Pen and Ink

R is for rating.

I've spent a little time this afternoon checking out some blogs I hadn't read before. I was visiting William at a portal into the mind of a writer and saw that he had a rating on his blog. There's a site called Mingle2 that will do it for you.

What the hell?, I thought.

So I'm officially rated R.

When you do your rating, they give you the keywords that they found that are contributing factors. Turns out I used the word "gay" (duh), "whore" (must have been the Paris Hilton rant) and "kill" (can't remember using that word, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

R.  I'm proud.

 

A Broadway treasure chest.

Oh my God, oh my god you guys.

Sorry, I had to write that. It's a lyric from the opening number of Legally Blonde and I just can't get it out of my head.

But It sorta fits this post. Martin sent me a link to a Broadway YouTube-ish site called bluegobo.com. It's got all sorts of really cool clips from Broadway shows and performances from various Tony Award telecasts.

I've written before about one of my favorite performers, the late Laurie Beechman. Well, I went to bluegobo earlier today and found this clip from the 1982 Tonys. It's Laurie and the cast of Joseph doing a medley of songs from the show.

Enjoy!

A cheesy anniversary.

You know how for every anniversary there is a corresponding gift? For example, a 10th anniversary calls for for diamonds.

John and I just celebrated our first. The appropriate gift would be paper or a clock. Boring, to be sure.

So I changed it. I gave him Velveeta processed cheese food.

Let me explain.

We did give each other nice gifts. He picked out a beautiful dress shirt and two gorgeous ties for me. He knew that the ties were ones that I would not ordinarily buy for myself, but I've worn both of them and received compliments. He put a lot of thought into my gift.

For John I bought a nice Calvin Klein shirt and a King Arthur Flour Baking cookbook (I have one and he's been coveting it since we first met.)  I could tell he wasn't wild about the shirt, because it was a white tone-on-tone shirt and he usually wears things that are more colorful. I thought the shirt was beautiful and frankly, it looks good on him.

He's been after me for months to go to dinner at Madam's Place, a restaurant/club that features shows with female impersonators. I'm told it's really a nice place and that the ladies are very talented. But alas, the place was closed on the day of our anniversary.

So we were talking on the phone, trying to decide where to have dinner. He said to me, "It's a rainy afternoon and on rainy days I always like tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Let's have that and watch TV."

That sounded fun, so I stopped at the Publix to pick up the fixings. Now, I have not made grilled cheese in a zillion years, and it's been almost that long since I've had one. But as a kid, it was one of my favorites. But it had to be made with Velveeta, which is like goo when melted. And if at all possible, it should be made with the flat side of a waffle iron. He didn't have one in his kitchen, so we muddled through with a fry pan.

The meal was great and we had a nice evening. As an added bonus present, I agreed, just for our anniversary, to refer to one of our favorite shows -- Law and Order: SVU -- by its official name, forgoing my usual nickname of the "B.D. Wong Show."

Now, fast forward a week later. John called me today rather sheepish and said, "I have something to confess. There's a problem and I won't be able to hide it, so I just have to be honest about it.

Uh oh. What did he do?

He proceeded to tell me that he washed the shirt with a few other light colored items, but put a little bleach in the washer. The shirt is now a lovely shade of pink. But, he said, it looks good and he will wear it that way.

Pink or white or Velveeta yellow, happy anniversary John.

Stupid whore.

Regrettably, I followed the reports of last week's media feeding frenzy for the post-prison interview with that tramp Paris Hilton.

 

Of course television news, like all other programming, is about ratings. But I just don't get the fascination with Paris Hilton, and all of the other stupid, blonde bitches out there. Why should we about Nicole Ritchie, Lindsay Lohan, the Simpson girls, and the rest of them? They've done nothing other than cultivate hollow celebrity status. Do they have any talent? I don't think so. They have no socially redeeming value.

What's worse is that those who otherwise respectable journalists -- Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, et al -- actually get into the fray. They demean themselves, their profession, and their audiences by actually thinking the blonde bimbos warrant any attention at all.

OK. Rant over.

Legally fun.

I'm back from another weekend in New York. This one came up somewhat last minute, as I had a business meeting to attend.

On Friday I took Kathy to see Legally Blonde. Neither of us had high expectations. That can be a good thing when, especially when your expectations are blown away. Blonde was just delightful! Colorful, as you would imagine. Choreography was stellar as was the music. Both of us thought the show translated well to the stage. To top it off, the dogs were great!

Before the show, Kathy and I had a bite to eat. I was debating seeing a show Saturday night. People kept saying that I should see Grey Gardens, but I just wasn't motivated. Curtains had been on my list for the last trip, so I decided to stop by the box office before Blonde, just to see if they had any seats.

Well, they did.  Eleventh row center.  Well, gee, shucks, I guess I should go, huh? 

I'm glad I made that decision. It's a big, old fashioned musical, which is just my type of show. David Hyde Pierce was great, as was Debra Monk. Plus, I had never had the chance to see Karen Ziemba on stage, so that was a bonus.

While sitting in my seat waiting for the curtain to rise, I had a bona fide celebrity sighting in the form of the one and only Glenn Close. She was sitting just three seats in front of mine. She seemed nice, in that she talked to the girl sitting behind her who had asked for an autograph.

