Retired

A year ago, I posted the following:

But why can't I be a Lady of Leisure? I have the attitude, I have the wardrobe (three pair of cashmere socks and some almost-clean tee shirts,) I have stacks of things to sit around reading, and I had 18 petit fours, but they seem to have been eaten. If it wasn't for this stupid "employment" thing, I would be good to go. Just this afternoon, I was trapped in a committee meeting and thought, "Now this, this is the wrong life."

So now, my whining dream finally has come true. On January 14, I filed my application to retire and now it has finally fought its way through the byzantine paths of federal personnel actions and as of March 16, I am retired, an ex-civil servant. Yes! Say it with me girls, I am OUT. I win. All it took was 22 years of listening to the public complain that I was not doing enough for them as I pondered where to go for lunch. Suck it bitches.

I worked for the Small Business Administration. I was a Business Development Specialist. I wrote press releases and speeches and dealt with the media (bitches) and made charming little speeches about topics I knew almost nothing about to the great unwashed. I developed and administered a training program of more than 400 classes attended by about 10,000 small businesses each year. I learned how to spell the word "entrepreneur." I kicked out an old lady who insisted on bringing her cat with her to class. I was the go to guy for any design decisions because I was the office homo. I frequently ate cheese enchiladas for lunch.

And now all that is behind me.

My attendance once R Man got sick was spotty anyway, and by the time he was actively dying, I just stopped even pretending to go in. Everybody was cool with that. When he died, I announced I was not coming back, period, and that I was filing for an early, disability based retirement. Everybody was not cool with that, assuring me it was rash decision I would regret.

Let me see, retirement: getting paid for not working. What's to regret? Anyway, I ignored their advice (as I so often did) and now I'm out and cheerful as all fuck about it. I have regarded the time since R Man died and I just have hung out, doing nothing, as practice. Turns out I have real talent for this, talent I have been wasting all these years in the office. Saki digs it.

Great Dame

A few things I know about E. Taylor, DBE.

1) I love her in Cleopatra, especially when she arrives in Rome on a giant golden sphinx, preceded by dancing semi-naked nubians, natch, every inch the great and mighty queen of Egypt and then winks at Caesar like a barmaid looking for a good time.

2) I have always had a hard time watching Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, even though she's fascinating in it, and a much better actor than Richard Burton.

3) her fake Southern accent in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof makes my skin crawl. It is, however, better than that of Dame Judith Anderson. Not that that's saying much.

4) her greatest role was in the White Diamonds perfume commercial where she saunters into a poker game (photographed through all the gauze available in California at the time,) hauls off her gigantmundo diamond earbobs and says "These always brought me luck." A role model for drag queens everywhere.

5) thinking of her always reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit where John Belushi impersonates her choking on a chicken leg. Heehee. I am a bad person.

Netflux

The internet: a sea of information and entertainment at my fingertips and I spend the last two weeks obsessively working my way through Netflix's backlog of stupid science fiction. Oddly, there seems to be only one plot available to all these shows: a rift in the space/time fabric allows Bad Things to come though and menace earth. "Bad Things" is a technical term. Here's my report as well as I can remember it.

Primeval. Doctor Who. Torchwood. ("Torchwood" is an anagram of "Doctor Who," the nerdly kind of thing that appeals to me.) In order they were: grim and stupid; whimiscal and stupid; and gay and stupid. Torchwood, gay science fiction! Hooray! They killed off the boyfriend of the excessively pretty hero and anyway, it was stupid. Not hooray! Kind of un-hooray!

Plus, let me just mention, if there is a rift in the space/time blahblahblah I would much prefer to have armies of seriously mean guys going up against the Bad Things rather than some tiny random gang of BBC nerds, even if they do have such thick Manchester accents no one can understand them. That's just how I roll.

But I also stumbled across Pushing Daisies which was not stupid and was charming and funny and cool and great visuals and Swoosie Kurtz and Kristin Chenoweth, who were both fantastic, and the very attractive Lee Pace in the lead.

Of course, it was canceled by ABC after two short seasons, probably to make room for Sarah Palin's Monster Truck Rally or something.

So now I've reeled back down off the Netflix binge. Much like eating a whole box of Girl Scout cookies at one sitting, about half-way through, you think "This is probably a bad idea." And then when you finish, you realize you were right, but that doesn't help, particularly.

Also, speaking of science fiction, here's my new parallel universe boyfriend.

I call him Spunk Nozzle.

Toy Story Two

It all started out so innocently. Super Agent Fred and I went to lunch this afternoon and I was telling him about the post below on the Invasion of the Barbies and then I told him about how the wicked, wicked commentators on the post had urged me to follow through on my harmless little whim about creating a Barbie cabaret act diorama and then, the next thing I knew, we were wheeling off for the Toys R Us in the suburban hellhole south of here in order to get the necessary Ken dolls for the essential, sordid tea room sex scene.

How do these things happen?

All the way to the store we sympathized with each other about how we loathe shopping malls. Once there, it turned out to be every bit as a bad as we had pissed and moaned about, if not worse. The whole place seems to have evolved over the years out of one bad idea into several. There was no directory, so we were forced to wander around amongst the fat people past the most dreadful merchandisers you can imagine. Who needs multiple stores hawking football logo crap? Did you know Orange Julius and Dairy Queen have joined in some unholy union? The only cute guy in the entire place only wanted to sell us a new cell phone.

When we did find Toys R Us, it turned out to be a stunted little mini-operation; it's possible the space was originally a storage closet. Still, Fred and I shared in the guilty thrill of it all. There was a whole raft of pirate stuff. Pirate stuff! If I hadn't already started down the Barbie path, I would so certainly have gone pirate. Maybe after the cabaret I can move onto Barbies of the Caribbean, Buccaneer Princess.

Instead of the sweeping aisles of Barbies I had envisioned, there was one dinky little section. I could have done better staying at home waiting for random kids to leave their dolls behind. We took two Ken dolls (thus cleaning out their entire selection) and scrammed, pausing only to feel really, really sorry for the poor schmo clerk, in his mid-30's, stuck in a third rate toy store with a crappy Casio knock-off keyboard set on "irritating 80s beat" to keep him company. He recommended we go to a famously evil, anti-gay mass marketer for more choice of all things Barbie. Possibly out of spite, I don't know. We went. I am ashamed.

Did you know Barbie has morphed out of the slightly slutty style icon she was in the 60s into some kind of fat faced mutant with a much smaller rack? What's the point? On a positive note, all of the Kens look totally, absolutely gay, gayer than me, and that's saying something.

Crushingly, there was no Solo in the Spotlight Barbie,

which, obviously, is pretty much the centerpiece of any cabaret act diorama, goddamit, unless I want to go with some Priscilla, Queen of the Desert salute with the Kens.

Exhausted, I dropped off Fred and came home where I started vaguely remembering a gay doll from the 90's that would add a lot to the whole thing. Internet-based research turned up the item that he was "Billy Doll, the anatomically correct gay doll" Although "anatomically exaggerated" would probably be more accurate.

I took some Vicodan and started looking further on the web (and let me say, no sentence starting with those words will turn out well) and stumbled on an EBay auction of him. I've heard how difficult EBay has become, with online tutorials about how to win now, but in this, my first crack at it, I bid and by the time I thought "I hope I don't score this stupid thing," it was too late.

So now I have two Barbies, three Kens and two Billys, one of which is his Puerto Rican friend, Carlos.

It's all spiraling out of control.

Toy Story

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I've Given Up Being On Time for Lent

I actually posted this three years ago for Mardi Gras and just ran across it now, more than a day late, but I'm dragging it back up now because a) I still feel this way about Carnival and b) I'm too lazy to come up with anything new.

Tomorrow, I promise to share the thrilling details about the Barbie dolls that have come to haunt me.

