Tune Town

Caught a Bass tonight. Well, technically, I didn’t catch one, I saw one. And it wasn’t a fish, it was a celebrity. So maybe I should start over. Saw Lance Bass tonight at Therapy. We all did. As expected, when he hovered around the lip of the miniature stage there, just at the edge of the lights, not at all to his surprise, two by two we turned and drank in his blond visage. There are no accidents.

It seemed appropriate to see a real live celebrity at the bar mere moments after Brian introduced me as one to his collection of bright young things. To be fair, he said there were two celebrities at the table: me and Michael Ausiello. I didn’t place Michael right away because I couldn’t hear his name over the loud music and after going around the table I wouldn't have remembered it anyway after all the other names were tossed out rapid fire like a pop quiz. I think one of the girls was named Colleen, but names and faces whirled by so fast, I can’t be sure of anything.

But, like Lance Bass and unlike me, Michael is truly famous. A genuinely famous person is someone you know as soon as you see them or hear their name. I am a veritable who’s that of Manhattan gay society. If it takes more than two reasons to justify the fame of a person you have never heard of before (i.e. “He has a show on Sirius XM. He was in the Out 100.”), then they are not famous. Therefore, I am not famous.

I’d never met Michael Ausiello before and I would be lying if I said I did anything more than just meet him tonight. He was too far away for me to hear anything even if I had tried to converse with him. Brian wanted me to go over and talk to Lance Bass, but about what? I have seen Lance Bass out and about a few times, but I hadn’t met him either. Sure, I saw him floating around Bowery Bar one Tuesday when we were all still doing that and just last year his boyfriend (at the time? Who can keep up!) mistook me for a bartender at a billionaire’s apartment, which was flattering, but again, since he was trying to order drinks and not compliment my arms means I'm not famous.

I suppose fame is on my mind because Brian was having a going away party, moving back to Los Angeles. Fame is LA’s chief and cheapest export, its lock stock and trade. Now, suffering in the depths of a classic New York winter weeks early, I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss the sunshine a little, although really I miss never having to check the weather before leaving home. Brian will do well in Hollywood. He is young and attractive and seems to lack all reservations. That is what they want out there.

Brian spent a lot of time trying to recruit people to join him in his new west coast life and it was probably the howling wind off the Hudson River talking but I think there might have been a few takers. Brian’s adorable little friend Ryan seemed the least likely to take the plunge, even though Brian drunkenly insisted he would be moving there in two weeks. Since I had lived in LA for a long time, Ryan asked a few select questions to help confirm his choice to stick around NY for a while. Although, I should note that he wasn’t wild about my assertion about NY vs. LA. I said you should be in LA in your 20s because you can live comfortably there on not much money and youth is king, and then move to NYC in your 30s when you can afford to live there and be interesting with interesting people. “Oh no!” he declared in bland mock horror, a step above deadpan because it contained a tiny grain of truth, “I’m doing it in reverse.” He is cute enough, he’ll be fine.

On the other side of me, Brian’s now former roommate Jordan was knocking back beers like he had accidentally ingested six jalapeno peppers. Jordan was very cute and I coveted his corduroy jacket with the soft woolen collar and plaid hoodie underneath. I also got to use a punch line I had been working on in my head all day, which is always rewarding when you think you have something clever to say and then you actually get to say it. “I’m Jewish too,” I told him. “You are?” he asked reflexively. “Well, Jew-ish.” It is such a cheesy romantic comedy script line, but like the bit from Postcards from the Edge, I only like it because it sounds like movie talk. Anyway, he looked instantly familiar when I met him and it would seem with twenty-nine friends in common on Facebook that we would have met before. But this encounter was meet cute, so that is what counts.

Well, we were all having a perfectly nice time and then whatever “show” was happening at Therapy decided to start and ruin everyone’s good time. We were sitting dangerously close to the stage which makes leaving awkward but if you don’t care about being hated, it’s easier than you think. The thing was hosted by two men. One of them looked like the sniveling creepy guy who used to be a rat in the Harry Potter movies and the other one, I don't know if he was 24 or 36. He got up close and his skin was so unnaturally perfect, I couldn’t tell if he was just young and lucky or if he splashed a bucket of cold botox on his face every morning before he pulled on his lace front wig. It was the kind of manufactured youth that is LA's true claim to fame.

It was some kind of Broadway thing and the former rat called out Brian for talking while the he was trying to sing, but we were there first! Also, it is a gay bar and not a Broadway stage. People come to drink not necessarily to ignore a drag queen, or whatever he was supposed to be. He told us not to talk during the performances, but then when they happened, they were all we could talk about! The first was a nice looking blond woman who sang Listen from Dreamgirls. She had a serviceable voice for a Broadway dancer but I don’t know what possessed her to tackle a barn burner of a song like that in front of a bunch of drunken hypercritical theater queens. While it went on, two writers from Entertainment Weekly who had joined our group and were sitting closest to the stage, sat stiffly with their backs turned to the action. They looked like two Victorian ladies trying to enjoy their tea while ignoring the unruly hooligans and their merry shenanigans going on in the background.

I tried to leave in between singers, but they happened so fast I could hardly say good bye before the next one was clearing his throat into the microphone. The second singer was a cute skinny gay who started in on Teenage Dream, a smash gay hit these days thanks to GLEE. The crowd was ready to sing along but he chose to do a down tempo ballad version which just left everyone hanging. But the most unforgivable crime was that he didn’t know the lyrics. This seemed impossible to me because everyone, EVERYONE, in the bar knew the words better than he did and it was his song. I had to leave before I told him that maybe his Broadway dream wasn’t going to come true after all, that no one wanted to touch him in his skin tight jeans, and a one way bus ticket back to whatever Hershey’s kiss of a town he came from might be in order.

As I went downstairs, I looked to see if Michael Lee and Gregg were still at the bar. I had happened upon them when I first arrived while they were entertaining a friend from LA with a run of the mill Tuesday night glass of white wine, like we always do in Manhattan. But they were already gone, as I should be as well. Earlier, when I was telling Ryan where twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds should live, he wondered aloud where the forty-year-olds live then. “We live in Westchester,” I told him finally, stumped for a real answer. I honestly don’t know where they live or even where they went. You don’t see so many of the old faces around anymore. I only know me.

It was fun hanging out with Brian and his adorable friends, each of them cuter than the last. They felt like people I would be friends with, but the next generation. I looked at them with their earnest young faces and fancy college degrees and exploding careers. They were all so cheerful and upbeat, and why not? Their lives are like that bar before the crappy act takes the stage. They can delight in being together and having fun because they don’t yet know how abruptly it might end and what truly terrible song could end it. But things can still end on a high note, I thought, as I stepped out of the warm confines of Therapy and headed up the windy streets of midtown toward the train and home. I whipped out my iPhone and pressed around a bit until I found the GLEE version of Teenage Dream. Maybe it is better to not know where things are headed and when it comes time for the song, pick the one you want.