RIP Steve Martin Caro.

When I was around 25 and just starting to record with my band The Woods, Robin Crutchfield of DNA and "No Wave" fame (whose band Dark Day I was playing cello, badly, in), told me that my voice sounded like Steve Martin, the lead singer in The Left Banke, which I'd never heard of.

I still don’t know a lot about Martin or The Left Banke, except this album, which might be their only one, which I wore out on cassette, and which is sublime. Martin’s voice is transcendent, one of my favorite pop voices of all time, based on a really small body of work. I continue to be massively flattered to be compared to him. I’ve always strived for that kind of clarity, but needless to say I’ve never reached such heights. My favorite tune was always She May Call You Up Tonight. I used to poo-poo Walk Away Renee because it was more famous and I was a snob, but looking back I can see how of course it was the biggest hit. It’s undeniably gorgeous.

Steve Martin Caro (he added the surname later because of confusion with the more widely known comedian/novelist/Broadway musical writer) died this week. A funny coincidence is that members of The Left Banke (though not Martin) went on to form another band, Stories, whose big hit Brother Louie was the first record I bought with my own money, a 7” 45 I got at the record store in the Devington Shopping Center on Arlington and 46th St. in Indianapolis. I rode my bike there to buy it when I was 12.

January.

I’ve been having these dreams lately — I asked C if he has dreams like this and he said yes, so I assume they’re one of the various broad categories of dreams that everyone seems to dream in common, like you’re trying to get somewhere and you keep getting waylaid, or flying, etc.; which, isn’t that strange but somehow reassuring? before you even get to consider how weird dreaming is, at all, and that we all do it and no one really knows why or even what it is? — anyway, I’ve had these dreams the last several days where nothing to speak of happens, I’m just sitting around feeling as if something has gone badly. Not something specific, or not that I remember when I wake up. Just something. The dream is just the feeling: worry, dread, embarrassment, something like that.

I have these dreams from time to time. I hate them. I hate them because that feeling is more or less what’s in my head about 80% of my waking life, and I feel as though I should get a break from it when I go to bed.

Maybe the dreams are about the heaviness of reckoning. January is for assessing. Where am I? What have I done? What is still to do? It’s all very serious and very …. visible, I guess? with the leaves gone and the air so clear and no Christmas shopping and no planning and traveling and no decorating and no mailbox full of catalogs and Christmas cards and no letters full of vacations and illnesses. December is a rainy night in heavy traffic with construction on the New Jersey Turnpike. January is a two-lane highway in West Texas it’s noon and there’s no one on the road but you, what’s in front of you in front of you and what’s behind you behind you.

January is when you’re supposed to do all those things you’ve put off (“December is CRAZY, but I’ll definitely get on it after the holidays!”). It’s not easy. I feel drained after Christmas, and picking up the ball requires me giving myself a good talking to, but I do love the cold clarity of January. Checking to-do’s off lists, archiving emails I didn’t respond to until now, pulling the trigger, the just fucking do it-ness of January.

I ordered new ceiling light fixtures for the kitchen and the hallway. I’ve hated the lighting in both those spaces ever since we moved in 4 years ago. The hallway light might as well not even be a light it’s so dim, and the kitchen has this I guess you’d call it track lighting but it has hanging things on it that I’m constantly bumping into. So. The new ones — one a vintage glass fixture I found on ebay and the other from Home Depot — are arriving by UPS tomorrow! I think we’ll have to hire someone to install them. I wish C or I was comfortable doing this kind of work. You’d think in a household of two husbands one of them would be that husband, but no. There should be like a rent-a-husband service for these things. But you shouldn’t have to pay them because husbands do that stuff for free. Okay it’s not a good business model.

Career-wise, art-wise, I’m ready to put together a reading of my new musical, Jack. Not a public reading but just me and 10 actors in a room so I can hear what my words sound like coming out of people’s mouths instead of bouncing around in my brain. It’s a very new experience doing something like this alone. (The only thing I can compare it to is my film Life in a Box, which I spent over a year working on by myself in a room, logging and editing sequences, but there were always others involved in various ways even if I was for much of that time the only one making creative decisions.) Momentum is so much easier in a team, and these practical non-writing tasks get divided up. The expectations of your collaborators pushes you along when you get sluggish.

