Rat.

Yes, New Yorkers should be worried about rats coming up through the plumbing.

In 1985, my boyfriend Brian and I, because we couldn’t find an apartment we could afford in the East Village, moved from his place on 11th and C (where the rent was, I think, under $200 but hadn’t been paid in months) to a floor-through in a Ft. Greene brownstone.

The apartment had a dilapidated romance about it and could, at night, say, decorated for Christmas, be kind of beautiful with its crumbling ceiling molding and painted wide-plank floors and Edwardian proportions, but in the light of day it was obviously, to say the least, worse for wear.

One of its charming features was that the bathroom and a tiny room over the stairs that we used as our music studio were outside the apartment, off the hallway. One night soon after we moved in, I got up in the middle of the night to pee, walked down the hall, opened the bathroom door, and, half asleep, flipped on the light to find a large rat thrashing and squealing in the toilet. Maybe it was me squealing.

I slammed the door shut, ran back into the apartment, and woke up Brian. We got a broom and, from as far away as we could get, pushed the bathroom door open with the broom handle. The rat was gone, and the floor and walls of the bathroom were splashed with water. There were piles of rat poop in the toilet and on the floor. The door had been shut, so clearly the rat had left by the way it came in.

I still think about that rat when I get up in the middle of the night to pee. Eventually, after many years, I got so I could sit on the toilet without turning the bathroom light on first, but for years I couldn’t.

Loving Judy.

There are fans of the artist and her art and there are fans of the gruesome spectacle of a celebrity falling apart in public. Fans of the art find their greatest pleasure in the recovery, the reassurance that the gift is still intact and powerful. We want Judy at the top of her game. Carnegie Hall, not Talk of the Town. But our love is not a completely pure love — we have some kind of love-adjacent relationship with the downfall, too, with the bottoming out. It’s necessary for the comeback. Part of loving Judy Garland has to be loving her ability to dig herself out of a deep hole and triumph, over and over, again and again. We follow her struggles, our hearts are heavy with her sorrows, we worry for her, and then that small, sad, terribly exposed woman summons some kind of Herculean strength and walks out on that stage and fucking nails it. For us. We love her, in some part, so intensely because we know how badly she needs us to love her.

But the other fans, the ones who honestly can’t even tell the difference between the artistry of Judy Garland — one of the greatest vocal talents* of all fucking time — and Renee Zellweger’s caterwauling,** and so don’t, either, make any distinction between tabloid photos of Judy, drunk and disoriented, and tabloid photos of Britney Spears, bald and drunk and disoriented. Or tabloid photos of Amy Winehouse, disheveled and falling down, or whoever. Each one is an “OMG did you see her??” moment of thrill at witnessing someone who was at the very top — worshipped and adored by millions — laid low.***

For some reason, to see a person humiliated, broken, mutilated, dead, obliterated, is a human urge. We slow down to see a body in a bag loaded into an ambulance, we love a perp walk or someone losing their shit in a McDonald’s, we click on a video of someone being shot or stabbed, we stare at crime scene photos of corpses in puddles of blood, we love the ending of Bonnie and Clyde, when they’ve been riding high for two hours, getting away with it, and now we want to see them fall out of that car, riddled with machine-gun bullets, and hit the dirt in slow motion. 

But the difference between the two films, Judy and Bonnie and Clyde, is hopefully obvious. Bonnie and Clyde is complex, compassionate, original, provocative. The lurid ending is not there just to satisfy the audience’s bloodlust, it’s about the audience’s bloodlust. It’s not that there’s nothing interesting about Judy Garland’s harrowing last weeks, that there’s not material there for an interesting film, an honest film, even a monumental film. They could have made a great movie about the public’s fascination with Judy’s worst moments instead of making a film that just revives and sustains it. But Judy is a paint-by-numbers biopic that even by the low bar of its genre was mediocre.

*She’s also one of the greatest actors, a fact that gets lost because of the force of her singing talent. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to watch Zellweger “do” Judy Garland. Zellweger is talented but I just kept thinking that if you gave that role to Judy she would blow Renee out of the water and make the film seem much better than it is in the bargain. 

**Judy Garland’s many performances of Come Rain Or Come Shine are some of the best among hundreds of extraordinary performances of a great artist. (Lucky for us and for the future, it was recorded for her TV series.) Zellweger’s performance of Come Rain Or Come Shine in Judy is, well, I love Renee Zellweger so I’m just hoping I will eventually forget it and move on.

***Again, I want to say that I’m a fan of Rene Zellweger, and I’m thrilled to see her make a comeback of her own, but there’s something gimmicky and cynical about casting her as Judy, the queen of comebacks, making her final comeback among so many.

RIP Steve Martin Caro.

When I was around 25 and just starting to record with my band The Woods, Robin Crutchfield of DNA and "No Wave" fame (whose band Dark Day I was playing cello, badly, in), told me that my voice sounded like Steve Martin, the lead singer in The Left Banke, which I'd never heard of.

I still don’t know a lot about Martin or The Left Banke, except this album, which might be their only one, which I wore out on cassette, and which is sublime. Martin’s voice is transcendent, one of my favorite pop voices of all time, based on a really small body of work. I continue to be massively flattered to be compared to him. I’ve always strived for that kind of clarity, but needless to say I’ve never reached such heights. My favorite tune was always She May Call You Up Tonight. I used to poo-poo Walk Away Renee because it was more famous and I was a snob, but looking back I can see how of course it was the biggest hit. It’s undeniably gorgeous.

Steve Martin Caro (he added the surname later because of confusion with the more widely known comedian/novelist/Broadway musical writer) died this week. A funny coincidence is that members of The Left Banke (though not Martin) went on to form another band, Stories, whose big hit Brother Louie was the first record I bought with my own money, a 7” 45 I got at the record store in the Devington Shopping Center on Arlington and 46th St. in Indianapolis. I rode my bike there to buy it when I was 12.

