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Monday, November 26, 2001

Good luck with your god-damn cherries!

I meant to blog so many things this past week. So now I'll just write them all at once.

On Wednesday night, we made our semi-annual pilgrimage to see Kiki & Herb, now ensconced at the Westbeth. Oddly enough, they had only half the room filled with seats, which were pressed tightly together. I guess they were trying to recreate the cramped seating from Fez. The staging was great (Herb had a white piano, for god's sake) but the show suffered the same way it has suffered on off-nights in the past: some of the stories sometimes just don't quite gel and you're left with tragicomic farce which is hilarious and cutting but lacks emotional heft. There have been nights when Kiki's tales transported me and made me cry (especially the story of Yasaweh coupled with that Stevie Nicks song) but this time it didn't happen. The Miss-D bombshell was great, though, as was the Grey Gardens reference. Well, OK, the whole show is basically one big Grey Gardens reference, but this time they made it a bit more explicit.

Also, there wasn't nearly enough shrieking.

As for Thanksgiving, well, it was kind of a chore. For the past few years we've spent the holiday in my Aunt's fantastic apartment in Philly, in a gorgeous, hip hi-rise on Washington Square (yeah, they have one down there too, donchaknow!). Now, I'm not one for generic tower block living, but this building is the shit: Barcelona chairs in the lobby, doormen with gloves and an apartment itself in the corner of the building so the whole damn thing is made of windows.

Unfortunately, my wacky aunts decided to sell the place, so this year Thanksgiving happened at my parents' modest cape in New Jersey. No view. No doormen. And absolutely no Barcelona chairs.

The food was good, the chat was alright (my boring parents might even go see Amelie now), but I hate spending time with my family now because I feel so deceptive.

My brother told my parents that I was gay when I was in high school but they never really dealt with it, and neither have I. In fact, it almost seems like they've forgotten, or maybe he just spilled the beans in too oblique a way and they never really understood it in the first place.

So that means we don't talk about the bf, we don't talk about the wacky drag cabaret shows that are now the mainstay at the club I book (even if the aforementioned Kiki & Herb have jumped ship), we don't talk about really anything that actually has any relevance on my life.

I wanted to sit down and talk about it this time, at least with my mom (my dad and i barely talk, he's a real punch-ya-in-the-shoulder-hey-how-you-doin-kid kind of guy), but the circumstances were just So Wrong. My brother is in the midst of a real crisis--almost failing out of college, getting dumped by his girlfriend, talking about suicide... I'd go into more detail but all I really have is the summary my mom gave me since he won't really talk to me about it. I would have pushed the issue more with him, but I know he saw a doctor and got some meds and that he's dealing with it in a responsible way, even if he's too embarassed to talk to me about it.

The only really meaningful conversation I managed to get into was about school: my dad wants to give me the rest of the money I would need to finish up, which was pretty cool coming from Mr. Reticent. It was probably the longest conversation we've had in years... we actually spent quite a bit of time together, since he's getting into using their Mac a lot more now. So I taught him how to dub audio in iMovie, how to edit power lines and red eye out of pictures using Photoshop, how to organize his files and folders. It felt good. I even dragged my mom to the new Apple store in Tice's Corner, which was ever so nice. She even got to participate in an OS X demo. Now she's all "Brian, dear, which FreeBSD book should I buy so I can harness the power of the new Unix core in this operating system?" and I don't have the heart to tell them that they're still using old OS 9 because I don't know jack shit about Unix.

Of course all this hard work at family bonding came at the expensive of losing out on time with the ever so cool Tamara who was visiting NYC this week. So this will have to suffice as a bye-bye baby, see you soon!

What else happened this weekend?

Hmm.

The bf and I drove down to Princeton yesterday, and cleared out the Pixies & Kirsty MacColl sections in the Record Exchange. We saw The Man Who Wasn't There in the ickle theater in the center of town. I was underwhelmed by some aspects of the story, but I did enjoy the film's ambience, and the fine acting by just about everyone involved. Scarlet Johansson has this oddly wooden but affecting & reassuring presence in this flick, just as she did in Ghost World. I'm betting it'll land some Oscar nods, but probably for lesser categories like Best Supporting Actor... Best Lighting...

When we got out of the movie theater, we did a little book shopping (one of the book clerks appeared to be playing a MUD on the book-search computer... how quaint and collegiate of him!) and grabbed some sandwiches. Our picnic plans were ruined by the threat of rain, so we hit the road instead of wandering around the Princeton campus. I'd love to live there, it's so cute, but there's really just NOTHING to do unless you're a student or you work for, say, Johnson & Johnson or one of the other huge corporations on the way out of town. So fuck that.

We got home as it was getting dark, and once again I didn't get any of the things done that I had planned to. Now I've been invited to join a blog about HIV and related issues, and how it affects our lives as World AIDS Day approaches... come on peeps, I can barely get anything written in here and my Nanowrimo project is thoooouuuusands of words behind and the toilet needs scrubbing and there is a boyfriend who needs to have Christmas gifts bought for him and a living room to be rearranged and a new Ab Fab to be absorbed through the eyes.

Thus endeth today.

Posted at 09:15 PM

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