This Week.

It's been a strange week, starting with the news that an old friend, with whom I spent a lot of time when I was finishing my film in San Francisco in 2005 (he edited the film) but I hadn't seen in several years, died last week. Apparently of a heart attack in his sleep, which is the death everyone says they want, but he was not old. I'm not certain, but I think he was younger than me.

Maybe everyone has people like this. I feel like I have dozens. I always attributed it to the fact that my life was so peripatetic for those 12 years I spent away from New York. People whom you feel very close to but live far apart and from time to time you worry about the friendship because you haven't seen each other for way too long but you always think, "One of these days we'll end up in the same city at the same time and we'll reconnect and catch up."

And then with that sadness about the passing of my old friend, and time, in the background, I got some disappointing career news. I and my co-writers had 3 possible opportunities for developing our new project in the coming year, and one by one they all evaporated, the third one in the form of an email a few days ago, very sorry, lots of great applicants this year, etc. (I know it's meant sincerely, but I wish we could retire that language of rejection letters. It doesn't help to know that they felt lots of other applicants were better.)

(Some vague sense of professional discretion makes me think, though I can't for the life of me see what difference it would make and maybe it's not discretion but embarrassment, that I shouldn't be more specific, but in a way it doesn't matter what the opportunities were. They're just a few in the endless list of things, as an artist in a culture of too many artists and too little support, one applies for and doesn't get.)

I'm not complaining, not really, I know I chose this life knowing full well that failure and rejection were always going to be much much more likely than success, and I can't say I haven't had way more than my share of amazing experiences and people and pure magic, but there are days when it's clearer than others that the real fabric of an artist's life is disappointment, and there are days when I don't have any more intelligent or skillful or useful response than just to pout.

I had a dream this morning, though. It was one of those dreams where all night long you're trying to get some place and every time you think you're close there's another obstacle and you find yourself slipping farther and farther way. I was trying to get home but I kept getting on the wrong bus, getting lost, getting caught up in the drama of random strangers.

But then eventually after a long night ride, the Greyhound pulled into a station I recognized. I got out of the bus and exited the station onto a dark, quiet street, walked for a while with a small group of people I had befriended on the bus. They told me that they had to find their car and still had a long journey ahead of them, and I told them that I lived just a couple blocks away. Even in the dream I was aware that being close to home meant that some new obstacle would appear and waylay me.

But that's not what happened. I just walked the two blocks to my house, a big old wooden house with a porch, and the light was on and there were people talking softly. I walked up the steps to the porch and lay down on a mattress that was there, and then C came and lay down with me, and then a woman I barely know, who I met when she worked for a company that develops new musicals in New York but she's since moved to San Francisco to start her own theater company, and she and C both wrapped their arms around me, and standing in the front doorway was a couple who were dear friends when I lived in Nashville but I don't really keep in touch with them anymore but I think of them often and wish they still lived nearby, and they were smiling.

Pray For Us.

I'm a little concerned about grocery shopping in our new neighborhood.

I've come to rely on Fresh Direct for most of our groceries the last 3 years. (For those of you outside of New York, Fresh Direct is an online grocery store. You place your order on a web site, choose a delivery time, and they bring your groceries to you at home.) I got in the habit when I was working 9-5 in Brooklyn and the 2 or 3 hours it would have taken to go grocery shopping felt like 2 or 3 hours I didn't have. And, though we have one big supermarket and another smaller one nearby, they aren't great. They're fine for staples, canned and dried stuff, flour, milk, snacks, etc, but I hate buying meat out of a big open case and you don't know how long it's been sitting there, and the produce usually looks ratty and old and well picked over.

Fresh Direct is more expensive than your average C-Town, but I rationalize it because the produce is very fresh and high quality and it's less expensive than Whole Foods or a specialty organic place where I would probably be going for good meat and produce if Fresh Direct didn't exist. I cook at home almost every day, and we have a small kitchen with very little pantry space, so I have groceries delivered at least once a week, often twice. It's always hard to know which shopping choices are more horrible for the world and the people in it, but Fresh Direct at least has lots of locally grown and made food, and I can get reasonably priced meat and dairy raised without hormones. I do try to be conscious of where our food comes from, buy local and organic unless it costs twice as much, but I'm not a fundamentalist about it.

I plan to wean myself off Fresh Direct after we move, because our new place is near enough Chinatown, where produce and meat are insanely cheap and fresh and good. And I love shopping in Chinatown. And now that I'm not working a day job any more, it doesn't make me panicky to contemplate an afternoon of grocery shopping.

All of that to say that I realized another benefit to online grocery shopping is impulse control. I keep a list of what we need, I enter each item in the search bar, check out, done! Grocery stores, however, are a mine field. This morning, I ran out of milk for my coffee, so I ran out to the little deli on the corner. I came back with, not milk but half and half, and a bag of pita chips, a pint of ice cream, and shortbread cookies. What the holy hell?

If I've learned anything in my 54 years it's that i have no power over a bag of potato chips or a pint of ice cream. Or chocolate cake. So I just make sure that they aren't in the house. Except on special occasions, like a birthday. Or a Saturday.

I'd forgotten that about grocery shopping, the way everything talks to you. Somehow the little picture on the computer screen is not nearly as persuasive as the actual item on the shelf. I want to walk down every aisle, and for some reason I think I need those little Dutch Boy cookies with the chocolate, and a big thing of wasabi peas, and ricotta because I don't know maybe lasagna?, and frozen pierogis, and look! Triscuits! and they have those honey sesame brittle things and Green & Black's chocolate at the checkout line, and Table Talk lemon pies, and now I weigh 300 pounds.

Lord help us.

History. It's a Thing.

I think it's just weird to lump The King and I in with An American in Paris and Gigi to make a point about how icky old musicals are politically and how hard it is to stage them now that we're all so enlightened.

Why do people always seem surprised that Rogers and Hammerstein's "golden age" musicals address these issues? Racism, colonialism, sexism were the subjects R&H were explicitly interested in, and they chose stories and dealt with them in ways specifically to comment on them.

The Times article says:

Anna and the king are not a couple, and their final scene is not a kiss in the moonlight. There is, however, a soaring musical number that feels like a happy ending: “Shall We Dance?,” choreographed this time by Christopher Gattelli. It has always been the show’s most thrilling moment. Anna and the king begin a polka by holding hands, but he knows better, having seen her dance with an Englishman. He puts his hand firmly around Anna’s waist, and hearts leap.

One interpretation: Natural order is restored; the man takes charge. Mr. Sher argued that something else was going on: “The king allows himself to be taught and to be equal to a woman. To reach across cultures. Stepping across that boundary is just gorgeous.”

And very 21st century.

