Fool's Gold Coast

Baby Aspirin

On May 11, I gained another niece. My hippie-leaning sister gave birth to a girl, who weighed in at 7 pounds, 11 ounces. Her parents named her Aspen, after their favorite tree (told you: hippie leanings). When I announced the baby's name to my elderly friend, Marie, she said, "Aspirin?" and gave one of those kids-these-days head shakes.

Aspen's middle name, Jewel, is a tribute to my paternal grandmother, whose middle name was the same. Everybody else on earth, except my sisters and me, called her by her first name, which was Mabel. But my mother didn't like that, so she had us call her Grandma Jewel. I don't know whether Mom got her permission to take this liberty. My guess is she didn't.

Anyhow, on Friday Kito and I are flying down to Arkansas to have a look at the new arrival. I bought her a stuffed zebra and a music box that plays "Talk to the Animals" from Doctor Dolittle (the 1967 version).

Typecasting

As I was getting off the train to go to work yesterday morning, a scuzzy young man who appeared to be in his early twenties asked me for a cigarette.

"I don't have any," I said.

"Well, you fit the profile of a smoker," he said with a sarcastic little smile, "so I thought I'd ask."

"He doesn't look like a smoker!" objected his equally scuzzy female companion.

"I know!" he said.

I chuckled good-naturedly, but to tell you the truth, this is the kind of thing that throws me into agonies of self-doubt. I mean, what kind of profile does he think I fit instead? That of a certified public accountant? A Designing Women superfan? Someone who has strong feelings about the Oxford comma? When I walk down the street, do I give off the powerful stink of squareness as if it were b.o.? Is this why nobody ever wants to hear my opinions on rock music or tattoo trends?

Getting Around

There was an article on the front page of Friday's Trib about how the CTA is closing down the south-side portion of the Red Line--otherwise known as the Dan Ryan Line--for five months, starting Sunday, to complete repairs. The story, written by transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch, contains the following sentence:

"The Ryan has been ridden hard and put away wet," said Christopher Bushell, the CTA's chief infrastructure officer, borrowing an old cowboy term about stabling a sweaty horse instead of allowing it to dry off outside.

I had no idea that's what that expression meant. If I had written this article and had felt obliged to clarify Bushell's remark, I probably would have gone with something like this:

"The Ryan has been ridden hard and put away wet," said Christopher Bushell, using an old expression for engaging in vigorous intercourse and leaving your partner drenched in semen.

And that would never do for a family paper.

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Roadkill and New American Folk Theatre's The Marvelous Land of Oz are in this week's Chicago Reader.

All That Glitters 171

A look at how I've been diverting myself lately.

Books
READ: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens [the April selection for my Read-One-Book-Per-Month-with-Kito initiative; he still hasn't finished it]; The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, trans. by Breon Mitchell.
COMING UP: Allen Ginsberg.

Plays
SAW: Head of Passes (Steppenwolf Theatre Company) [I liked the second act].

Movies
SAW: The Magnificent Ambersons [dir. Orson Welles, 1942], Like Someone in Love [Abbas Kiarostami's latest].
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS
THEME: New Releases.
MY SELECTION: Rust and Bone.
KITO'S: The Impossible.
THIS WEEK'S THEME: Japan.

Music
LISTENING TO: Iggy Pop, Lust for Life [he's probably the hottest of the ugly rock stars, wouldn't you say?].

Television
WATCHING: Warehouse 13 (Syfy), Nashville (ABC), Scandal (ABC) [though it's murder on the blood pressure], The Simpsons (Fox), Game of Thrones (HBO).

Current Interests
Conservatives, my family, Ian Buruma, the Internet, animals, The Great Gatsby, race, liberals, art, travel, country music, Shakespeare, Chicago theater critics.

Fool's Four
FOUR BOYS I CRUSHED ON BEFORE ENTERING HIGH SCHOOL:
1. Tall, lispy Jonathan from the neighborhood.
2. Sad-eyed Kyle from English class.
3. Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell.
4. Harry Connick, Jr., from left field.

Flashbacks
ONE YEAR AGO: "Tomorrow afternoon Kito and I will attend the closing for our new condo."
THREE YEARS AGO: "I will now condense James Joyce's Ulysses to a mere 14 words."
FOUR YEARS AGO: "Quite possibly the gayest thing ever broadcast on television."
FIVE YEARS AGO: "I hope you can carry on without the knowledge that I am up-to-date on America's Next Top Model."

Glitter
Bea Arthur was born on this date in 1922. Here she is performing "Where Do You Start?"

The Gold Mine 159: May 12, 2005

Stuff I've dug up.

Here's a passage from a diary entry I wrote on this date eight years ago. I was 25.

Thursday. 5.12.05. Morning. The road.
En route to Zion National Park from Vegas. It's day four of our Wild West Adventure [a two-week road trip I took with my mother]. It feels to me as though I was born in this silver Mercedes and have spent my entire life here.

When we woke up yesterday we were still in Grand Canyon, Arizona. We took a shuttle along what is called the Hermit's Rest Route around the rim of the canyon. Dwarfing immensity, just like the day before.

