Saving the Best for "Last?"

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and the Christmas season is now upon us. People have all sorts of Christmas traditions -- but one in particular, that it seems has become more popular in recent years, kind of gnaws at me.

"Whamageddon" is the challenge to go for as long as you can in the holiday season without hearing Wham's original version of the song "Last Christmas." I'm sure everyone who participates in this is just having some goofy fun. (And if you've already posted about "Whamageddon" online, please know that this blog post is not at you in any way. I was thinking about all this... well... last Christmas.)

The thing that increasingly bothers me is: why, of all possible Christmas songs, is it "Last Christmas" by Wham that you're supposed to avoid?

If the challenge were about sheer difficulty, there are more ubiquitous Christmas songs you could set out to avoid. A true Christmas warrior would try dodging Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" for the holiday season.

If the challenge were about keeping goofy synth-pop instruments out of your ears, surely the challenge would be based around "Wonderful Christmastime," Paul McCartney's agonizing contribution to the Christmas canon. (I'm still haunted by that song, more than 25 years after I worked a retail job through several holiday seasons.)

Maybe there's something about the melancholy nature of the song, and wanting to avoid sad sentiments over the holidays? But the challenge could just as easily been about avoiding Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas," or The Carpenters' "Merry Christmas, Darling," or "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (the original version being especially dark).

Even though I know it's all "in good fun," I find myself wondering if the dark reason everyone is supposed to avoid the song "Last Christmas" is because it's the gay Christmas song.

George Michael was closeted for most of his life, including at the time he wrote "Last Christmas." Sure, that doesn't automatically mean the song is about gay love. But if you really listen to the lyrics, I feel like you can't avoid the distinct impression that it's the story of a gay romance gone sour because "the other guy" wasn't ready to be public about his sexuality or the relationship.

Add to that the fact that Michael himself seemed to indicate how important the song was by the fact that he played all the instruments on the recording, which he did not normally do for Wham songs. Also, for years he downplayed the song, trying to distance himself from it and not embracing it until later in his career. (Perhaps because it was only later in his career that he lived openly gay?)

Like I said, I'm sure that the "Last Christmas" challenge is meant in good fun. But, as we now stand on the brink of a major backslide for LGBT+ rights, I kinda don't feel like letting even the innocent things slide without comment. Sure, when tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court hears argument in a major transgender case, and telegraphs some horrific and hostile development in the law they're going to realize by next June, whether or not you enjoyed avoiding one particular Christmas song is not going to matter at all. But since it can sometimes feel so impossible to affect the big things, I'm gonna try to notch a completely symbolic win on an admittedly insignificant thing.

And so, this humble proposal: let's all ditch "Whamageddon" and just openly enjoy the song "Last Christmas" without treating it like some kind of holiday contagion.

The Horror... The Amor...

Casa Bonita is a Denver institution, famous to everyone who ever lived here, long before an infamous episode of South Park depicted it for a wider audience. The bizarre Mexican restaurant with TARDIS-like interior dimensions and entertainments from puppet shows to a "haunted house" to cliff divers was decaying in decades of squalor before the creators of South Park bought it, refurbished it, and reopened it to more public demand than ever.

That story is chronicled in a new documentary streaming on Paramount Plus: ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! I found it both quite entertaining and more than a bit horrifying.

First: the entertaining part. The film really demonstrates how improbable it is that Casa Bonita even continues to exist. Only because South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone stepped in was the rundown restaurant saved. Parker in particular is portrayed as a Don Quixote who has made this project his personal windmill. Most people are familiar with the deep lure of nostalgia, but few of us have the kind of financial resources he had to just keep throwing money at a problem past the point of reason.

In the course of this documentary, we see the already-exorbitant sticker price of the restaurant become laden with repair costs that rise, then sail, then soar well past any possible expectations. Casa Bonita has been called "the Mexican Disneyland" by some, and it starts to look like it might cost as much.

That leads to the horrifying part of the documentary. I actually ate at Casa Bonita many times over the years, including a few visits during the 2010s, not long before it closed prior to Parker and Stone's purchase. When the documentary shows you what was actually going on in the walls of the restaurant at that time, I wonder how I've even lived to tell the tale. Vile filth infesting walls, ceiling, and floors feels like only the beginning, as we're shown how much money needs to be spent just to turn Casa Bonita into an inhabitable space -- never mind restoring it to its former glory. You can only wonder how the place was passing inspections for all those years. Bribery? People looking the other way out of their own sense of nostalgia about the place? This documentary is a sort of real-life version of the 80s comedy The Money Pit, where everything that can go wrong does.

But the story does have a happy ending -- and the documentary even showed me things I never knew about Casa Bonita. It points out several spruced up or wholly new features that I didn't notice in my one visit since the place reopened, sparking a feeling in me I hadn't had since visiting the restaurant as a child: there's always something new to discover there, some nook or cranny with something you've never noticed before.

It may be that ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! would hold less appeal for anyone who has never personally visited the restaurant. Then again, maybe it would be interesting to see how this funhouse fever dream is actually a real place. Regardless, I myself give the documentary a B+. It's a fun, wild watch.