Actually, no, it's more like mid-20th century. When it was written. The revival didn't make that up. It's in the piece. It's what that moment and that song are about.

The King and I and South Pacific, Oklahoma, etc., don't just demonstrate regressive attitudes, they confront them. There are lines and passages that feel old-fashioned, condescending, uncomfortable to our sensibilities because we think about these issues differently now, but can we stop talking about these musicals as if they're from the dark ages, before we all become so sensitive and smart about racism and misogyny in our popular culture?

For their time, R&H were practically activists. Think about the huge mass audience they had during a period when not much pop culture questioned the status quo.

Millenia?

It's a stupid argument anyway, that the definition of marriage has been the same for "millenia." Even if were true, the fact that we've been doing something for a long time doesn't make it right. But it's not even true. I guess I'm a little surprised that the tradition of same-sex marriage in Native American communities seems never to have come up. Do these people (the lawyers and judges in favor of same-sex marriage ... and for that matter, this New York Times reporter who doesn't bring it up) really not know this stuff? I find that hard to believe. Maybe it's not flattering to compare ourselves to "primitive" cultures?

I know there was assorted institutionalized queerness all over this continent before Europeans arrived and obliterated it along with everything else, but Texas is what I'm familiar with because I wrote a paper on it at UT.

Cabeza de Vaca was the first European to encounter the Natives in Texas. This is from his journal. He's writing about various coastal groups:

"During the time I was among them, I saw something very repulsive, namely, a man married to another. These are impotent and womanish beings who dress like and do the work of women. They carry heavy loads but do not use a bow. Among these Indians we saw many of them. They are more robust than other men, taller, and can bear heavy loads."

This kind of stuff is all over the contemporary written descriptions of Native American societies by the Spanish invaders in the 16th century. The Spanish at the time were obsessed with homosexuality (the Catholics are always obsessed with homosexuality but it was particularly harsh in the 16th century -- the "sin against nature" was regarded worse than murder) so they wrote about it negatively of course, but the fact that they were so fixated on it at least had the effect of them noting it at all.

Moving.

The best thing about getting ready to move is the feeling of relief knowing I'll soon be leaving behind all the small things that get on my nerves about the place where I live -- the janky oven that can't maintain a temperature and burns everything on the bottom before it's done on the top, the electrical outlets with too-big holes so that plugs fall out of them, the lack of trash bins so that we have to keep all our stinky garbage in the apartment until collection day, the bathroom mirror that doesn't line up with the sink but is about a foot to the left of it -- and all the things that will irritate me at the new place are as yet unknown and unable to touch me.

This is the biggest move I've ever made -- maybe not in terms of geographical distance or impact on my life because I've had several moves that were huge by those measures, but in terms of the logistics, the number of steps, the planning, the actual amount of stuff that's coming with me, the number of people involved (actual hired movers!), not to mention the months-long process of buying an apartment and the multi-layered approval process that is, we hope, almost over.

This is the first time I've moved and taken the furniture, other than maybe a couple lamps and a futon. Most of the time when I've moved I've just gone to the liquor store and asked for a few boxes, packed up my clothes and books, and splurged on a cab. It's the first time I've had furniture that was nice enough to take.

I'm exaggerating -- there are exceptions: When J and I left New York for Nashville, rented a U-Haul, and filled it with the contents of our 10th Street studio (which was roughly the same size as that U-Haul). Or the move out of Nashville when J and I sold everything for nothing on the lawn so we could fit in a 20-foot camper. Some of that stuff I regret losing (an old wood dresser that my parents gave us comes to mind, as well as my copies of Word Is Out and the ReSearch journal issue on body modifications, and other loved and irreplaceable books). Or when I left B in 1989. We had great furniture in our Ft. Greene apartment. All street-found or thrift store-bought, but B had an eye. I was the one who left, and I didn't take anything.

But those moves were more like fleeing than moving.

I don't mean to downplay the life-change aspect of this move. One -- C and I are becoming homeowners (!), which is big and would have been unimaginable 10 years ago when it was also unimaginable that I would get married, let alone to someone with a much more normal life and stable income. Ten years ago I had no home at all, except in the hearts and spare rooms of dear friends and family members. And two, I am moving back to the part of New York that was my home through most of the 80s and 90s, not including that 4-year stint in Brooklyn in the mid-80s. I feel like I've been working my way back for a long time now.

I know, it's a stretch to say that Grand Street on the East River is the old neighborhood. It's not the East Village and it's not the part of the Lower East Side above Delancey that we all know and love or hate. I think that's one of the things I love about our new place. Co-op Village is definitely the LES, culturally and historically a part of that larger LES that includes the East Village and the super-trendy area between Houston and Delancey, but it's not one of those parts of the neighborhood where I feel like I would have to excavate to find anything I remember. The area around East Broadway and Grand Street going toward the East River has not changed much since the 1950s, when the slums were cleared to make room for the buildings we're moving into. Not that it's done all the changing it will ever do.

While I was writing this, C went downstairs to check the mail and came back with a letter notifying us that we've been approved by the co-op board. I guess this is really happening.

A Chorus Line Premiered in 1975, Which Is a Long Time Ago.

The first Broadway musical I saw on Broadway was Sweeney Todd in 1979, but the first Broadway musical I saw was A Chorus Line, the touring production, at Clowes Hall in Indianapolis, on a school trip.

I want to say I was a sophomore in high school, so like 1976 or '77, but my memory is bad. It could have been the following year. Either way, it was during those couple years when I was figuring out why, when I saw Brad Christie standing in line at the water fountain, I was compelled to stand in line behind him and hope that my hand accidentally grazed his butt when he bent over for a drink.

And by figuring out, I mean freaking out.

A friend and fellow writer, a straight man, asked me once a few years ago at a musical theater cabaret event, after 2 or 3 boys in a row had sung songs about coming out, "Why does every song lately have to be about being gay?" As I was pondering the question, the lights went down for the second act and our conversation was cut short, but I've thought about it a lot since then and I think the simple answer is that it hurts less and less to tell these stories.

Despite the fact that the musical theater industry was and is so packed with homosexuals, the larger world was still rabidly homophobic, so we could only very tentatively tell our sad tales and then basically only for emotional shock value. Not that Paul's monologue isn't authentic and beautifully told, but it's there to inform you that being gay is super sad. We have more colors to work with now. (Times have changed. Fun Home is funny, moving, thought-provoking, and masterful, and tells a story with a butch lesbian at its center with layers and layers of complexity that would have been unimaginable in a hit Broadway musical in the late 70s when there was only one layer of gay.)

