Club Step

Providence is not only humanity's cruel scorekeeper but also a dark chalet on West 57th Street filled with a complex labyrinth of stairs and levels. It's like a Hamburger Hamlet designed by M.C. Escher. Not the kind of dimly lit establishment where drunk and clumsy people can find peace of mind.

If you get lost inside Providence, here's a handy map.

I turned to Donny, still recovering from a broken hip, and issued a dark warning:

"One of us is going to fall down and the other one is going to die from laughter."

Since Donny fell last time, undone by an icy pathway outside his apartment as 2014 began, I decided to tread carefully through the club. Karma, being what it is, I was more than past due for a hard tumble of my own.

We came to Providence for their new Friday night party Berlin. On line for coat check, I met a nice young man visiting from Germany, who sensed providence in the name and came based solely on that.

"Is this one of the big clubs in New York City?" he asked in flawless if heavily accented English.

I just shrugged. This was my first time too. But I was drawn by Brian Gianelli's suggestion and the prompt 11pm show by local drag pathogen Bianca del Rio. I should have known before we arrived that everything would fall apart, this being the endless winter of our discontent and all, but I tried to ignore the warning signs and instead enjoy a night on the town during one of the first moderately decent nights of the year.

This winter has been unrelenting, like trying repeatedly to squeeze a size 14 into a tuna can. Back in December, I mocked my friend Terry Goldman when he wore a short-sleeved shirt to dinner on the single day that month where the temperature threatened to touch sixty. In retrospect, if I had known about the three months of polar vortex ahead I would have appeared in little more than a bathing suit.

So since it was only just in the thirties tonight, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to pull myself out of hibernation and drag Donny out on the town for the first time since we skied through the Aspen Social Club as winter began. Ryan Hahn was organizing a mini-reunion from his holiday party with Griffin Parsons and Jennifer Cheng in tow, but for one reason or another, they all dropped out at the last minute, almost literally as Brian’s plane was making its final descent into madness.

How bad could it be? Bianca. Bunny. No cover charge!

In addition to the chance to spend some time with Brian, I was lured to Providence by a flyer Bianca del Rio posted on Facebook promising both no cover charge and Lady Bunny. The evening had neither. But Bianca, a giant black cotton ball perched on her wig, made the most of it with her usual warm blend of racism and anti-Semitism. The crowd ate it up. After the show, the crowd swarmed, temporarily overwhelming Bianca with photo requests. I was only half-joking when I suggested to Donny that I should organize them into a line and charge five dollars. Between the $30 in cover at the door and $12 at the coat check, recouping our losses was high on my list.

"That'll be five dollars, please. Insults cost extra."

The club was filled with lots of young men and some of them weren't bad looking either. While waiting for the coat check, however, we landed behind a man in a striped jumpsuit (Donny kept calling it a "onesie") that had a glittery owl on the back.

Stop staring at me! It's freaking me out!

It was so quaint when Donny expressed shock that anyone would buy such a thing. “You know he rolled out an old McCall’s pattern and made that himself down at F.I.T.!” I screeched before suggesting a variety of potential Tim Gunn critiques. Later when we were upstairs, Donny spotted him again and yelled, "Ugh. It's back!"

"The front sucks too." I offered.

Look, if you are going to be a man in a skin tight jumpsuit, you better have the body of death not a dead body. I don't know anything about fashion but even I know that’s the truth.

Unfortunately in the midst of all of our gay shenanigans, we lost Brian and his cute friend Andrew in the crowd. It was the second time tonight that it happened and with the drunk train pending, I did not have time for the third time to be a charm. I texted him one last time and headed for the exits.

On our way down to the coat check, I bumped into a collection of cute guys on their way in and one of them was a Grant Goodeve-looking mother fucker. All sorts of hipsters were floating around in plaid tonight but he was the only one that made it work.

In this case, eight would be enough for anyone.

I suppose the hipster thing is like any movement in fashion. Many will try it but most will fail. In his case, the red plaid tucked into his jeans effectively transported me back to my adolescence. Others just looked like sloppy messes for whom an unkempt beard and ill-fitting tank top was statement enough.

Life is full of potential pitfalls. If it isn't bad fashion, it’s a treacherous staircase. One minute you're a nice Asian woman looking for the ladies room and the next Bianca del Rio is dragging you on stage and forcing you to play the role of manicurist. I think monsters lead such interesting lives, don’t you? Even in party palaces where the stairs climb on forever to nowhere. 