January.

I’ve been having these dreams lately — I asked C if he has dreams like this and he said yes, so I assume they’re one of the various broad categories of dreams that everyone seems to dream in common, like you’re trying to get somewhere and you keep getting waylaid, or flying, etc.; which, isn’t that strange but somehow reassuring? before you even get to consider how weird dreaming is, at all, and that we all do it and no one really knows why or even what it is? — anyway, I’ve had these dreams the last several days where nothing to speak of happens, I’m just sitting around feeling as if something has gone badly. Not something specific, or not that I remember when I wake up. Just something. The dream is just the feeling: worry, dread, embarrassment, something like that.

I have these dreams from time to time. I hate them. I hate them because that feeling is more or less what’s in my head about 80% of my waking life, and I feel as though I should get a break from it when I go to bed.

Maybe the dreams are about the heaviness of reckoning. January is for assessing. Where am I? What have I done? What is still to do? It’s all very serious and very …. visible, I guess? with the leaves gone and the air so clear and no Christmas shopping and no planning and traveling and no decorating and no mailbox full of catalogs and Christmas cards and no letters full of vacations and illnesses. December is a rainy night in heavy traffic with construction on the New Jersey Turnpike. January is a two-lane highway in West Texas it’s noon and there’s no one on the road but you, what’s in front of you in front of you and what’s behind you behind you.

January is when you’re supposed to do all those things you’ve put off (“December is CRAZY, but I’ll definitely get on it after the holidays!”). It’s not easy. I feel drained after Christmas, and picking up the ball requires me giving myself a good talking to, but I do love the cold clarity of January. Checking to-do’s off lists, archiving emails I didn’t respond to until now, pulling the trigger, the just fucking do it-ness of January.

I ordered new ceiling light fixtures for the kitchen and the hallway. I’ve hated the lighting in both those spaces ever since we moved in 4 years ago. The hallway light might as well not even be a light it’s so dim, and the kitchen has this I guess you’d call it track lighting but it has hanging things on it that I’m constantly bumping into. So. The new ones — one a vintage glass fixture I found on ebay and the other from Home Depot — are arriving by UPS tomorrow! I think we’ll have to hire someone to install them. I wish C or I was comfortable doing this kind of work. You’d think in a household of two husbands one of them would be that husband, but no. There should be like a rent-a-husband service for these things. But you shouldn’t have to pay them because husbands do that stuff for free. Okay it’s not a good business model.

Career-wise, art-wise, I’m ready to put together a reading of my new musical, Jack. Not a public reading but just me and 10 actors in a room so I can hear what my words sound like coming out of people’s mouths instead of bouncing around in my brain. It’s a very new experience doing something like this alone. (The only thing I can compare it to is my film Life in a Box, which I spent over a year working on by myself in a room, logging and editing sequences, but there were always others involved in various ways even if I was for much of that time the only one making creative decisions.) Momentum is so much easier in a team, and these practical non-writing tasks get divided up. The expectations of your collaborators pushes you along when you get sluggish.

A friend offered me space for a reading; now I need to find 10 actors (three of them teenagers, one elderly woman, and others of various ages and genders). I’m increasingly anxious contemplating that this will be the first time anyone has read the work but me. I’ve shared a handful of songs with a few friends but no one has heard the whole thing.

That’s what I’ve got cooking so far this year.

A New Year.

Sometimes when I’m reading a book, I’ll have an odd compulsion about turning a page, maybe there’s a particularly long sentence running from one page to the next, a reluctance causes me to have to flip back and forth a couple times trying to hold the old page in my mind as I venture into the new one. New Year’s Eve can be like that, too. As midnight gets nearer I’m anxious to hold the disappearing year in my mind, in my heart, to try to see it, understand it, take and hold it all within me before I let it go and move on.

This would seem to call for a kind of New Year’s Eve that I have rarely had. Something simple and reflective. Quiet conversation. No whooping, no Times Square on the TV.

I have a, well if I’m honest I have a dozen or so, alternate lives that I think about, ways things might be if I’d made different choices, and in one of them I’m in control of December. I don’t know why I hold onto these desires — how very un-Buddhist they are — but I do. I love winter, for so many reasons, not least of which is the turning of the year, the longest night, the long vigil, the sun coming back, the renewal, another chance, hope. But December in real life is a race to feel those things, to have that inner experience, to do that work before some date on the calendar that says “Flight to ….”

Not since my early twenties have I spent the winter holidays at home, and that was because for a couple years I couldn’t afford to travel. And then there was another year or two in my forties when my mother and I weren’t seeing eye to eye and I stayed home, though home that year was a camper parked somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, I think.

In my twenties, and even in my forties, if I even thought about it I would have thought there were plenty of years to come and if I missed a Christmas with my family there would be so many more it didn’t matter. Close to sixty now, my mother already gone and all family holiday traditions coming unmoored, I’m practically counting them down. So, now, I am always at someone else’s home for Christmas, and often for New Year’s Eve. I chose to make my life far away from my family. I got married, with the give and take of considering someone else’s family holiday traditions. And gay uncles, when it comes to family gatherings, are more often guests than hosts. That is the way things are.

Or maybe I just want to control everything.

How ungrateful I am. How selfish and mean. How ungracious to each and every one of my generous, wonderful, loving family who, to a person, open their homes and lives and holiday rituals to me.