I had done my research. (There must have been a theater queen or two at the DePauw University library where I worked after school, because the library subscribed to After Dark magazine, the gayest periodical ever to never use the word gay.) So I knew how A Chorus Line was created, that the stories the dancers were telling were true -- Hm. It just occurred to me that A Chorus Line is a devised musical. Maybe the first? -- and from then on, though I was still too afraid to tell my own story to anyone but myself, I knew that if I could make a life in the theater in New York I would be fine.

So I did.

Happy anniversary, A Chorus Line!

Random Thoughts About a Few Broadway Musicals.

Lots of Broadway musicals opening -- April is to the Tonys what December is to the Oscars. I have random thoughts, which are not to be read as opinions on these shows, which I have not seen.

Both Gigi and Finding Neverland are getting terrible reviews. I know as well as anyone that critics often just don't get it, so I'm very reluctant to take the fact that reviewers have found these shows boring and/or incoherent at face value. But it's interesting to me that both shows' producers set out to excise what they felt was an uncomfortable whiff of sex with children in the source material.

I find it really sad (and not a little homophobic) that just the idea of friendship between an adult man and a group of boys makes people immediately think about pedophilia. One of the things I liked most about the film Finding Neverland was the strange tenderness of that longing to be a part of the boys' lives. It's more complicated and infinitely more interesting than sex.

Gigi is a whole other beast. The movie is basically about a girl being groomed for prostitution, so the sex is more than just prurient audience projection. But the novella on which it's based was written by Collette, who is kind of known for having interesting things to say about men and women and love and sex. Why, when you have such rich, juicy source material, would you decide it's a good idea to make it "innocent"? Sometimes I just don't understand people.

I guess what I've done here is implied that these shows are bad because they took the sex out, and I don't know if that's true or not. Like I said, I haven't seen the shows. These are just thoughts that come into my head.

The show that's not getting bad reviews is The King and I at Lincoln Center. Oh my god, I want to see this show! Rogers and Hammerstein musicals bring me the greatest pleasure and I don't feel the least bit guilty about it. The songs! The songs!

One of my two favorite R&H songs (Something Wonderful) is in The King and I. (The other is Something Good from The Sound of Music. Nobody does ambivalence about love like R&H.)

Here's Terry Saunders from the movie soundtrack:

What's Happening Now.

My sister and nephew were here for a week's visit, left Saturday. My nephew is 15 and is dead certain he wants to be a composer of percussion music, specifically marimba. He's not much interested in discussing any other trajectory.

He (my sister and I went with him, of course) visited Mannes School of Music, Juilliard, and the Manhattan School while he was here. Everyone around him is saying some version of "Well, that's great, but you need to think about how you might make a living." When the idea of teaching comes up, he says, "I can see myself doing that when I'm older and I've accomplished all I set out to do."

Though I could certainly share a thought or two with him about the relationship between what you set out to do and how you actually end up living a life, I'm really reluctant to join the chorus of pleading for practicality. Dreams are dreams, and it might not matter that they don't usually drive you where you planned. They drive you somewhere. When I was 15, I didn't want to listen to anyone telling me No. (I still don't.) My nephew has energy, focus, talent, and loves to practice. Fifteen is not the age for practicality.

What else?

My old friend Linda Smith asked me to record a cover of one of her songs for an album of covers her label is putting out. Linda and I were in the The Woods together in the 80s and have kept in touch, more or less, since. Linda made a name for herself in the 80s and 90s putting out several home-recorded albums on cassette, when that was a thing. Her albums are full of great songs and I have many favorites. It's been a long time since I've made a recording that wasn't just a work demo for someone else to learn the song from, and I can't wait to dive in. I was not a songwriter when I joined The Woods, and I learned so much from Linda, mostly about how songwriting is 95% intuition. I still jog myself back to that attitude when I find myself bogged down in the knowledge of "rules" I've acquired since.

What else?

Okay, so Hillary Clinton is in it now. It's gonna be a long year-and-a-half and I'm going to try to not complain too much. I'm not a fan, as we know, but -- with the current composition of Congress and the Supreme Court -- I have a hard time taking any other stance than that it's important she win this one. I live in a safe state, but I don't want to contribute to any sort of Democrats-sit-this-one-out-because-they-don't-care-for-Hillary phenomenon. I feel like, with Obama, I got as close as I might ever get to a president who represents my values. And it turns out that wasn't super close. Sometimes you just have to hold your nose.

And I should add that the antidote to that feeling that presidential elections are a depressing exercise in cynicism is to vote in other elections, the ones closer to home, where it is possible to vote for candidates with integrity. One of the many reasons I'm excited about moving back to the LES is that, because I lived there for so many years in the 80s and 90s, I have a better sense of the politics.

Monday.

My day started with breaking my glasses. One of the little plastic oval feet that rest on the side of my nose had been digging into my skin for days, so I went to bend it a little and it snapped off.

I live in near-constant fear of breaking my glasses -- that's an exaggeration, but it's true that it's very often on my mind, because I can't do much of anything without them, can't read, can't leave the house, I don't even like to walk around the apartment without them because I run into things -- but I have an old pair that are close to the same prescription, just not as clear for reading, so I put those on. C dug out some epoxy for me and I glued the nose piece back on. It doesn't swivel like it's supposed to, but maybe it'll be fine.

Writing days have been frustrating the last week or so. I have a couple small things yet to write for Hester Prynne and I can't find anything interesting about them to draw me in. There's no big rush -- we have a nearly-complete first draft and a workshop in the fall at Playwrights Horizons Theater School. We have the summer to get ready, so there's time to get these last bits done. But I have time now, and I want to write.

I want to start a new play or dive back into something old and incomplete, but I have to decide which, so I've been sifting through old notebooks in search of notes or a fragment, a sketch, a story, something to galvanize my artist brain.

The city is replacing the concrete stairway that goes up 10 flights from Broadway to our street and runs right past our apartment. There are 2 parallel staircases. They ripped one out last year and just finished making the new one. Now they're ripping out the other one. A lot of concrete has to be smashed and hauled away. They start at about 8 and stop for the day at about 4. It's very loud.

I decided I was thinking too hard and needed some busywork to get me out of my head. I've been putting it off because it makes me sad, but I'd given up on my worm composting and had to dispose of the bin and its contents, and that seemed like as good a task as any for an already frustrating Monday.

I got the worms about 3 years ago and set up a plastic bin under the sink. They were going to eat my kitchen scraps and make potting soil. I loved those worms, they were easy to care for, and I felt good about doing some small part to keep garbage out of the landfill. But a small bin of worms under the sink, it turns out, eat very little. Very little. Like about a banana peel a week. I cook every day, so they weren't eating more than about 1% of the vegetable scraps I was throwing away. Even though it quickly became clear my worms were no more than a gesture, a ritual of environmental consciousness that wasn't doing anything to actually help the environment, I hated giving up. The ritual was enough for a long time. But then it just started to feel stupid.