Model Home

"Why are you here so early?" Ryan Hahn's voice rang out across his empty apartment as I dodged three eager waiters desperate to put a drink in my hand before I even had a chance to dispatch my coat. This is what happens when you show up at 9:05 for a very fancy holiday party that started at nine. Apparently, Ryan and our mutual friend Brian Gianelli (aka the only other person I would know at the party) had already decided Brian should come closer to eleven, when the party was in full swing. Information that would have been important to know.

As it was, I happily unloaded my junk at the coat check and grabbed a hot apple cider from the hot tasty bartender. I discovered the big-armed bartender with the heterosexual hair (see below) and equally hot waiters were no mere coincidence, but had been hired from Marc Levine, the owner of Model Bartenders. I came by this juicy secret from Marc himself who had come early to make sure everything was going well, which might explain the aggressive lords-a-leaping as I walked in the door. 

"Would you like to try on that Santa suit? It needs a bottom." - My Best Line of the Night

#FallowFridays

Elmore Leonard is dead. 

That is the kind of spare opener he would have enjoyed. Obviously, I have a very different writing style. But when famous writers die these days, the internet briefly fills with anecdotes and life lessons in a really lovely sort of communal wake. And so it has been the case with Elmore Leonard this week and through that I have picked up a few writing tips that I both never follow and will savagely paraphrase here. My apologies to him on both counts.

Elmore Leonard said never open with the weather, but I don't think he ever had a Friday night like the one we experienced tonight in Manhattan. The air was crisp and clear, with only the barest hint of diaper.  As the immortal bard Taylor Swift once opined, "It feels like a perfect night." And it does.  Normally, in blazing winter and bitter summer, I am a reluctant adventurer. But when the temperature and humidity are just right, like dry bath water, I am not just encouraged to go out but I become the encourager. 

Moon Stuck

So there is a super moon going on right now. This means the moon is full and at its closest point so it looks a lot larger and brighter than usual. This also means everyone is batshit crazy. What a perfect night for Broadway Bares at the Roseland Ballroom.

For those of you who aren't from NYC and think Smash is a wild night at the theatre, hold on to your aisle seats because you ain't seen nothin' yet. Twenty-three years ago, Broadway Bares started as a fundraiser where Broadway dancers would do a burlesque show to raise money to fight HIV/AIDS. The event has grown and tonight raised more than $1.5 million and had over 200 dancers peeling it all off for charity (including my pal Christopher Sieber in a wild leather thong and chains!). You weren't there so here is a glimpse of the show:

The Two Night Show

Well if you were wondering if it is summer in New York yet. It’s fucking summer. After struggling last weekend to resist the urge to turn the heat back on after the nighttime temperature plunged back down into the 40s, this week has been a parallel struggle to not install the air conditioners. It has been 90 degrees every day for the last three days and now we are supposed to be grateful that this horrible storm from the Midwest (that dropped enough twisters to get Dorothy a dozen round trips between Kansas and OZ) will be the thing that breaks the hot and humid spell that has fallen over the city.

But I can’t complain about the heat (even though that is exactly what this sounds like) because our winter was so arduously long this year that anything, even 90 degree highs, are an improvement. I was commiserating tonight with another New Yorker at a party about the temperature swing but more importantly, the long winter that made everyone I know question our decision to live in this urine soaked wonderland.

The Americanization of Richard

By this point, The Park is like an old friend. I haven’t seen it in a while, but coming back was like I never left. It was the place, downstairs by the fire, that Romaine and I first met a decade ago and talked for hours, assured by the end that we could do a radio show together. Years later, near the front bar, I had spotted Erik Rhodes, sheepish after he had been discovered, no doubt feeling guilty after blowing off the show. The subterranean coat check is where I first spotted Daniel, the hot Brit who would make frequent appearances in my writing but to whom I have still never spoken. And upstairs months later, it was Conor McGill who finally helped solve the mystery of his identity, throwing everyone else under the old age bus for not knowing it themselves.

This afternoon it was a different Brit who was the subject of conversation and center of attention. Fresh meat has a tendency to do that, especially when the beef is firm and tender and the winter nights long and lonely. Parked at The Park, sealing in my own juices under the intense heat lamp that Brian Babst called home, I quietly roasted in a wool sweater cleverly disguising long underwear below. Not that anyone there would ever know the difference. I take winter very seriously, but not much else.

In this particular moment, Brian was elsewhere and I was explaining to his friend Omar Torres about my blog and how I write about my nights out on the town and the not-so-ordinary people I meet there. "My fifteen seconds of fame!" he declared excitedly, and that is how long it will be because the subject of tonight's essay is not Omar, or Brian, or any of the other ghosts of bars past. It is Richard, newly delivered to New York City from London.

Omar and Brian enjoy their fifteen seconds of fame while it lasts.

"What a terrible idea!" I told Richard when I heard of his recent arrival. He smiled a winsome grin. "No one has said that to me yet." I didn't mean the city. I meant the weather. January is the worst month in New York, if you don’t count August and about six or seven others. "I wanted to move here now," he explained, "So I had time to get settled and by the time summer rolls around, I’ll be ready." He is a smart cookie, that Richard. Also he has big arms and a good job, so I predict smooth sailing, even now that he is firmly planted on dry land.

Without prompting or request, I gave Richard some of my most valuable advice for living in the city. It started with a story from when I first arrived in 2001. Also known as the year he turned twelve. Oh? Did I not mention that he was born in the 80s? "In November 1989. Slipped in under the wire!" Being exactly twenty years older than he was, I felt it was my obligation, in a strictly paternal way, to tell him everything I knew about the city.

I told about losing my good leather coat on the divine Robbie Hammond's bed at a fabulous party he threw. My coat was exchanged for an inferior leather coat someone else had brought and given how ill-fitting the leftover one was, I don't think it was an honest mistake. I frantically tore Robbie’s bedroom apart for a coat I knew in my heart was gone, a coat that wasn't even mine in the first place, and haven't been invited back since. My bad manners aside, Brian confirmed my advice to always have a couple of cute but cheap coats you won’t mind losing along the way.

"Don't lose your accent" was another sage piece of advice I gave him. "You'll see all sorts of people on TV who came here decades ago and they never lose that accent. It is the secret to their success. And Americans worship class. We think anyone with a British accent is classy. Don’t lose it." Richard insisted he had no plans to lose it but is worried about it slipping on its own as fags became cigarettes and queues turned into lines. "My grandmother doesn't want me to sound like an American." Unfortunately, as I learned from my incomprehensible Scottish friend Jim Hepburn whose mother chided him for talking like an American newscaster, back home they only hear what is gone and we only hear whatever is left.

I have a lot of nerve giving advice. This is the first gay social event I have been to in the city in months. No wonder I persist with perfection as Roy Cohn's definition of a homosexual from Angels In America: Someone who knows no one and who no one knows. I was a host for the event today but my name was misspelled, where you could find it. Ben Roussel, in a crazy fabulous fur hat, his shirt tight like Saran Wrap, fruitlessly toured the bar, never able to accurately determine which VIP table was mine. This culminated in an awkward encounter at table seven where I insisted Brian and Richard could get a drink only to be rebuffed by some queens who had no business being there either.

Aside from the event organizer (the ever handsome and tall Zachary Barnett) and the assorted characters I have mentioned (as well as Ben Dixon and another Ben that I do not know but have seen so many times, I almost feel like we were roommates once), the only other person I knew at the event was someone I met once several years ago at Brian Gianelli's going away party.

"That's Ryan Hahn," I said, gesturing in his direction. "I only met him once but we are friends on Facebook." Knowing my reluctance to digitally befriend anyone, this is me really saying something. But Brian was not impressed. "Are you pointing? In a bar?" His line delivery would have made the Dowager Countess proud as he slipped away from me, drenched in shame. As I told Richard when we met, I am a social dead end. He is wise to stick with Brian Babst who today proved once again to be someone who knows everyone and who everyone knows and who knows not to point at people in public. 

Some man tries to welcome Richard while Ben, never my roommate, looks on warily.

I hope Richard enjoys being in America and more importantly, being in New York. Today Ryan reminded me of the advice I gave to him the first time I met him. "Live in LA in your 20's when you are young and cute and can live well on not much money, but move to New York in your 30's where you can be interesting and afford to live there like a human being." But Richard is starting with New York and I suspect will skip LA altogether, his IKEA shopping spree aside. His quick success will enable him to be young and cute and interesting and afford to live here like a human being all at the same time. 

And that, my friends, is a design for living worth following. 

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.