All's Well That Cazwell

It was just one of those nights, where you know you won't have any control over what happens so you just have to give yourself over to the run-on sentences that will be. This feeling about tonight has been building up inside me for weeks now. Too many people in town for the holidays, an underwear model showing off in the studio, a certain crispness in the autumn air. So, I let myself not be my usual type-A nut job about the whole thing and I turned myself over to the adventure at hand. This is that story.

Things began barreling out of control even before the show during dinner with Andrew, his boyfriend Joey and Andrew’s brother and sister-in-law. During our polite meat orgy at HB Burgers, sister-in-law suddenly decided that I was the perfect set-up for her gay friend. For you straight women out there, this is our worst gay nightmare. The words "He's so nice, he's so handsome" just mean "He's so fucked up, he has so many problems" to us. You can't understand why he is single because he is hilarious at the office and wears adorable bow ties. We know he is single because he has a serious meth habit or he hasn't finished building out his basement dungeon yet.

Ben There, Done That

There I was, shivering as the icy wind kicked up off the East River. It’s night in DUMBO and I am in line outside the Galapagos Art Space. I have been here so many times that I can’t possibly recall them all, but I do know that I have never waited in this long of a line before.

"Here we go again. Out at another gay bar."

Apparently the two guys standing behind me were straight (in Brooklyn it can be very hard to tell) and even stranger, one of them was clearly reading my mind. But while they hurriedly texted their friend Rachel, hoping she was already inside, I waited impatiently as the time dwindled away. With the new hours of my show and the rigidity of the Metro North train schedule, I don’t have time to sit idly by on Grindr chatting with Mr. Easy-On-The-Eyes-Even-Though-Mine-Are-Rolling-From-Annoyance. For this latest adventure, I had literally fifteen minutes and the thought of spending all of them in line to get into a club was not my idea of fun. 

My Submission To DouchebagsOfGrindr.com

The occasion was the third anniversary of Ben Harvey’s smash hit GUMBO party. Fittingly, this was my third time seeing Ben this week and my second night in a row out on the town with him. Last night, I was his ad hoc plus one for the Out 100 party at Milk Studios down in the Meatpacking District. If you are keeping kosher, you know Milk and Meatpacking should not mix and in this case you are right. The crowd was lively but the venue was too small.

Grant Central

I don't have a lot of friends. Some of that is by choice (I hate people). Some of it is by geography (I live in the suburbs). But most of it is purely my personality (I am unpleasant to people I hate, which is everyone). I am just a hard person to be friends with. I don’t like to leave the house. I don’t like going new places or meeting new people. When they were filming You've Got Mail, one of the scenes took place in an apartment in director Nora Ephron's building prompting Tom Hanks to quip that she would film a whole movie inside her own apartment if she could. I always liked that Nora Ephron.

So it was a conflict diamond of a moment when I saw on Facebook that my LA pal Grant Landry was in New York City. Facebook is the ruiner of worlds. People think Facebook friendship is the same as actual friendship (They couldn't be less alike). But more to the point, it is no longer possible to slip in and out of a city unnoticed. It is the digital equivalent of Meryl Streep caught hailing a cab in Heartburn.

Not a great movie but this is my favorite hilarious bit.

Card Again

The doorman waved me into Vlada with a smooth gesture, “Go right in. I know your face.” He was as unknown to me as Jupiter. I know your old face he meant as he didn't bother to ask for my ID. I remember being offended when I would get carded at the door even though a baby could have been born since then who is old enough now to not be carded himself. Things just aren't as they used to be.

This was at Vlada but it was the second time in the evening that I wasn't carded. The first time was at Therapy where I went to meet Brent, who is visiting from San Francisco. Brent has been a long time listener of the show and I first met him when he was a nineteen year old college student seeing New York City. But that was eight years ago and Brent is all grown up now with a real job and boyfriend and everything.

