New York New York Makes You Feel Brand New

I'm at a hotel in Dublin; near Temple Bar. That means I'm staying in the part of the city I would caution people against because it's overrun tourists. Dublin is so small in a way that you can't apply the same principles.

It's Friday night at midnight and through my open window I heard "New York! New York! Makes you feel brand new." Ms Alicia Keys. I'm home.

The place they aspire to is the place that I live...when I'm physically there.

NYC is a state of mind. I carry it with me as I place my foot onto each Irish cobble stone.

Who Cares What Happened in High School? Me. A Little

"Carl thinks that you hate him."

Someone ran up to me, delivered the news, and ran away. At least that's how I remember it; like a poof of information from a crier.

Then just as quickly Carl was standing near me, in a small semi-circle of people.

"I'm gay," he told me. He seemed to tremor, in his voice, in body.

"Yes. I know." I must have sounded annoyed. We'd known each other since we were in elementary school.

Carl had been absent from the Dobson High School - class of '89 - ten year reunion and the retirement party for drama teach the year before that (1998).

He's one of the only people I rejected when I got his "friend request" on Facebook.

This was a grudge I had been intent on keeping. It had lost it's enmity and perhaps even it's purpose. Still it had a rationality that kept it preserved.

What had happened back in high school that twenty years caused me to still give a damn?

When I was 18, he and his mother had sat down a new friend of mine and told him that I was "evil." And they were serious. I don't think they had any justification or reason to support their claim. They thought I was Ouija board evil and wanted to protect other people from that. It had been a hard experience at the time because this was a new friend and he listened to them. Or at least my purported evilness cast enough doubt for him to dump me.

If I had to guess, I would suspect that Carl's and his mother's insanity had been born from toilet paper.

I was sixteen and driving around Mesa, Arizona in a VW Rabbit Convertible with my friends Stacy and Sean. We bought toilet paper and flung it all over Carl's house. Why him? Because we knew where he lived. We went back an hour later. Why? Because we weren't sure where anyone else lived so we went to revisit our work. The TP had been removed. So we TP-ed it again.

Then we drove around. Unable to find another target, we went back to Carl's house. It had been cleaned again. But this time they were waiting for us, in stealth. Then Carl jumped out in front of the Rabbit, causing me to turn it around on two wheels. He took off after us in his Mustang. I lost him on the freeway. But then we were determined to, well, to take it too far.

I dropped off my friends at their homes. Two hours later, well after midnight, I snuck out to pick them up in the same Rabbit and redecorated Carl's front lawn.

That's the only thing I can come up with. Carl's family had been deeply religious - Catholic, so I became a bogeyman to them.

So more than twenty years later, we stood near each other in a ballroom at a Hilton in Scottsdale with him coming out to me. I look down at a red string on his wrist. He noticed, tugged at it and said, "My partner Gary and I practice Kabbalah." Carl had always been a Madonna fan going back to Junior High.

I knew that Gary was his partner for close to twenty years. Jesus. We had friend in common for thirty years. Carl and Gary had been living together since college in a condo that Carl's parent's had bought for him, not far from the TP'ed house. Carl was a flight attendant who had been having an early mid-life crisis putting that relationship in jeopardy a few years ago.

I had all that information without having spoken to him once in twenty years. I had all that news without really even wanting to know.

So Carl was still worried what I thought about him. And I was still mad at him for being a weirdo dick to me a generation ago.

I didn't want to confront that. And I couldn't let it go.

That's what people do at reunions.

Ignominy

This story is old. Maybe six or seven year old.

I was thrusting. I remember nothing about the man underneath me.

It was at this place that's no longer there - El Mirage.

"Houston, between Norfolk and Suffolk." I had that sentence memorized so that I could recite even if I were stoned and drunk, which was the state I generally arrived in.

El Mirage was the last of the New York sex clubs. You can still find a couple sad semblances of bath houses. At El Mirage, you would get past the doorman, M*, a gentle giant. "Are you a cop? Show me your dick." Apparently a real cop had to answer the first question honestly and couldn't oblige the second request. The health department reps that shut it down, after witnessing unsafe sex, must not have had the same restrictions.

Everything there was black - the floor, the walls, even the lights.

That night I had been there awhile. The guy beneath wasn't my first...or second.

I was thrusting. Then I started slowing down. Not consciously. I had wanted to keep a pace. My dick needed it at that point to stay interested, but my energy faltered.

"LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE RUNNIN' OUT O' STEAM!"

In a place where everyone spoke in whispers or grunts, this fellow next to me, watching, gave me his review in a too loud voice.

He was an older dark, black man, maybe sixty, who resembled a turtle. Round body. Little head jutting forward. I remember him wearing glasses. He used to wander around El Mirage watching. He seemed harmless. He was harmless. He never interjected himself, just sat back a little observing.

I was running out of steam. I should have pulled out and left.

