The Good Old Gays

All you cynics – look at that young man’s eyebrows.

How can you not trust him?

You had me at “poppers.” WTF do you know about poppers? Hmmm? Seriously. I need a moment. Poppers? I thought you were kinda, er, old. Poppers…

Whoa. That guy? The one in the picture? That business of his I just read – that wasn’t a satire fail? He’s an asshole. One too many poppers.

@JNOV: Honey please. His generation invented poppers. They used to pour them into bandannas and do them on the dance floor.

@Benedick: Yeltzen’s last illegitimate American son.

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: Oh. I was thinking about the stuff you suck out of a balloon.

@JNOV: Nitrous, or NO (NO2?). Scored by the tankful from medical supply warehouses in the 80s before they, like, wised up. Also procured in lesser quantities by college friend’s mom who was sure her daughter was just doing a lot of baking as an undergrad.

@flypaper: Yup Yup. That’s what it was. I bought them in a head shop. The gas was in little things that looked like 02 tanks. You put one of them in a metal thing that opened the tank and inflated a balloon with the gas. Inhale. Roll on the floor giggling until you wet your pants.

I miss poppers. The vitamin C of sex drugs.

I had lunch today with Catt, Catt’s better half (a lot of fun when tipsy), Lefty, Catt’s drop-dead gorgeous tennis pro girlfriend (and her husband, but it was hard to pay attention) and word hit the street that you (Benedick) may be coming to L.A. Anything to this?

@Dodgerblue: That was just an idle threat about my visiting LA.

@Benedick: Oh c’mon. You could totally break the bank on Jeopardy.

@Dodgerblue: The tennis pro was the hott man sitting next to Tommy, he’s the brother of the drop-dead gorgeous woman. And Mr. Catt was a doll! Why he puts up with Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn, we’ll never know.

@Benedick: I could totally see you in LA. With some short shorts. Dodger and Catt got to hear me bitch about my inability to find a Sunday New York Times in Santa Monica, including at two $tarbuck$ and a Whole Paycheck.

@SanFranLefty: Jen actually is an ex-semi pro herself- she played with the Williams sisters.

@Benedick: We have cookies…

@SanFranLefty: Wait. Jen’s not married? [sucks in gut]

@SanFranLefty: Santa Monica has sushi on conveyor belts. Why would you need the New Y Times?

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: Jen actually is an ex-semi pro herself I’ve been ex-semi-pro myself from time to time.

@Dodgerblue: Thing is I have an exacting work/drinking exercise regime that doesn’t allow much time for jaunts.

But good to know that Catt kept his pants on. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.

Plus some unpleasant person sent a linque to this post to Mr Howley who was not amused.

I’m not jelly. The Boy and I will be in Hellay from 1/2 – 1/7 (tickets booked). I told him we’re staying in a hostel, and I asked him if he wanted to share a two-bed room with me or be in a room with 6-8 other folks his age, from different countries, good stuff like that. His response:

Uh

I don’t really want to be in a room with random people I don’t know

To which I replied:

I think random people you don’t know are called “strangers.”

Magic Mountain, here we come!

@Benedick: Come see us, Man!

@JNOV: There are “gang attire” issues at Magic Mountain. Proceed accordingly.

@Dodgerblue: Lovely. All I want to do is ride Superman.

@JNOV: I think you’re out of the age range they care about.

@Dodgerblue: Haha! Yeah. But the kid isn’t.

Are we talking colors?

@JNOV: I think that’s part of it. Saggy pants.

@JNOV: Yes. I believe there have been incidents with firearms. As a random middle-aged white dude they just ignore me (not part of their universe, but if I were younger/browner I’d mind what I said to whom. Not that it’s a huge problem, just something of which to be mindful.

Gah. All of his pants are saggy. I’ll tell him to eat more pizza.

@JNOV: Darling, we all want to ride Superman.

