Math.

Doug Miller taught my Algebra II class at Greencastle High School. Everything rode on my grade in his class. Everything. I hated math, despised it, but I had to get an A in that class or I would lose my 4.0 GPA, lose a lot of scholarship money, and not be able to afford to go to college out of state. Getting out of Indiana, away from everyone who knew me, to come out, felt (and I think actually was) necessary.

Mr. Miller was the coach of something, I don't know what sport, I didn't pay attention to that stuff. All my high school math teachers were coaches, as well as my Civics teacher. As a rule, the coaches were terrible teachers, and all of these teachers were, except Mr. Miller, who was kind and patient and able to explain difficult abstract concepts in a way that made them clear and obvious. Which is to say, he knew how to teach.

If I didn’t get an A on the final exam, I would get a B in the class, it was that simple, and Mr. Miller made sure I was prepared.

Usually when I think of the many remarkable teachers I've had over the course of my life, they're art or music or theater, or literature or history teachers, because those are the subjects I’ve always loved and that I naturally excelled at in school. But I'll be forever grateful to Doug Miller for the difference he made in my life at a turning point by simply being excellent at his job.

Ignore the Sourpusses. Go See Camelot.

It made me sad to read a lot of sour reviews of Camelot this morning after being so thrilled and moved by the show only 2 days ago. I feel like what most critics have forgotten, or maybe never knew, is that what makes these great 20th century musicals great is that they are open-hearted, and they are only legible if you go in with your own heart open.

I also didn’t realize until recently (in a conversation about Bartlett Sher’s last revival of a golden age show, My Fair Lady, where I expressed a preference for Alan Jay Lerner over Sondheim) that there’s such a big contingent of Lerner haters out there. I had to smile reading the Times critic (who worships Sondheim) mock Lerner for triple rhymes —he called them “show-offy.” I’ve come to love (a late, qualified love) much of Sondheim, but one thing that still irritates me in his lyrics is all those gratuitous triple, quadruple, quintuple rhymes. 

Camelot is about the power of idealism, about faith in compassion and fairness and justice, in virtue, to transform humanity. This revival with its revised book makes that theme more explicit, but it’s always been about that. Ask Jackie Kennedy. It’s about a steadfast focus on the moral arc, on the future effect of our deeds, in the face of meanness and violence and greed for power in the present. I’m sure for professional critics it’s not easy to reopen the aperture, after a few dozen musicals about teen social anxiety, wide enough to take in such a sweeping theme.

These midcentury shows spoke to and about, not just aging vaudevillians or ambivalent urbanites, but all of us. That’s why they were so popular. We need to constantly re-visit them not just because they are great works of art but because they do something the form has mostly forgotten how to do: ask big social questions which boil down to one question: how do we live together in the world? Maybe critics now, in our contentious, defensive, solipsistic age, don’t think that question is answerable. That conclusion feels so, so bleak to me. “One brief shining moment” indeed.

Thread.

I was putting away some clean clothes in Chan’s closet early this week when I saw a white thread dangling from one of his sweaters on a shelf, and I pulled it. I kept pulling, it was very long, and it turned out to be elastic thread, so it stretched even longer. I realized that as I pulled the thread it was unwinding from a spool on an upper shelf in a small plastic set of drawers that Mom had kept her sewing thread in — one of the few objects of Mom’s, along with her sewing machine, that I claimed after her death. I don’t know what to do with it, but I can’t imagine not keeping it.

To get to the spool and rewind the elastic thread, I had to take the whole unit down, set it on the bed, and remove the duct tape my father had put across the drawers to keep them shut when I shipped it here from Indiana. There are dozens of little drawers in the unit holding at least a hundred spools of thread of all colors, each of them partly used. When I took the tape off, the drawer containing the elastic thread slid out, dumping the spool on the bed. Also in that drawer and also landing on the bed was a small spool of bright peacock-colored thread.

