Like many, I’m big fan of Nicolas Cage’s work. How big? On my bachelorette party to New Orleans a few years ago I requested we tour St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 so I could get a pic of me and my girls with Cage’s nine-foot pyramid tomb.
Not only can the man seriously act, he can also seriously overact. As a writer who loves puns ( especially bad ones), I appreciate someone who has fun with their art form to the point it causes eye rolls.
And so, when I learned about Uncaged in Jenkintown: A Nic Cage cocktail crawl that happened on Sunday, I wanted to check it out. In some ways, it turned out to be like a lot of Cage movies — not a blockbuster, but still quirky and fun.
The crawl was spread across four Jenkintown bars — the Keep Easy, the Drake Tavern, Buckets Bar, and King’s Corner. Each one featured Cage-themed cocktails and hosted a “Cage match,” where participants went head-to-head in challenges based on Cage films.
Organizer Mel Hager, an owner of the Keep Easy, said she sold out of the 50 Uncaged kits she’d prepared for $15 a pop. While the crawl was free to attend, those who bought a kit — including yours truly — received a passport book, which got you a free Cage match at each establishment (otherwise they were $2 to play); a piece of Cage cash, which was good for one shot at any of the bars (it’s a tiny dollar bill with Nic Cage’s face on it, I’m never spending that); and one of a variety of Cage masks (I felt like I won the lottery when I got the Con-Air Cage).
While I didn’t drink, I hopped around to the bars, tried my hand at the Cage matches, and talked with fellow Cage fans about what brought them out to the event. Here are five of the wackiest things I saw at the Nic Cage bar crawl.
1. H.I. fashion
When H.I. McDunnough kidnaps one of the Arizona quintuplet babies in the 1987 Cohen Brothers classic, Raising Arizona, he proclaims to his wife: “I think I got the best one.”
Of the few Cage character costumes I saw Sunday — which included Ronny from Moonstruck, Cameron Poe from Con Air, and someone portraying Cage’s first role as an unnamed burger shop worker in Fast Times at Ridgemont High — Mike Hutz’s H.I. McDunnough costume was undoubtedly the best one. Hutz, of Huntingdon Valley, had the open Hawaiian shirt, a wig, and McDunnough’s mugshot board.
“What else are you going to do on a Sunday afternoon when you have a Nicolas Cage crawl option?” he said. “There’s nothing he can’t do and he does it with maximum cheesiness, which is just perfect for people who love cheesy.”
2. The faces
Seeing people at bars and walking the streets of Jenkintown wearing Cage face masks was both highly amusing and mildly unsettling, mainly because the eye holes were cut out wonkily, giving them a ragged, creepy edge.
Masks included Face/Off Cage, Con Air Cage, red carpet Cage, and Dracula Cage (from the movie Renfield).
Julia Sousa and Josh Douglas traveled to the crawl from Roxborough because they love Cage and Jenkintown. Douglas walked from bar to bar with his Cage face mask on, which seemed to startle some passing motorists.
“I’m pretty sure they thought I was Michael Myers,” he said.
3. The Cage matches
The games based on Cage films, while homespun, were clever and fun. At Buckets, the game was inspired by the scene in Honeymoon in Vegas where Cage skydives with a bunch of Elvis impersonators. Contestants had to throw toy parachute soldiers that were painted to look like Elvis onto particular spots of a mock-up of the Vegas strip for points.
At King’s Corner, where the challenge was based on the movie National Treasure, participants had to solve little metal mind-bender puzzles.
For the Spider-Noir Cage match at the Drake, you had to keep a balloon bouncing in the air while putting on a cape, mask, and fedora.
I failed spectacularly at all three of those challenges — and I was completely sober! The only one I did succeed at was called Ghost Glider. Based on the film Ghost Rider, the challenge was to to roll a penny down an inclined surface made to look like a road and into the tongs of a fork at the other end.
4. Stickers and sage
For winning the Ghost Glider challenge, I received a bundle of sage and a sticker for my passport book of a shirtless, reclining Cage coming out of a banana.
Let’s address the sage first: Nobody could tell me why this was my prize for winning the challenge, which somehow makes it even better. I have two theories — it could be because sage rhymes with Cage, or maybe it’s because you light sage and in Ghost Rider, Cage lights on fire.
Whatever the reason, I’m gonna smudge some stuff up this weekend.
Now onto this banana sticker — I don’t know why it exists, but I am so happy it does. Each bar gave a different sticker if you won a challenge, but this banana-Cage split one was, by far, the most a-peeling.
Later at the Drake, I met Erica Adams of Bensalem and “her only friend of whimsy,” Amanda Knop, who’d driven from Baltimore to attend the Cage crawl with her. Adams had her own stickers of Cage’s head she was handing out like friendship bracelets at a Taylor Swift concert.
“I just love his movies and doing silly, fun things,” Adams said. “Nicolas Cage himself is very unserious. He’s lived a million different lives in a short span already.”
5. Picolas Cage
A giant cut-out of Cage as a pickle, aka Picolas Cage, was stationed outside of the Keep Easy during the crawl. As someone who likes Cage and cucumbers — but hates pickles — it was a jarring experience. But I saw others relishing the photo op so I didn’t make a big dill out of it.
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