Brent suggested Therapy (the only bar in the city he could remember) and the last time I was there, it was something of a ghost town since Hell’s Kitchen fell under the spell of Industry across the way. But tonight the bar was packed, to the rafters, with many young people and a few bewildered old people like myself who wondered what happened to their quiet old haunt. It turned out not to be a place to have a catch-up conversation but it was a place to run into Philip.

Partying Ways

All this talk about the 1% and the 99% percent has finally piqued my curiosity. It is time to see how the other half lives. Unfortunately, I haven’t been invited into the home of a billionaire since that pride weekend party where Lance Bass’ boyfriend mistook me for a bartender and the highlight of my adventure was buttoning the front of Michael Holtz’s denim shorts. Those were the days. But in that spirit I journeyed a few blocks away from my radio studio to the penthouse birthday party of Penthouse pet Krista Ayne.

Krista has been a frequent guest on our show over the years. Romaine might be so captivated that a photo of her hangs in Romaine’s dressing area so she can gaze upon her naked form while naked herself. That’s devotion. I like Krista, but as a friend, who wears clothes. And has birthday parties in fancy bars in midtown.

Guy Society

There is never anything I want to do more on a Friday night after the show than go home. But my world has been shattered since the death of James last week and it has created a certain fever pitch of impetuosity on my part. I thought about the last time I saw him, sweating like a whore in church at XL a few months ago. And maybe it was the magical thinking that if I just went out to every bar in town, eventually I would see his hulking frame lumbering through the space like an elephant moving slowly through the jungle, a catastrophe of casual destruction in his wake.  Like the months after 9/11 when I would gaze down Seventh Avenue at Times Square hoping to catch a glimpse of the twin towers, I think I will forever be looking over my shoulder with a sense of maybe.

In my grief, I sent a flurry of messages to my local friends that I had been remiss in seeing these past few weeks. I guess the arrival of spring had made me anxious to wring every second of delight out of my house that I can and my friendships, long on nightlife support, finally faded away. Ryan White and I planned to get together this week and then never did, but MattKugelman and I shared a delightful late meal at Vinyl on Monday. My friend Erik and I made plans to venture down to The Park on Thursday but fearing the zit on my nose would get worse, I pawned him off to a Friday party in SoHo.

The End Of The Rhodes

Erik Rhodes passed away this morning and whenever someone dies, you reflect back on their life and what you knew of them. To millions of people he was a larger than life porn star, a bull in a sex shop, but I saw through all that to my friend James, a kid from Long Island, consumed by the life around him.

Whenever I think about life, I think about my favorite line from Gattaca, near the end when Ethan Hawke and his genetically superior brother (played by Loren Dean) are swimming out in the middle of a stormy ocean, and Ethan is beating him handily. When Loren asks him how he is able to do that, he replies, "I never saved anything for the swim back." Erik Rhodes was so much like that character, built up as this stronger than life facade and leaving nothing for the swim back.

The City By The Gay

Just for the record, when I first moved to New York City, I was hired at a company that worked on the redevelopment strategy turning The Nashville Network into Spike TV. And in between, it was our beautiful missing link The National Network (aka The New TNN). And there, I toiled away writing hilarious puns about Pamela Anderson on Baywatch (“Double Vision”) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Set Your Phasers On Fun”) that populated the website. So I would like to take credit for the current passion for puns in everything from The Daily Show to Morning Joe, even though a pun is truly the lowest form of comedy. So don’t think for a minute that my pun headlines are a riff on current popular culture. I am just reusing bits I did eleven years ago. And they were no fresher then than they are now, my friend.

On the subject of the good old days, my ex-boyfriend Curtis is in town. Years and years and years ago, I spied him across Revolver and bravely gave him my number as he was leaving and then he didn’t call. For three years. But eventually he was moving a desk and found my number which had fallen behind it and finally picked up the phone. As it happens, the number I gave him was for my friend Paul's apartment where I had been staying temporarily at that time and purely by happenstance was back there, sitting waiting for Paul to get out of the shower, the night Curtis deigned to call me back and I happened to answer the phone. Please note: if I am close friends with someone, I will wash their dishes if bored, answer their phone when they are in the shower, or sort through their mail even if they are standing right there, so if you value your privacy or personal space, it is probably not a good idea to be my close friend.