One of my first Christmases after moving to New York — not the very first one because I didn’t go home to Indiana that year — I did all my Christmas shopping at Pearl River. For Mom, I bought 2 or 3 yards of a heavy peacock-colored silk with a pattern of a bird embroidered in gold. She loved the fabric. She made a beautiful, very dressy vest out of it that she wore on special occasions for many years. The thread that popped out onto my bed in front of me was the exact color of the fabric, and I have no doubt she bought the thread to sew the vest.

I think Mom would find it silly that I’ve kept this drawer full of spools of thread. She was not sentimental about objects. (There were exceptions — also among the few things of hers I kept is a tiny Saint Teresa medal on a delicate silver chain that she’d had since she was a girl. Mom hated organized religion and she used to scoff at her Catholic school upbringing — but she kept the little Saint Teresa medal on a silver chain. I also have no fondness for the Catholic Church, but that medal she wore against her skin feels charged with her presence.)

Trudging On.

I’ve been rewriting my musical, Jack — the one that turned out to be 4-1/2 hours long when we read it last May at LaMama — for months now. The task was straightforward at first, but then became less and less so as I got into the weeds. I’ve cycled through 4 or 5 schemes, controlling ideas, each of which worked and then didn’t, but then early this year the thing sort of took some shape in my mind. Paradoxically, as I began to relax and loosen up about what the piece could be, it started to cohere. The amount of sheer labor, cutting huge swaths of it and then pushing it back together, has been huge, and even up until last week I felt unable to solve some big, big problems. And on and off all day every day I despaired of even being capable of the job.

But I've kind of figured it out.

Starting before Xmas when I found a musical theater grant I hadn’t known about, I was working to a deadline, the application due mid-March, if for no other reason than to keep myself focused and motivated through the hard patches. The amount of work I needed to accomplish for the application was daunting but I was hacking through it and feeling better and better. I had two weeks till the deadline, and if I really buckled down I could get it done.

An hour or so ago, I went to the grant-giving foundation’s website to verify something about one of the application questions, and there in big red letters on the home page it said, “UPDATE* Due to overwhelming response, the Submission window is now CLOSED.”

Now that I think about it, this application deadline was mainly important because it gave me a sense that someone was interested in the work, was waiting for it. Someone was actually going to read 30 pages of my libretto and listen to 5 songs and form an opinion about the quality and potential of this brand new musical. After the twists and turns of my life and career in the last 30 years, I find myself now unconnected to a community of artist peers. The kind of theater I made in the late 80s and 90s, the period of LIZZIE’s inception, was always a room full of people making a show. And the Y’all years were a constant treadmill of writing and performing and performing and show after show after show.

I have nothing to complain about. I have the luxury now to sit in a room alone and write what I want to write, and I’m confident of my talent. But back in the day, when I wrote something, more often than not someone, maybe me, was going to sing it or say it on a stage in front of an audience within a few weeks. Now I’m a lonely writer in a room putting stuff on paper and tape, hoping I might have the opportunity to hand it to someone who is always more likely than not to be uninterested.

I’m surprised to say this, but I don’t feel defeated today. The last few days I’ve felt more confident about the work than I have in months. I’ve solved some big problems in the structure and the story, and that’s put some wind in my sails despite knowing that my neat solutions require a ton of work: a new character, a new scene, a new song, and then all the rippling revisions that those big changes necessitate throughout the rest of it. Last week this news would probably have been a body blow.

Raquel Welch.

When I was around 10 or 11, the name Raquel Welch had a sort of talismanic power with other boys, just uttering the name would charge the air. I had no idea who she was, had seen no photos of her, no movies she was in, but eventually I realized it was her breasts the boys were concerned with, that her name meant breasts, or I guess meant the things boys think about when they think about breasts. Hm. I was beginning to think I wasn’t like the other boys, or, more precisely, not having those feelings boys had about breasts, I started to question whether or not I was a boy. Not that I wasn’t similarly preoccupied with body parts. Was the Six Million Dollar Man about anything but Lee Majors’s hairy chest? Not that I remember. But I had no inkling that my feelings and theirs were the same thing — theirs being a group activity and mine being somehow monstrous and shameful and definitely not to be shared with anyone.