I heard a thing about gangs on This American Life and (okay, could we all please stop laughing at the Limey? I’ve led a sheltered life. I still get chills at West Side Story) which floored me. If I can spare time from my fabulous life drinking despair I’ll do a thing on it.

As the actress said…

Speaking of which, at high schools what is meant by ‘homecoming’?

@Benedick: Also in US colleges, when the football team plays at its home campus, usually after a long road trip and late in the season, often against the school’s traditional rival (UCLA v. USC, Cal v. Stanford) etc. It is an excuse for drinking and sex by all.

@Dodgerblue: In high schools. Is it like returning for the Lent term after the long vac and some Sport event takes place?

@Benedick: What is Lent term? Does it involve vicars and choirboys?

@Benedick: Homecoming means Nojo earns beer money designing flyers and shit for campus departments.

@Dodgerblue: Public schools in Limeyland are all about vicars and choirboys. And spanking. Lots and lots of spanking. Think of that when you next see Roils or Conservative cabinet members or PMs.

Gym Master Jenkins: C’mere Cameron, you snotty little oik, bend over, pull down your shorts so I can spank you with this plimsole. What do you want to be when you grow up? Prime Minister? Smack. Chancellor of the Exchequer? Smack. Tony Blair? Smack.

High school: homecoming king and queen; what does this mean? Are Birks involved? Or Motel 8? Assless chaps? Help me. What does it mean?

@Benedick: When I was on my high school swim team, we would get swats on our Speedo-clad butts with a drilled-out wooden racket that our coach had made. Sounded like a rifle shot.

Homecoming King and Queen are two students usually chosen by their high school classmates to “preside” over homecoming festivities. In our modern times, boys can be Queen and girls King, etc. It didn’t usta be that way. There is also a Homecoming dance at which school officials strive to keep hormonally-raging teenagers from mating.

@Dodgerblue: Homecoming. What is that? What does it mean? Plus, speedo swim team spanking: are there pictures?

@Benedick: We didn’t have cameras then. There may be clay tablets.

Steve’s went to his first homecoming in his girlfriend’s dress. Her shoes didn’t fit. There was some dress code he didn’t like, but it said nothing about cross dressing. His armpits were itching for weeks.

@Dodgerblue: You’re feisty today!

@Benedick: Who says I haven’t?

@JNOV: I’m feeling peckish. I’m going to take the edge off by going to my second spin class of the day. Cancer shmancer.

@Dodgerblue: Damn right! Fuck cancer! Mangia, paesan!

I’d join a gym if I’d go. I need a personal trainer to pick me up and take me there and to find me when I’m hiding because I don’t want to go. The times I get to the gym, I’m good.

Guess I need to get ready for the beach, or they might try to roll me into the ocean.

@Benedick: I want to be Rita Moreno.

Besides Tonight and all the jazzy songs, the one that had the most impact on tween me was:

A boy like that
Who’d kill your brother!
Forget that boy!
And find another!

One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind <— Mind blowing to hear it said so plainly, and mind blowing to realize that my tri-racial parents thought that way, too.

Why limit yourself based on dumb stuff like that?

@Dodgerblue: You pretend to give up sugar or something until Jesus rises at Easter. Like when I pretend to give up drinking.

@JNOV:

“A Boy like that,
Would kiss your brother,
And wear a skirt,
Just like your mother!
Stick to the straight kind, it will waste less time!”

These are the lyrics that would inevitably arise in any production of West Side Story that I was in, given that actors playing Tony tend to be a bit fey (something about the counter-tenor, I think).

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: Heh. And I was just thinking about baked. I was running through a bunch of unnamed pictures on my computer looking for one unnamed picture (I guess img_182483974.jpg is a name, but, you know), and I came across some I took with baked. Man.

And why are images stored in 18 different places on my computer? There are some hiding in there that I thought I’d deleted…

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: Now explain Michaelmas.

@nojo: September 29, Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, start of fall term. Don’t eat blackberries after that date–St. Michael threw the devil into a blackberry patch, and the devil peed on the fruit.