I stopped feeding them. A worm composting bin self-regulates. If there's less food, they reproduce less and their numbers dwindle. So after a few months, there was just dirt left. Or so I thought. When I went to empty it out this morning, I found one small worm. One. Since it's spring, I thought it would be fine if I took it out to the front yard. I put it in the sink while I scooped out the dirt and scattered it among our various potted plants. But I forgot it was there when I came back to the sink to wash my hands, and, when I remembered and looked down, it was gone down the drain.

Like my day.

Freedom's Just Another Word for Bigotry.

I feel like if there's anything positive about this new spate of "license to discriminate" legislation cropping up in state after state in response to gay marriage decisions by federal courts, it's that it crystallizes the mission of this brand of Christianity, which is to exclude people. They cry they're being persecuted for their religion, but it must be clear to everyone by now that these laws are about revulsion toward non-gender conforming people. It must, right? It kind of separates the soft bigots from the hard bigots.

It's interesting stuff in the midst of all my reading about the 17th century Puritans, the original American Christians, as we write our musical about Hester Prynne. Not that it's a coincidence these topics are current -- that's the whole reason we like the story. The Puritans were just as preoccupied with who's in and who's out, probably more so because they believed the lists had been made at the beginning of time and could not be changed. So they were obsessed with trying to determine ways of knowing who was on which list, so that they'd know whom to let in and whom to keep out. They of course couldn't know, and, in fact, it was sinful to suggest that one could know, but that didn't stop them from speculating on all kinds of outward indications that one might be saved or damned and banishing or executing people who disagreed with the approved methodology. Underlying everything was a great deal of personal anxiety because of course no one could even know whether or not they themselves were chosen. At least now your average Southern Baptist can rest assured he's going to heaven if he accepts Jesus Christ as his blah blah blah. I appreciate the Puritans for that -- at least they had rules. All today's Christians have to do is be super sanctimonious and they go straight to heaven.

I guess we'll know more in June when the Supreme Court weighs in. We'll either end up with a federal right to gay marriage but a bunch of states where you can't buy flowers or cake. Or, if it goes the other way, then all these desperate religious freedom laws will be moot and Alabama and Indiana can go back to the 17th century. Most people in my safe little circle of urban liberals anticipate a positive ruling to come out of the cases before the Court right now, and it's hard to imagine any other result since the argument has been framed in classic conservative terms. But I'm not feeling so sanguine. With judges like Thomas and Scalia, who are less concerned with justice than with creating a world where everyone is forced to follow their rules, there's no end to perfidy.

Indiana hurts particularly because I grew up there. Of course when I was there I wanted out and I fled as soon as I could. But my family is still there, and, though I have no illusions about it being much different than it was, I have to say I was moved last year when the Court of Appeals ruled Indiana's gay marriage ban illegal and suddenly C and I were still married when we visited my folks at Christmas.

It gives me hope that my mom is there fighting the good fight. She's remarkable. I don't think I have the stamina to be a liberal in Indiana, but she's been at it for decades. She'll give you an earful about Mike Pence. He's a grade A asshole. You almost have to be to get elected in Indiana.

Time, Work, Home.

The other day a friend asked me if I miss my old job and I didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. "No." Of course I don't. I worked with people I liked. I didn't hate my job like I have others. I didn't dread going to work. It was a good job, I felt appreciated, and it paid me well, but what it was most of all was a giant time suck and as soon as I didn't have to spend 32 hours a week plus 3 hours a day commuting to Brooklyn that time was immediately full of everything that I didn't have time to do before. I've written several songs in the last two months and, though I may not be the second coming of Jesus Christ, I think I'm doing the best work of my life. None of this is a surprise to me. I knew exactly how it would be. I waited all my life for it. I was ready.

Now that all my time is open, though, the one thing that has suffered is my blogging. Blogging was always something that required some focus but not the deep, long focus that the real writing needs. So I could do it on my lunch break at work. Or often I would blog on a weekend afternoon, but now that I know the week is available for my serious writing, I feel justified relaxing on a Saturday afternoon. The weekdays feel so wide open.

But then when I'm here at my desk and C has gone to work and I might have an idea for something I want to blog about I can't somehow make myself do it. This is real writing time!

But today has been so full of distractions, the real stuff didn't stand a chance, so ... here I am blogging. (But I did, on my walk to and from Target a couple hours ago, make some notes for a song I've been trying to get a grip on for weeks. It never really leaves my system for good, it's always churning somewhere under the surface.)

So today. Target for batteries. I did a Target run on Tuesday -- there's a Target just across the bridge in the Bronx, about a ten minute walk -- and we shop there for cleaning and laundry supplies, toothpaste, etc., because it's cheaper than the Rite Aid, but I forgot to get C batteries for C's shower radio. He's been a little squirrelly in the morning without his NPR. So I went back.

I spent the morning trying to find someone to move our elliptical machine to a friend's house in Brooklyn. Our new building has a gym, so we don't need it. (Yes, we've moving, and that should by rights be a whole blog post on its own but my rule is no looking back, so ...) It was surprisingly difficult to find someone to move the damn thing. It took the better part of 2 mornings. And we're putting together our co-op board application, which is, well, something I never imagined I'd ever be doing. Besides reams and reams of financial history, it requires dozens of reference letters from friends and business associates and current and former landlords.

If they like the way we've dotted all our i's, we will move most likely in June. Back to the Lower East Side, but this time lower and farther east. C lived for some of the 90s on Clinton St and I lived in the East Village most of the 80s and 90s but on Pitt Street near Delancey for a couple years around 1983 or 4. So, even though we won't be right in the heart of all that gentrified madness we'll be close and it feels to both of us like a homecoming.

Oscars Post-Mortem.

Lots of chatter still about the Oscars, most of it of the banal language-policing variety that makes me want to jam pencils in my ears and give up all hope for the future of social justice movements.

But this article in this morning's New York Times got me thinking.

Early in my first painting class at Parsons, our teacher, Regina Granne, said something that looms in my memory as “Art is a specialized activity practiced and appreciated by an elite group of people who have the education and refinement to understand it.” Probably she said something more like, “Your parents will never understand what you do.”

Whatever she said, it crystallized for me at that moment and forever a feeling I’ve had at least since high school and still feel, a pull between wanting to make art that everyone will love and wanting to pursue something more esoteric.

Part of that latter impulse is defensiveness brought on by the sense of grievance creative people feel toward a world they think misunderstands and underappreciates them. “I don’t care if you don’t understand me. It’s not my fault you’re a philistine.” And I think a milder, more mature and less emotional, version of that is the realization that there will always be people who get your work and people who don’t and you can’t please everyone. I like to think the reason I don’t like superhero movies has more to do with taste and cultural differences than whether they’re good or bad.

Still, it does have something to do with education and refinement. I don’t think it’s just a matter of taste that there is a group of people who love a Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA and a much larger group who think it tastes nasty and would prefer a Bud Lite. I won’t apologize for having done the work necessary to appreciate art or ideas or food or whatever that is sophisticated, complex, dense. Does that make me a snob? Can someone who loves Neil Diamond and Hello Kitty be a snob? Maybe.

Always these two impulses that seem contradictory and zero sum. I want to make work that straddles the divide, and sometimes I’ve been successful, other times not. Y’all was almost the very definition of populist art. But we were trying from the beginning to subvert what it looked like on the surface. (At first … eventually we just gave in to the fact that the simplest way to be subversive was to be sincere.). And we won over audiences -- sometimes -- in the very highbrowest and lowbrowest of venues (art museums and grocery stores, experimental theater festivals and elementary schools). Rural conservative folks knew we were just aping the Grand Ole Opry, and kids love a toe-tapper. And I guess because we were queer and undermining stereotypes and fucking with unreliable narratives there was enough for the theory-prone arty types to chew on. (Little did they know that country entertainment had been queer and undermining stereotypes and fucking with unreliable narratives at least since the Carter Family.)

And LIZZIE, the other work that’s occupied an outsize portion of my life and career, I think exists somewhere in between, too. It has lots of big accessible catchy songs but it’s emotionally complex, layered with meaning, deals with history in ways that I think are incisive but open-ended, and rewards close attention. Sorry to brag, but I’m not going to say all that stuff isn’t in there. We spent a lot of years working to make it so.

I’m not sure what I really have to say about the Oscars. I’m not too outraged that lots of small indie films get attention. Some films are not for everyone. It doesn’t make them any better or worse than the blockbusters. I didn’t get much out of Birdman. I was deeply moved by Boyhood. It didn’t just make me cry. (It did, but so did Theory of Everything which I thought was a pretty good movie but nothing special really.) It got under my skin, rearranged my brain, made me see art and life differently forever. Like Terrance Mallick’s films (the other Austin filmmaker), Boyhood left me sort of gasping, puzzled, full of love, afraid and thrilled. As I’ve discovered many times when I try to describe what it is about Mallick that I think is so great, it’s not a feeling that I can really put into words.

Blood Sport.

I always think I’m going to read a lot on long flights, but I hardly ever do. I can’t stay awake, or alert, or focused enough. But I don’t mind falling asleep on the plane. I dislike air travel so much I’m happy to sleep through it.

Packing for our trip to Dublin last Friday, I almost grabbed the book I’m reading, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (by Brenda Wineapple, who wrote the Nathaniel Hawthorne biography I enjoyed so much recently). I’m having a bit of trouble getting through it because it’s too big and heavy to carry on the subway, which is where I get a lot of reading done, even now that I’m not commuting every day. But I decided at the last minute to leave it home and take instead the new issues of Tricycle and The New York Review of Books, both of which I read cover to cover on the return flight yesterday and left in the seat-back pocket.

All of which is to preface saying that this piece about football violence stuck with me.

Every thinking fan must, in order to enjoy any NFL game, consent to participate in a formidable suspension of disbelief. We must put aside our knowledge that nearly every current NFL player can expect to suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease that leads to memory loss, impaired judgment, depression, and dementia.

Read the whole thing, it’s not long.

Not that I didn’t already have a list of reasons why it might be better to send your kids to piano lessons or art class instead of off to play football, but all this recent information about long-term brain injuries is pretty unequivocal.

I grew up with the point of view, at least as far as schools were concerned, that there were arts people and there were sports people and not a lot of overlap. We were arts people.

Sports always got more attention and money, and the arts had to beg for whatever if anything was left. I guess I got this attitude from my parents, who were not necessarily anti-sports (my dad always watched football on TV when it was in season) but they were very critical of the over-the-top fandom all around us in Indiana, the way the achievements of high school athletes always got more attention than those of scholars and artists and musicians, and the pervasive belief that the arts were frivolous while support for high school sports was an unassailable civic virtue.

And that attitude dovetailed perfectly with my increasing anxiety around “male space,” as I reached adolescent and began to feel that I was not male, at least not in the way that the boys around me naturally were.

I’ve written before about my belief that junior high and high school phys ed has always been an arena of officially-sanctioned sexual terror. Even if that is no longer true -- people tell me things have changed -- you’ll still have a hard time convincing me that it is not a colossal waste of time. People will make the argument that the so-called obesity epidemic justifies physical education in schools. Somehow the cultural stupidity epidemic doesn’t provoke similar feelings about music and arts education.

But as I’ve gotten older, my feelings have mellowed. I’ve grown more sympathetic towards sports fandom. My time in Texas, where college football brought everyone, including my queer friends, together in something that was so obviously joyful and fun, was a watershed. And then the world of professional sports started to become less homophobic, with gay players coming out and their straight teammates expressing support. Maybe kids playing sports, even if it wasn’t my thing, wasn’t such an awful thing.

But now this stuff with the head injuries, and finding out that football is so important to its fans that they will tolerate near-certain brain damage of the players they claim to love (including their children), puts me right back where i was, hating the whole base enterprise. This --

Studebaker is the twenty-nine-year-old backup linebacker for the Colts who, while defending a punt return, was blindsided with a gruesome hit to the chest by the Patriots’ backup running back Brandon Bolden. Studebaker’s head jerked back and he landed on his neck. On the sideline after the play Studebaker was seen coughing up blood.

-- toggled a switch in me and took me right back to believing, not that sports and the arts are just two things people might be interested in, neither any better or worse than the other, but that music and art lift us up, encourage our highest aspirations, our most noble characteristics, those which bring us together and spur us to compassion and understanding, whereas sports is just about encouraging and celebrating our worst animal tendencies: brute competition, bloodlust, and an “us vs. them” gang mentality.

New Year's Eve At The Edge of America.

Contemplating the end of 2014 here from the roof of a rented house at the top of a hill with a view of the blue, blue ocean and out toward the south, New York somewhere behind me and South America out somewhere past the horizon, everything seems connected in that way that arbitrarily significant dates can make things seem.

As you know, I’m working on a new musical adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. I thought I’d have hours to write lyrics and make up tunes, alone at the house all day while C and my in-laws fry like hushpuppies in the mid-day sun at the beach, but I’ve mostly been reading, and thinking, and gazing. Lots of gazing. And snoozing. What could be sweeter than dozing off in the middle of a paragraph, sitting on a plastic Adirondack chair on the roof of a rented house at the top of a hill with a view of the blue, blue ocean?

The book I’m reading is Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, which, if I’d come across it a few months ago, might have derailed (which is not to say that I wouldn’t have loved it, because it’s a book made for me to love) might have derailed my own sort of fast and loose line (but less like a line and more like a quilt or a pair of darned socks) of thought connecting the Puritans to the mid-19th century and to Reagan and then on to America’s various current wars in the Middle East along with the latest peck-peck-pecking of assorted so-called Christians against women and anyone else they think is being treated too kindly.

It’s a beautiful book, funny and at times very moving (in that American Studies way) and almost too eerily on the nose, as I said. (There’s a photo of Ms. Vowell on the dust jacket, and I kept looking at it trying to remember where I’d seen it and why I felt strangely irritated by it when suddenly yesterday afternoon I remembered that the same photo had accompanied a New York Times op-ed piece I had kind of hated a couple months ago. I had liked the writing but hated the conclusion, which at the time I felt was a bit cowardly. So, remembering my first impression of her writing made me feel even more fond of the book. I’m glad I didn’t realize it was her book before I was way into it and loving it, or I may have either had a chip on my shoulder and been unmoved or possibly not read the book at all.

Anyway, great book. I recommend it, even to those who aren’t already lovers of Puritan trivia and America’s founding ideas.

So, Puerto Rico. One big point on which I diverge with Vowell is that she, despite the harsh criticism she levels, retains a love and faith and optimism regarding America’s uniqueness and promise. I’m struggling. This year I’m really struggling. I’ve always till now felt like the ideal of American democracy could be set apart from all the monstrous things, like slavery, like the slaughter of the indigenous people, like the horrific way we treat our poor and sick, that even though we are flawed and stunted we aspire to justice and equality. Even through the Ferguson and Staten Island grand jury decisions I kept hope. Since I discovered Thoreau in 8th grade I’ve thought of my impulse to dissent as the most “American” thing about me. Americans are people who become aware of injustice and they protest. That’s what I thought, and that’s how, even in the face of Vietnam, Reagan, Nicaragua, the government’s response to AIDS, NAFTA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I never lost faith.

What’s caused me to lose my grip is the Senate’s torture report – and not the report but the response to it, the bleak news that most Americans are really kind of okay with torturing people. It’s hard to ignore what seems so incredibly clear: that this is who we are, a people who want people whom we feel threatened by to suffer the most intense pain we can imagine and implement.

My life is pretty near perfect, so should I be complaining? I’ve quit my day job. I’m a full-time, independent artist now. I’m only 53, so I hope I have at least a couple decades left to get some work done faster than ever before now that I have suddenly so many more hours in a day. My mother’s health is worlds better this holiday season than last. C’s parents, in lieu of presents and decorating and baking treated us all to a week here in this transportingly and unexpectedly gorgeous place. Until yesterday I would have said I didn’t much care for the ocean, but it turns out it was only the Atlantic (which is trying only to do one thing and that is to kill you) that was my enemy. Here the water beckons, warm and cerulean and softly rolling onto the shore. It wants to lick your face, not bite it off.

The whole family has been piling into the rented SUV with piles of beach chairs and sandwiches, leaving me here to my own devices until 3, when C comes back to fetch me and ice and happy hour bourbon and cokes, so I can enjoy paradise on my own terms -- which means avoiding the blazing mid-day sun and the unpleasantness of my head swelling up like the Goodyear Blimp and then slowly over the course of a week draining out through my sinuses.

Maybe it doesn’t help that I’m doing this year-end reckoning in a place not only beautiful but also so directly connected to 1) Spain’s first voyages to this part of the world and their prompt slaughter and enslavement of the native people they encountered and looting of the land’s resources, and 2) the United States’s first all-out imperial war at the turn of the 20th century. The landscape is prettier than the history.

But maybe I should take heart. The island of Vieques, where I am spending a week with my in-laws in a rented house at the top of a hill with a view of the blue, blue ocean is also the site of one of the most inspiring protests in the history of civil disobedience, where the United States Navy, who had seized most of the island, wrecked the local economy, and left the already poor farmers homeless and even poorer, was after decades of protest forced to leave. Now the land they had used for test bombing and war training is a protected wilderness.

Things End, Things Begin.

The thing I think I'm most looking forward to about not having a day job -- besides just the fact of maybe having enough damn time -- is that I won't have to always try to figure out how to make the distinction between my work and my job, between work and "work," between my work and other people's work. I'll no longer get twisted up in sentences like, "Yes, I'm working; I have the day off." Work will always mean work. When I'm working I will be working.

I guess I'm finally at the tail end of a long transition that began in 2002 when Jay and I separated and we stopped doing Y'all. That period of time -- 10 years with Jay and Y'all -- was so jam-packed with art and love and poverty, sharp turns this way and that, intense experiences of every imaginable type, highs and lows, and over and above all of it an obsessive tenacity, that it took 12 years to feel my feet under me again.

To be honest, it's kind of silly to even speak in these terms, of transitions being over, because haven't we learned by now that nothing ever stops changing? I could just as easily say that the transition ended when I went back to writing musical theater (for whom I have my friends P & H, who called LIZZIE out of the cobwebs and created a reason to re-write it, to thank), or when I moved back to New York (T, who said "Come back," and who gave me a place to land with no end point, no conditions), or when I met C (my ultimate savior), when I married him.

I said goodbye today to the folks I've been working with at the prop shop in Brooklyn for 4 years. When Austin bottomed out and I decided to come back to New York, not having any idea what the hell else made sense to do, I emailed everyone I knew here and asked for help. An old friend, CM, emailed back and said that she might have a job for me. Within a few weeks I was commuting every day to a dusty industrial neighborhood in north Brooklyn to work 9 to 5 in a shop that rents furniture to TV and movie sets.

And just like that, I was back in New York with a place to live, a way to make a living, a musical that was being produced, and then new love, marriage, a reconfigured future.

It's not like I ever forgot how grateful I was for that job when I needed it, but today when CM and I were saying goodbye and she cried a little it became suddenly apparent to me that nothing good ever happens except because I am surrounded by people who care about me. Such a simple, sort of obvious idea, but I'm very moved by it today.

This Week.

Today I received a rejection letter from a theater I had submitted a play to that said that, although my play is not right for them, they found it "sturdy" and "well written." On one hand, ouch. But on the other, as far as I can remember this is the first rejection letter I've ever received that contained any evidence at all that someone had read the play/watched the film/listened to the songs. It may sound pathetic (though probably not to anyone who's received as many rejection letters as I have -- a.k.a. anyone in any creative field) but I was heartened, in fact moved, by the letter.

And on it goes. "No" is my second favorite answer.