Avatar.

We went to see Avatar last night. We got 'er done.

First, if you are reluctant, like I was, see it at Alamo Drafthouse. It’s painless. I’ve said it a million times but, if you want to watch a big Hollywood movie like Avatar, Alamo is the only place. You can have a beer or two, eat a very good burger, and you never have to worry that some asshole sitting behind you is going to be yapping on his phone so that you want to murder him.

I didn’t see the first one. I was thinking it was in the 90s it seems so long ago, but it was 2009. You don’t need to, to understand the sequel. They kind of catch you up at the beginning, but it’s not necessary. There are a couple unexplained things, but I think they’re just mysteries. (I love Edie Falco, but it’s a weird character. And there’s a kind of gay Richard Dreyfuss character who flies around on a boat and I never really knew who he was, but he’s entertaining.)

For a movie that sometimes feels like it’s flapping its morality in your face for three hours, I found it in the end to be strangely amoral or even immoral. Or maybe just pro-war. It’s set within a war, and the last hour is pretty much non-stop combat, which is portrayed, of course, as not just valorous but thrilling, fun, beautiful. There are huge operatic massacres a-plenty, as well as dozens of beautifully rendered zooms-in at the various exciting ways individual are killed. For all its anti-colonialism messaging, you’d have a hard time arguing that this movie does not glorify war.

I’m being a bit of a smart-ass, but I did enjoy it. It’s often visually astonishing, and the underwater sequences are breathtaking — and they are long, and you are thankful because above water the characters are as insufferable as you can imagine, and the story makes you want to throw things — the family and gender politics are so reactionary in such a tired way you wonder if it’s satire (I’m pretty sure it’s not), and it’s very Second-Amendmenty. It’s disappointing that in a movie so imaginative about the future and about the possibilities of the universe, it couldn’t spend a moment or a dime imagining a world that doesn’t revolve around a man killing people to “protect his family.” There are a couple of characters obviously meant to be the “strong women characters” and they are strong, but they never threaten the nuclear family structure or the strong man at its apex.

But if guns and battles aren’t your thing, there’s lots of nudity, which is unsettling. It’s alien nudity mostly, and it’s blue, but it’s clearly ass. There is lots of ass in this movie. And there’s a shipwreck, there are several shipwrecks. Lots of ships sinking, sliding into the sea. But one big spectacular one, so if you liked Titanic, go. I’m not being snarky, he does a good shipwreck.

Seriously, how did I not know it was a war movie? Was the first one a war movie? I feel like the first one got criticized a lot for being lefty environmentalism. I can’t speak for the first one, but this one was like John Wayne on a horse.

Torch Song Trilogy.

We watched Torch Song Trilogy the other night. I hadn’t seen it, and I missed the original stage production (the first of the trilogy ran the fall I moved to New York, I think). I saw the revision/revival at 2nd Stage a few years ago with Michael Urie, which was wonderful.

Harvey Fierstein’s performance is epic. It’s easy to see why it was so acclaimed at the time. Reviews and chit-chat about the play often said that it showed the world that homosexuals wanted the same things as straight people: to be loved, to have someone to take care of, a family. That a gay story could be a universal story, etc. And I think lots of gay people loved it, but there was also a big faction that called it conservative, reactionary, for glorifying the nuclear family. In the 1980s, gay activists’ only interest in marriage was in blowing it up. It’s kind of shocking to look back and see how gay marriage was not at all a thing until it suddenly was, and then how quickly it became the only thing.

But the world Fierstein imagined in Torch Song Trilogy feels radical now: his so-called reactionary nuclear family consists of two parents, one a gay man, one bisexual, who are ex-lovers, and a gay teenager they’ve adopted and are raising as their son. That arrangement can’t but seem radical now that the preferred model is actual same-sex marriage, modeled on straight marriage. A setup like that would be not only outre but would arouse “groomer” accusations from straight people and I’m pretty sure gay people, too.