@Mistress Cynica: All these educational terms sound subversive. Did the Church of England keep the saints after ditching the pope?

@Mistress Cynica: Some of the stuff I drank in college should have been called “Devil’s Piss.”

@Dodgerblue: Are you certain it wasn’t?

@Mistress Cynica: Hey, so the parade of cats continues. The white and gray female kitty went home, and I saw her today. She looks, well, pregnant, but I also saw her person. He saw her try to follow me home, and he called her. She went to him.

For a (nice!) change, I have two kittens that are not strays. Steve named the girl Ventress, and the boy is Samsara. I call them Ven and Sam, but I really just call them Good Girl and Good Boy until we get this litter box business under control. They’re happy and hale. They drag socks and bras around my apartment. I need a different hamper, but I also have an excuse to go braless, so there’s that.

@nojo: I’m no Cynica, but I’d say it’s a combination of subversion and an attempt to keep people from revolting.

There was a huge back and forth with how many of the trappings of The Old Religion protestant monarchs needed to keep to avoid major revolts, and the degree to which they could keep it varied by time and country. Don’t want a revolt? Substitute martyrs for saints. I grew up with a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. We didn’t pray to them, but we were supposed to not only revere them but summon their courage to follow in their footsteps if need be.

My father’s side is Episcopalian and Lutheran. Both churches I went to were Catholicism without a pope. We had that nastyass incense nonsense. I’m not sure what incense is for. Maybe it drives out evil spirits kind of like a Native American smudge but much stinkier.

My grandmother’s form of Lutheranism had baptism and confirmation. I’m not sure about 1st Communion. Grandmom was beyond pissed when I wasn’t confirmed. My mother didn’t allow me to go to the confirmation classes because she was immersed in fundamentalist Christianity at that point.

Martin Luther loved the Catholic church. He wanted reform, not Protestantism. But once someone has the balls to call out the Pope, someone else will come along and talk about personal relationships with Jesus and folks will mass produce Bibles, and the rest is history.

Oh. And when we went to church, it was called “A Gathering of the Saints.” I guess we were saints, too? I think using the language but attaching new meaning to it was like a rope bridge and how far you wanted to cross was determined by your fear of heresy. Herky jerky. Not stable. Keeping the old language bound us. It’s like the first time I thought that Jesus might not have existed. I was already an atheist, but that thought scared the shit out of me. I was waiting for the smiting. And there’s something to be said for the comfort of ritual for ritual’s sake. Religious OCD.

@JNOV: My Lutheran baptism photo lurks at the Ancestral Home. Never got confirmed, but it wasn’t a big deal like a bar mitzvah. Although I should merit an honorary confirmation, given all the pear lime jello I consumed growing up.

@nojo: Oh, yes, though it has long been divided into Low Church (more like Methodists) and High Church (Catholic without the guilt, and you can use birth control). The British flag is a combination of the cross of St. George (patron saint of England) and the cross of St. Andrew (Scotland). High Church C of E loves the pomp and ritual, smells and bells. That was the only part of religion I cottoned to–who doesn’t love a production number?

@Mistress Cynica: I think the ‘Union’ (hence its name) Jack is a mashup made from the crosses of the four nations’ patron saints: Andrew, George, Patrick, and David. Make of that what you will. And yes, the Anglican church can be High or Low, or anything in-between. In Wales and the north of England we are Chapel (baptist), in Scotland we follow John Knox, I have no clue about Ireland and I’m too afraid to ask, in England we are mostly Smug.

@JNOV: Darling, everyone wants to be Rita Moreno. If they can’t be Chita Rivera.

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: Tony is a lyric baritone. That, in theatre parlance, is a tenor who can fit in jeans. Unlike this guy. In my opinion that’s Bernstein’s best score. Unfortunately most people working in musical theatre have never read Voltaire so they belittle his strange little book instead of reading the damn thing and turn the musical into mere campery. It’s better than that.