South By Key West

This past week, I took a much needed vacation. I know that everyone thinks my job is so easy because all I do is sit on my duff, tossing out olde tyme phrases, making references to old movies and TV shows that only I remember, and hanging up on strangers like Ernestine.

How Listeners Imagine Me At Work

But there is more to my job. First of all, you try being interesting for four solid hours. As I have proven repeatedly, that is impossible. Plus, how would you feel if every day you went to work and random strangers came up to you and called you fat or ugly or untalented and then you had to turn around and try to be hilarious? No wonder I need a Bloody Mary for breakfast. And so off to Key West I went.

My Tart Will Go On

This is my fourth night in a row out on the town, but only the second adventure I have written about. Thursday night I went to Matty and Andrew’s apartment for a quiet birthday celebration for Matty to which I was (as usual) the last to arrive. I was insistent that I wouldn’t write about the evening because it was private, even though Matty didn’t seem to mind either way. But since the two highlights of the evening for me were Matty reading my last post about him out loud to the mortified left standing and the dozen cookies I ate, there really wasn’t much left to say. I love them. That is all.

Friday night I went to Therapy after the show with ADDJeff, our producer Katie and Jim the Sound Guy. Jim and I spent most of the evening talking about work while Jeff and Katie frowned at us for being so insular (with good reason on their part). Because we are practically neighbors now, Jim took my same train home so I didn’t have my usual time to write up the adventure. Even still, I talked to no one else and nothing else happened so consider the evening dutifully reported.

But today, Mike went into the city to attend a party with his boyfriend and that left me free to join Ryan White and all his friends at The Ritz. First however, I needed to satisfy my Titanic fever by catching the 6:15pm showing at Kips Bay in IMAX 3D. Even though their screen is what Mike has not so lovely described as “FauxMax” because it is just a regular theater modified slightly that charges the same elevated price, I had a good time anyway. ADD Jeff joined me at the last minute for this trip back in time and it was worth it.

Fable For Two

Once Upon A Time… I woke up two days ago to find Reichen had sent me a text message while I was sleeping. For some reason, when my phone is next to the bed, I sleep through everything, but when it is across the room, even on vibrate, any activity wakes me. In this case, the phone was on the nightstand and I pleasantly slumbered through his message. He wanted to invite me to another viewing party of his VH-1 show “Couples Therapy” at a bar I had never heard of before called Fairy Tale Lounge. Even though I instantly assumed it was on the other side of the world (read: Brooklyn), I knew I had to go after the sign off moniker he used was “The Irish Setter.”

You see, the last time I went to a viewing party Reichen invited me to, I described him here as being like “an Irish Setter whose only interest is in setting.” This gave me great pause. It is rare that I hesitate before I hit the old PUBLISH button, as evidenced by the invariable typos and spelling errors I spend the next two days correcting. But as accurate a description of his personality as that may be, I was still comparing one of the more handsome members of our community to a dog. So I wasn’t sure how he would accept that. Naturally, he took it with his usual equanimity and it turns out I am not the first person to see a personality resemblance between him and this particular breed.

Road Scholar

Stopped for the moment at the traffic light at East 4^th Street, Matty turned a little wistful as he gazed out the car window at the venerable old Bowery Bar across the way. “Do you think people will ever go back there?”

“In a year or so,” I mused, “When some promoter makes a new night there.” What followed can only be described as nonsense as Matty suggested that we could be those club promoters. I was aghast, not forgetting for a second my first failed foray into club promoting in 2001 (not coincidentally down the road from Bowery Bar) that we had just been talking about!  “I’m too old and too disconnected from this community to promote a club night.”  