More likely than not I stayed.

The Signs of Summer - Brooklyn Style

"Sure. It's, like, summer...in theory!"

Last night friends and I were at dinner, commiserating at the lack of summer this June - endless bouts of rain with rarely a sunny day in between.

This was one of those "greatest hits" conversations that New Yorkers replay every year. Summer in New York City has never been demonstrated by the weather. The signs have always been more subversive. How can you measure a season by its temperature in a city that has the odd 90 degree day in January(!), between blizzards?

Manhattanites used to declare summer by the first sighting of a Mister Softee truck. A few years ago, though, the soft server ice creamery on wheels stopped hibernating, hanging out on the streets Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.

I live in Brooklyn now at the corner of South Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, and Bed Stuy. Our apartment building sits just one block into the wrong side of the Whole Foods delivery radius. It's been almost four years since I made the migration from the East Village.

Summertime in Brooklyn starts with watermelons. A bunch of withered black men set up a folding table selling them on the corner of Nostrand and Myrtle. The watermelons have numbers written on them in black marker - 9, 10, or 11, denoting the price. They all look the same to me so what makes a melon a nine versus a ten remains a mystery to me still.

"Where do these come from?" I asked the first time I bought one.

"Georgia."

They're trucked up from Georgia and dropped at street corners of the ghettos of Brooklyn.

This year a new sign of summer revealed itself to me. As I rode my bike up Bedford Avenue to work on May 28th - a particularly cold and dark day - I made my way up through the Hassidic neighborhood that runs between Myrtle Avenue and the Williamsburg Bridge.

The Hassids are a peculiar and completely foreign culture. To live surrounded by them is to observe but never understand. They're a very introvert group, speaking their own language (Yiddish?), wearing a narrow range of garb, and milling around at all hours of the day and night in random zig zagging patterns, on-and-off sidewalks.

That gray Thursday was typical, bewigged mothers were leading their many children through intersections, pad-pad-padding along like ducklings. For all of their differentness and chaotic movements, however, nothing is rarely ever different in their behavior, so that when something changes - no matter how subtle - it's shocking.

As I peddled up Bedford Ave, I saw stations of folding tables with bunches of flowers and little potted plants. Small groups of Hassidic women stood by them as the vendors, which is also so odd that I nearly forgot to stop for the next traffic signal.

It was Shavuot. It's one of the many Jewish holidays that some Jews observe, and fewer pass without notice. Most goyim have never even heard of it. It marks the end of Spring and the beginning of Summer, in addition to its Biblical function.

That day, as I huffed and puffed my way up and over the Williamsburg Bridge I looked up for a moment to see a sign I'd managed to miss every other time I made this trip:

"Now leaving Brooklyn. Oy vey!

The Planet Spins, and the World Goes 'Round and Around and 'Round

I had missed the G train. Worse, people were streaming up the steps as I descended into the station. For those of you who never traveled to the boroughs surrounding Manhattan, the G only runs from Court Sq, Queens to Smith-and-9th Street, Brooklyn. Living near the G means you're always at least two trains away from Manhattan. It also only run every 8 to 20 minutes, depending on the caprice of the MTA.

That morning my bad luck was soon erased by the subsequent G train that arrived a mere five minutes later.

Then I also missed the 7 train from Court Sq to Grand Central. I watched the doors close at a short distance and then it slipped away, onto the next station. Two minutes later another arrived. The ride home repeated my bad luck/good luck on the L to the G.

I have to say that missing a train by seconds cannot be healed by the balm of another train showing up soon after. It's hard to appreciate what you have when you're still mourning what you've lost.

Today I arrived at the airport to find myself eighth on the list for upgrades, despite my gold frequent-flyer status. (Seriously? Who are these eight people flying to San Francisco with more credibility?) Later I stepped out of the Balducci's made-to-order line to find the ready-made bins missing my favorite sandwich for in-flight consumption. Once I got onto the plane I was made aware by the attendant that I had somehow booked a middle seat!?! I've flown 40,000 miles in last six months. Never, ever have I intentionally booked an middle seat. The flight to San Francisco lasts six to six-and-a-half hours. The horror! The horror!

Still, it was an exit row, so my legs had room even if my torso did not. Then a miracle happened. The window, exit row seat next to me remained empty, even after the plane door closed. So now I have plenty of room length- and width-wise.

So now I'm on the plane from JFK to SFO. After a double-vodka bloody mary and a Xanax my woes are receding. Soon I will eat my only choice from the Balducci's ready-made bin - a chicken curry wrap. The remake of "Race to Witch Mountain" is playing on my in seat entertainment system. The day proceeds and the flight continues.

Life is full of these little wins and losses. Why any of them should feel personal is just a solipsistic exercise. (Isn't "solipsistic" a lovely word?)