I’m always reading that the big shift in Americans’ approval of gay marriage shows that things are better for gay people, or that straight people are more open-minded, more liberal than they were about gay people, but what that shift really means is a narrowing of possibilities for us.

You should watch it, it’s very good, touching, hilarious, and Fierstein is a wonder. But good luck finding it. It’s not streaming anywhere, you might find a used VHS copy on eBay, I got it from the library but had to wait over a year for someone to return what I guess is their only copy. I always laugh when people talk about how we live in an age where “you can watch anything you want any time.” An acclaimed, historically important indie film, essentially unavailable.

Art and Life.

I think what I’ve figured out is that I can do life well or do art well but not at the same time. When I am making art, I slip at life, and when I am really killing it at home I lose the thread of my work. They both require a comprehensive commitment.

The other thing, related, that has become very clear to me is that life, the activity of surviving as a human in the world, is about 75% administration, or maybe the word is management. Art sometimes needs administration to flourish, but it does not consist, in any portion, of administration.

Old Pictures Lost, Found.

A few weeks after we met in 2010, Chan went to North Carolina for Christmas with his family. I spent that Christmas with friends upstate. It snowed that year in North Carolina, which is probably rare, and Chan sent me some photos of him and his siblings with a snowman they built in the front yard. Since we’d known each other such a short time, it felt like a big deal, that he sent the photos, and called, while he was away.

I lost my early correspondence with Chan when I left my old Yahoo account, and I thought the photos were gone forever, but Chan’s sister found some of them on her phone this Christmas. There are two additional ones in my memory, one of Chan alone with the snowman and another of him, a selfie maybe, inside, standing in front of the Christmas tree. (The first might be a false memory, but the second one I’m sure of.)

We talked on the phone while he was in North Carolina. I asked him what his family does for Christmas and I so clearly remember him saying, “Not much, we sit around and talk, we eat, we play games.”

Satan is Real.

Mom and Dad were both raised Catholic and Mom went to Catholic school, but they stopped going to church soon after I was born (“they’re all a bunch of hypocrites”) but when my brother and I were about 11 and 12, Mom had a fit of guilt or panic about raising her children to be godless heathens, and she sent us to communion classes at a nearby Catholic church.

One day, the teacher, who I think was a nun but maybe she was just dowdy and mean, was talking about what happens when you sin and she held up a picture of a devil face with an evil grin surrounded by flames, and said, “This is what Satan looks like!” I wasn’t scared, just uncomfortable and embarrassed. Later Mike and I told Mom about it, and we all laughed. After weeks of those classes, the priest told Mom that we weren’t ready for communion and would have to repeat the whole thing. Mom said fuck that — I’m paraphrasing; Mom could swear with the best of them, but never the F word — and that was the end of our Catholic career.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about that Satan face since Ratzinger died and now we have to endure two weeks of blather about how important he was. I never did believe in Satan but I came pretty close when he was the Pope. I was going to Google so I could share a list of his greatest hits of hate, but I don’t have the stomach for it. He was truly awful. They’re all pretty awful, but he stood out.

Imagine that grinning lizard face all red and orange surrounded by flames.

Please nobody lecture me about not saying bad things about bad people immediately after they die. My New Year’s resolution this year is to be more offensive.

Christmas in Colorado.

The year Jay and I were with Roger (2001, but don’t quote me), my mother told us that we weren’t welcome for Christmas in her house. Jay and I could come if Roger stayed home, but we lived in a camper so there was no staying home that wasn’t coming along. Mom never accepted the relationship; she just waited for it to be over.

So, when a friend and fan and sometime investor/benefactor’s step-mother inquired about hiring us to perform after dinner at a small holiday party she was hosting at her home in Aspen, we figured out how much it would cost us to get there and sheepishly quoted what felt like an extravagantly high fee. It strikes me as especially sad as I write this that it was a perfectly reasonable figure (I think it was $5000); it only seemed extravagant to us because we were used to playing for little or nothing and had come to believe that’s all we deserved.

She agreed to the fee and we were off to Colorado. I assume we drove there in the van with the camper, but I don’t remember, and I don’t remember where we were coming from. (This period was well-chronicled in our blog and personal journals, so I could look up these details, but honestly why?)

The gig was to play four or five songs right after dinner. A few days earlier, the Manager (I think that was his title) relayed the host’s request that we sing God Bless America. This was the Christmas after 9/11 and everyone (well, not us) was in a jingoistic mood. We pondered the request. I hated the song, hated the politics. We decided we’d sing This Land Is Your Land instead. I remember that it felt risky because we were being so well paid, and because this friend/fan/patron had been very generous several times in our money-hemorrhaging career and we were grateful. That memory also makes me sad and embarrassed.

(We also learned the Dreidel Song because our fan/patron’s family was Jewish. Did they request it? God, I hope so.)

When we arrived, we were shuttled through a back door into a maze of hallways through what looked like a restaurant kitchen to what I think was probably a storage room where we changed into our costumes and warmed up and waited. It wasn’t exactly upstairs/downstairs; more like front of the house/back of the house. The Manager came and brought us to a sort of hall in front of large double doors. We were told that the host would introduce us, the doors would open, and we’d start playing. Which is exactly what happened.

The doors swung open and revealed four or five steps leading down into a small dining room, a table right at the foot of the stairs, eight or ten guests finishing dessert and coffee, looking up at us skeptical-delighted. Halfway into the first song, a couple at the far end of the table got up and left the room. I won’t say who they were, but they were very famous in the 1970s. (I feel like I have to be discreet. Beats me why. I just finished reading Mary Rodgers’s memoir, and I can’t wait till I’m 80 and don’t give a shit.)

Part of our agreement was that they put us up for the night. (This is why I think we must not have taken the camper.) Our lodgings were in a very fancy hotel in town. Everything on the little strip of shops and hotels was covered with snow and twinkling lights, pretty, romantic, and slightly surreal. Our rooms were luxurious. It was the first time I’d seen those thick white bathrobes they provide in expensive hotels and later that night we sat outside in a heated pool surrounded by snow, the surface of the water covered with a thick layer of steam.

I don’t remember where we stayed after that night, but we were in the area at least until Christmas. One day we drove past a sign for such-and-such monastery with an arrow pointing up a narrow road. Either the sign said this, or maybe we called, but there was a midnight mass, open to the public, on Christmas Eve. We thought it would be a perfect remedy for our Christmas blues. 

The mass was performed in a small, plain room with low wood benches and bright overhead light. There were half a dozen monks and maybe ten guests. I guess I’d imagined Medieval chants but the music was contemporary Christmas songs accompanied by a little Casio or maybe a guitar, and that was it for pageantry. The thing lasted at least two hours, the benches had no backs, the room was hot, and we’d had a couple drinks beforehand. It was excruciating.

We spent one January in a driveway just outside Estes Park overlooking the Rocky Mountains. This may or may not have been the January following this Christmas memory.

Kindergarten, Indianapolis 1967.

My mother saved a small stack of my art from kindergarten, and I have it now. I’ve always been curious why she kept things from kindergarten but didn’t continue. She didn’t like for things to accumulate. Dad was like that, too. (Not so with photos. Photographs were precious; you handled them carefully.)

Anyway, here’s a taste of kindergarten in Indianapolis.

I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s a little too redrum for my comfort.

I don’t know whether this is a self-portrait or I was just signing the picture.

A page from “My Weekly Reader.” Do they still publish My Weekly Reader? I used to love it.

"and I thought you were worth it"

This odd letter never sent was tucked into my high school diary. I think I’ve written before about Tamara who was my girlfriend for a month or two my freshman year of high school and who broke up with me in a letter, which I have also saved. My first encounter with Tamara was when she beat me in the spelling bee in 8th grade.

I say girlfriend but I don’t think we used that word at 14. We were “going together,” which is also a strange expression for it. I don’t remember doing anything together or going anywhere except maybe football games?

