy myself.

Fun stuff. I might go again in December – they’re planning to do it monthly now. Check it out at Buffy Sings.

P.S. Probably more fluffy posts for the next few days as I catch up on homework. As usual, read the comments on my last post for some well-thought-out alternative viewpoints.