New Year’s Eve 1989 I was alone in Brooklyn. I had pulled the rug out from under my life. I had recently deserted the man I was with for 6 years, and I was living alone for the first time in my life, in Boerum Hill in an apartment I couldn’t afford. (Incidentally, in that 6-year relationship we hadn’t spent one Christmas or any other holiday with his family or mine — or together, for that matter. In fact I never met his family. He was not out to them.) That New Year’s Eve, I avoided plans. I bought potato chips and Doritos and onion dip and whisky and I spent the night alone (well, not alone, my cats Honey and Jimmy were with me — my ex-partner got the dog) watching American Family. Channel 13 was showing the whole series. As I remember, I stayed up all night and watched it from beginning to end, but it’s possible I fell asleep. There was whisky.

I’ve been thinking about 2019, full of, like all years, like everything, wonderful and terrible things. The older I get the more I experience a kind of involuntary gratitude — or something like it that I find impossible to adequately describe — for all of it. The things so marvelous I think I probably don’t deserve them. The awful things I think I just can’t bear but do.

And there are things that cut deep because they remind me of the whole, they place me in a life, or in a sequence I recognize as my life despite how random everything seems close up. In 2019:

A piece I wrote was published in an online journal called Statorec, an essay in which I alternated between my recollections of my life in the East Village in the 1980s with excerpts from letters my friend and roommate Joan (who commissioned the essay as part of an artist’s book she created) wrote to me from Berlin and upstate New York from 1983 to 1989. It was one of those rare pieces of work that became, in the end, more or less what I imagined and hoped it would be. The experience of writing it, of evoking those years when we were young artists trying to figure it out, the experience of collaborating with Joan, my friend of almost 40 years, my first roommate in New York, was deeply moving.

In February I flew to Knoxville to see Valley High School (from Huntsville Alabama) perform my musical LIZZIE in a regional theater competition (they won their state competition!). So high schools are performing my work. High schools are performing my work.

In April, I had lunch with two friends from college, Dottie and Keith, whom I hadn’t seen in decades. Dottie was the first straight person I came out to, at 18. And Keith I had such a crush on. We did our damndest to share the last 40 years of our lives with each other. I saw in their faces, and maybe they saw in mine, the young, overconfident, terrified people we’d been drawn to all those years ago, and the older, smarter, happy, wounded people we’ve become.

C and I did get home from North Carolina early enough on New Year’s Day to throw some black-eyed peas and a ham hock in the pressure cooker. And I had some greens in the freezer, the first time in many years I’ve made this traditional good luck meal, so I’m feeling sanguine about 2020.

Photography.

I post a lot of photos, most of them from a big collection of slides my dad shot from the late 50s through the 60s and had digitized several years ago. Dad was an accomplished and talented, and, at that time prolific, photographer, and many of his photographs are by any standard excellent.

But we all loved taking pictures. My first camera was a Brownie that my dad gave me when I was around 9 or 10. I loved that camera and, in retrospect, am very moved to see all the little and big ways my parents encouraged every creative impulse I had. Dad taught me all about how photography works, how to focus and compose a shot, how to develop the film in his basement darkroom. (His inflexibility regarding what makes a good photo probably pushed me away from photography but likely pushed me toward other modes of expression that he knew less about, like visual art and theater.)

My Grandma Lenore always had a cheap Instamatic camera with her and was always trying to get everyone in the same room so she could take a “family portrait.” And I got a cheap camera too, once I got to about high school age. Growing up, there were always cameras around and there was always my dad telling everyone they were doing it wrong. And there were always lots of photos and photo albums and lots of trips to the Fotomat. Most are not what you’d call “good” photos, but I treasure them.

You can always tell Grandma Lenore’s photos because the subject is half out of the frame and there’s a big sort of blank area taking up most of the image. This drove my dad crazy. I guess they actually are pretty terrible photos, as photos — the above is not intentionally a photo of 3 ships on a wall, but I sure am glad to have a photo of those ships — still I love them I suppose mostly because they make me think of Grandma Lenore, but there’s also something wonderful and dynamic about the weird framing, like the camera is trying to escape her hands.

(The kid on the left is Mark King who lived down the street. Once my brother and I were at his house for a sleepover. In my memory it’s around Christmastime but memory is unreliable. We were in the basement, in sleeping bags but not sleeping, talking and laughing, it was very late. Mark’s father burst through the door at the top of the stairs, dragged Mark out of bed, took off his shoe and beat the crap out of him with it. Mike and I were terrified and didn’t say a word. Everybody beat their kids back then, but Mark’s dad was especially harsh. Back then, we called it “strict.”)

In the photo above, I’m wearing a sweater vest Grandma Lenore crocheted for me. By the early 70s, she’d more or less given up painting and entered a long phase of compulsive crocheting. Everyone she knew had piles of odd-shaped “blankets” in odd, unplanned, color combinations and proportions. She made ponchos for my sister, hats she called tams for EVERYONE, and sweater vests for me and my brother. Ugly is not even the word.. I knew that at 10, but it was a painful dilemma for me because I so worshipped Grandma Lenore. I had to wear them. And to school. To not would have been a serious betrayal. But I mean, look at that thing.

Grandma Lenore taught me to crochet and I also became a little compulsive about it. I totally sympathized with Grandma. Crocheting was fun, but patterns and planning and all that were not. (The most ambitious I got was, around the age of 12 or 13, I crocheted a new wardrobe for my sister’s Barbies. I liked small projects I could finish in a day or two.)

I’m guessing Mom took this one. Her sense of composition was also, by Dad’s standard, lacking, but it wasn’t as crazy as Grandma Lenore’s. That’s Grandma Lenore of course in the spider web dress. The tree is the same tree as the one in the shot above. Around the time my sister was born, we got an artificial tree which lasted well into my 20s, maybe longer.

These 3 photos happen to be from one of my grandmother’s scrapbooks, which I took when she died. She often wrote directly on photographs, dates and names, I guess so no one would forget. I used to think it was overkill, but I appreciate it now because, though I don’t forget who these people are, I often have trouble pinpointing dates.