@Benedick: I beg to differ. Even a regular old tenor would have a problem with the high notes in “Tonight”. Tony hits a high “C” in “Maria” without another voice present. A baritone range is only up to an a-flat above middle “C”.

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: Good God, even I can sing a C.

Nowadays Broadway baritones can belt A Sharp. It’s terrifying. (They also wear really tight pants to auditions. And they all clearly spend their entire waking hours working out. One doesn’t know where to put one’s face) Maybe I’m making a distinction without a difference but to my ear the part lies lower in the voice with occasional outbursts of tenor. It doesn’t have the tenor’s sharpness. Mind you, I don’t know that part much on account of always being fast asleep when he’s onstage. You will I hope admit it’s one of the most excruciatingly boring leading men ever writed. I don’t know how anyone stays awake long enough to get all the way through singing Tonight. It’s worse than Being Alive and that’s saying something.

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn @Benedick: Can I just say I love the South Park movie’s take on the Quintet?

As you were.

Audra McDonald.

@nojo: That’s very funny. You have my approbation.

@Benedick: Oh, I’ll agree with that. Tony is the kind of good-guy cypher that I spent my life playing as a young man. But I also agree with you that the piece itself is brilliant, if staged without a condescending museum theatre slant.

@Dodgerblue: noticing a trend…

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: HAPPY BIRFDAY TO YOU, MY SWEET TOMMCATT!!! May your birfday be full of Asian men in assless chaps with sweet weed and show tunes for you.

@Dodgerblue: Without a doubt. Love.Her.

@Dodgerblue: Here you go, big guy. A tribute to Barbara Cook climaxed, after some great singing, by Ms McDonald. (Note to our straight friends: All the songs sung were either introduced by Ms Cook or were performed by her in significant revivals.) I have only one question: what on earth are those boys doing?

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: Funny to think now that neither Candide nor West Side were hits in their original productions. As with Sweeny Todd they were well-regarded flops that only grew into themselves with the passage of time. And in the case of West Side the movie.

By the way, this is what a star looks like.

Happy Birthday to our darling @Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn!!

Thanks Guys! So pleased and proud to have a group of funny, intelligent people like you in my life! Even Benedick!

@Benedick: Oh hell yeah. That’s what a goddess looks like, frankly. I saw her in Albee’s A Delicate Balance in the 90’s, wherein she did this amazing four-minute monologue on alcoholism. It’s one of the things I will remember on my deathbed.

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: This is my birthday treat to you. Something I don’t ever admit to: I once drunkenly threw up on her after a dinner party at our London apartment. As I tried inchoherently to apologize she said “Oh honey. Who better than me?”

The hub gave her away at her wedding in London (another birfday treat though I’m surprised you can still keep count). She’s quite an observant Catholic. As he walked her down the aisle she said aside, Isn’t this fucking ridiculous? He, being a good Jewboy, was shocked. “Elaine!” he remonstrated. “What,” she replied, “You think God never heard the word ‘fuck’ before?”

Note to self: It’s the glamor that keeps us going. And the lube.

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn:
Happy B-day

@Benedick: The first linque is broken. You have graced us with the barfing story before, but not the wedding story. I’m wondering how God handles it when one of exclaims “Jesus H. Christ!”

@Dodgerblue: Barbara Cook Kennedy Center Tribute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0aV-gXIMCg

The women in this tribute kick total motherfucking butt. They make you know why American performers and American musicals are revered and copied the world over. They get you by the back of the head and slam your face down to where truth lies.

And NO ONE does it as well. This is why we KICK MOTHERFUCKING BUTT.

To my eye the revelation is Sutton Foster. Anyone can name the show it comes from gets a date with Catt. This will involve paddles, over the knee spanking, and life examining.

Have I gone too far?

SHOWQUEEN FIGHT!1!!

