Since Last We Matt

 "Did I tell you that I was kidnapped?"

I have many friends who could say these words to me at a party in lower Manhattan and I would be forced to respond, "Which time?" Over the decades I have collected more than my fair share of loose characters and have long suspected that the reason some people stay friends with me is that I am the kind of person who you can call from jail at 3am and will not only answer the phone without judgment but also be able to arrange bail before dawn. 

Matt Kugelman is not one of those people. He is a good person. A nice person! And yet this was his opening salvo at Matty Kelleher's #MattGala birthday party. Kugie is so thoroughly midwestern that the worst thing I have ever heard him say is, "Hmmm... I'm not sure that will work out that way." For Kugelman, as brutal a takedown as there ever is. And yet, inexplicably, he has been punched in the face, doxxed, revenge porned and yes even kidnapped. 

While waiting at the bar, a woman insisted Kugie looked like some movie or TV star, she just couldn't put her finger on which one. "I get that a lot," he insisted even though while genuinely possessing movie star good looks, he literally looks like no specific movie or TV actor I can name. "It must be nice," I assured him coolly, briefly channeling Barry Humphries from the great beyond "to be in Manhattan where you look like a movie star, as opposed to Chicago where you look like literally everyone else in Chicago." Midwestern nice I am not. 

But maybe that is why Matty Kelleher has kept me around all this time too. Like me, he has assembled his own distinctive band of loose characters and many of them descended tonight in a torrent of rain and fabulosity, in near equal measures for a costume party to celebrate a milestone birthday of his which you can guess based on my answer to the persistent party question, "how do you know Matt?"

"I met him when he was working at Barnes & Noble. No. Not at a store. They had a website. BN.com. They sold books." Finally weary of trying to explain what a book used to be, I settled on, "We went to elementary school together. He was my third grade teacher." If only the party hadn't featured projected photos covering decades of adventures that belied my lie. I told Jeremy Blacklow it was the Wall of Incriminating Evidence. The photos were in semi chronological order and at a certain point, my already infrequent appearances ended. "I'm coming up to haunt your pool one day this summer," I told Matty to his patented hand-clapped squeal of delight, "But I won't stay over. Just come up one afternoon, take a lap around the deck and head home." I want to be in some new photos but I don't want to be a nuisance about it. 

"Work's been kinda slow since cartoons went to color."

Seeing so many of the old faces again brought back of a flood of memories. Meeting Blacklow for the first time at Bowery Bar when he oh so casually showed up to see Matty fresh from kickboxing class, his sweaty shirt clinging, his hands taped up, the entire bar transfixed by his hotness. Another B-Bar night,  rescuing Kugie from standing on the metal trapdoor out front. "Samantha fell through one of those on Sex And The City," Jeremy's boyfriend declared. "My number one fear" all New Yorkers responded in unison with Carrie Bradshaw. 

Robbie Hammond regaled us with the time we were in Provincetown, when I was newly ejected from gay Los Angeles and Matty tried unsuccessfully to introduce me into impolite New York society. Despite our happy times balancing cock rings on our noses in PTown that weekend, I am not fun and fabulous and all of top tier gay Manhattan eventually nodded in approval when I was again ejected, this time to the suburbs and I never looked back for fear of turning into a pillar of saltiness. "I've never been to Provincetown, "Mario Palumbo sniffed dismissively as photos of him outside the Crown & Anchor scrolled behind him on the ever-looming Wall of Incriminating Evidence. 

"Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or 

will do over and over and over again... forever"

Brian Babst was there, and we were both in jovial spirits although Babst was not fully remembering the last time we saw each other. But speaking of incriminating evidence, that is what my blog is for! No use crying over spilt wine, or in the case of this blog, voluminous decades of tea. My writing truly serves no other purpose than to tickle Matty relentlessly and infuriate nearly everyone else. Young Bradford was there as an internally youthful vampire swathed in a cummerbund while Lina Bradford (no relation but let's see how the evening goes) worked the DJ booth before an eager and packed dance floor. 

