About fifteen people onstage including some very goddess-looking chicks. Buxom-blondes, namely. A smattering of guys.
He's not a punchline to this crowd, he's more of a hedonistic legend, or a libertarian folk hero. He's tapped into something that this crowd needed. He's not political.
There's a man onstage that looks just like Duane Allman, and he asks Sheen what planet has the purest cocaine. "Planet Fucking Houston," replies Sheen to a roar.
This crowd is a microcosm of the side of Houston you probably hate. UFC-looking guys, very plastic girls, assorted everyday people. Lots of drunken groups of guys. Small clans of smoky blondes.
A lady who could have been my junior high science teacher is trashed onstage and makes out with Sheen for two seconds. Is that making out or just orally attacking?
No one is leaving this show. He's getting loved. Where are the hecklers?
He ends on a very hopeful note, sad about losing his kids, Two & A Half Men, but seeming to feel like he can get them back somehow. He thanks us all and the show is over. The Snoop Dogg song "Winning", recorded for Sheen, plays us out.
I wait by the buses after the show to mix with autograph hounds and super-fans holding movie stills and baseballs for Sheen to sign, to get a sense of Sheen Nation. An older Hispanic woman screams "I love you Charlie!" in odd intervals even when he's not present or even in view. She's trying to give Sheen's security team a note imploring him to help her father get a Medal Of Honor. Lots of groupie gals catting around.
Like I said before, to a section of the country he's a fucked-up glimmer of hope in a world of "moral Nazis" and liberal alarmists. The response to the Obama rip was evidence enough. Sheen is not just a hash-tag or a YouTube clip, he's an ethos.
The women here want to sleep with him, and the men want to be him, or maybe even help him screw those women. Folks on Twitter will complain that I am leaving out his criminal past of abusing females, but I'm just covering a show, not prosecuting him in court.
I wonder what other celebs could do tours like this. Lindsay Lohan? It's a first as far as I can tell. Don't know if anyone has this captivating skill he does. Sure there was Conan O'Brien last year after the NBC unpleasantness, but he is a comedian who is used to performing nightly on the fly, and Sheen is an embattled actor who deals in written scripts. Maybe Anna Nicole, Tonya Harding, and John Wayne Bobbitt could have done something on this scale.
I don't agree with his lifestyle personally or morally, but it's a hell of a story, and my opinions don't matter. He's the gonzo best-case scenario that Hunter S. Thompson strived for. Sheen's story is an interesting one to say the least, and a lesson in just what social media can do in 2011. Winning or losing.