“You are a pillar of this community!” Matty declared, the seriousness of the statement evaporating faster than the words themselves could leave the air. Sitting next to me in the back seat, ADD Jeff had a good laugh at that. Then Matty added triumphantly, “That’s your blog right there!”

Honestly, I hadn’t given a thought to writing anything tonight. Sometimes I go out just to go out, no matter how wanting my website might be. In fact, my only thought tonight was catching up with Ben Harvey at his Gumbo party at Deity in Brooklyn. And since I spent most of the evening fighting semantically about the show with ADD Jeff and grilling Martin about possible Supreme Court outcomes for the health care mandate, there didn’t seem to be much to write home about. But then Matty and Andrew showed up at Gumbo too and the subsequent ride to Grand Central Terminal delivered all the material I needed.

While Andrew white-knuckled it behind the wheel, stressed about all the late night traffic preventing me from catching my last train, Matty sourced tunes through his iPhone to personally DJ the ride back from Brooklyn. I so rarely get to see them both and I love them so much that it was nice to have this time together, however brief.

But then ADD Jeff was upset about something he heard on the show last weekend. Someone asked me recently what drugs people are doing these days and not being a young person or a drug person, I was at a complete loss. “We’ll ask ADD Jeff when he gets back from the Black Party,” I allegedly (but quite probably) said on the show. Even though I suggested it was the party and not him that was filled with drugs, Jeff feigned outrage, but then seconds later he was explaining what drugs he saw other people doing at the event. So I guess I wasn’t too far off.

“They’re still doing ecstasy.” It was all very clinical the way he said it. Still? That didn’t seem right. It can’t possibly still be 1992. I insisted that it must have left and come back, like cardigans or Madonna. Add Jeff rattled off a bunch of other drugs I had heard of but never done. Apparently GHB has become very hard to come by in New York City. That seems impossible, too. This is the kind of town where anytime of the day or night a governor can get a blow job from a woman who can get a record deal. That’s not the kind of town where they run out of anything, and certainly not moxie or a drug that comes in gallon jugs.Maybe Jeff wasn't anymore knowledgeable about this subject than I was. 

Like a really inappropriate episode of Sesame Street, our conversation was brought you by the letters E, G and K. For those of you who don’t remember the 90s, K (Ketamine) is an animal tranquilizer that was all the rage back when people still knew who Courtney Love was. ADD Jeff the science guy, then started explaining what he had heard about the various forms that Ketamine comes in. If it is liquid then it needs to be double baked. “Like potatoes,” Matty offered brightly from the passenger seat where he had been listening intently. “Like twice baked potatoes.”

Maybe it was the hunger talking but the twice baked potatoes sounded pretty good to me. Much better than the drug that took six steps before you couldn’t walk anymore. “Too much work!” I yelled, “If I wanted to cook, I would have made dinner.” I have no moral problem with people doing drugs. I would do them myself but the circumstances are never right. The only people I ever run into who offer me drugs, I know are also the kind of people that if I had a problem while high, would step over my body and keep going. And besides, all those stories of cooking and baking and sourcing and snorting all sound like a lot of extra work to me. I suppose drugs are for people who are highly motivated and not lazy like me.

This is why I live in the suburbs and I will not be promoting a new club night at Bowery Bar. The discussion about the drugs people do only reinforced for me that I really am too old and too disconnected from this community to get into club promoting, unless it is a club where people mainline twice baked potatoes. I will probably never need to pick E, G or K out of a line-up, but it’s still nice to know how much you can learn in the backseat of a car.

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Read more of Derek's adventures in When Nightlife Falls and Colonnade: A Life In Columns. Both are available now On Amazon.com, and in digital form for The Kindle, The Nook, and in the iBookstore.