My original costume idea was to come as me circa 2007. I pulled out a Digg.com hoodie, my Fab.com tee shirt, a pair of cargo shorts and some shiny metallic Nikes I owned but knew I could never pull off. I was all set to twist my hair into a faux hawk when Matty's boyfriend Austin sent along a "helpful" Pinterest look book filled with costume suggestions that can best be described as Grace Jones on a horse at Studio 54. End of list. "I was so stressed out!" one partygoer confided. Uh. Me too! 

Groove is in the heart

I knew I had to step my game up so I was going to wear same said cargo shorts, a Polo shirt (from Matty's stint at Ralph Lauren, after the books and before the search engine thing) and then craft an oversized Polo logo so big I would have a face hole cut into it. Unfortunately for the fleet of Lauren family copyright lawyers looking for billable hours, I am not crafty enough to pull that off either, so I decided to get a Jedi costume to go with my ridiculously expensive lightsaber that was otherwise collecting dust. 

I wasn't sure the Jedi thing would be good enough but as it turned out, it was a generational hit. And whipping out the lightsaber and lighting it up a few times during the party ended up being the kind of crowd pleasing prop comedy I don't usually get to pull off, personally or professionally, much to my chagrin. There was a drag show in the middle of the party and at one point, during a fantastic performance one of the queens came over to dance up on me, I assume because like a third grade teacher, she saw me not paying attention talking to Kugie and decided to make herself known. I lit the lightsaber and she improv'd all over it and that was my gag of the evening. 

"You look like Ewan McGregor. I guess that's the idea, right?" one partygoer said to me. "If I kept my hair natural, I'd look a lot more like Alec Guinness." Thank god even at my advanced age, I still can't grow a goatee. Later in line for the bathroom, a fabulous woman was waiting before me but the fabulousness was starting to get to her. "My back hurts from these heels." she confessed. The hunk of a man behind me squinted at the basket of toiletries across from him and then waved them away. "Without my glasses I can't see a thing." Thank God Matty is still Matty. I can handle anyone in the world getting old but him. 

TWINKle TWINKle forever our little star

Creaking knees aside, the costumes were great, the people were fun and it was an incredible party though I was grateful for the midnight end time. It felt good to be out with the old gang but not feel like when I rushed off to the drunk train at the stroke of twelve like Cinderella past her prime and pressed for time, that the party was just getting started. The Wall of Incriminating Evidence isn't the only thing moving in chronological order and even as we add more photos to it, ain't none of us needs to scroll as hard as we used to. But still, it's fun to play dress up and twirl around once more. It may not yet be the Last Days Of Disco but there is no denying there aren't as many nights left in this Donna Summer as some of us would like.  

Not pictured: Gray Hudkins. 

The 99 Cent Match

 Are we out of the woods? I fear I have strayed far from the path. But are any of us sure of our journey these days? Is this finally our long promised Hot Girl Summer or is that burning sensation Monkey Pox? Last week I was spitting distance from Sara Bareilles as the Baker's Wife in Into The Woods and tonight I was sitting across from Matty at the Cookshop in Chelsea. Life felt normal again but then as I passed the gleaming vast emptiness of the Hudson Yards it suddenly felt like an unnecessarily optimistic night in early October 1929. When do we all come to a happy end, or are we doomed to drift through the darkness of this second act in American life forever. 

Contrary to public reports, I did not spit on Sara Bareilles

As you can tell, the relentless brutality of the last two years has not dissipated like a fine morning mist but I haven't seen Matty in four years and was determined to not be a total summer bummer. On my walk from my office to the restaurant I made a plan to dig up a dusty old story to amuse him should things all turn too dark. A cheerful hill to pull us out of any emotional valley. It was the story of the worst date I ever went on, really two dates since after the first one I somehow thought the second one would be an improvement. It was not. Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald was right! In my defense, the date had been with a 99% match on OKCupid but then in the retelling I accidentally called him a 99 cent match and honestly that seems a lot more accurate. Plus the story came with a recent twist that was both topical and timely.