@Benedick: I gasped with joy when I clicked on the YouTube and found Elaine Stritch.

@Tommmcatt: Big B-day hugs, Tommy.

@Benedick: Thank you. It’s a mitzva, what you’ve done. Do you have her phone number?

@Dodgerblue: There’s this. You might need to keep some tissues handy.

We’re Your Dreamgirls. Too bad she never got to do it. The show was magnificent.

@Benedick: Glenn Close sings?

@Benedick: There are no pictures of this vomitizing? Must you tease me so?

@¡Andrew!: Thanks, it was a great one.

@nojo: ahem Sunset Boulevard ahem.

@Tommmcatt Says Get Off My Damn Lawn: We didn’t have cameras then.

@Benedick: They did that as a musical? Ahem all you want, but I live on the far end of Steinberg’s New Yorker cover.

@ManchuCandidate: Dude, your mayor was on the teevee again. Apparently the wimmins of Toronto are begging the meth-crazed Jabba to stop trying to go down on them all the time.

What in the hay-ell is goin’ on up there??? I thought that Alberta is the New Texass.

@¡Andrew!: Sandy Eggo’s (now former) mayor is such a pitiful also-ran.

@¡Andrew!:
Not meth-crazed. Crack crazed.

It’s called the Toronto suburbs full of angry mainly white low information voters wanted a “tax cutting, football loving non wussie mayor” but ended up with an overgrown rich corrupt (that shoe has yet to drop) baby who is a glutton for a lot of things including punishment. The rich guys (who benefited the most from his tax cuts) from the downtown core in Rosedale and Forrest Hill are probably in furrowing their brows at the crack smoking alcoholic and pussy eating monster they helped bankroll.

@Benedick: You should have stayed put for an oil painting then. I have needs.

@ManchuCandidate: I can only imagine that the propagandists at Le Fox Nouvelles Canada must’ve worn themselves out replacing the (C) with an (L) in every frame of the broadcast.

Oh well, at least he’s got his career as the (foul-mouthed, crack-pipe sucking) Kool-Aid Man to fall back on.

@ManchuCandidate: As Jon Stewart so succinctly put it last night, he’s a one-man episode of COPS.

@Benedick: I only know her from 30 Rock, wherein she was always delightfully caustic.

@Benedick: Thanks. I just got the DVD of the LA production of Mahogonny, a show I didn’t much like except that Audra and Patti Lupone were in it. “Oh moon of Alabama . . .” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ydld2SkDGk

@Dodgerblue: I don’t know that show but they’re both terrific.

@mellbell: She sure can sing and dance. She began in musicals. And gets better all the time.

@nojo: The American version began in LA. Before coming to Broadway. Andrew Lloyd Webber? The whole set went up in the air? Any of this ringing any bells?

@Benedick: Los Angeles? I wouldn’t have noticed if it landed in Portland.

@¡Andrew!:
Nope. PM for life Harpo has been photographed too many times with Cunnilingus Ford for Faux Lite to get away with it. There’s the other problem… no one watches Faux Lite aka Sun TV.

The other news nets are not as happy with PM Harpo these days as he declared war on cell phone bills and tried to get Verizon into Canada City. You know, the asshole behemoth that every one in US Amercia “loves.” Since all the major telephone companies here own TV networks so that didn’t go well with some of PM Harpo biggest fanboys.

@nojo: I’m sure it did at some point in its bus-and-truck.

@Benedick: bus-and-truck

I’m not familiar with that position. Can Tommmcatt explain it to me?

@nojo: I’m sure Tommy and Benedick will be happy to demonstrate.

@nojo: You might want to fix a cup of cocoa. Ready? Comfy? K.