Anyway, back to Mardi Gras posts gone by:

Darlings, a moment, please, while an old man wipes a sentimental tear away. As a young homo living in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Carnival was a time that never failed to thrill me to my very core. The whole season is a celebration of debauchery, and Mardi Gras is its apex, nominally to get it all out of your system in time for Lent, to which I always said a hearty "whatever". I adored the tons of boys pouring into town looking for sex, which I was only too happy to provide; getting loaded with friends at all hours for hours; the parades; hell, I even looked forward to the nasty little king cakes.

I actually moved to New Orleans because of Carnival. I had been lucky enough to go to several while in college in Austin, driving 10 hours to New Orleans, careening through the weekend and then dragging my sorry ass home. After I left Austin, I briefly wound up in Seattle, but one day suddenly realized I could live in New Orleans and have Mardi Gras come to me instead of the other way around. Coincidentally, that was the same day Reagen was elected the first time and NOLA seemed like a good place to go hide. I was there in time for the next Carnival. I seem to remember costuming as a flamingo.

I spent one Mardi Gras lying on my back athwart the threshold of my bathroom tripping like a million screaming monkeys. My friends alternated between stepping daintily over me to use the facilities and trying to talk me into going outside. I steadfastly refused, announcing that I was perfectly comfortable. And I was. I had spent the whole weekend running around to bars with my dick hanging out. I needed the rest. After another Mardi Gras, I was discussing what a gorgeous day it had been with my dear friend Magda who finally had to point out it had, in fact, rained non-stop and that I had simply been too loaded to notice.

The year I was working as a room service waiter, I amused myself all morning doing acid and then had to go to work for the 3:00 shift still tripping. Oh, that was a year to cherish, let me tell you.

Of course, drugs and sex are not all Carnival has to offer. There's also parades and beads, both of which are dear to me. I vividly recall the image of a float bearing down on me one night on St. Charles Avenue, its glaring lights illuminating a fountain of beads erupting from it. They were cheap and gaudy and I would fight you to the ground for them. Do not get between me and them pearls, bitch. We had bags of them by the time we left town, everyone does.

After we moved to San Francisco I went back once for Mardi Gras. It was terribly amusing, of course, but not the same, poignantly enough. Still, this time of the year, every year, I remember it all longingly. And to that young poofter hanging out in a jam packed bar tonight, high as the proverbial kite, feeling up some humpy guy from out of town, and simultaneously wondering what he's going to wear on Tuesday, I say Here's to ya honey. You go girl.

An Afternoon at the Opera

Super Agent Fred and I went Sunday afternoon to Philip Glass's opera Orphee. It seemed like a good idea at the time; I love Philip Glass's weird little neener-neener-neener music and the opera was based on Jean Cocteau's film, of which I am one big gay fan.

We settled in and I was trying to listen to the Glassian melodic noodling, but there was this ongoing, annoying noise interrrupting my concentration. I finally realized it was the singing. The whole thing was a "word for word re-enactment of the movie." Again, probably a good seeming idea, but it meant all the singing was actually recitative, which I hate because I'm shallow, and no arias, which are the parts I love because I was raised on operas performed in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

The best line: "My life stinks of success and death," sung by Orphee and which wins the award for the most French sounding declaration in history. Speaking of Orphee, one of the show's insurmountable problems was that Jean Marais (one of the most beautiful men in history) played him in the movie and those are some pretty big cheekbones to fill. Compare and contrast:

Jean Marais

Eugene Brancoveneau, the Orphee in Sunday's opera.

I think he looks like a shoe salesman. Jean Marais would never sell you shoes. You should be so lucky.

Also, here's a picture I stumbled on of Brancoveneau getting up to something or the other at Spoleto:

Oh dear.

The set looked like it was borrowed from a middle level community college production of Death of Salesman. Eurydice had a snappy little New Look shirtwaist dress that was very pretty, but Death was tarted up in a corset and a full skirt, neither of which fit or did her any favors.

So intermission rolled around and we sort of left. "Fled" would probably be a better description of us scurrying out, looking for cupcakes, which we never did find. Rats.