9 Things I Invite you to Ram up Your Ass:

1. Your Peloton bike
2. Your ride logbook, which you regularly post photos of on social media
3. Your macros pie chart, which you ... (see above)
4. Your clueless "all lives matter" bullshit
5. Your inane social media posts about how much you are deeply #inlove your #soulmate and what a #perfect #lover your #soulmate is and how you are #blessed and #spoiled etc. Everyone knows it's bullshit. Also, it's fucking annoying. 
6. All things Disney-related
7. Your thoughts and prayers
8. Your travel photos, which you relentlessly (see #2). We get it. You have disposable income and plenty of time on your hands. But we don't need to see 30 photos a day of your two-week stay in Oaxaca for chrissake.
9. Your thoughts and prayers.  

Crude, angry, politically incorrect, chain-smoking and sophomoric = dreamy. I am counting the days until Rescue Me returns to FX. Yes, yes, I know, I am a sad excuse for a feminist.

My spouse is going through what all my girlfriends are gleefully referring to as male menopause.

The signs and symptoms? He’s driving a new black Mustang convertible and has joined the gym. What can I say? Could we be any more clichéd if we tried? Probably not. He works hard and he deserves to embrace whatever makes him happy as far as I’m concerned, so what the hell, right? The only thing that truly mystifies and sort of bothers me about any of it is that he seems to be dragging my dad along for the ride, literally.

My dad is a die-hard type-A as is the Guy in the Boxers. So they have had more of an arms-length relationship with one another over the past 17 years rather than a warm fuzzy one. Dad is a retired career officer of the Army genus and the GITB was enlisted swine in the Navy. Strike one. Dad was raised Catholic and converted to Buddhism after one too many tours in Southeast Asia. The GITB is a non-practicing Jew. Strike two. There really is no strike three. All that they have in common has always far outweighed the things that they don’t, but still, there’s always been a bit of antler-ramming and intellectual sparring over the years. Just enough to keep my mom and me entertained. But they have of late become gym buddies, working out together several times a week and hiring a trainer together. Which is weird for me. Dad has even taken to calling the GITB “son.” I’m sure this meets some need for the GITB who grew up without a dad but for him to suddenly bond with mine now is just kind of unexpected. It’s nice. Just weird.

Maybe part of this coming together has to do with the small but steady steps our kid is taking toward full-out adulthood. She is sailing through high school at alarming speed and with great academic success, so much so that she has been invited to transfer to the local college for her junior and senior year of high school, graduating with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree. She’s learning to drive and the old family sedan has been spruced up and is in dry-dock in the neighbor’s extra garage, patiently tapping its toes awaiting her 16th birthday. Her trajectory is making us talk about what we’ll do in two years when she launches from the nest. The possibilities sit whispering in the corner of my writing room and I try to tune them out but they sneak up and tap my elbow and say “Hey! what about…”

Maybe I’ll go get a doctoral degree. Or I could join my friends who do merchandising for Broadway tours and go out on the road for six months. Maybe I’ll tell my bosses to shove it once and for all and totally go out on my own as a consultant. Or maybe school is it. I start teaching at a local small liberal arts college this summer and the idea of settling into academia for the rest of my working career is more appealing now than ever, especially with the fabulous schedule and freedom it affords.

In the meantime, it’s watching the gym rats do their thing and trying not to freak out over the demise of newspapers and the fucked up economy and all the for sale signs in my neighborhood. And the surreal awareness I have as I drive in relative safety and security to pick my kid up at school marveling at the serene blueness of the cloudless sky and the warm sun that it is disrupted by Coast Guard helicopters searching for a group of friends who went out on the water Saturday for a day of fishing and camaraderie and never made it home.

Spending the day with the gays

So my parents called me this morning to ask why my picture was on the front page of today's metro section seeing as how it was attached to a a story about a gay rights protest against the recent passage of Amendment 2 in Florida. Imagine their dismay when I told them that the whole damn family including the dog attended to lend our support and join the chorus of voices opposing this hate and intolerance-driven measure. We attended with our friends Kathy & Lisa who have been married for 13 years and my dear friend Scott and his new partner Tommy. How I wound up in the paper I cannot understand, though, seeing as how I write for the paper and we have a strict policy about running pictures or stories of reporters. All I can figure is that the photogapher is new (I have not met her) and whoever was on the copy desk yesterday failed to recognize me, maybe because I am in fuzz focus here. I was laughing at the time the photo was snapped because the speaker was a woman with a Leonid Breshnev unibrow and Scott could not stop commenting on it in his syrupy southern twang. "Oh, Lord Jesus, please let me help her with her grooming, bless her heart..."

