I haven’t written, but I’ve been keeping up with everybody else’s posts and comments and wondered how long I could lurk before my name disappeared from the Contributors drop-down on the masthead. Finally AKA William, responding to my repeated and broken promises of getting back to work, suggested that I approach this column as “a chatty list of what’s going on on Broadway.”
Happy April, AKA William readers!
I haven’t written, but I’ve been keeping up with everybody else’s posts and comments and wondered how long I could lurk before my name disappeared from the Contributors drop-down on the masthead. Finally AKA William, responding to my repeated and broken promises of getting back to work, suggested that I approach this column as “a chatty list of what’s going on on Broadway.”
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I was born a little too late to have more than a vague, if warm, memory of Betty Buckley’s work as a TV mom (on Eight Is Enough), but I have thought of her for years as a quintessential Broadway star. My sister and I used to dance around the living room to the tape of Cats, exhausted just in time to collapse and listen breathlessly to Betty singing Memory. Years later, when I was getting into musicals, “Memory” sounded weird on the Andrew Lloyd Webber CD my mom bought for the car, Elaine Paige’s recording felt unfamiliar, rarified, far away. Then, a friend gave me a video where Angela Lansbury introduced Broadway originals to sing their signature songs. From the alliteration of Buckley’s name, I got the tingle of Broadway magic. Betty Buckley is a goddess to me, in the pantheon of divas along with Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli and Bette Midler, as well as Betty’s own contemporaries in more recent musical theatre, Bernadette Peters and my beloved Patti LuPone. One of the hallmarks of divahood is a signature song, a calling card, something to be known for in the great tradition of Judy with “Over The Rainbow” – an excellent model not only because of its popularity, but also for the way Judy, later in life, found a new take, a totally different way to sing the song, separate but equal to, or arguably better than her youthfully pure, exquisite original in The Wizard of Oz.
There’s a list of shoulds I mean to tackle every single day: write, read, exercise, quit smoking, pay off debts, save for vacation, save for retirement, call my mother, etc. In my holidaze of the last two months, I’ve felt incapable of doing anything but the dishes after night after night of drinking and eating with friends over at my house.
My roommate has been gone for over two months, but I haven’t been alone for one night, between the parties and partying, and going out and dating and having my friend crashing on my couch in between apartments. Part of why I wanted to live alone was so that I could entertain like this, cook and drink and not have to leave the house. I love being a host. I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but I haven’t written a page in almost two months, not for The New Old Gay nor for the show I’m hardly working on. I’m devoting this week’s column to Our Lady J’s upcoming Boob-Aid concert on December 16th, a benefit to raise money for her breasts. Looking back on the more than four years I’ve known the “trans songstress” (as she is often called), I want to express how much our relationship has meant to me and what I have learned about myself in watching her transformation. I first met Our Lady J when she was still Jonah, a boy, the hot young musical director of my friend Natalie Joy Johnson’s joint cabaret act with Adam Fleming at Feinstein’s at the Regency.
My uncle is an editor at a major publishing house and recently, pillaging his office for free books (unemployed a couple of years ago, I’d sold most of mine…), I picked up a trade paperback of Gone With The Wind, probably my favorite book of all time although I hadn’t read it since 1987.
It has stayed close to my heart, though, partly due to watching and rewatching the movie over and over again throughout the years, and mostly because of the multilayered affect it had in defining a great deal of who I am as I came of age. Last week, my cable service was shut off due to non-payment of my bill (whatever, it’s gonna take me a couple of months to catch up from the cost of transitioning to living without a roommate, or bed bugs . . . ). One sleepy, hungover morning-after-a-wild-night kind of day, I was faced with the dilemma of what to watch. It was the kind of day when I like to melt into the couch and “m’stories,” i.e. all the various and sundry programs I DVR on a wide-range of channels from ABC to VH-1, from HBO to DIY, Bravo to Showtime, etc. What was I going to do without all that?
It’s not news that gay movies are usually crap. I still see them, or watch them on TV or Netflix or whatever, but my expectations are invariably low. As a matter of fact, I think over the years, my standards have been substantially lowered by the constant influx of dreck.
Why do I keep going back? This weekend, the day came at last when my roommate moved out and I got to take over the entire railroad apartment for myself, after sharing it with one person or another, for 10 years.
Unfortunately, I won’t be the only living thing in the place for the next couple of weeks, because, to update you on my post of few weeks ago (Bed Bugs and Scabies and Crabs, Oh My!), it has turned out that I actually have a bed bug infestation. It seems that in order to start writing, I have to exhaust everything on TV and eat all the food in the house. To get to that Carrie Bradshaw place of introspection at my computer, I have to have nothing else to do. 10 years ago, I had to have no one else to do as well, but now I can write without sating that appetite. I’m looking for something more meaningful now, not so interested in sleeping around anymore and it’s, thankfully, one less distraction in trying to do what I really want to do. Last week, at Tivo’s end, I was still not ready to start writing, and I happened upon the Quentin Crisp later-years biography, An Englishman In New York, on Logo On Demand. I think I’ve always been somewhat vaguely aware of Quentin Crisp, although I think I may have confused him with Oscar Wilde.
I started watching The View, or at least recording it every day for Hot Topics and the occasional must-see interview or diva performance, when Rosie O’Donnell took over for Meredith Vieira a couple of years ago. The show itself became very must-see as the discussions grew increasingly heated, particularly in the tension between the ultra liberal O’Donnell and the acutely conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck. There was something very democratic and America-as-it-should be to see a right-wing voice in a left-leaning forum.
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