Thanks giving.

When we were kids, we spent Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods, either at home or, alternating years, at their house in Dayton Ohio. Before my sister was born, the Bidgoods didn’t have any children so it was just my brother and me and adults. My parents and the Bidgoods had been close friends since they were newlyweds and lived in the same apartment building in Waukegan, Illinois, and they sustained their friendship with this Thanksgiving tradition, which we all loved and looked forward to. Dad and LeRoy Bigood shared in interest in aviation. Verna had been a schoolteacher and she was “educated,” a quality my parents, neither of them college graduates, placed a high, almost mystical, value on. LeRoy and Verna both chain-smoked, their humor was a little sarcastic, and they always included the kids in the conversation. Verna could be caustic at times, or so it seemed to me at that age, but I loved her. The meal was traditional, except that Verna, beside the mandatory pumpkin, made what she called an apple custard pie (I think sometimes it’s called French apple), that I had mixed feelings about. It was unusual and sophisticated to my aspirational little boy mind, but to be honest I really preferred Mom’s more traditional apple pie. I would have a slice of each.

Around the time my sister was born, the Bidgoods adopted a child, then another, then Verna, who’d been unable to get pregnant, did, and eventually as my brother and I got older and eventually moved on, my brother into the Navy, I to college and then New York, the Thanksgiving tradition dissipated. I feel a little sad not to remember if my parents and sister, who is six years younger than me, continued to spend Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods; for me it’s a memory that sits squarely in the mists of my childhood.

I think of Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods as sort of the ur-Thanksgiving. The air outside is getting sharp, the kitchen is a little too warm, the day is long, lots of conversation, laughing and conversation, and then a thrilling moment when everything is on the table untouched, the turkey, sagey stuffing, mashed potatoes with tons of butter and cream, gravy for it all, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, the amazing abundance of it.

Thanksgiving the two years I was in college at Miami, was bus trips to New York, marathon Broadway weekends, and Thanksgiving dinner at Tavern on the Green. Later, in the mid-80s, with Brian my first longtime boyfriend, we had big dinners for friends in our Fort Greene apartment with the kitchen that consisted of a sink and stove crammed into what in the original brownstone had been a dressing room over the stairs. (There was a hole in the floor behind the stove, and once our cat Sparky climbed back there and jumped through the hole onto the stove in the apartment below, scaring the crap out of the elderly Chinese mother-in-law of our landlord who was cooking at the time. A couple years later, in an unrelated incident, the elderly woman’s Rottweiler mauled Sparky to death in the backyard.) Our fridge was in the bedroom. One fall my sister was in New York for an internship, living a few blocks away with a friend. We cooked for two days and between the two of us managed to get pretty close to Mom and Verna’s version of all the traditional dishes. That was the year we had 25 for dinner.

Jay, my partner through, roughly, my 30s, and I hosted a couple of small Thanksgivings in our tiny studio on East 10th St. for stragglers and orphan friends. I remember a staggeringly good chocolate cake that one guest brought, which I ate too much of and had to lie immobile on the futon for half an hour because I thought I might actually explode and die.

Years later, when I was living in Austin — Jay and I had separated but were living in a big house with friends and my life was more untethered to anything than at any other time and there have been untethered times … oh, it’s too much back story for right now — I made a pot roast instead of turkey, and we played an epic air hockey tournament with friends that I still recall as one of the sweetest moments of my life.

I’m thankful for it all.

Now I’m older and married and probably as stable as I am capable of being and we spend Thanksgiving alternating years with my family and my husband’s family. His family Thanksgiving has moved from his parents’ home to his brother and sister-in-law’s and my family has moved to my sister’s family’s home. The year after Mom died, my sister and I made Thanksgiving dinner in her kitchen for the last time. Soon after, my father cleaned out most of Mom’s kitchen stuff, not keeping much more than he needs for the simple meals he heats up and eats. My sister is vegan now, but she gamely roasts a big turkey at her house for the carnivores. We’ll be there next year.

This year we’re with my husband’s family in North Carolina. The meal, mostly prepared by C’s brother but everyone helped, was traditional and delicious. No apple custard pie, but there was pear-cranberry. I did very little of the cooking, but I made the gravy, a task which has a high satisfaction to effort ratio.

My History of Violence.

I assume everyone has seen or at least heard about these videos of a high school boy confronting a bully. I’ve been watching them over and over. It’s — understatement! — an emotional ride, as I imagine it is for most queer people who were once high school kids, and I admit that’s why I’m a little obsessed with it, but it’s interesting on many other levels as media, as popular culture.

There’s the whole wooly conversation about who witnesses these moments of crisis in people’s lives, about surveillance, about virality, about how bullies have access to a large audience, but also the bullied have access (without or without consent) to a large audience. Smarter, more patient people than I study this stuff.

But something that fascinates and puzzles me is the “performance” of the kid (and I suppose performance more generally in heightened moments like this). I keep coming back to the boy’s affect as he threatens the bully, which is very different from his (natural?) affect in the talk show appearances:

“Back the fuck up out my face, now, ‘cause I’m not playin’ witchoo.”

“Call me a fag one more fuckin’ time and I will pop yo ass.”

“Wassup?” “Wassup?” “Wassup bitch?”

Being careful not to get myself in trouble here, is his affect and language not a performance of a black stereotype? And why? Is there a general perception that this “gangsta” stereotype is intimidating? Is that a go-to “threatening character,” like how a kid in the 1920s might have taken on an exaggerated Al Capone-type demeanor?

I’m not suggesting it’s a conscious choice this boy made, and I’m definitely not accusing him of some kind of racist blackface performance. A charge like that would, I think, overshadow most of what’s interesting in the analysis of his performance. Complicated, for sure, and of course part of the larger topic of white people and hip hop, cultural appropriation, and white kids more generally adopting so-called urban black affectations.