We caught each other up on each other and shared the cheesy dish on all our mutuals over cheesy dishes. I told Matty about running into Charlie and his husband Kent in line for Into The Woods with their five year old daughter. Charlie was levitating at the prospect of his daughter attending her first ever Broadway show, while she, no doubt familiar with this blog and with a lawyer for a father, invoked her right to remain silent. But mostly I recapped all of the aftermaths and recriminations this blog has caused over the years that he had either not heard before or politely forgot. All those criticisms of me were valid but without 'whatever this is" our mutual history would have been lost to the hazy last days of disco and cruelly forgotten. Besides, if I may step way up in class here, I am sure everyone found Marcel Proust unbearable in his lifetime, no doubt leaving him free to blog incessantly. 

Lately MonkeyPox is much on all our minds. Personally, I am not yet ready for the second act of the pandemic, still being in the "Or Is It Covid" phase: "Is it seasonal allergies or is it covid?" "Am I stressed out or is it covid?" But now that social media is filled with graphic stories and even more graphic images, near panic has set in among the gays. But then when faced with traveling to Brooklyn or The Bronx for an appointment, the kind of gays that definitely would have gone to The Bronx for free tickets to see Meryl Streep's cartwheel in Shakespeare In The Park suddenly are weighing the chances of permanent scarring from the August company at their next Hamptons weekend. 

Who is already vaccinated and who feels comfortable waiting has turned into a not entirely judgment-free acknowledgment of who among us is the biggest slut. As Dorothy Parker said, "Don't be the town drunk. In Manhattan." Personally I think the CDC should team up with Buzzfeed for a Cosmo-style quiz "Are You A Slut?" If you aren't that slutty, you get a Little Miss Goodie Two Shoes meme, but if your summer street meat habits bear more than a passing resemblance to the Coney Island hot dog eating contest, your quiz ends on the confirmation page for the one injection your body needs most this summer, at a clinic very near you. 

There is a reason that when schools perform Into The Woods, they only do the first act. Just as in real life, it is all wishes fulfilled and consequences TBD. The second part is darker and more perilous with too many lost along the way. Jonathan would have happily flown to NYC for the weekend to sit in that second row with me. And instead of sadness, my feelings are more reminiscent of Kitty Dukakis' response to her husband's loss in the 1988 campaign: "I'm bitter enough for the both of us." I wished and my wish came true. But then the consequences came and now as I try to make my way back out of the woods again, I wonder what is waiting on the journey, 

Stephen Sondheim has proven F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong. There are second acts in American lives, they're just a lot less fun without the people you have met along the way. We are all of us now In Search Of Lost Time, and a vaccine appointment that isn't too inconvenient. 

The (Lack Of) Rhythm Is Gonna Get You

 For more than a year, my social life has consisted almost entirely of mouthing "thank you!" and waving through a window at delivery people leaving near daily Amazon care packages on the front steps. As human contact goes, it is extremely unsatisfying  but then again, every day is in the manner of Christmas morning. Let's face it. In some ways, pandemic living is literally the gift we give ourselves. 

So it's some shit that after staring at a social calendar as empty as the calories in my diet I had two things to do on one night. First, a Zoom pride party for the show and then a birthday party for old friends. The Zoom was planned weeks ago when life was still more shut down. An opportunity to have a virtual celebration for those who didn't have anywhere in-person to celebrate. But now everyone is very "pandemic who?" and by the time Friday rolled around, it felt like the last Zoom ever. It's possible we turned the lights off by request as we were the last to exit. 

Code switching from virtual to IRL, I dashed a few blocks away to a gorgeous apartment in Hell's Kitchen where the birthday party was to be held. That I was instantly flummoxed and incapacitated by the intricacies of the auto entry system should have been my first warning of what was to come. In my defense, it told me to enter the apartment number into the keypad but I was going to the numberless penthouse! Fortunately, two nice, possibly already somewhat intoxicated people, Michael and Brandy, arrived right behind me and Michael, not taking my body blocking of the keypad for an answer was already on the phone to the host demanding in his best Albert Finney that the door be opened. 

"Open That Penthouse!"

Normally for me, circles one through seven of Hell are all the same: attending a birthday party where the celebrant is the only person you know. But in this case, it wasn't just Matt Kugelman and his side by side birthday pal Roy Haylock (aka Bianca del Rio) that I knew. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise that as I made my way through the party, every few minutes someone would call out my name and I would be instantly reconnected with someone I hadn't seen in years. Michael Lee! Even Chris Crisco, our former intern, who I thought was still down in Mexico. But I guess now, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, their gay counterparts have made their way back to midtown. 