I have a cold, but today was a good writing day. I revised a couple lines of problematic lyrics in one of the Scarlet Letter songs. I haven't shared them with my co-writers yet, but I think they do what they need to do. And I made a stab at another song, which may turn out to be more like just a coda or partial reprise.

I enjoy all the creative work I do, but lyric-writing I think brings me the most pleasure. It's one thing I'm pretty certain I'm good at, so, when I'm writing lyrics, I trust my inner critic to help not sabotage. With other activities, I'm less confident.

I have three more days of nine-to-five. It's exhilarating and scary. I feel like I'm about to jump off a cliff. I keep telling myself that this is by no means the first cliff I've jumped off, and I'm not alone.

Peter Pan And Quitting My Day Job.

So, this week I found myself the great defender of Peter Pan Live! When they (they? I'm not even sure who they are, CBS?) announced last year that they were following up The Sound of Music with Peter Pan, I probably groaned or made some other kind of noise or at least rolled my eyes because Peter Pan? In my memory, it was just dumb and kind of incoherent and really not my favorite musical.

But then it happened, and it was not bad. In fact, I really kind of enjoyed it. (Marijuana helped, but I was loving it even before that.) Granted, the first 20 minutes were boring, but once they started flying I was in. And then the pirates and the dancing and all the fucked-up weirdness of the sex and gender situation, which is weird even without the additional layer of weirdness added by casting (always) an adult woman as Peter Pan, who is a little boy who seduces a pubescent girl who falls in love with him and he calls her "Mother," okay? And meanwhile they're being pursued by a homicidal gay pirate (seriously, maybe Hook's queerness was all very coded and sly back in the fifties but we're onto all that sexual innuendo now).

I think the real reason it's customary to cast a woman as Peter is that it somewhat de-sexes the show. With a boy in the role, it would be too obvious that those scenes between Peter and Wendy are all about sexual desire. And it takes the edge off Hook's obsession with Peter if Peter is a woman.

So, yeah, there was lots of indignation from the high art crowd and blah blah whatever, but what really got my dander up was the talk about Christopher Walken, the sort of glib evaluation of his performance, like "Well, yes, he was entertaining, but he's just doing Christopher Walken." What does that even mean? Sandy Dennis got that a lot, too, Diane Keaton. Jack Nicholson. Some of the greatest actors ever. And did anyone say that about Kelli O'Hara? I love Kelli O'Hara, and Kelli O'Hara does Kelli O'Hara. Ethel Merman did Ethel Merman, Bernadette Peters does Bernadette Peters, Mary Martin did Mary Martin. And they are and were great, turning in transporting performance after transporting performance.

What was thrilling to me was seeing Walken, after so much film work, deliver a real musical comedy performance, live. Focused, detailed, specific, and fucking hilarious.

Anyway, so, I loved Peter Pan. Wonders never cease.

Speaking of wonders, I'm leaving my day job. A week from tomorrow is my last day. I envisioned myself writing a blog post about this, but there are so many aspects to it I haven't been able to home in on a way to synthesize my thoughts or even list them coherently.

I've had a couple of brief periods in the past of making a living as an artist with no day job, but they were dependent on specific projects with endpoints in sight. Nothing so open-ended as this. Now I will be a full-time writer. I feel tremendous exhilaration, but not without a streak of apprehension. I could not make this move if I weren't married to a man whose income is enough to make up for the loss of mine. Not that my theater work doesn't produce any income, but it doesn't produce enough to support a life in New York City. Of course, the idea is that with more time to devote to my career, my income will eventually rise. But only eventually. And with no guarantees.

The other day my co-writers on LIZZIE and I were talking about how we'd like to publish some sheet music of a few songs. People ask for it, musical theater students and girls looking for interesting new audition songs. It's an expense: someone has to be paid to turn the score into publishable arrangements and then we have to actually publish them and probably pay someone to administer the sales. A few thousand dollars all told. We were discussing how much we're willing to front, and my point of view was basically that I'm not willing to put up much at all with no guarantee of making it back.

Because 1) I'm just done with that kind of financial optimism. I've thrown too many boxes of unsold CDs into dumpsters after dragging them all over the place for years, CDs that I paid thousands of dollars to have manufactured because I thought they'd sell. Too many. I spent thousands of dollars finishing my film Life in a Box (a lot of it borrowed from friends and credit card advances) because I was sure we'd get a big distribution deal. We didn't. So, yeah, no.

And 2) now that I'm married I share my finances, so any expense that's bigger than just normal spending money and household stuff is a conversation with my husband. It's not that we have approval over each other's spending. I guess we sort of do, technically, but it's not how we experience it. We make decisions together. That's what marriage is. And not that C is stingy or unsupportive -- I'm the thrifty one in our house -- but the fact of the conversation (and not always even having the conversation but just knowing there will be one) makes it easier for me not to be impulsive, to be more rational, sensible.

C's and my income has always been very unequal, but it will get more so now for a while. We're good at working things out. We're good at loving each other. I don't have any doubt that we will adjust, but it will be a new, unfamiliar landscape for a while.

"Enjoy these precious days," whisper their leaves.

There's a massive gingko tree in Isham Park, and I pass it every day on my way to and from the subway. It's gorgeous and really huge. I don't know if I'd say that I consider it a friend, but I do sort of say hello to it, or something like that. I acknowledge it. The way the stairs wind down the hill out of the park, heading straight toward it from above, puts the tree suddenly in front of you in a way that makes it impossible not to sort of bow.

The leaves turned bright yellow this week like they do in the fall. I wanted to take a picture on Monday -- I have a friend in Austin who is an amateur botanist obsessed with gingkos and from time to time I'll send him a photo of it -- but I was running late for work so I didn't, thinking I would do it later. The next morning, all the leaves had fallen. Every single one of them, and the sidewalk was paved solid yellow with them. Later that day I read that all the Gingkos all lose their leaves overnight, every tree, all on the same night.

There are thousands of gingkos in New York, in most cities, but the only other one I remember that was so large was in front of the DePauw University library in Greencastle, Indiana, where my mother worked when I was in high school. That tree -- and I don't know if this is exactly how it works but for some reason it's stuck in my head -- was close to another tree of the opposite sex, and when that happens they develop yellow-orange fruit that drop in the fall and stink like fresh vomit and diarrhea and sex. It's a noxious, unsettlingly human smell that seems to drift for miles.

My Musical Education, cont.

Because I came at musical theater writing sort of sideways -- I loved the golden age stuff, Cole Porter, Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and whoever, etc., from before I even have any memory of it, probably for no more interesting reason than that I'm gay, but in college I was more interested in serious theater and then I went to art school and then played in bands, because that's what you do after art school, and that led me back to experimental theater which 30 years later has me writing musicals -- there's a whole raft of material from the 70s through the present that I missed.

