Miscasting muscle

So, Tim and I are at the theatre, watching Absurd Person Singular. Lovely play, marble pillars, Jane Horrocks etc etc. All is going well, until...

You see, the play is all about the quiet triumph of a mildly vulgar, vaguely weedy man. Yet, half way through the play, he gets wet and has to take his shirt off, humiliated in a crumpled old sleeveless vest, only...

He had steroid Mary arms. Enormous things you could crush the Terminator with.

The audience made a noise. It wasn't so much "ooh!" as "oh". His arms were completely wrong for the part. I mean, clearly "well done him for having a very good trainer etc etc" but also "i can no longer take you seriously as Sidney the put-upon shopkeeper".

Afterwards, Tim and I went for a po mo, ironic drink at 79 CXR. Forgetting that the last time we'd done this, neither of us laughed. My favourite barman was there, the one i'd had a crush on for years. I told Tim how I'd eventually realised he was going out with a sumo wrestler, which meant I could never be a) Japanese enough or b) fat enough.

There was also a very obvious rent boy in there, which was kind of saddening. The place is currently decorated with elaborate paper lampshades, which I used to rather like. And the toilets really do smell very strongly of vanilla, which is quite sweet, but doesn't take away from how unnerving it is trying to pee in them. I marched in, found a corner of an empty urinal and stood there, my body language saying quite firmly "please, just let me pee and go". Curiously, in the time it took, a man had managed to wander across to the washbasin, and was standing fiddling furiously with himself in the mirror, clearly hoping on some kind of Angle-of-incidence = Angle-of-refraction thing would come into play. I didn't wash my hands.