Last night was the annual membership meeting at my community theatre. It's usually a very acrimonious event -- the annual ritual when the old timers heave themselves from their Barcaloungers and drag themselves away from the shuffleboard courts and some of the ladies ill-advisedly paint their faces up with gallons of oily make-up that probably reached its expiration point at least a decade ago. They come and take up the front rows of the creaky old maple seats and grumble and grouse about how we kids are running the theatre into the ground with our dirty plays that use the eff word and other such indignities we are heaping upon the great old lady (the theatre).

They are all too old now to tread the boards any longer, their advanced years keep them from being able to memorize lines or climb the stairs that lead from the dressing room to the wings backstage. So now they buy season ticktes and come to see all the shows, relegated forevermore to the role of audience member, a painful transition.

So they rail against what time has wrought at the annual meeting every year. It's an opportunity to play one last scene, to "take the stage" in a way. Old battles and rivalries are revisited and bruised egos flame anew. I always find it exhilarating and relish the glimpses I see here and there of great beauty and drama coming from people one would walk past at the grocery store, never guessing that at one time they lit up the stage with a fearfully thrilling portrayal of King Lear or Desdemona. It's something I look forward to every year.

But last night's meeting was such a disappointment. There was no rumbling or grumbling, no one took a pregnant pause and shuffled to their feet to ceremoniously and defiantly nominate a confederate from the floor when the proposed slate of new board members was announced. Margarite, our flame-haired 80-something parliamentarian and Roberts Rules devotee (who bears a startling resemblance to Carol Burnette) was still at her summer home in North Carolina, the first time in decades that she has not arranged her seasonal migration to enable her to grace us with her presence and tsk, tsk and/or sternly correct us when we stepped over the line of proper decorum.

Tim and Lena, a pair of 75-year-olds who met and fell in love 30 years ago while performing in Life With Father up and got married last month after years of loving one another from afar and waiting until they both were widowed to hook up. They moved to New Hampshire to be closer to his kids.

Clark, a mean old kid-hating S.O.B. who has convincingly played the warmest, most loving Santa in Miracle on 34th Street every year since I can remember, is recovering from a stroke and he sat forlornly silent at the back of the theatre, unable to negotiate the downward rake of the floor in the auditorium.
The meeting was quiet and collegial and there was no reckoning -- no arguing or snarky commentary from the peanut gallery as reports from various committees were made. It was as if the backbone of every production (the chorus) and of our theatre -- the old-timers -- had collectively decided to wander upstage and not let any of us know they were exiting and we were left not sure of when they might enter again. It was as if the oxygen had been sucked from the building and replaced with ether.

The meeting was over in exactly an hour and we all wandered out to the lobby and stood over the full punchbowl and murmured, quiet little conversations about vacations and school starting up again and gas prices. I looked around and realized Cookie wasn't there either -- she maintains the same hairdo she has sported since I was in high school- a fluffy blonde pageboy with a slight pink rinse on it so that it resembles backlit carnival cotton candy from across the room. Cookie was a regular on the Jackie Gleason show back in the 1950s and '60s and used to entertain us with backstage stories about how sweet it was. The show taped in Miami and all the June Taylor dancer girls would spend the mornings basting on the beach before the evening shows. Jackie would have flowers delivered to every female in his show before every performance. As a teenager I found Cookie's stories tedious because she kept telling the same ones over and over, so I began to avoid her whenever she spotted me in the lobby after a show and waved a lavender scarf to get my attention. Now of course, I realize how cool her memories are. Cookie is a widow now and she doesn't like to drive at night anymore and she is recovering from hip surgery. As I stood and looked at the platters of pinwheels and brie and crackers it ocurred to me that I should have called Cookie and asked her if she wanted a ride. She hasn't missed am annual meeting in years.

bent

I realized the other day that I have no respect for my boss which is not a good place to be for me. I can't love someone if I don't respect them and somehow, I have always found something to respect about my boss of many years and so I was able to "work love" him, i.e., work for him and be a team player and always do my best and tell him the truth, you know, and feel okay about spending more time with this group of people every week than I do my own family. The usual. Working for a decent stand-up guy made it not so bad if you have to work for a living. But I found myself last week experiencing an emotion when he and I were talking that I have not felt in relation to him before: disappointment. And the cold bucket of water in my face of reality was particularly uncomfortable because as he spoke to me, it became clear that he really does believe his own line of bullshit. He has sold out. He is making the big bucks now and therefore he must speak the party line. It's nauseating to me. I'm not so naive as to think that maybe I wouldn't do the same thing, but I'd like to think that I wouldn't. If they (the hord/borg of smug elitists who have taken over our company) suddenly doubled my salary as they did his, would I willingly bend over and at the same time, blithely allow my colleagues to be shat upon? I hope not. But a six-figure salary does things to people sometimes. I guess the thing that disappoints me the most is that I realize my boss is sort of spineless. Not sort of. He is. He is a coward and this realization bothers me almost as much as it would if I had discovered that he is a closet anti-semite or a gay-basher or an abuser of kittens and puppies.