I also wonder — though I suspect here that I’m stretching it a bit — how the possibility of this moment being videotaped and broadcast (whether or not anyone involved has specific knowledge at the time that they are being recorded, but it’s just a thing that happens these days so it must register somewhere in people’s minds) might affect the performance.

When I was in 5th grade, there was a boy named Bobby Tate who tormented me relentlessly. (He was in my class nearly every year from 1st grade, so it had been going on for a long time.) I don’t remember what he said, what he called me. I know it wasn’t “fag.” I don’t remember hearing that word until at least 7th or 8th grade, but maybe “sissy”? I did my best to ignore him — Is “ignore a bully and he’ll go away” the worst advice ever in the history of childhood? — but I think that only encouraged him. I was miserable. One day, I don’t know what if anything was different that day, I exploded. I jumped him. We scuffled and ended up with him behind me with his arms wrapped tightly around my waist trying to take me down. I managed to pull one of his arms off me and I began twisting it with all my strength. He let go, and I kept twisting his arm as hard as I could. He screamed with pain and begged me to let go. I did. He never bothered me again. I was happy to have resolved the situation, but shaken by my rage.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a boy named Bill Conrad took a mind to walking behind me in the hallway and muttering epithets. Again, I don’t think he used any f-words, but I do remember that a favorite was “woman.” (Try and tell me homophobia and misogyny aren’t the same damn thing.) Interesting background on Bill Conrad is that in 8th grade, both of us fairly often came up with excuses to get out of gym glass. We weren’t friends, but I remember feeling some solidarity in those moments sitting on the bleachers together while the other kids played basketball. (I don’t remember what our excuses were, but I’m guessing the teacher was just glad to have a reason to not deal with us. Bill Conrad was the fat kid, I was the fag.) So, anyway, I have no idea why he chose me to torment, but it went on for weeks, and finally one day I turned around and said, “You’re FAT!” and that was the end of that.

I have mixed feelings about responding to hate with violence, but I’m generally against it. I actually feel much less regret about the physical violence toward Bobby Tate than the psychological violence toward Bill Conrad. But in the case of Jordan Steffy, is socking that little asshole in the face a level of violence to be concerned about?

Years from now, when you talk about this -- and you will -- be kind.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to finish reading a book so C — because I’ve been raving about it and he wanted to read it next and I only had about 40 pages left — could take it with him on his trip to see his family this weekend, and he was leaving for the airport at 6:45. I didn’t set the alarm or anything, I’m not that thoughtful — most mornings at 4:30 I’m lying in bed awake thinking, “I should just get up,” and sometimes I do. (The book was The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide, which you’d probably call postmodernist except it was written in 1915, and it’s a ride.)

All of which is to say that by 11:30 I was already feeling like I’d had a day. I was tired of reading (after my regular morning news fix I started Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir), not ready for a nap, or lunch, or much of anything, so I decided to rent a movie. (As fascinating as the impeachment hearings are, I can only take so much at a stretch.)

I have no idea where a sudden urge to watch Tea & Sympathy came from. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the movie, I read the play in college, which was a long time ago, but I was in the mood for something cinematic and nobody does Cinematic! like Vincente Minnelli. In case you’re unfamiliar: Tea & Sympathy is a gorgeously filmed 1956 melodrama directed by a closeted homosexual about a prep school boy accused of being a homosexual (though it’s the 50s so they’re not allowed to actually say it), but who is not an actual homosexual but just artistic and sad, who loses his virginity to a beautiful older woman who loves him because he reminds her of her dead first husband who was also sensitive but not actually homosexual and, though the older woman and her second husband, whom she leaves after her affair with the boy, live the remainder of their days alone and contemplative (she) and bitter (he), the boy grows up to write a tender, sweet roman à clef about his school days and his affair with the older woman and life is good because he’s not actually homosexual. And there’s a whore who works in a soda shop.

It was great. I wish I’d bought it for $9.99 instead of renting it for $2.99, because I would definitely watch it again a couple times at least. I mean, Deborah Kerr.

You’d think I might enjoy a bachelor weekend now and then, but I just don’t. Absence makes the heart, blah blah, but my whole week every week is a cycle of him leaving in the morning, having my own time all day, and then in the afternoon looking forward to him coming home from work. I get enough absence. I don’t like sleeping here alone; there are unidentifiable noises in the walls. If I sleep with the bedroom door closed, I start to wonder what’s lurking on the other side, and if I leave it open I am exposed to … I don’t know, bad things out there.

I’ve had a miserable cold all week and just today I am emerging from the fog. I’m still coughing a lot, but I’ve turned a corner. I feel light and overstimulated. Maybe I should watch another movie. Where does one go from Vincente Minnelli? Douglas Sirk? A nap? Or Liza Minnelli! Maybe I should watch Liza With A Z. Yeah maybe not. I’m already overstimulated. All that Halston and Fosse might give me a coronary. Better go with something artistic and sad, like me — though to be clear I am an actual homosexual.

Good Morning, Baltimore.

My old friend, artist and singer-songwriter Linda Smith, who I played with in my first band in the mid-80s, The Woods, went to see a licensed production of LIZZIE in Baltimore last night and sent me a note this morning to say that she thought it was excellent. (It got great reviews.) Linda hadn’t seen the show before, and for years I’ve wondered what she would think of it. I was playing with Linda when I first started writing songs. I looked up to her and probably imitated her more than I knew at the time.

She told me that this production was in an old warehouse full of lots of artist studios, and she sent a couple photos of the venue and set that she took before the show. They reminded me of the old days at the Pyramid Club, all that performance art and drag shows — theater — with a DIY punk aesthetic.