I used to say sort of glibly that I didn't like Sondheim. (I used to say, even more glibly, that I blamed his influence for most of the contemporary musical theater that I hate, which was not technically a criticism of Sondheim, but it was definitely obnoxious.)

But just a couple nights ago I was telling C a story I had forgotten, that when I was 14 I heard Judy Collins sing "Send in the Clowns" on the radio and I felt like I'd been struck by lightning I was so moved in a way I couldn't have describe then and still probably can't. I had no way of finding out what the song was (I guess I could have called the station but that didn't occur to me) pre-Google, so I sat by the radio for hours listening to that station, my finger poised on the record button of my tape recorder held up to the speaker, waiting for the song to come on again, for days and days. I was haunted by it. It never came on, and it was years before I found out what that song was.

And I love Sweeney Todd, but I always attributed that anomaly to the fact that the original Broadway production with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou was the first Broadway show I saw. I would have been dazzled for life no matter what the show was, was my thinking.

In my defense, there is still a lot of Sondheim I don't really get. I'm looking forward to the movie of Into the Woods coming out soon because I'm hoping Meryl Streep will show me a way into that score that I've never found on my own.

All that to say: a few days ago I was having a conversation with someone about the new piece I'm working on and the music I'm listening to for reference (lots of Americana, with a particular ear to Puritan church singing, Salvation Army bands, Stephen Foster, Appalachian ballads, Sacred Harp, and folky blues), this person mentioned Assassins. The only thing I knew about Assassins was that Neil Patrick Harris was in it on Broadway and that it's about ... assassins.

Intrigued, I downloaded the cast album and listened to it this morning. Wow. I love this so much. I stand happily corrected. I will never again say I don't like Sondheim.

(And now we know what all the reviews will say we cribbed.)

Tuesday Cat-Blogging.

I get irritated at C when he calls Tuesday my day off, because I think of it as my one day "on." I can't do much of anything on days when I work, except a little business (a few quick emails, the occasional lunch time conference call, or evening meeting), so Tuesday is the day for writing and I feel a lot of pressure to make it productive.

I made some progress on a song today. No real writing, but more like list-making, which is how I usually start lyrics, just a list of lines, ideas, thoughts that I then push around the page until they tell the story I want to tell. Today was just lists.

Now it's almost 3 and my brain hurts, so I'm hoping a bit of blogging will loosen things up.

C called me a cat lady last week. Not literally a cat lady. He was talking about my recent obsessive posting of pictures of the sky and clouds, like some people post and blog about their cats.

But, years ago, I was an actual cat lady. Before the internet. Well, not literally before the internet, but before the era of cats on the internet. Though I haven't had cats now for many years, I think of myself as a cat person. I identify as a cat person. After Gravity died, the last of them, in 2001, I more or less decided that I wouldn't get another cat. Not only did I want to enjoy the freedom of not having to always consider the cats when moving or traveling or whatever, I'd said goodbye to 4 in about 4 years and I was wrung out from cat death. (I also said at one time that I would never fall in love again, so.)

I love seeing my friends' cat photos on facebook. I feel a little left out because I never got to blog about my cats. If I had cats now I'd totally be blogging about them every day.

Better late than never.

This is Honey. He was about 2 months old when I found him cowering on the steps of a building on Pitt Street between Rivington and Stanton. I guess this was 1984. I had just moved there, alone, after breaking up with Eduardo. It was raining and his face was splattered with tar. I took him home. We got to know each other over the next several days while he sat in my lap and I picked the tar off his face gently one speck at a time. He was my friend and companion for 15 years, longer than I've been with any man. I still miss him a lot.

 

He was always thirsty. After all these years, I still compulsively put down the toilet seat cover to keep him from drinking out of it. We found out later that the reason he was thirsty is that he was diabetic and that's what killed him. That's not true,  J and I had him euthanized when we went into diabetic shock. He probably could have been saved and kept alive by giving him injections twice a day for the rest of his life but we decided against that.

This is Jimmy. She was little and black. We got her from a couple of friends who'd adopted her from a shelter but then, I can't remember why, couldn't keep her. Her papers said she was a boy, so we gave her a boy's name. A few months later when she went into heat (we thought she was losing her mind) we took her to the vet and found that her papers also said she was a dog.

This is the apartment in Ft. Greene where I lived with B. He had a cat, Sparky, who I'm holding, who was killed by the landlord's Rottweiler who lived in the backyard. He ran out of our apartment and into the back yard during a party. We and the few party guests who stayed watched him die from our second floor window.

Okay, it's not just cats. This is Karen. We found her at the North Shore Animal League. Is she not the most adorable puppy you've ever seen? Good thing she was cute, because she was a hot mess. Totally neurotic.

 

Here's Honey again. He liked to sit on his butt like a human.

Jimmy was a little freaked out by Karen. She took to peeing on the floor. We tried a million different remedies, including cat Prozac, none of which worked. She peed on the floor every day for months, years, I don't remember how long it was, but it was rough.

Honey was never bothered by anything, really.

Once I took Karen for a long walk to Prospect Park. Just inside the park, she dove face-first into a big pile of homeless-person shit and rolled around in it. I was so angry I thought I would literally explode. She couldn't have been more pleased with herself or more perplexed as to why we were going home already when we just got there. I gave her about 25 baths and I swear I could smell it on her for months.

But I was so in love with that dog. After I told B that I was going to leave him, and before I actually moved out, for weeks I curled up on the bed with Karen every night while B was at work and cried into her fur.

B took Karen and I took Honey and Jimmy.

Three years later, when I moved in with J, he had 2 cats of his own. Gravity, who was a dead ringer for Sparky -- grey tabby, friendly but opinionated -- and in fact for years Sparky was the name that came to mind first when I called him. 

And Natasha, a Siamese mix and completely bonkers. With no warning, she would become possessed by a demon, start yowling and running up and down the curtains.

When I cooked, I had to use my wits and my elbows to keep Honey and Gravity out of the pan. They worked as a team. They didn't care how hot it was, if I looked away for a second one of them would grab a chicken breast or a piece of fish out of the skillet and run as fast they could. Once J and I sat down to eat, sometimes I'd give in and let them lick the pan.

We lived in a small studio apartment with those 4 cats. Looking back it seems crazy but we and they were all pretty happy with the arrangement.

This is a weird double-exposure but it's the only photo I have of all 4 of them together. Look at Jimmy (the black one). She liked to sit next to Honey and push her face into his fur. She'd stay like that as long as he'd let her, and he was so imperturbable it could last for half an hour sometimes.

And this is my favorite picture of Honey. We have it framed on the living room bookshelf. Oh, those eyes.