So it was a great weekend, with two shows, glorious weather, a visit with my sister and lunch with Claude. But arriving home I found my American Express bill waiting. No more New York for me for awhile!

Google yourself.

I took in a new play Thursday night. I Google Myself is written by Jason Schaefer, who wrote the screenplay for the film Trick and was on the writing staff of "Queer as Folk."

Being performed, as it was, in the basement of a building on St. Marks Place in the East Village, I didn't hold out high hopes. But since it's Pride Week in NYC, I figured I would try it out. The premise, at least, sounded interesting.

Turns out it was quite good. Guy #1 Googles himself to see if there are other people out there with his name. Or at least that's what he wants you to believe. 

He ends up finding two people with the same exact name. For one though, a famous gay porn star, the name is assumed.

It was an interesting piece that held my attention for it's 74 minutes running time.

As we were waiting for the play to start, the audience was able to focus on a laptop sitting on a table on the otherwise bare stage. The screen saver was a scrolling string of text that said something like this: "A person with my same name...runs a yoga studio...likes bunnies...has been on death row since 1998...teaches molecular biology..."

Now, let's face it, at one time or other, we've all Googled ourselves. Don't deny it. But I've never done it looking to see if anyone else had my name.

So today I tried it. I came up with two pages of my links to websites to various places I've worked. I even found that a book that I co-wrote in 1986 has been acquired for the library of the Columbia County Historical and Geneological Society in Pennsylvania (don't ask).

While there was nobody with my name, it was an interesting exercise to try.

Cool blogger.

Whenever I go into Starbucks, a Panera cafe or lots of other public places, I've always seen people sitting there banging away on their laptops.

What on Earth are they doing? Do they have to schlep their computers everywhere? But truth be told, I always thought there was something a little cool about it.

Now I've joined their ranks. My new MacBook has a wireless modem. And the Pod Hotel where I'm staying in NYC has free wireless. I've got a couple of hours to kill and thought I'd catch up on posts for my blog and checking on some of the other sites I like to read. But the rooms here are really tiny. I mean really tiny.

So I'm sitting in the lobby of this newly re-done hotel that is trying to be cool (I'm not sure it's succeeding, but that's another story). And I've got the MacBook on my lap as I write this, my fourth post in a row.

Does that make me cool? Not likely.

*  *  *  *  *

Speaking of cool, I really, really love my new Mac. As I finished writing the piece above, I searched for a picture of someone typing on a laptop. I didn't find anything. But then I thought, hey, take a picture of yourself using the camera that's in the computer. Very cool stuff.

Back again.

I'm back in the Big Apple, much sooner than expected since my trip last month.

So far it's been a great trip. I saw a new play last night (see tomorrow's post), which was really interesting. And today, I asked someone for $5 million. Not for me, sadly, but for the college. I think we'll get $3 mil, which ain't so bad.

Tonight my sister Kathy is meeting me for a bite to eat and to see Legally Blonde. It's light and fluffy, I'm sure, but it looks fun.

Tomorrow, Claude and Philip come over from NJ, and then I'm on my own for the rest of the weekend. I'm debating taking in a show tomorrow night. Or maybe I'll just hang loose and see what's going on in town. It's Gay Pride Weekend here in NYC. Unfortunately, I'll miss the parade on Sunday, but there should be lots happening tomorrow night.

Sheep farts.

NPR had a report on global warming and what New Zealand is doing about it.

As I listened, I thought maybe my calendar was off and it was April Fool's day. This report sounded like a joke.

New Zealand is taking seriously its responsibilities as an industrialized nation to do something to reduce its "greenhouse-gas footprint."  The problem there, though, is not with factories, but with sheep. And cows.

Turns out that sheep and cows contribute quite a bit of methane gas into the environment through burps and farts. Who knew?

Well, scientists have found some enzyme or other in these creatures that apparently serves no purpose other than producing gas. They've apprently found some way of eliminating this from the animals.

It seems to me that we should leave Mother Nature alone. Sheep and cows were designed with this, so who are we to remove it? The world has bigger problems than sheep burps. Let's focus on that.

<Burp.>

Another hundred people.

Sitting in the gate area at Newark Airport recently, my gaze shifted to the windows looking out over the airfield. What I saw struck me.

Like a perfectly framed photograph, on either side of the window there were two planes. One was a Continental jet, while the other was from Air India. In the background, two trams passing each other, shuttling people from terminal to terminal at the busy airport.

As the song from Company goes, "Another hundred people just got off of the train and came up from the ground, while another hundred people just got off of the bus and are looking around, and another hundred people just got off of the plane and are looking at us who got off of the train and the plane and the bus, maybe yesterday."

I'm always slightly amused by our ability to move so many people from place to place. Within a span of a couple of hours I was transported back to Florida. Crowded, to be sure, but not like New York. We can go from hot to cold, alone and side-by-side with hundreds, thousands of other people. Transportation technology allows us to experience the world -- and each other -- with relative ease.

Don't ask me what this post is really about. Maybe that's why it's posted under "random musings." It was just that, a musing.

* * * * *

And speaking of transportation and New York, I'm back there for three nights starting next Thursday. As ever, I can't wait! And yes, I'm going to theater again. Just one show: Legally Blonde.