So many circles overlapping: Linda, Baltimore, the Pyramid Club, this exact moment in my career. I don’t suppose it will ever not be awesome knowing that there are all these productions of our show happening everywhere on just about any given day, so many that there’s no way we can see them all, but I kinda wish I’d gotten on a train and gone down to Baltimore to see this one!

Scuttled.

I’ve been doing some housekeeping today, and while I was updating things on my web site I thought I’d listen to this demo we made of one of the songs I wrote for our Hester Prynne musical that never went anywhere. It made me melancholy; one, because our Hester Prynne musical never went anywhere, and two, because I still, even while daily witnessing our Democracy corrode from the inside out, I still feel all the wide-eyed Emersonian yearning I put in this song. I still believe every word of it. I don’t know what I would do or who I would be if I didn’t.

Heritability.

This started out as a comment on a friend’s Facebook post about The Inheritance, the new 7-hour gay history play on Broadway that my husband and I saw this month (part one a couple weeks ago, and part two early this week). It is, we’re told though I haven’t read the novel, very loosely adapted from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. If you pay attention to theater news or gay news or both, you have probably heard about this play, or will soon. The Broadway production is still in previews but is opening soon.

You should see it, if theater or history or literature is your thing. It’s sprawling and fascinating. There’s a lot to chew on, and I know responses are and will be all over the place, but I will say this by way of recommendation: audience members all around us were sobbing through much of it and gave it a real standing ovation, like the old-fashioned kind that happens spontaneously instead of just “oh, all right I guess I’ll stand since I can’t see through the people in front of me.”

I'm not going to get into a big critique of the show. But gay “scholar me” got the better of “politic theater professional me,” and I will share one thought because it’s stuck in my craw:

There is a scene, a moment, late in the play — I don’t think this is a spoiler really, but if you plan to go, and you don’t want to know ANYTHING before you see it, this is your alert — which reenacts an anecdote Forster related in a letter, the text of which is in the graphic above. This scene, Forster’s telling of it, is practically scriptural. It’s like a station of the cross on the way to 20th century gay history, literature, culture. Without this moment, we would have nothing. If you care about these things, you know this story. I’m especially attuned to it right now because I use it in the new piece I’m working on. Here’s my draft text, from a line delivered by one of the characters in my show:

“The novelist E.M. Forster, in 1912, visited Edward Carpenter, the Victorian socialist, nudist, feminist, vegetarian, sandal-maker, and open homosexual and his working-class lover, George Merrill, at their cottage in rural Northern England, a pilgrimage that was made for decades by artists and radicals, writers and streams of curious young men. Forster wrote in a letter that, during a visit, ‘George Merrill — touched my backside — gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought.’ When Forster got home, he wrote the first gay novel, Maurice.”

But in The Inheritance, Merrill does not touch Forster gently on the small of his back, he grabs a handful of his ass and leers. A light touch on the small of the back is incredibly erotic but also tender. It is very different from a frank sexual come-on. The subtlety of the touch is what makes this seminal moment so powerful. If Merrill had just stuck his hand in Forster's crack, would Forster have suddenly and completely understood the connection between desire and love — would he have had the sudden insight that physical intimacy between men is not just illicit lust but something deep, essential, holy — that led him to write Maurice, a radically new kind of gay story that ends happily for the two lovers?

So okay, I will admit that, of course, one reason I’m so worked up about this is that another playwright beat me to my thing. But mostly I’m shocked that he got it so wrong, in a play that is explicitly ABOUT history and literature and the transmission of culture.

The Rose Tattoo

I saw the Roundabout’s production of The Rose Tattoo yesterday. If you ever thought of The Rose Tattoo as minor Tennessee Williams, this production will disabuse you of that notion. It’s gorgeous, tense, funny, sexy, heartbreaking, chilling. I loved everything about it. Marisa Tomei will knock your socks off.

Seeing it on Columbus Day weekend heightened the immigration politics in the play for me. It's set in a community of Italian immigrants on the Gulf Coast in the 1950s. There aren’t many white people in the story, but the ones there are don’t much like or respect the Italians.

There's a character called The Strega (the witch) who lives next door. I don’t know if Williams specifies her ethnicity in the text, but in this production she’s clearly a white lady in contrast to the Italian-Americans at the center of the story. The Strega mostly lurks in the periphery, but from time to time she steps out and addresses the audience with bigoted comments on the main action. The audience we saw it with laughed with her. Not at her. Their laughter seemed to me to indicate clear identification with The Strega’s view. (Were the character Italian, her comments would of course sound very different, and mean something different, in that context.)

It almost felt like a test. The character is played by Constance Shulman (my husband tells me she’s well known from Orange Is The New Black) who delivers these lines with sharp comic timing, so you know they’re jokes, but they seem to have no other content besides ridicule. They’re only funny if you find Italians laughable.

If it was a test, the audience failed it. Their laughter was shocking and creepy.

It's National Coming Out Day.

Steven and Eduardo, summer 1983, camping near Phoenicia, New York.