Bjorn Millom 1946-2012

Today would have been my father's 66th birthday. He passed away very suddenly on March 3rd from a heart attack. He was gone in an instant. I flew immediately to Utah to be with his wife, Margaret, my eleven(!) siblings and step-siblings, and his twenty grandchildren. When my grandmother Doris died in 2008, I thought a lot about what would happen, how I would feel when one of my parents died. I knew this day would come, I just didn't think it would be so soon.

I asked Romaine not to say anything on the radio show and I have wanted to keep a low profile about this. At first, I really couldn't deal with the hundreds of very well meaning but ultimately upsetting messages of condolence from total strangers. I am a private person and I like my private life private, despite my chosen occupation. But not mentioning it would just eventually get weird, so I wanted to explain my two day absence earlier this month and thank Romaine, Katie, Amber and Adam Sank for holding down the fort while I was gone and respecting my wishes.

I can't even begin to express how lucky I was to have Bjorn Millom for a father. He was always supportive of me and proud of my accomplishments and having a gay son altered him for the better. I saw his world view change in the twenty years since I came out to him (after I trapped him in the car while it was going through a car wash). "You know what word I can't stand?" he asked me a couple of years ago. "Tolerate. When people say, 'I tolerate gay people,' it just makes me furious. I can't imagine anything worse than someone saying, 'I tolerate you.' I don't know how you stand it." He wasn't the same man I grew up with. But that is how life is. We all change.

I spent three very difficult, very loud days with my family but surrounded by all of the other kids and the grandkids made it so much better. His passing was something I always believed was an experience that would happen to me and me alone, but it was there that I realized I wasn't alone in this. And we were all together, which we never had been before, which is all he ever would have wanted.

All The Kids. Twelve Is More Than Enough

I have included a link to his obituary and for those of you who are interested, I have also included my eulogy from his funeral. We had a wonderful service at the funeral home that handled his grandparents and his parents, and it was right down the road from the house he grew up in. He hated Utah, but it was always unfinished business for him, and he always kept coming back.

The service was very informal, with my sister Lysanna making the opening remarks, and then we allowed anyone who wanted to speak to come up and do so. Everyone was so warm and eloquent, including total strangers to us who were moved to come and speak, even though they had only known him a short time. After his wife Margaret spoke at the end, we played a montage of photos from his life, most of them pictures of him with one kid or another climbing all over him. I gave the closing remarks and I admit that I wrote them mostly for us, his children.

I welcome you to check out the photos I have posted and this opportunity to learn more about this man who was so important to me and I only ask that you continue to respect my privacy and most importantly the privacy of my enormous family in this difficult time for us. Thank you.

My Eulogy

Instead of a program, we should have passed out a family tree. It would have made this a lot easier for everyone to follow.

As you can see, for forty-two solid years, Bjorn recklessly pursued his greatest passion in life: parenting. And it all started with me. I was the first. The one he made all the mistakes on before he got around to the rest of you. And I turned out okay. Gay, but okay.

He met my mother when I was five weeks old and from that point forward he was the only father I ever knew. After that there was Tiffany and then Adam and Lysanna. When he met Margaret, her seven joined right in already in progress and immediately became his too. And when Zach finally came, there was an even dozen of us. Zach is 24 years younger than I am, and when Dad told us that Margaret was pregnant his rationale was that they got so tired of waiting for grandchildren that they decided to have some of their own.

He was like a child hoarder. He loved being a dad so much, more than anything. It was the fulfillment of his existence. I told him once that when it came to parenting, what he lacked in ability, he made up for in enthusiasm. And I came to that conclusion slowly over time. He wasn't always the easiest father, not in the sense that he was particularly strict. He just had ideas of how things should be. But not people. He always let us be ourselves.

Being a full time parent for forty-two years meant that each of us got a different dad, but he was also reacting to who we were as individuals. We all got a piece of him but each of us got different pieces. We got the piece that fit us. He never tried to make us be the kid he wanted, he would just find the points where our personalities met and that was home base.