There is Broadway. In the old days, after a show had finished its run it would then go on tour. The first class pukkah way to go is with a #1 National Tour (salary plus handsome per diem. If you stay out for two years you come home and buy a condo). You play the big touring houses in major cities. As the big dates get played out the tour contracts, scenery is shed, the amount of get-in time shrunk (the time it takes to load a show into new house. For a #1 can take a week. It can also involve ten or fifteen trucks) till the get in can be accomplished in one work call and haulage shrunk to one or two trucks. At this point you’re playing split weeks in towns like Troy NY, Iowa City (I have no idea), Grand Rapids, Sandy Eggo, etc. The cast will travel by bus from date to date, usually on the day off, while the truck or trucks go on ahead. Hence the term bus-and-truck. It is not considered first class and is used as a pejorative among show folk. Unless you’re dealing with dancers or recent graduates from BYU musical theatre department.

Nowadays, with the Road, as it’s called, collapsing, there are very few old-fashioned #1 tours going out. A new contract has been devised that scales everything back so that most tours are hybrids. I’ve only done one big tour and adored it.

@Benedick: Dude. I thought your name meant “Good Penis.” Much ado…

What is this fascination with musicals? I watched some videos on YouTube, (Audra has awesome arms, amirite, DB?). But it was a whole bunch of vibrato screeching loudness (sez the metalhead). I mean like, why is your voice quivering like that? Ick.

But Sutton Foster sounds pretty normal, which mean she probably sucks.

@JNOV: Everything about Audra McDonald is awesome. What first attracted me to her was her voice — my musical-theater loving daughter was listening to a CD that featured what sounded like the (female) Voice of God and I asked her who it was. It was Audra, whom I had never before heard of. My daughter said that Audra had a huge range and could sing in any style. I then googled her and goddam!

@Benedick: Don’t rock bands, Willie Nelson and the like travel by bus and truck now? Would their buses have more or fewer drugs than a touring theater company?

@Dodgerblue: Heh. I dunno. I love Someone to Watch Over Me, but Audra’s rendition is too um, high brow? Her voice is beautiful. She’s beautiful. But it doesn’t sound like she’s longing to have someone watch over her. Does that make sense? Ella Fitzgerald, yeah. Frank Sinatra, sure. Amy Winehouse, definitely. Audra’s voice is too powerful to sound vulnerable.

ETA: Linda Ronstadt covers it well, too.
ETAA: Willie Nelson. :-)

@JNOV: She’s singing in a theatre style that uses the whole body. It’s just a more expansive sound to fill a big space. She’s singing that song as it is in the show. Or as it can be. It almost never works on TV. Someone singing to be recorded uses a very different, more intimate technique. I just thought the women were all kinds of great and the event was so moving as they paid tribute to Barbara Cook.

@Benedick: In the version I was watching, she was sitting in a chair. Huge voice. I liked the Cook tribute.

Maybe my problem is that I have only seen Annie performed live and by professionals. Speaking of which, where’s Expatria? I was forced to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (my mother was trying to mix her religion and her addiction) and Hair (OMG! Mother didn’t know they were going to get nekkid!!) by local folks.

It’s not that I don’t like musicals; it’s just not something my family did. They don’t camp or ski, either. Dad can’t swim. Mom can’t ride a bike.

This is what it’s like to be uncultured.

@JNOV: I grew up in a jazz house so therefore musicals were beneath me. Ditto rock. I’m still an absolute asshole about that. I saw my first musical when I was at drama school and was all kinds of flummoxed. It was really very good. And it’s not a very good show. But Pat Routledge was a revelation. Later, in London, among other things that happened that first night, the hub played the overture to Gypsy and the rest is history. In NYC in the 30s and 40s there was a flowering of talent not unlike Florence in its heyday. We lived in its afterglow for a long time.

BTB. Watch the Stritch video. You will see a very great star make a total fool of herself and demonstrate complete mastery of the stage. It’s pretty grand.

:-)

@JNOV: About 20 years ago I watched Sweet Honey in the Rock perform on PBS. It gave me goosebumps to hear them. Not an individual thing I know but very moving to hear that harmony. I think the song was Grey Goose.

@DElurker: Grey Goose, indeed.