Then we got back in the car for the drive to Las Vegas, which is not a city you want to experience with your mother, especially when she's my mother. We stayed in a very nice room in the very tacky Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, a solid gold monstrosity that looks like something Donald Trump would cough up. After settling in, we went to the theater in the casino to see Mamma Mia!, the silliest, most homosexual thing I've seen in a while (I enjoyed it immensely). During intermission my mom asked, "Is it really necessary for them to over-exaggerate like that?" The only answer, of course, was an emphatic yes.

When I Knew

On this date 14 years ago, I began coming out of the closet. I was 19 at the time, which means that in just five years I will have been out for as long as I was ever in. The first person I told was the BFF. We were in her dorm room in the Public Affairs Residential College at Northwestern. After some hemming and hawing, I clenched my jaw and told her I was attracted to men. That's how I put it--"I'm attracted to men"--because I couldn't bring myself to say "I'm gay" just yet. Consequently, she initially thought I meant that I was attracted to men as well as to women. After all, she had met my high school girlfriend.

So it wasn't a complete out-of-the-closet-coming, but it was a start.

I myself first became aware of the attraction on a summer afternoon when I was 9 or 10. My family had one of those big, round, death-trap trampolines in the backyard--how my sisters and I got through childhood without chipping our teeth or snapping our necks on that thing is a mystery. On this particular day, my friend Jonathan and I were lying on its springy nylon surface after having spent a long time imperiling our spinal columns without adult supervision.

Jonathan was a year older than me in school. He was tall and slender and had braces and a lisp. The sun was merciless that day, the atmosphere was languid, and I was filled with such a powerful, aching, nameless longing for him that it was actually making me tremble.

Feeling panicked, I said that I had to go back inside and he went home. I didn't know what had happened, but I knew it meant trouble.

The American Plan

Kito and I have returned from Playa del Carmen, where we spent four days at an all-inclusive, adults-only resort. "Adult" makes it sound racy, but you should think of the word in the sense of "adult contemporary" rather than "adult situations." By which I mean there were a lot of heterosexual white people there. The TV in our room did, however, have a gay porn channel. With completely free and completely uncensored programming, I might add. I was like, "And people want to leave Mexico for the US?"

The all-inclusive package (which evidently has nothing to do with an enormous penis) entitled us to consume mountains of bland food and gallons of watered-down cocktails. I became rather grossed out by the gluttony this privilege inspired in my fellow white people; Kito kept overtipping the waitstaff to assuage the guilt he felt as a Latino being served by other Latinos.

Each night, the staff members would put on a show of some sort--Mayan drumming, fire twirling, what have you. My favorite performance was called "Grease Show," which involved four T-Birds and four Pink Ladies dancing and lip-synching to several songs from the Grease soundtrack. Danny Zuko looked like a salsa instructor and danced like Michael Jackson; Rizzo looked like somebody who would have gotten cut during the early rounds on RuPaul's Drag Race. It was easily one of the top 10 campiest things I have ever seen.

I don't mean to sound overly critical of my stay in Mexico. After all, the ocean was turquoise, the sunshine dazzling, and the watered-down cocktails eventually effective, provided you had the perseverance. It's just that when I travel, I like to get some sense of the history of the place or what it's like to live there. This felt like a four-day-long wedding reception.

Down Mexico Way

Kito and I leave for Playa del Carmen, in eastern Mexico, early tomorrow morning. We'll return to Chicago on Monday, May 6, and I'll resume blogging shortly thereafter.

In honor of our run for the border, here's an early-1990s Taco Bell commercial starring Willie Nelson--who, by the way, turned 80 this week.

[Incidentally, this is Fool's Gold Coast's 1,500th entry.]

Wet T-Shirt Conflict

On Thursday, Kito and I leave for Mexico to spend a long weekend by the sea, and I totally forgot to acquire a hot bod in preparation. I knew something had slipped my mind.

I suppose I could just keep my shirt on the whole time, which is what I did during puberty whenever my family would drag me to the Gulf Coast for our annual vacation. Nothing on this earth could have persuaded me to strip to the waist in public, not even when I went swimming. My mom has all these photos of me wearing waterlogged t-shirts that sag to my knees and look like they weigh about 40 pounds.

I wouldn't have minded if we had skipped the picture-taking altogether, but that wasn't an option. My parents assured me that I was being ridiculous, that there was nothing wrong with my torso, and that soaked-through fabric left little to the imagination in any case--arguments I found mortifying and exasperating. To make matters worse, I was always placed in these compulsory snapshots next to my younger sisters, who were still in the prime of cuteness and therefore made me look even more like a teenage minotaur by comparison.

I got chastised a lot for having a bad attitude while I was growing up, but I might have been in a better mood if I had been allowed to pubesce in peace.

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Circle Theatre's Death Takes a Holiday and Strangeloop Theatre's The Robbers are in this week's Chicago Reader.

Avuncular

My nephew Cash turns 5 on Monday. Here's what I wrote in his birthday card:

Happy birthday, Mister Cash!
Throw yourself a great big bash--
Make the loudest cymbals crash!
Blow the horns, let lightning flash!
Nothing is too big or brash
For tiny, mighty Mister Cash!

Around this bit of verse I drew pictures of other things with "cash" in their names--a dollar bill, a jar of cashews, and a little Johnny Cash holding a guitar.

Here's a recent picture of us: