There are always hot guys around. This is the world I live in. Well, it is the world I work in, which sometimes feels like real life, even when it isn’t. I exist on a plane with blurry players dancing on the blurry lines between fantasy and reality. Who can say what is real and what isn’t?
The whole show tonight was the subject at hand. We spent an hour talking to the two finalists and the winner of the current season of Project Runway. But I was less interested in talking to Seth Aaron about his leggings than I was confronting him about my lack of an invitation to Laura Bennett’s finale viewing party. After all, I thought Laura and I made a connection when she joined us in studio recently to plug her delightfully breezy parenting guide “Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?” In my head, I imagined I would be her new gay boyfriend and even though I know less than nothing about fashion, we would pal around over spiked coffee and she would try to marry me off to her gay manny. But I emailed her more than a week ago to no reply and then I see pictures from her party posted by the gay bloggers she did invite. Suddenly the reality is that I am Stella Dallas, outside looking in.
We rounded out the show with our usual Friday Night Dance Party, our excuse to not talk much in the last hour of the show while a famous DJ plays their favorite tunes. Tracy Young the sexy lady who spins at all the hot gay boy events was in studio for this round, looking as adorable as ever. Her first song was her mix of “Tardy For The Party,” the freshman musical effort of one Kim Zolciak, who puts the real in The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Kim called into the show and was exhaustingly vague about their relationship, while Tracy just sat there politely minding her own business. Now I know why reality TV requires so much editing. Some stories demand scissors and tape to make sense of.
Moments before Tracy bounced into our lives, adorable singer and actor Chris Salvatore popped into the studio. Ever since his film Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat hit the home video market, the gay community has memorized every detail of his naked body in freely distributed screen caps. Yes, we got him to reluctantly take his shirt off in the studio. It was very Coco from Fame without the creepy campiness. But he really wanted to discuss his music, especially his appropriately titled single “Dirty Love.” While he was leaving, he asked for my phone number so he and his manager (my friend Ryan) could meet up with me after the show.
I admit it. I thought he was attractive. After my silly flirtation with Drew Cutler a few weeks ago, I should have thought better of another in-studio showmance, but flirting is fun and it’s even more fun when the flirt comes back to you. So I met up with Chris and Ryan after the show at the apartment of some friend of theirs that is apparently so popular (aka whorish) that it appears on foursquare.com as a destination. (Normally a line like that would be me trying to be clever, but in this case it is in fact true.) My plan was to just spend a few flirty minutes with him before heading off to Brooklyn for a special Friday night edition of Ben Harvey’s GUMBO.
There were about eight gay men in the apartment and each one was more attractive than the last. They kept exploding out of nooks and corners, arms bulging from tight t-shirts, winning smiles shimmering in the night. I have to assume they all share a very popular house on Fire Island in the summertime, although I honestly didn’t want to know more. No sooner had I tried to remember some (any) of their names than a titsy blond woman wandered into the scene demanding acknowledgement that she wasn’t a fag hag because fag hags have no hope of ever getting laid and then blurted out, “You know what I hate about the gay community?”
“Everything?” was one response. “Gay men?” was the one with universal agreement among the men.
These of course were our reasons for hating the gay community. She hated it because when she went out to a gay club, she had the least chance of getting laid. She said this of course while a gay man was running his hand over her left breast and I pointed out to her that she already had gotten more action at the party than any of the gay men standing there. Let’s just say between her ridiculous stance against the gays (if all you want is to get laid, hang out with straight men you idiot) and her monologues delivered at full screech (“I just don’t understand lesbians. The whole thing doesn’t make sense. I am hungry for cock in my stomach!”), my dinner was ready to leave before I was, and I was beyond ready to go.
After Chris was prodded into singing a bit of one of his tunes a cappella in the bedroom, the three of us decamped to The Ritz. I had planned to ditch them at the door on my way to a quick turnaround in Brooklyn, but then Chris had nuzzled up to me while we were walking over after he found out I was single. As I tried to leave, he grabbed me a bit on the arm, “You aren’t leaving now, are you? You’ll come in for one drink, right?” Cut to me standing there with Ryan watching Chris do a shot out of an ice sculpture shaped like a man’s ass. “I thought it was a vagina!” he yelled with a smile, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. A bit later, I was leaving to try to make the 1am train when I ran into Rob on his way in with his notorious roommate Erik Bottcher, who I had never really met (or have I?) and who is connected to me on Facebook through about 120 of the hottest men you have ever seen.
Tardy Erik, for whom the party was just getting started, grinned at me and it was wicked, “Oh you aren’t leaving right now, are you? You can join us for a minute right?” I can’t say no to a handsome man and back into the breach I went. It was nice to see Rob again since we used to work together and he keeps trying to get together with me and I never make it happen. We swirled around a bit downstairs, perplexed by the bartender who was half wearing a shirt. I watched Erik and Rob do shots out of test tubes served by a weary drag queen. A not-so attractive man followed Rob out of the bathroom and tried to make something happen between them but the reality was that was never, ever going to happen.
Naturally, Rob and Erik wanted to go upstairs and moments later I was back where I had started. Erik knew all of Chris and Ryan’s hot friends from that tiny apartment located on the corner of Manhunt and used condoms. Of course they did. Hot men are like migrating birds. Their way in life is easier when they all group together and head in the same direction. Suddenly it was Chris and Rob side by side doing shots, Chris out of an ice penis and Rob’s lips pressed against that frozen ass from before. It was time for me to go, again. For real this time.
The first time I said good bye to Chris, I dirty danced with him for a few minutes before walking out the door, but this time, I gave him just a quick hug and a kiss good night. The slow dance had felt hot and passionate, like the real thing. But what is the real thing anyway? Earlier on the show, he said people liked his performance in Eating Out but he was essentially just playing himself. He is an actor and creating a moment and making it seem true is what he does for a living. Besides, didn’t I think I had the real thing before only to have it explode into a horrible ball of hatred that left only mutually assured destruction? Perhaps showmance is real enough for now. After all, it always feels good and there is never any bitter after taste.
Kim was so maddeningly vague but when you are a real person in a Real world, there is probably a lot to sort out. I know the feeling. What do any of us know for certain about anything? My mother used to say that my grandmother Laura “never believed in anything she couldn’t put her fist through” and maybe that is the right idea. So much of life is show and unlike a movie where they turn up the lights or a play where the actors bow, the show of life doesn’t have the kind of definitive delineation that makes separating truth from illusion easy. Without the comfort of a proscenium arch, none of it is particularly real and reality is just what we make of it. If pressing up against Chris and running my hand through his hair and down his chest felt real then I guess it was real. Or at least, real enough for tonight.
Showing posts with label Tracy Young. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tracy Young. Show all posts
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Dinner At Eight
Last night I was riding in the car with a slutty lesbian with a southern accent and I called her the "Paula Deen of pussy!" Everyone in the car laughed and in that moment I thought, "Oh I can't wait to post that in my blog." When I woke up this morning, it was still on my mind and when I started to post about last night I realized that the whole encounter was part of a dream I had, Romaine was not suddenly a blond from Alabama and it in fact never happened. I think it says less about how I amuse myself even when sleeping than it does about the sudden pressure I feel to write a good blog entry.
My last posting involved a very long night hanging out with Matt Kelleher. My retelling of Friday's events passed through his social network faster than Syphilis and by early Saturday night on our way to dinner for round two, the pressure was on! Matt is someone who has always been in my life in waves. When I lived in LA and he as always was in NY, we would see each other once or twice a year for intense weekends of type A gay behavior on such a grand scale that a routine schedule of that level of activity would cause the heart of an American Gladiator to explode. Perhaps it is for the best that we always have months in between to recover.
This weekend has been typical for us. We are like two planets in the same solar system with erratic orbits who have near fatal encounters every few cycles. Eventually we will either slam directly into each other and go supernova or our orbits will just naturally send us spinning further and further apart. This weekend, the planets aligned in their own way and we had two very intense days together. And then we won't see each other again for months, as Matt's orbit takes him very close to Uranus, and mine takes me back to the outer reaches beyond the gay galaxy (aka Westchester County).
After Friday night, I only had four hours of sleep and I was hurting by the time I got home at 1pm. It took all the strength and brainpower I had to pull together my blog posting, shower and change and get back to the city for dinner. I had noticed earlier this week that Chip Arndt and Matt Kelleher were carrying on a private discussion of their dinner plans Wall-to-Wall on Facebook (tacky, but in this case, helpful) and I endeavored to shoehorn my way into their social calendar. I never see either of them, so the ability to see both of them at the same time relieves a lot of my guilt about being a good friend. This set our weekend in motion and Ben Harvey's party ended up being the appetizer for a very long 36 hour meal.
Originally, Chip had wanted to go to a restaurant called "Employee's Only" which being me, I had never heard of. But since Chip really wanted Andy Towle, the Nora Ephron of gay society*, to come, it really needed to be a place very close to his apartment. (*Far Too Obscure Reference Alert: In a press junket interview for the film "You've Got Mail," Tom Hanks revealed that increasingly Nora likes to stay very close to home, down to filming scenes for their latest work together inside her own apartment building. He joked that her next film would be set entirely inside her apartment so she could just direct it from her bedroom.) Matt always the arbiter of where the gay sheep are headed insisted ELMO was the practical solution. Quickly the guest list snowballed and Chip made a reservation for twenty, which I feared (especially after his open invitation on my radio show on Friday) would be insufficient.
I met Matt at his apartment where Gary, who had not intended to crash there, was in need of a fresh shirt. "He's about your size. Bring him something cute!" Matt insisted, forgetting of course that I am the least fashionable person he knows and asking me to bring something cute from my closet is like asking a lesbian to tip better than 15%. It could happen, but not without a lot of anxiety and effort. Gary is blond and fair so I brought him a brown retro vintage Buffalo humor printed ringer t-shirt (origin unknown) and I wore a green Otter Fashion shirt from their collection that they thoughtfully sent me, knowing either one would work for him. The brown shirt was a little big on him, so we switched and he filled out the Otter top perfectly. And, in my personal fashion-blind opinion, the hue of the olive green really worked for him.
Dan also met us at Matt's place since he lives close by, a gay football widow free for dinner while Cyd had a game to play, and Matt's friend Brian and his statistically-handsome date Dallas met us around the corner for the short walk to ELMO. I met Brian forever ago at (I think) SHAG, Matt's favorite hangout and have always found him very sexy, but never more so then when he gushed about what a great writer I am. He has the eyes of a winning poker player and a smile that says "I'm going to eat you." an expression which is open to wild interpretation, although I mean it in the sense that he will in fact devour you if you aren't careful. On our walk to ELMO, we swapped our favorite 30 Rock lines (he is obsessed) and he expressed an interest in the wider use of the words "chortle" and "guffaw" and I promised to work them into the blog.
At ELMO, Chip and Rob were there, as were my friend Kevin, the sexy homo from Chicago and the original Jonathan with his friend Mike. We congregated in the bar for a few minutes as the ultra fit and flitty staff put the finishing touches on our two tables. We moved en masse to the back of the restaurant and then were forced to chose which tables to sit at. I immediately took the middle seat in the smaller table for eight. At San Simeon, Hearst had one of the longest tables I have ever seen, set inside a chapel he had imported stone by stone to make a dining hall. In Citizen Kane, Kane and his wife always sat at long ends where they couldn't hear each other but in reality, Hearst and Davies sat in the dead center facing each other with house guests emanating out from them newest to oldest. Once you got to the end of the table as Louise Brooks reported, the implication was that it was time to pack up and go home. In dining out in big settings, egomaniacs like me always want the center most seat so the conversation radiates out from you as if you are hosting the dinner party.
In the end it didn't matter much where anyone was sitting because it was a non-stop game of musical chairs (set once again to Britney's album playing in its entirety in the background -- did Gary tip someone twenty bucks?). At one point, Mike and Dallas were sitting next to each other and their arguing got so passionate I thought they were going use my bleu cheese dressing as lube and start fucking right on the table. Jason Bellini came in without Will Wikle, who was at home nursing a sore throat (insert your own cocksucking joke here). And Andy Towle finally arrived with his hot boyfriend. Andy's arms were massive and the talk of two tables. Plus, they allowed me to sandbag him with Bette Midler's famous hello to Bruce Springsteen at We Are The World: "You look fabulous! What happened?" which she followed up with "I remember when his arms were as skimpy as his chord changes." All the seat hopping was a little much for our appropriately hot waiter whom I dubbed "Supergirl" because of his famous S logo belt buckle. He dealt with our physical instability by just calling everyone "tranny," "fierce" and "hot mess" every fifteen seconds until I was almost sorry Project Runway and SNL existed.
From there, we of course had to go to a club. Matt offered up his tried and true SHAG but no one was having it. Finally we settled quite reluctantly on SPLASH because it was close by and we knew we could, with a little wrangling, all get in free. I was relieved because the DJ Tracy Young had been on the show on Friday and I told her I would stop by (which is usually a lie). At the door, the doorman our group knew (Derek) wasn't there yet and there was much strum und drang (and minimal guffaw and chortle) about getting ten of us in for free. Dallas was put in charge of this effort as we all bantered on the curb. The whole thing chaffed like a dry rubber leading me to grouse "We have two TV personalities and a radio person who just interviewed their DJ yesterday to promote the night and everyone is hot. What more do they want?"
I think John Blair is a lovely person but the state of NY nightlife is in such disrepair that SPLASH is one of the only options in town if you are in the mood for an old fashioned Saturday night muscle fest set to a bone-rattling beat. Yes, going there is like going back in time to the early 90s and they might as well require high-waisted acid-wash jeans at the door, but what else are we supposed to do? Andy's new arms are nice but they aren't the only game in town. Eventually Derek arrived and we were all ushered into the fixer-upper sanctum. I chatted with Tracy, who gave me some drink tickets which when he saw them caused Matty to do his trademarked clap excitedly and guffaw thing. His friends should know he didn't laugh like that until he started hanging out with my incendiary laugh, and for this reason, I apologize.
At one point, the dancers climbed on top of the bar over us and we all did our level best to ignore their gaze, lest they try to shove their giant crotches in our faces in the hopes of getting spare change. All of them had completely outsized packed-to-the-brim thongs which because of my height kept ending up in my hair (is it possible to get MRSA in a hair follicle? I hope not). It also caused me to suggest they were "holding Nana's purse for her" but it was either too loud or too late for the joke. When the bowl of fresh fruit appeared on the bar, I knew it was time to disembark from the Love Boat and started quickly looking for the exit and bottle of hand sanitizer.
I made my good byes and dashed out into the still of the night. My stomach was still aching from the night before and the beats and cheek implants made me dizzy. It was a sweet weekend with Matt but the shirtless John Blair muscle crowd had a nostalgic feel to it, like watching RENT on Broadway. Even though it is still the current production, the whole thing felt like a creaky revival. At one point for old time sake, Matt stuck his tongue in my mouth like we were back in Terminal Six at LAX in 1997 or back at SPLASH in that same year when I got really drunk and shoved my hands down his shorts, but the whole experience just ended up reminding me that we are too old for this kind of thing and so was everyone else there.
My last posting involved a very long night hanging out with Matt Kelleher. My retelling of Friday's events passed through his social network faster than Syphilis and by early Saturday night on our way to dinner for round two, the pressure was on! Matt is someone who has always been in my life in waves. When I lived in LA and he as always was in NY, we would see each other once or twice a year for intense weekends of type A gay behavior on such a grand scale that a routine schedule of that level of activity would cause the heart of an American Gladiator to explode. Perhaps it is for the best that we always have months in between to recover.
This weekend has been typical for us. We are like two planets in the same solar system with erratic orbits who have near fatal encounters every few cycles. Eventually we will either slam directly into each other and go supernova or our orbits will just naturally send us spinning further and further apart. This weekend, the planets aligned in their own way and we had two very intense days together. And then we won't see each other again for months, as Matt's orbit takes him very close to Uranus, and mine takes me back to the outer reaches beyond the gay galaxy (aka Westchester County).
After Friday night, I only had four hours of sleep and I was hurting by the time I got home at 1pm. It took all the strength and brainpower I had to pull together my blog posting, shower and change and get back to the city for dinner. I had noticed earlier this week that Chip Arndt and Matt Kelleher were carrying on a private discussion of their dinner plans Wall-to-Wall on Facebook (tacky, but in this case, helpful) and I endeavored to shoehorn my way into their social calendar. I never see either of them, so the ability to see both of them at the same time relieves a lot of my guilt about being a good friend. This set our weekend in motion and Ben Harvey's party ended up being the appetizer for a very long 36 hour meal.
Originally, Chip had wanted to go to a restaurant called "Employee's Only" which being me, I had never heard of. But since Chip really wanted Andy Towle, the Nora Ephron of gay society*, to come, it really needed to be a place very close to his apartment. (*Far Too Obscure Reference Alert: In a press junket interview for the film "You've Got Mail," Tom Hanks revealed that increasingly Nora likes to stay very close to home, down to filming scenes for their latest work together inside her own apartment building. He joked that her next film would be set entirely inside her apartment so she could just direct it from her bedroom.) Matt always the arbiter of where the gay sheep are headed insisted ELMO was the practical solution. Quickly the guest list snowballed and Chip made a reservation for twenty, which I feared (especially after his open invitation on my radio show on Friday) would be insufficient.
I met Matt at his apartment where Gary, who had not intended to crash there, was in need of a fresh shirt. "He's about your size. Bring him something cute!" Matt insisted, forgetting of course that I am the least fashionable person he knows and asking me to bring something cute from my closet is like asking a lesbian to tip better than 15%. It could happen, but not without a lot of anxiety and effort. Gary is blond and fair so I brought him a brown retro vintage Buffalo humor printed ringer t-shirt (origin unknown) and I wore a green Otter Fashion shirt from their collection that they thoughtfully sent me, knowing either one would work for him. The brown shirt was a little big on him, so we switched and he filled out the Otter top perfectly. And, in my personal fashion-blind opinion, the hue of the olive green really worked for him.
Dan also met us at Matt's place since he lives close by, a gay football widow free for dinner while Cyd had a game to play, and Matt's friend Brian and his statistically-handsome date Dallas met us around the corner for the short walk to ELMO. I met Brian forever ago at (I think) SHAG, Matt's favorite hangout and have always found him very sexy, but never more so then when he gushed about what a great writer I am. He has the eyes of a winning poker player and a smile that says "I'm going to eat you." an expression which is open to wild interpretation, although I mean it in the sense that he will in fact devour you if you aren't careful. On our walk to ELMO, we swapped our favorite 30 Rock lines (he is obsessed) and he expressed an interest in the wider use of the words "chortle" and "guffaw" and I promised to work them into the blog.
At ELMO, Chip and Rob were there, as were my friend Kevin, the sexy homo from Chicago and the original Jonathan with his friend Mike. We congregated in the bar for a few minutes as the ultra fit and flitty staff put the finishing touches on our two tables. We moved en masse to the back of the restaurant and then were forced to chose which tables to sit at. I immediately took the middle seat in the smaller table for eight. At San Simeon, Hearst had one of the longest tables I have ever seen, set inside a chapel he had imported stone by stone to make a dining hall. In Citizen Kane, Kane and his wife always sat at long ends where they couldn't hear each other but in reality, Hearst and Davies sat in the dead center facing each other with house guests emanating out from them newest to oldest. Once you got to the end of the table as Louise Brooks reported, the implication was that it was time to pack up and go home. In dining out in big settings, egomaniacs like me always want the center most seat so the conversation radiates out from you as if you are hosting the dinner party.
In the end it didn't matter much where anyone was sitting because it was a non-stop game of musical chairs (set once again to Britney's album playing in its entirety in the background -- did Gary tip someone twenty bucks?). At one point, Mike and Dallas were sitting next to each other and their arguing got so passionate I thought they were going use my bleu cheese dressing as lube and start fucking right on the table. Jason Bellini came in without Will Wikle, who was at home nursing a sore throat (insert your own cocksucking joke here). And Andy Towle finally arrived with his hot boyfriend. Andy's arms were massive and the talk of two tables. Plus, they allowed me to sandbag him with Bette Midler's famous hello to Bruce Springsteen at We Are The World: "You look fabulous! What happened?" which she followed up with "I remember when his arms were as skimpy as his chord changes." All the seat hopping was a little much for our appropriately hot waiter whom I dubbed "Supergirl" because of his famous S logo belt buckle. He dealt with our physical instability by just calling everyone "tranny," "fierce" and "hot mess" every fifteen seconds until I was almost sorry Project Runway and SNL existed.
From there, we of course had to go to a club. Matt offered up his tried and true SHAG but no one was having it. Finally we settled quite reluctantly on SPLASH because it was close by and we knew we could, with a little wrangling, all get in free. I was relieved because the DJ Tracy Young had been on the show on Friday and I told her I would stop by (which is usually a lie). At the door, the doorman our group knew (Derek) wasn't there yet and there was much strum und drang (and minimal guffaw and chortle) about getting ten of us in for free. Dallas was put in charge of this effort as we all bantered on the curb. The whole thing chaffed like a dry rubber leading me to grouse "We have two TV personalities and a radio person who just interviewed their DJ yesterday to promote the night and everyone is hot. What more do they want?"
I think John Blair is a lovely person but the state of NY nightlife is in such disrepair that SPLASH is one of the only options in town if you are in the mood for an old fashioned Saturday night muscle fest set to a bone-rattling beat. Yes, going there is like going back in time to the early 90s and they might as well require high-waisted acid-wash jeans at the door, but what else are we supposed to do? Andy's new arms are nice but they aren't the only game in town. Eventually Derek arrived and we were all ushered into the fixer-upper sanctum. I chatted with Tracy, who gave me some drink tickets which when he saw them caused Matty to do his trademarked clap excitedly and guffaw thing. His friends should know he didn't laugh like that until he started hanging out with my incendiary laugh, and for this reason, I apologize.
At one point, the dancers climbed on top of the bar over us and we all did our level best to ignore their gaze, lest they try to shove their giant crotches in our faces in the hopes of getting spare change. All of them had completely outsized packed-to-the-brim thongs which because of my height kept ending up in my hair (is it possible to get MRSA in a hair follicle? I hope not). It also caused me to suggest they were "holding Nana's purse for her" but it was either too loud or too late for the joke. When the bowl of fresh fruit appeared on the bar, I knew it was time to disembark from the Love Boat and started quickly looking for the exit and bottle of hand sanitizer.
I made my good byes and dashed out into the still of the night. My stomach was still aching from the night before and the beats and cheek implants made me dizzy. It was a sweet weekend with Matt but the shirtless John Blair muscle crowd had a nostalgic feel to it, like watching RENT on Broadway. Even though it is still the current production, the whole thing felt like a creaky revival. At one point for old time sake, Matt stuck his tongue in my mouth like we were back in Terminal Six at LAX in 1997 or back at SPLASH in that same year when I got really drunk and shoved my hands down his shorts, but the whole experience just ended up reminding me that we are too old for this kind of thing and so was everyone else there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)