Bjorn and I had a lot in common. Neither of us knew our birth fathers. We were raised by men who had other children. Growing up the father/son relationship was sometimes contentious and we often felt different, like we didn’t fit in. Me for my own reasons! But it was important to Bjorn that I not feel toward him growing up the way he had felt toward Glen. Although in the end, Bjorn made his peace with Glen and looked after him in his final years. With me, he never had to. I was just his son. And our time together, especially over the last few years just kept getting richer and richer.

I see now all the ways that he influenced me. I share his unique combination of vanity and a total lack of fashion sense. It used to drive me crazy how overly friendly he was with waiters and waitresses, calling them by their names on their nametags. "Hey Sharon. Thanks for sharin' this great cup of coffee." I would be so embarrassed but now I find myself doing it too. I find myself saying “Ready Freddie?” all the time, which I am pretty sure he started doing because after a while he couldn't remember all of our names. I have to leave the house three times before I really leave, always forgetting something. My friend Mike was with us in Hawaii a few years ago and it drove him nuts sitting the car watching the two of us go back and forth for sunscreen and sunglasses and a book, the keys to the car. Forgetting to lock the door.

He really wanted me to run for political office and I couldn’t imagine anything I would have enjoyed more than campaigning with him. It would have been the only part of running I would have liked. But it didn't matter that I didn’t run. He was proud of me no matter what I did. He was proud of all of us. The last conversations I had with him were all about the rest of the kids. How proud he was of each and every one of you, of who you were as people. The adults you had become. And he was fascinated by it. He loved how a baby in his arms would magically turn into this grown adult person with their own ideas and interests. He never got over it.

Bjorn was not always the easiest father to have. He had a temper and it sometimes got in the way of his better judgment. He wasn't great at planning very far in advance. He wasn't exactly what I would call handy. Or hip. He loved to travel but he wasn't what I would call good at it, especially when it came to family vacations. I don't know what it was about family trips, but he was obsessed with them and they were almost certainly assured to go awry. But it didn't matter how many trips ended in yelling or the silent treatment or the hospital, he was never more than minutes away from planning his next adventure.

When I found out he died, I immediately felt guilty about all the times I turned him down. "Are you coming for Christmas? Just us in Hawaii in the spring." Or that long promised trip to Norway. And I know all of us turned him down at one point or another but it was just because he was relentless. We always knew if it wasn't this weekend it would be another weekend. And he would just keep asking. As much as he loved that we had our own lives, at the same time he never got the concept that it meant we weren't able to drop everything at a moment's notice and fly off somewhere. He would tell me all the time. “Just put on a rerun. No one will know the difference.” And he admitted to me that he thought of all of us as being approximately the same age. For the last 25 years, he kept expecting that he could just write me a note of absence and we could all be together.

And now here we all are together. This is all he would have wanted. He would have hated the flowers and the crying and me in a black suit. And most of all he would have hated a church service. All he wanted was all of us together, laughing and having a good time. He just wanted to race you to the car or put you up on his shoulders or just see you one more time.

I last saw him at my house. He told me he really liked being there because it was clean and quiet. I came home and he couldn’t figure out the TV and the wifi and how to turn on my stove to boil some eggs. He told me he just drove to KFC but not to worry, he threw the bag away outside because he didn’t want to stink up the house with fast food. I put a space heater in his room and I thought the house was going to burn down from the heat. That’s how he was.

I know we are all sorry that he is gone. But it couldn’t have come at a better time for him. He was too restless to retire. He was too vain for old age. Could you imagine him in a wheelchair? Last year when he broke his foot and couldn’t ski with us, I don’t think in forty-two years, I ever saw him so disappointed. He just loved being a dad and with the last kid finally out of the house, his forty-two years of active parenting had come to an end. I don’t think he could have borne it if one of us had gone before him. He left us too quick but he left us the way I want to remember him: vital and happy and so proud of each and every one of us.

Looking through the photos for the montage together, it brought back so many nice memories. But there was one photo that really got me. Dad in the 80s with a bad sleeveless shirt and awful oversized glasses, laying on the floor, hugging Adam when he was four and just grinning.

More than any other photo, that summed up who he was for me. As Orson Welles once wrote, "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?" That picture says everything to me.

I’ll miss him terribly, every day. But as I look around and see all of his kids, I see a little bit of him in each of us. And as long as we are around, he will be around.

Bjorn And The Boys

Bjorn Millom 1946-2012

The Boyfriend Racket

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The Sweet Smell Of Excess

You know you are in the bathroom of a very fancy apartment when you are halfway through peeing and you realize you don’t know how to flush the toilet. This is why we can’t have nice things. I am out of my element all the time in Manhattan, but never more than when I am hanging out with Reichen. It isn’t Reichen, just to be clear. He is in every way a very earnest and accepting fellow, like an Irish Setter whose only interest is setting. But like a magnet he attracts the who’s who of this and that. If it isn't always A-List, it is frequently at least, an act of becoming, huddled masses on the teeming shores of fabulous with me, the tempest tossed.

Reichen invited me to a private party for his new VH-1 show. Last I heard, he was on that LOGO show which is in every way the afterbirth of Andy Cohen’s very demon spawn. I adore Reichen, but I am not a fan of that particular version of reality. Actually the last I heard of Reichen was his fragrance launch party at Industry, which I had a delightful time at. And since I met my most marvelous new friend Ryan White there, I thought it only fitting that he join me as my plus one for this latest Reichen launch event.

I met Ryan outside a rather nondescript building on the outskirt steak of Chelsea. At first I thought we had the wrong address but Ryan assured me he went to a holiday party in the same building and it was quite fabulous. What the building lacks in curb appeal, it makes up for in soaring twenty foot ceilings and private car elevators so you can literally drive right into your apartment.  “But,” Blair hastily added with a mock sniff. “It’s only a one car garage.” And who can live like that!

Tress This Mess

My hair is a fair weather friend. It does not do well in the elements. I have long been jealous of my grandmother Doris and her sassy wig and I live for the day when I can just give up on hair altogether and don a wig. It must be genetic. Besides, under certain circumstances, like tonight, the mop on top takes on a certain plastic wig-like quality anyway, so it isn’t like synthetic would be some kind of step down from normal.

Since we are on the subject of wigs, it is probably most appropriate that I journeyed down to XL tonight for Hot Mess featuring two of the hottest messes in Manhattan: Bianca del Rio and Lady Bunny.  It is day two of Josh’s first ever visit to New York City and I am determined to make sure he has the most amazing time anyone has ever had in our city ever. If only I approached fitness with the same zeal.

I figured if anyone could put on a show that once seen can’t be unseen, it is Bianca and Bunny. And that is the kind of unshakable memory of America I want Josh to take back to Afghanistan. While he is on leave from his deployment, he needs to see two people who are on leave from their senses. He needs to know what he is fighting for: the right to tell racist jokes in between subpar dance numbers. In this regard, they did not disappoint.

Downtown Shabby

“I love Kathy Griffith.”

Dear gays,

If you are going to express your devotion for some famous lady, be it on Facebook or talking on your cell phone next to the 14^th Street entrance to the 1 train, please get the name right. I am a man of many pet peeves but this one ranks near the top. Don’t post that you are someone’s biggest fan and then misspell their name. And who doesn’t know that the red headed loudmouth with no loyalty is Kathy Griffin? Not Griffith. Everyone knows that.