The stars only come out at night

I spent some time checking in again and again with Matt's mom, who is a very sweet woman I have met numerous times on her many visits to the city and whose best gay party trick is her ability to tell you everything she is thinking after a single glass of Chardonnay. But she was largely tended to by Bobby of Denver who I trust was Good People, because that was printed on his tee shirt and you know how susceptible I am to advertising. 

But the good people I spent the most time talking to was Chris, who was handsome and looked familiar. At first I thought I had just met him before which in gay circles is always possible. But later I realized that it is infinitely more likely that I saw him recently on television. Because TV is more real to me than real life, I frequently see people out and about and think we went to high school together and it turns out to be Ryan Gosling getting a double shot at Starbucks. 

Chris and I were having a great conversation. Nothing like two people who interview others for a living to keep the banter going. We covered all my best subjects from Room Rater to eating at Wendy's to falling down a ski slope. I felt like a Jeopardy champion confidently clearing categories. But then I realized I was getting short on time. The trains stop running at a certain point and as usual I have no sense of time passing so I unforgivably rudely pulled out my phone to check the time. Ten to Midnight, like the awful Charles Bronson movie with the hot naked serial killer in it. Time to go. 

I made my abrupt, nearly mid-sentence good byes to Chris and dashed off into the party to find Roy and Matt to tell them I was leaving. When I had arrived earlier Roy joked that we had to take a picture fast because I would be leaving in twenty minutes. This is a running gag for us after years of me hanging out after my show at one of Roy's bar nights and then leaving the moment that he said he was about to hit the stage. But in my defense, his show would always start at 1am and my last train leaves at 1:50am. I can't alter time. Or can I?

Running into Michael and Brandy to create bookends for the evening, I explained I had to go and then made a big show of checking the train times on my phone. After all, the MTA has a habit of changing schedules around in unusual circumstances like pandemics and I didn't want to be off by thirty minutes. But when I opened the train time app, the schedule was blank. No more trains tonight. I had missed the last train! When I told Roy he rightly howled with laughter. After so many years of choosing the train over the party, I finally chose the party and missed the train. 

Matt made a very kind gesture offering that I could stay with him, even though his entire family was already splayed out Walton Mountain style on air mattresses in every nook and cranny of his new apartment. No No, Good Night Matt Boy, I insisted, I will just stay at my office and catch an early train back. But then after I left I realized I didn't want to catch the side eye from our building super who is very nosy about these things and decided to just check into a hotel instead. 

So roomy I could almost extend both my arms

So there I was, after 1am, no luggage, checking into the Club Quarters Times Square. No one to blame but myself I thought. The world has changed and as usual I refused to double check reality. It's been 20 years since I left LA, and I still never check the weather before I leave the house. So as I settled into my room, I decided to check what time the first trains would be leaving in the morning, so I could get back ASAP. My town doesn't allow overnight parking in the lots so I didn't want to add a parking ticket or tow to my already luxurious hotel bill. 

Open the train time app and there it is. Next train: 1:50am. 

It was 1:45am. I was stripped down to my underwear in a prepaid, non-refundable hotel room, more than five minutes but not much more than five minutes away from Grand Central Terminal. I had screwed myself. The train time app lists all trains by date so when I looked at the app at 11:50pm there were no more trains for Friday but if I had thought to look at Saturday which it technically was ten minutes later or had looked at the app at 12:01am instead, I would have seen I still had two trains to go. Just like always.

So it was my own dumb fault but in my defense, aren't we all a little out of sync? The world has changed, but also stayed the same, and how are we supposed to know which is which. I thought the most difficult thing would be the part where I had to talk to strangers, up close and in person. But instead, I was totally confident and at ease around people again, not just like nothing had happened, but like the after scenes in an anxiety medication commercial. "Look at me, full of life at this party now that all the medication in this ad has made me normal!" But I am clearly not normal. What a mess. Just when I think I have it all together, it all falls apart in my hands. 