My fixation on money in this letter is the weirdest thing about it. I can’t have had much, and I don’t remember spending money on girls. I didn’t have an allowance as a kid, but I started my first real job, working in the kitchen and as a waiter at the DePauw University student union building, when I was 14, so I guess I had a little spending money. In this letter I seem kind of bitter about it. I remember shopping in town for a Christmas gift for Tamara and buying a small houseplant. I kind of remember not being able to give it to her personally because she was away for the holidays and then the next thing was the Dear John letter.

Ken Oliver of Oliver’s Bakery in Kenosha Wisconsin was my Grandma Lenore’s friend (possibly a longtime boyfriend, she never said). Oliver’s Bakery is still a popular local institution, I think still run by Ken’s family.

Thanksgiving.

After my parents got married they lived in an apartment in Waukegan Illinois. Verna and LeRoy Bidgood, also newlyweds, were their downstairs neighbors. They were a few years older than Mom and Dad. LeRoy shared Dad’s interest in aviation and they both built and flew model airplanes. The four of them became close friends. 

When I was 3 and my brother was 4, my dad got a job in Indianapolis and we moved. The Bidgoods ended up in Dayton, Ohio, about 3 hours’ drive away.

Through most of my childhood, we spent Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods, alternating years. I don’t remember having a preference for one house or the other, just that my brother Michael and I looked forward to seeing them every year. They had no children and they doted on us. Maybe doted is the wrong word. They seemed to enjoy our company as much as we enjoyed theirs. They included us in conversations, talked to us like people, not like children. Verna was dry and funny. She had a smoker’s laugh (and a smoker’s cough -- she and LeRoy both smoked Kent cigarettes one after another all day long). She was a great cook, as good as Mom. She made something called a French apple pie that had a sort of eggy filling and a streusel top. I didn’t like it as much as my mother’s more traditional apple pie, but I thought it was very sophisticated. They had a dachshund named Duchess who would snap at your fingers if you weren’t careful, so you were.

Their house, like ours, was full of books and I loved, like I still do, to scan the titles and pull out and read a bit of anything that piqued my interest. One year I found one called something like “Why I Don’t Believe in God,” and it was way over my head but I devoured it anyway. I never had “believed in God,” but it hadn’t occurred to me till then that not believing was its own belief system. On their living room wall they had two framed reproductions of Margaret Keane paintings of sad little girls that I loved to just gaze at.

Around the time my sister Kay was born (she’s 6 1/2 years younger than I), the Bidgoods adopted a baby girl and then a few years later a boy. Their son had what they used to call a learning disability. I remember the year when he was 1 1/2 or 2 and just starting to form words I picked him up and carried him around the house pointing to things and asking him what they were called, like “lamp” or “chair” or whatever, and if he didn’t know I would teach him. Thanksgiving was always such a long, slow day, with Mom and Verna in the kitchen and Dad and LeRoy usually out in the garage or the driveway. Michael was probably out there with them; he took more of an interest in airplanes and cars than I ever did. Behind their house was a woods with a creek and a huge uprooted rotting tree and we’d spend quite a bit of time out there poking and digging at it.

Soon after the Bidgoods adopted their second child, Verna got pregnant and had another girl. By this time I guess my sister was a toddler. The yearly gathering had turned quickly from a party of four to ten, six of them kids, and then my brother and I were teenagers and I guess less interested in a long day with the adults, who were older now, and I don’t remember exactly when but the Thanksgiving tradition fizzled.

I think Verna and LeRoy were probably always Republicans but back then Republicans and Democrats could be friends. By the 1980s they’d become much more stridently right-wing which Mom and Dad found hard to take, and the smoke-filled house was too much for my dad’s asthma. Their long friendship suffered. They continued to exchange Christmas cards. Verna would write a newsy letter every year in her nearly illegible handwriting. When they retired, they moved to northern Wisconsin, closer to where they came from. Chan and I send them a card every year and most years they send us one too. Verna’s handwriting still takes some effort. They must be in their 90s now, and I haven’t seen them, I don’t think, since my sister’s wedding to her first husband, around 1990. I don’t know anything about their children, who would all be in their 50s now.

I was thinking about the Bidgoods because this year Chan and I are flying to Indiana to have Thanksgiving with my sister’s family. Since Mom died, for enough years to get used to it, Thanksgiving at Kay’s has been a big gathering: Kay and her husband, Chan and I, Kay’s 3 sons and the two older boys’ partners, Michael and his wife Sandy, Dad, and my friend since childhood, Martha. But my oldest nephew lives in San Antonio now and can’t manage such a long trip for the weekend, my second nephew, the one who lives in the East Village now, is working at Starbucks and can’t get the time off (even if he wanted to go home which he says he doesn’t). Michael and Sandy are caring for Sandy’s 99-year-old father whose wife just died, so they can’t make it. Martha will be with her dad this year. Dad lives in Muncie, about 45 minutes from Kay’s, and won’t go very far from home any more. So this year it’ll just be Chan and I, Kay and her husband and their youngest, who is 19.

Obviously I was cooking, not “playing with matches.”

I don’t think I’m feeling particularly sad about the smaller Thanksgiving this year. The cooking will be a little less hectic and for decades I didn’t spend Thanksgiving with my family at all. I usually cooked at home in whatever ratty apartment I was living in, invited friends — for several years in my 20s my boyfriend at the time, Brian, and I invited 20 or more people and cooked the whole meal in what passed for a kitchen but was really just a stove and sink shoved into a closet in our Ft. Greene apartment. I miss those dinners intensely. I miss the holidays in New York, which were always lovely and melancholy, but the winter holidays are sad no matter where you spend them.

Thanksgiving is always just as much about who is not at the table as who is.

Mom.

I Thought I Was Over It, But I Guess I'm Still Mad This Morning.

Last night Chan and I had tickets for a show in midtown and my new glasses are ready for me to pick up on E. 56th St., so my plan was to leave the apartment in time to pick up my glasses, meet Chan for dinner at the little burger joint (I think it’s actually called Burger Joint) hidden in the lobby of a fancy rich people hotel on 56th St., and then walk down to the theater for a 7:30 curtain. Perfect.

But when I walking out the door at 4:30 it suddenly occurred to me that the optometrist was not going to be open after 5:00, duh. I should have been thankful that I’d realized this before I got all the way uptown but I was just annoyed that I was going to have to make a special trip which is the exact thing I thought I’d so ingeniously avoided.

We still met at the burger place, which I’m not going to link to because it’s almost a secret, nearly invisible, and such a great place, just really good burgers and really good fries, and beer. Before the pandemic it was always mobbed (but so good it was worth battling the crowd), but last night it was just bustling in a normal, reasonable way. I hope it’s doing enough business to stay afloat. When our burgers arrived, the server brought 3 orders of fries by mistake. We’d only ordered two and had even thought about ordering one to share because it’s a lot of fries.

There were two young guys sitting next to us and we asked them if they wanted the extra one, but they didn’t, they’d just ordered their own. As we ate, we couldn’t help hearing their conversation, it’s New York, they were like 3 feet away. They’re co-workers, one had recently discovered that the other was “a Christian,” so apparently they’d decided to start up a friendship. Okay. People are Christians, whatever. I think they worked in some kind of financial field, maybe lawyers. The taller, whiter, more dominant of the two hates it when he misses his morning time with the Lord because how can he bring his commitment to serve the Lord to his projects at work if he doesn’t begin the day affirming that commitment? Every sentence out of his mouth had 3 or 4 “the Lord”s in it. He started talking about his Bible study group that someone had invited him to, and he thought it was a men’s group (“I don’t need another men’s group, I’m looking for my wife!”), but he decided to go anyway. At the beginning of the first meeting there were just 4 men but then women (or “girls” as they call all female humans no matter their age) started arriving. Then 30 minutes into the meeting, a woman arrived late, he liked the look of her, and then, when he noticed that she was carrying a bag of Chick Fil-A, he knew she was “his girl.” I guess now they’re engaged or whatever they call it in Gideon.

I was so tense listening to this that I could barely speak, or I should say I could barely say anything that wasn’t sarcastic, passive-aggressive, and nearly audible to them.

Between dinner and the theater we passed a big Chick Fil-A store on 6th Avenue. They seem to be everywhere you look now. It’s like an occupation. For the most part I’ve made my peace with how New York has changed since I moved here. Things change, not often for the better, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it, and I still love this city. But at times the infiltration of suburban values punches me in the gut. One of the things the two Christian bros in the burger joint talked about was how hard it is to be a Christian in a secular city, how hard it is to meet people with “your values.” And as we walked, Chan and I wondered what that must be like, and I said I thought there were probably more of them here now than say 30 years ago, because I never had to listen to that kind of horseshit while I ate dinner back then and now there’s a fucking bigot chicken stand on every other corner in midtown. Chan guessed there were probably less of those people here now, I disagreed, and we argued, a stupid argument that was likely my fault because oh my god was I in a mood.

I try to be generous and open-minded, but I don’t welcome those people here. Or I should say, let them come but leave your “values” at home. I left the Midwest to get away from that. I don’t want to listen to their asinine conversation. The only thing I want to do around them is watch my back.

(The Chick Fil-A remark was revealing though. Because I avoid people like that and so don’t often get to observe them in the wild, I don’t get to hear what they talk about to each other. I’ve often wondered if they consider Chick Fil-A as a sort of tribal marker in the way that we do. If I encounter someone who avoids Chick Fil-A, I know I can trust that person not to be an anti-gay bigot. They’re my people. When “Christians” encounter someone who DOES patronize Chick Fil-A, they know that person supports anti-gay bigotry. Their people. But what I’m wondering is: they could get their shitty little chicken sandwich two blocks away, so why were they fouling our hip little burger place? That’s the thing about those people. They are not happy with their own stuff, they want OUR stuff, too.)

Death of Camp?

My sister and oldest nephew were here for a long weekend, and Sunday my husband and I took them to see Newfest’s screening of The Cockettes to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its premiere. (If you haven’t seen this film, you really really should. I know it’s on Amazon but you can find it on other streaming services too.) My second eldest nephew lives in the city now, and he was with us as well.

I didn’t get a chance to talk much with my older nephew, who is somewhat conservative but thoughtful and openminded, about the film, but he told me that for the first 30 minutes or so he felt like he didn’t know where he was or what was happening. I think the idea of people who look and act like that kind of blew a hole in his idea of what the world is like. My younger nephew who lives here now commented that my generation — I don’t consider myself really to be of the Cockettes’ generation, but kids under 25 lately don’t seem to make any distinctions between anyone born in the 20th century — my generation’s conception of non-binary identity is about combining the two extremes, whereas for his generation it’s about being somewhere in between. I told him to keep in mind that the Cockettes were performers and a very small sample, that we had no shortage of the type of nonbinary queer people he was claiming as something new, but in our day they called themselves butch lesbians or “Mary,” or some such.

Anyway, that’s not what I sat down to write about. After the film, the festival held a Q&A with the filmmakers, Bill Weber and David Weissman, who is a friend. I don’t remember what the question was, or what David was discussing at the time, but in the course of his answer he said something about camp and that it’s “not really a part of queer culture anymore.” Just a casual observation in the middle of a sentence about something else, but I felt for a moment like I couldn’t breathe, that, like my nephew, I was suddenly in a world I didn’t understand. David is just a few years older than I but he has close relationships with queer people who are older and who are much younger (check out his Conversations with Gay Elders). His observations regarding history and these generational differences are consistently wise and measured, and compassionate.

For me, there’s no separating camp from being gay. That a sensibility, an aesthetic of anarchic humor and playfulness, hyperbole, theatricality, irony, extravagance, all of it, could set me apart in a positive way, a superior way, could be a powerful statement of protest, of refusal, saved me and I don’t mean that rhetorically. Maybe that change in the culture is just one way in which I often feel at sea in the newer younger “gay community,” but it’s also possibly true that it is the whole of what makes me feel left out, or I should say makes me want to be left out.