I was downtown for practically five seconds, so I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised that someone had already annoyed me. Downtown is awful. People in New York complain about neighborhoods the way other people talk about the weather. It is just something we do. So, I'll say it. I hate being downtown. As a snob who hates snobs, it is the worst place on earth. While waiting for my Army pal Josh to arrive in town tonight, I sent a text message to Matt Kugelman to find out if he was out and about so I could kill some time with him in the interim. Matt is a delight and more importantly, he is nearly always out somewhere when my show ends. So when I am in the mood for a drink or well that’s pretty much all we do is drink, so whenever I am in the mood for a drink, that Matt Kugelman is pretty handy to have around!

Birthday Preppers

Life is really unexpected. You just never know what is going to happen. This is why my new obsession is Doomsday Preppers, the show where ordinary people hoard a decade’s worth of food in their basement in the unlikely event of a water landing. Even today, I was crossing Sixth Avenue at 48^th Street and an SUV was driving the wrong way toward me, right past the cops permanently stationed by their cars outside Fox News. Always ready to channel Albert Finney in The Dresser, a movie I have never seen, I stood in front of her car and simply lifted my hand. She slowed to a stop and gave me a funny look and I showed her the error of her ways by merely gesturing back past her. Seconds later, she was completing a U-Turn and we were both on our merry way. The cops didn’t even bother getting in their cars and chasing her. That’s New York. And if you are going to freak out at every little thing, don’t come here.

I was making a rare Saturday night appearance in the city for back to back birthday celebrations. It is also Mike’s birthday on Sunday but he doesn’t feel like celebrating this year even though now that we have our glorious new coffee station in the kitchen, amazing new bathroom and showstopping fireplace, there is every reason to rejoice! I even upgraded the shelves in the closets so our own doomsday prepping won’t look as sloppy as that girl in Houston who plans to shoot her kittens in the head when we run out of oil.

First stop was The Tenth Rail down on 10^th Avenue and 33^rd Street. The neighborhood is so sketchy, the highlight is the well-traveled drive through McDonald’s next door from which the pernicious glare of the fluorescent lighting is a vision direct from the worst nightmares of the Dowager Countess, minus the gaiety. Perhaps they should rename the place The Seventh Circle, although we were really only there for the Third. As the strangers streamed into the empty bar from the street, each entered with a bewildered look on their face. “I took the M-11 bus!” one woman declared incredulously. I would have been less surprised (or concerned for her safety) if she had said she took an M-16. 

Craze The Titanic

When I bought my house five years ago, I did it because I loved New York City but I wanted some quiet so I could sleep in on the weekends. There is just something not so restful about someone screaming “White Jesus” outside your window every Sunday morning. I don’t know why. But the unintended consequence of moving upstate has been not so much peace and quiet as a flat line where my social life used to be.

I am derisive toward anyone who posts too many photos online of their baby and heaven help them if their baby is a cat named Emily Dickinson or even, as a random example, a camera hog of a pug. But lately I have found myself white knuckling it everywhere I go, desperate to show people the photos of my newly remodeled bathroom I keep on my phone. Yes. It happened. I turned into one of those people I hate. So when ADD Jeff wanted to go out tonight after the show, and I found myself explaining to him that I couldn’t stay out late because I had to get up early to take things to the city dump. Even I could hear the dull thud as the words fell out of my mouth. That was it. I needed to go out.

The New Tron Dance

I’ve never walked into a bar that smelled new before. Not just clean, but actually brand, spanking new. The whole experience reminded me of the old lady from Titanic describing the famous ship, “I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used. The sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called the ship of dreams, and it was. It really was.” Well, tonight I went to the all new XL bar in Manhattan to smell the fresh paint. The plastic cups had never been used. The stalls hadn’t had any drugs done in them yet. I suppose it could be the club of dreams if your dream is to see other gay men prancing around like always. And if that is your dream, then it was. It really was! I'm oversimplifying of course but what are gay men in a club if not overly simple?

I was excited to see XL since everyone has been talking about it for months now. And like the Titanic, the maiden voyage of this truly new bar for a new generation would either sail into glory or go down sensationally. I asked my friend and trusty nightlife pal Matt Kugelman to join me and he was more than game for the adventure.