The more things change, the more I stay exactly the same. 

Ready! Reset! Go!

 I think we can all agree: it's been a crazy few years. 

My radio show was canceled, but then we successfully relaunched ourselves and have grown into a podcast network with our own smartphone app. A reality star and tabloid fixture decimated a generation of establishment Republicans and ended a 25 year Clinton dynasty before embarking on what can only be described as a turbulent and tumultuous rollercoaster of chaos. Inexplicably I wrote a movie that was actually produced, fulfilling a lifelong dream but then earlier this year all my personal plans for the future were shattered in an instant when the love of my life suddenly died. 

So when X Files creator Chris Carter reminds everyone that there is a nutty conspiracy theory floating around that the relaunch of the Hadron collider in Cern in 2015 sent us into an alternate reality Hellscape, you start looking back on the shocking number of relevant pop culture figures who died in 2016 and think, "Sure. Why not?" After all, to quote George W. Bush at the Trump inaugural, the last few years have been "fucking weird."  

Me thinking about the last six years

But now we have a new old president and a vaccine that is powerfully ending an 18 month pandemic as isolating as a dunce corner timeout. It's summer and the sun is shining and things feel really truly optimistic for the first time in a really long time. Maybe it's too much to hope for that the rollercoaster is finally pulling into the station and we can transfer to a different ride more to our liking. Or maybe it is just the calm before the next series of last gasp loops and turns. 

I started to write about the city opening up a few weeks ago. I walked through Bryant Park and it was full of happy people. For the first time since March 2020, I was annoyed by how many people were in my way on the sidewalk. It felt good. The old New York was back and just as obnoxious as it ever was. And me too, I guess. But then I got busy at work and didn't actually do anything more than walk through a crowded park so without stronger literary inspiration I let it go. But tonight, I am going to a party and that in and of itself should be cause for celebration. 

As the fallow nature of my blog can attest, I haven't been nearly as social in the last few years as I once was. My blog has transitioned from a mixed emotions accounting of various nightlife adventures to quite literally a morgue. Though I confess pride that one of my only true talents as a writer is to capture the essence of another person with pinpoint accuracy, that Eric' husband liberally quoted what I wrote at his international Zoom memorial was bittersweet at best. I may not know myself but at least I have some sense of the people I love. Shame it only comes into focus after they are gone. But I think it is too soon to hang up my hat as a social animal and relegate myself to the grim task of high quality obituaries. So tonight, I'm off to a party. 

In the past year and a half, Matt Kugelman is the only person I have seen socially. Last summer, he coaxed me out to dinner on the streets of Hell's Kitchen. I was wary, but Matt was tested daily at work and I had been a literal and figurative homebound hermit, my only source of entertainment a series of increasingly ill-advised self haircuts that only confirmed that staying home was the best plan. But Matt is social and friendly like a golden retriever with a squeaky ball in his mouth, so I was persuaded to join him for what turned out to be a totally safe and perfectly fun meal outside in a Manhattan gutter. 

Today Facebook served up a photo of us together at a party in 2009. I joked that I would be wearing the exact same outfit tonight, to which Matt replied with a Romy and Michelle "Me Too!" meme. That would be hilarious if I didn't still own and wear that $9 Gap polo. Matt and I don't have everything in common but I realized today seeing that photo that our strongest bond is probably that both of us established a casual look that we will never deviate from, for better or for worse. Take any random photo of either of us, together or apart in the last decade and I dare you to guess the year. Good luck, 

But life is about change, right? Going to new places, seeing new people. But is that really what we all want now?  After the year we've had just seeing the same old people in the same old shirts is more than good enough, and probably exactly what the doctor ordered. This timeline sucks and anything that looks like Earth One these days looks pretty good to me. So tonight I am off to Matt's birthday party, as I have done year after year after year after year. In this case, familiarity doesn't bred contempt, it engenders relief. It's the shiny golden promise of the same comfortable old thing again and, well, as William Mulholland said at the opening of the Los Angeles aqueduct, "Here it is. Take it." And thank you very much, I think I will. 

I just need a minute to dust off this outfit first. It's been a while.