This is an excerpt from Jack, the piece I’m working on:

“Here’s something on the reliability of memory, on how stories get told, and on whether or not they are true and whether or not it matters: after two years in New York, broke and not sure what to do anymore, I decided to return to Greencastle, live with my parents, and attend DePauw University long enough to finish an undergraduate degree. I was 22. But that summer, two months before I was to leave New York, I fell in love with a boy, Eduardo. This was the summer of 1983. In the fall, I brought Eduardo home to Indiana to meet my family. Both Eduardo and I had bleached our hair platinum blond and wore oversized Bermuda shorts and black boots. We looked like every other kid in the East Village that summer. But this was Indiana. I hadn’t yet told my parents I was gay. The bus dropped us off in front of the Greyhound station, which was at Marvin’s Pizza Place but not the old Marvin’s, which had been torn down. There was a new building on the same site and it doubled as the bus station. Eduardo and I went straight to the library a few blocks away to meet my mother who would drive us home. Our appearance there made a stir. A janitor at the library taunted my mother about her queer son, she cried that night and pleaded with me to cut my hair. I did. For her. A few days later, Eduardo went back to New York, and I remember waiting with him for the bus at dawn on a bench in front of Marvin’s, the smell of his shoulder, how sad I was. That’s my coming out story. My mother tells a different coming out story that takes place four years earlier during my first visit home my freshman year of college in Ohio. She and I and Dad are having lunch at Moore’s Bar downtown on the courthouse square, where they served, where they still serve, the best tenderloin sandwiches in town. Mom says I told them I was gay that day over lunch and my father told me about his father, Ed, and told me that it was fine that I was gay, that they knew already, but to be careful because there are men who will hurt you if they find out. I have no recollection of having said anything about being gay that day, but I had pierced my left ear and I remember how strongly Mom disapproved. In my mother’s version of my coming out story, which I don’t remember, there is a conversation where I say the words, ‘I’m gay.’ In mine, there is not.”

John Addington Symonds, 1840 – 1893.

Tomorrow is the birthday of John Addington Symonds. I'm sure I've gone on about him here before so I won't again. To oversimplify, when we look at the history of the "modern lgbt rights movement," all roads lead back to a handful of guys, mostly English, in the second half of the 19th century, one of whom (and for my money the most remarkable) is John Addington Symonds.

Most of Symonds’s personal papers were burned after his death by his biographer. You might or might not be surprised how often that happened. Homophobia is a forest fire raging through gay history. Vast fields of research are just smoke and cinders now. But, incredibly, Symonds autobiography survived and was published in the 1980s as “The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds.” It’s quite a read.

We stand on awesome shoulders.

Correction.

So the joke or the stereotype or whatever is that people curate what they share on social media to make their lives look full of love and fun and cake and beautiful things for which they are daily grateful, with the intention of making their friends envious, and I always kind of thought, Well, i don’t do that. I share everything.

But of course, I do, I mean, the good stuff is the stuff you want to tell people about. I don’t feel like my intention is to arouse envy, but I’m sure somewhere in the back of my mind I’m trying to present my life as enviable.

Yesterday I posted a picture of beautiful flowers I had just planted and a sweet memory that they evoked, and later I posted a brag photo of the pizza I’d just pulled out of the oven because I thought it looked gorgeous and I was proud of it. There was nothing untrue about either of those photos or the moments associated with them. I do have a pretty good life that I love and I do put a certain amount of effort into noticing the good things and feeling grateful for them.

But that doesn’t mean most days there isn’t a parade of annoying shit going by, and I am easily irritated, easily hurt, given to complaining and bad moods that spiral downward quickly. So, in the spirit of telling the truth about my Sunday, or at least painting a more comprehensive picture, here’s the other stuff.

When I got up at 7 (I can’t sleep late even on the weekends, no matter how little sleep I’ve had), I opened the dishwasher to retrieve my favorite coffee cup ( a hand-painted mug I bought in Deruta on our first trip to Umbria 2 years ago), and the door fell off. I had turned on the dishwasher before I went to bed Saturday night, but all the dishes were still dirty.

(BACKGROUND: A few months ago, we couldn’t get the dishwasher door to shut, rendering it useless, so we bought a new one. But after 2 delivery attempts (the first time the cabinet needed to be modified before they could install it; the second time, we discovered that the new one plugged into a socket but the old one was hardwired so there was no outlet where we needed one), we pushed the old one back in and suddenly the door was shutting again, so we kept it.)

This time, though, the door completely came off the hinges. C and I are both avoiders when it comes to big household projects like this. Our deal roughly is that he has to go sit in an office all day, so I take care of the home stuff. Despite its evocation of a 1950s marriage, it’s a good arrangement, and it works well. I love the cooking, hate the cleaning, don’t mind the rest of it. He doesn’t necessarily love getting up at dawn and going to the office, but he has a job he’s good at that provides us with a comfortable life. But when it comes to tasks like figuring out how the fuck to get a new dishwasher installed, we’re both like “No, you’re the husband,” “No, YOU’RE the husband.”

So the first thing I got to do Sunday morning was pull all the dishes out of the broken machine and wash them in the sink like a normal 50s housewife. It was a LOT of dishes. It was steamy in the apartment because on Thursday when I was cleaning the house I decided to clean the kitchen grime out of the air conditioner. The previous owner of our apartment put a massive a.c. unit in our little kitchen, which is probably the worst place imaginable for a massive a.c. unit. (It’s meant to cool the whole apartment, so of course in order for it to be comfortable in the living room in August, the kitchen has to be as cold as a walk-in fridge.) Every time I use the stove I have to turn the a.c. off because it sucks the flame out from under the pan on the stove. And the cold air blows directly onto whatever you put on the counter. It’s a daily pain in my ass (as if summer isn’t annoying enough). Also it basically functions as a kitchen exhaust fan, and if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant kitchen you know how disgusting those get. So I pulled it apart, cleaned the grime out of every crevice I could get to, and ordered a new filter on Amazon, free overnight delivery. Thursday evening it was pretty cool out, so I figured we wouldn’t need the a.c. anyway.

Amazon sent a big box of paper cups instead of an a.c. filter. A weekend without a.c. is not the worst thing in the world, it would have been worse if it had been July, but it was uncomfortable. Our concrete and steel building heats up all day in the sun and stays warm, and it’s been muggy the last couple of days.