Pride Promenade 2008

I was lecturing a few of my boy-toy friends yesterday about how fortunate they are to be of the generation they are (they are in their 20s and 30s) because when I was their age a lot of my friends were getting sick or dying. There was a point in the late 80s and early 90s that I developed an aversion to a ringing phone. It seemed like every day there was more bad news, more people I knew getting sick then finding out they were positive, then they quickly got sicker, and at the time, it meant death, certain, swift and agonizing. It was a terrible dark time. Being a theatre person I think I was more tuned in to what was happening than my straight non-art-ish friends. It was very isolating in a way too -- like living through a terrible, roaring plague while most of the population seemed to ignore it as they blithely went about their lives. It was surreal.

Anyway, enough of that. The Pride Promenade in my town gets bigger every year and this year, like last year, was the best ever (so far). It made me smile until my face hurt. It was a good day to be in the world.

Happy V-Day

I heard Woody Allen being interviewd recently and his response to the interviewer's question about what lessons or truths he's learned in his long life made me laugh. (Woody is 73 now. Can you believe it?)

Woody didn't hesitate before he responded, "Nothing really." I could totally relate.

The older I get the more I know I don't know shit. As a kid I just assumed that the grown-ups knew everything there was to know and I also assumed that once I too reached adulthood, I would somehow magically be instilled with this all-knowing-ness. So when I became a young adult I was shocked, shocked by the adults (especially the older adults) with whom I crossed paths who were complete fucking idiots. And by that I do not mean mentally challenged due to some sort of genetic mishap. No, I am referring to the idiots who choose freely to be ignorant assholes.

But that is a whole 'nother rant. This rant is about love. WTF is love? Who knows.

I know that most of the times in my life that I have been "in love" I have been in the end:

A: actually, just wanting to have sex with the person;

B: hugely disappointed at best and;

C: completely devastated at worst.

But unlike Woody, I haven't learned zip. I have had some moments of clarity. They may make no sense to you, but I don't give a shit. They're my truths. So here goes:

*Guys sometimes say "Baby,I love you..." during sex because at that exact moment, they sort of do. I mean, can you blame them for blurting those words out when their tiny little brains are being flooded by an electrifyingly euphoric tidal wave of hormonal surging? What they are really (usually) saying is: "Holy shit, it's good to be alive and THIS FEELS FUCKING GREAT!!!!"

*Lust is a wonderful thing. But it is not sustainable as a constant if you share the same bathroom for a few years. But if you truly had it at first, it comes back in flashes here and there, usually when the house is kid-free thanks to sleep-overs or grandparents and you have engaged in a nice dinner and/or a prolonged happy hour. It can return and manifest in a really hot romp of sweating and hair-pulling and loud vocalizing and happy endings that make your home a happy, shiny place for at least a week afterwards. And that's good to know.

*Some people (okay, not just men) oh, fuck it--it's the men--only want to be with you when you don't give a shit about them. This is particularly maddening when it's a case where you are hot for him but he has a thing for someone else who treats him like utter dogshit. So you're all: "Hey!!! Hello??? Come over here!!! I'm the one who loves you and appreciates you!!! I'm the one who really does want to give you everything you want!!!" But do they listen? No. And then when you have seen the light and walked away, they decide you may not be a bad bet after all. But at this point you're turned off and disgusted and don't give a shit anymore.

*Some of us say "I love you" without having the slightest fucking idea what that means. And how can we? It doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.

*If you find someone who loves you, wants to be with you and sticks by you no matter what (excluding acts of animal cruelty, child abuse, and certain felonies), you're good. If there's mutual respect and friendship the rest can be worked out.

*I know that I do not have one singular soul mate. I have many. And that's not a slam on the GITB who is awesome. It's about the reality of life and the odds and laws of fate and all that stuff. I know that there are a few people out there in the universe who I will never meet who are perfectly suited for me and with whom I could have shared a long, happy lifetime. Others are great guys I've met and adored but we just didn't get the timing right. A few drift in and out of my life even now. There's the guy I dated off and on in high school and college who got married impulsively at 21 then found himself single when we were in our early-30s. I loved him. But he tracked me down a few weeks after I had hooked up with the GITB. There's another old friend of mine with whom I have lunch once a year. We connect on every level and I think he's adorable. There's nothing going on, but given the right circumstances and timing for both of us, no doubt in my mind it would be a wonderful relationship. And there's nothing wrong with knowing that. Nothing is ever black and white. It's trying to force things and people into perfect compartments that causes the pain.

*I have experienced all sorts of love: puppy love; unrequited love; young, first love; intense, ill-advised psycho love; rebound love that was less real than other love but absolutely necessary; lust-driven love; and, finally, thankfully, contented, mature,I'll-take-care-of-you-after-you've-had-surgery-and-need-help-getting-on-and-off-the-toilet-love. And it's the best.