My husband and I bought a lamp recently. The Flos Glo Ball floor lamp. It was a floor sample from Design Within Reach, where Mark works. After all discounts we paid 30% of its original price. Yesterday we rented a Zipcar to bring it home. We separated the hand blown glass diffuser (globe) from the stem and base, and packed it into the car. On the first turn the heavy base rolled from one side of the hatch to the other and shattered the diffuser. We stopped the car. I collected the glass and dropped it into the trash can across the street from store. We found a replacement online. It will cost more to replace the glass part than we paid for the lamp.

"It will take me awhile to order it," Mark told me. He needs to mourn the loss before accepting that we need to replace the glass globe or else abandon the lamp altogether.

I'm sure I could drudge up some real problems; the kind that gives one perspective on such trifles. Today, however, I will enjoy the luxury of sweating and celebrating the small stuff.

Oh Shit!

Thursday morning I shit myself. Just a bit. At the Hyatt Regency on East Wacker, in Chicago.

It felt like a fart coming, a little relief from the tempest in my stomach. I was just waking and the king-sized hotel bed was clinging to me. But, let me tell you, once it became apparent that my gas had some substance I leaped out of the bed and into the bathroom, dropped trou, and sat myself onto the porcelain.

It was too late. The damage had been done. I wiped, washed, rinsed and tried to rehabilitate my sweatpants (by scrubbing with soap and scalding water, and blow drying and ironing).

I took some Imodium and then shaved and showered and dressed, trying to erase the ignominy and make myself presentable.

Due for a 'breakfast meeting,' I rushed out of my hotel and walked to another across the river. It was the wrong hotel. (The ABA Tech show had been there the last two times I went.) This is all the more confusing because the hotel, like any major hotel in Chicago on any given day, was hosting one or two conferences.

I got to the right hotel, only ten minutes late. After spooning some oatmeal, I worked our booth for half a day, then went to a meeting, then to O'Hare - where my flight to Harrisburg was delayed while its gate changed four times, all the while feeling like John Hurt giving birth to the Alien.

Friday I sat at a table in a table in a hallway outside a ballroom at a court reporters convention at the Sheraton Hershey. More Imodium, a mid-day nap, and cautious conservation of energy got me along until 5 PM when I presented to them a primer on the processes of electronic discovery.

After the presentation, I read through the comment cards. About half wrote that I had spoken too fast. That is something that makes a court reporter anxious, as quick talkers make their jobs more difficult.

Done with work for the week, at last, I walked across the parking lot to a Target, where I bought new pajama bottoms - navy blue pinstriped - for $9.99, along with saltines and several bottles of Smart Water (to restore my electrolytes).

Saturday morning I flew home.

The tempest has started to subside and my clothes are in the laundry.

Graham Norton Made Me Cry

La Cage aux Folles was the second "Broadway" production I ever saw, or rather Broadway by way of a touring company to downtown Phoenix, in 1985. (The first had been 42nd Street starring a blowzy Dolores Grey.)

I didn't register the gayness, or didn't feel much for it. Odd considering I was a fourteen years old going in knowing each showtune. There was no "I Am What I Am" because I loved musicals without shame and no one told me that I should feel any other way. My parents and sister were with me, in fact.

Peter Marshall and Keene Curtis starred. (Turns out Keene was the first gay man to play Zsa Zsa, playing his first gay role, which I just found out while reading my program from a revival - nearly 25 years later, 500 miles away from Phoenix, on the bank of the Thames.)

Tonight I sat in the third row, on the far aisle, as Graham Norton sang "I Am What I Am" and then stormed off the stage, past me and directly out the side door of the theater onto the honest-to-goodness street.

As the lights went up for the interval I wiped away my tears. I had already been crying intermittently, involuntarily in that way that feels embarrassing for a grown man to cry at a Jerry Herman musical.

It's a brilliant production, don't get me wrong. It's been stripped of it's glitz and it's stopped apologizing for itself. The men don't rip off their wigs at the end of a song to shock a complicit audience. No self-respecting drag queen needs to trick the audience into believing she's a woman. There's no trickery necessary because a drag queen would be the last person to deny she's anything other than herself.

Graham Norton cannot sing so much, but he owned his part. His Zsa Zsa was not what we used to patronizingly refer to as courageous. He played his part with aplomb but, so much better, his performance was matter-of-fact. Thank you to Sean Penn for his courageous Harvey Milk, but no one except a gay man can sing "I Am What I Am" with the integrity of a real live homosexual. So, thank you Graham Norton for playing her with no more affection than one would expect from a French drag queen in a Jerry Herman musical...and no less.

When gay Arthur Laurents first directed La Cage, written by gay Jerry Herman and gay Harvery Fierstein, he said he couldn't have the leads kiss because half the theater would walk out. He wanted to finesse the audience into acceptance. This revival - some 25 years later, long enough for someone to be born and grown into an adult, this revival ended with a middle-aged gay couple kissing as the curtain slowly went down.

And the audience still leaped to it's feet.