BUT, I turned that shit around. In the afternoon, I walked down to Trader Joe’s and bought red and gold chrysanthemums to plant and I planted them. I also picked up some nice cheese, and I made cocktails, and we had a Saturday happy hour on the balcony. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and I am grateful beyond words to have a small balcony where we can sit in the shade for a few minutes with flowers and cheese and a cocktail and my husband who tries so hard to keep me content and quite often succeeds.

And then I made a truly exceptional pizza that tasted every bit as great as it looked.

September.

I won’t recycle my 9/11 story today, I’ve shared it before, probably more than once, and today isn’t really the day on which people are most interested to hear about how I was, on September 11, 2001, too preoccupied with the disintegration of my own life to feel much about the attack on New York. But now, all these years later and people around me still feeling so very sad on this anniversary, I’m sadly grateful that I had no emotional resources at the time to allow me to take on the full force of the event. As years pass, it feels less like disassociation and more like equanimity.

However, I did recently, as I was transferring data to my new computer, rediscover these photos, and I want to share them. The first 3, taken on September 10, were shot in the state park near Ithaca, New York, where we were staying that week. The other two were taken several days later, from our van I believe in New Jersey across the river, probably somewhere on Route 1/9, on our way into the city to do a show at HERE. We’d been in touch by phone with a handful of close friends but really had no idea what to expect.

They would need helicopters.

One thing leads to another and I find myself this week transcribing and scanning manuscripts of my very early writing. There was a time, 1984 and thereabouts, when I thought I might write plays, or fiction, or something. Other than journals and fragments, what has survived is 1) a play called Helicopters Landing, which I would call the opus of my great early 20s disillusionment of love. At the time I abandoned it, I was preparing to make it a film, so the draft that survives has vestiges of its life as a play along with notes about shots and camera angles, etc. I left it behind, and my writing aspirations when I started to play in bands and learn to write songs. And 2) a handful of stories I was writing for pornography magazines, when porn was in magazines and they published erotic fiction. I think my scheme was that I would make a living at it — along with the manuscripts are letters from publishers with submission guidelines — but, at $100 a story, to pay the rent I would have had to work very much faster than I did. I put a lot of effort into this project but then abandoned it also. I got bogged down in revisions and re-typing and just couldn’t keep organized. This was 1991. I’m sure somebody somewhere had a little MacIntosh, but all I had was a manual typewriter. It was a beautiful machine and I love the look of the old typewritten pages, but every time you wanted to add a comma, you had to retype the whole fucking page.

Both the play and the story are saturated with my sense of my life, of myself, my aspirations and surroundings. Me. And for the most part, they are successful, as far as they go. They still do what I wanted them to do, have the same effect now as I thought they did then. Even the porn stories have an emotional atmosphere, a sense of complex interior lives, that I still try to bring to everything I create.

Soon, I’m going to add a section to my web site, an archive of old work, but for now, here are the first couple of pages of Helicopters Landing. Actually, it’s short, I’ll just upload the whole thing. Why not?

Carol Lynley.

The Poseidon Adventure is one of those movies that is easy to mock and over time becomes sort of the sum of the jokes about it and nobody really remembers, or cares to remember, the actual film. But I think it’s a great movie. Nonnie, the ship’s singer, is the character I identified with as a kid, and still do if I’m being honest. I used to refuse to believe that she didn’t actually sing The Morning After. I was convinced that there were two versions of the song, the radio hit sung by Maureen McGovern and then the recording in the film.

I didn’t know until later that Lynley had appeared many years earlier in the film adaptation of Blue Denim. (She had originated the role on Broadway.) I think Blue Denim must have been the first “serious” play I saw, at 13, a community theater production in Greencastle, Indiana, where my family had just moved. (Looking back it’s kind of astounding that they did this play, about teen pregnancy and abortion, in rural Indiana at that time. I don’t think they could do it there now without it becoming a big political shit show.)

I’m not sure why Carol Lynley’s career sort of trailed off, at such a young age, into guest spots on Fantasy Island. I think she was wonderful.

And I still can’t dislodge her from the song in my mind, despite how gorgeous Maureen McGovern sounds singing it.

Sweet Dreams, Rhoda.

The only item from my Valerie Harper collection I can’t put my fingers on this morning is a clipping from the Sunday Indianapolis Star, a column in the entertainment section where people wrote in to ask questions about their favorite celebrities. I wrote with a question about Valerie Harper and they printed my letter. I can’t remember the question or the answer off the top of my head. That clipping is around here somewhere!

But I was obsessed. I was 15.

My mom and I went to see this touring production and waited around after the show hoping to meet her. It was Mom and I and maybe 4 or 5 others, mostly older women as I remember, waiting in the house, and someone came out and brought us all backstage. We waited just offstage in the wings, surrounded by all that beautiful old hemp rigging, for quite a while until she and Anthony Zerbe appeared, all smiles, changed and out of makeup. They must have talked to us for a good half hour. They took a moment with each person there individually. When Zerbe found out I wanted to be an actor, he took me off to the side a bit and gave me a “don’t give up on your dreams” speech. I was practically vibrating.

This venue, Clowes Hall in Indianapolis, is the same theater where I saw the Broadway tour of A Chorus Line the following year (1977) on a Thespians trip. It’s still there, I think, still bringing in touring shows. In my memory it’s sacred ground.

This must have been during the third season of Rhoda because backstage after the show, one of the women who’d waited to see her said that she was heartbroken that Rhoda and Joe had separated and asked why they wold do that, and Harper said, “Marriage just wasn’t funny.”

I loved Mary, but I identified with Rhoda. I wanted so badly to be friends with her, or just to BE her. Much of what I think of as my taste or sensibility, my idea of what I wanted my life to be like, comes from being infatuated with Rhoda as a teenager: my obsession with New York before I’d ever been here, my lifelong love of bead curtains. A sense of the possibility that insecurity could be attractive if you were smart and funny.