HOW MUCH TRITENESS?

When people ask, “If you could be 18 (or 25, or 12, or whatever) again, would you?” — for me a panic-inducing question because it contains hundreds of questions within it — I always say, “God no!” But, buried for the last three years in the journals and letters and ephemera of my youth, I’ve kind of fallen in love with my 18-year-old self. The world was cracked wide open and I was ready for it, all of it. I was preoccupied, obsessed every moment, with clearing all the accumulated Midwest bullshit and getting on with my life as an artist. I had no patience.

One regret, I guess, that I have, though, related to the question of returning, is that back then, through college, my twenties, especially my late twenties when I started working with theater artists downtown, I had opportunities all around me — in that DIY scene, people were making theater everywhere, putting on their plays, devising performances, adapting, appropriating, experimenting, in their apartments, on the street, in tiny storefronts, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, everybody was up for something weird and new — but I didn’t initiate much of anything. I’m not saying any of it was easy to put together, but you could do it. If you had an idea there were venues, collaborators, an audience. You could try stuff. It’s not that I didn’t have ideas of my own, but they weren’t concrete theatrical ideas. They weren’t “I want to try this on a stage.” I depended on other artists to come in with the framework and then I could contribute. I had tons of ideas, but they were more theoretical than theatrical.

I’ve had, continue to have, a rich and varied career, a huge success by the standards I set for myself as a kid (luckily those standards did not include financial rewards), but something nags at me. I missed a world of opportunities. I could have pushed myself, demanded more of myself as an artist and thinker and writer to find ways to theatricalize the stuff in my head. Now that world of freedom and experimentation is gone. We all turned 30, the rent went up, we had to make more money or leave New York, every marginal, liminal, derelict space was bought up and developed decades ago. Downtown disappeared. If anything like it exists now, which I doubt, it’s not accessible to me.

So maybe I lied, maybe I do wish I could return, but not to my younger self, just to the circumstances of my young life.

Old Songs.

Nice list of great songs made over for a new time.

I was thinking along these lines when If I Loved You, from Carousel, came on during that awful gay rom-com, Red White & Royal Blue, in a cover by a singer called Vagabon (I’d never heard of her, is that because she’s obscure or because I’m old?). It was gorgeous and immediately moving. I downloaded the recording and enjoyed it, I love the airy arrangement, but I probably won’t play it much. Toward the end of the song, she alters the melody in a couple of places in ways that diminish it.

Strangely, I don’t have any trouble with Dolly Parton’s loose approach to the melody in her recording of Let It Be. I think I’d put McCartney is the same category as Richard Rodgers when it comes to just sing the tune as written, but something about the churchiness of Let It Be makes it feel okay.

Non-binary thinking.

I had a sudden insight regarding the label, “non-binary.” I’ve been irritated by it for years, didn’t really get how people were using it, I thought it was an unnecessary, and ugly, word. Some people identifying themselves as non-binary are outwardly, visibly, gender nonconforming in dress and speech, body, affect, what we used to call butch lesbians or nellie queens, bulldykes, sissies. Since to me “gay” and “lesbian” have always included a vast range of gender presentation, most of it nonconforming, I felt like “non-binary” was sort of implied. But others using the label appear conventionally male or female, sometimes even heterosexual. The latter phenomenon is still baffling to me.

I also resisted the word because it has an off-putting scientific, computery smell about it. Some people have the same issue with “homosexual” — they find it antique, clinical — but I like it. Meaning accumulates on words over time, and I think homosexual after a couple centuries has acquired a more complex resonance, warmer than it was when it first appeared in scientific literature. 

First I was gay, then for many years I preferred “queer.” I liked the broader brush of “queer,” the way it included trans and bisexual, men and women. I liked how blunt and confrontational it was. I liked the way it felt to steal the power of a slur. But recently queer has come to be used in a way I don’t, to be honest, really grasp, and yet feel specifically excluded, as a homosexual man, from whatever its umbrella is meant to cover, so I mostly avoid it. I strongly dislike being called “cis.” I think originally cis had a simple technical meaning — a person whose sense of their own gender matched their biological gender — which I guess more or less describes me now, but lately I see the word used to mean something more like a person whose sense of their gender and their presentation of it in the world conform to a stereotypical, essentialist view of gender. Which doesn’t describe me. (And “cis white male” now seems to mean no more than “culprit.” It’s lazy politics and lazy thinking. It’s also snobbery, looking down on people with conventional taste and aspirations, judging certain people to be not queer enough.  My first thought when I hear or see “cis white male” is “yeah fuck you.”)

So, as a person whose life and personality gender- and sexuality-wise are a very mixed bag and more often than not misaligned with society’s expectations of how male-bodied people act, look, and behave, I am non-binary. I don’t mean that in a “this is me!” way. I’m not coming out. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I don’t see any of these words in terms of some deep characteristic of identity. They’re descriptive words. What’s immutable is my sexual attraction to men. My identity as a gay man is cultural, it’s political. We come together and assert a common identity because it gives us political power. I see non-binary as a broader category, comprising anything that rejects or confounds or debunks or flies in the face of the idea that male and female are separate and opposite, literally “not binary,” and that describes me, so I’ll embrace it. I am gay, I am biologically male, and I am non-binary.

I know that most young people, with their endless appetite for taxonomy and moral certainty, will probably disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay. I won’t say they’re wrong. But I’m not a young person.

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.