A friend offered me space for a reading; now I need to find 10 actors (three of them teenagers, one elderly woman, and others of various ages and genders). I’m increasingly anxious contemplating that this will be the first time anyone has read the work but me. I’ve shared a handful of songs with a few friends but no one has heard the whole thing.

That’s what I’ve got cooking so far this year.

A New Year.

Sometimes when I’m reading a book, I’ll have an odd compulsion about turning a page, maybe there’s a particularly long sentence running from one page to the next, a reluctance causes me to have to flip back and forth a couple times trying to hold the old page in my mind as I venture into the new one. New Year’s Eve can be like that, too. As midnight gets nearer I’m anxious to hold the disappearing year in my mind, in my heart, to try to see it, understand it, take and hold it all within me before I let it go and move on.

This would seem to call for a kind of New Year’s Eve that I have rarely had. Something simple and reflective. Quiet conversation. No whooping, no Times Square on the TV.

I have a, well if I’m honest I have a dozen or so, alternate lives that I think about, ways things might be if I’d made different choices, and in one of them I’m in control of December. I don’t know why I hold onto these desires — how very un-Buddhist they are — but I do. I love winter, for so many reasons, not least of which is the turning of the year, the longest night, the long vigil, the sun coming back, the renewal, another chance, hope. But December in real life is a race to feel those things, to have that inner experience, to do that work before some date on the calendar that says “Flight to ….”

Not since my early twenties have I spent the winter holidays at home, and that was because for a couple years I couldn’t afford to travel. And then there was another year or two in my forties when my mother and I weren’t seeing eye to eye and I stayed home, though home that year was a camper parked somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, I think.

In my twenties, and even in my forties, if I even thought about it I would have thought there were plenty of years to come and if I missed a Christmas with my family there would be so many more it didn’t matter. Close to sixty now, my mother already gone and all family holiday traditions coming unmoored, I’m practically counting them down. So, now, I am always at someone else’s home for Christmas, and often for New Year’s Eve. I chose to make my life far away from my family. I got married, with the give and take of considering someone else’s family holiday traditions. And gay uncles, when it comes to family gatherings, are more often guests than hosts. That is the way things are.

Or maybe I just want to control everything.

How ungrateful I am. How selfish and mean. How ungracious to each and every one of my generous, wonderful, loving family who, to a person, open their homes and lives and holiday rituals to me.

New Year’s Eve 1989 I was alone in Brooklyn. I had pulled the rug out from under my life. I had recently deserted the man I was with for 6 years, and I was living alone for the first time in my life, in Boerum Hill in an apartment I couldn’t afford. (Incidentally, in that 6-year relationship we hadn’t spent one Christmas or any other holiday with his family or mine — or together, for that matter. In fact I never met his family. He was not out to them.) That New Year’s Eve, I avoided plans. I bought potato chips and Doritos and onion dip and whisky and I spent the night alone (well, not alone, my cats Honey and Jimmy were with me — my ex-partner got the dog) watching American Family. Channel 13 was showing the whole series. As I remember, I stayed up all night and watched it from beginning to end, but it’s possible I fell asleep. There was whisky.

I’ve been thinking about 2019, full of, like all years, like everything, wonderful and terrible things. The older I get the more I experience a kind of involuntary gratitude — or something like it that I find impossible to adequately describe — for all of it. The things so marvelous I think I probably don’t deserve them. The awful things I think I just can’t bear but do.

And there are things that cut deep because they remind me of the whole, they place me in a life, or in a sequence I recognize as my life despite how random everything seems close up. In 2019:

A piece I wrote was published in an online journal called Statorec, an essay in which I alternated between my recollections of my life in the East Village in the 1980s with excerpts from letters my friend and roommate Joan (who commissioned the essay as part of an artist’s book she created) wrote to me from Berlin and upstate New York from 1983 to 1989. It was one of those rare pieces of work that became, in the end, more or less what I imagined and hoped it would be. The experience of writing it, of evoking those years when we were young artists trying to figure it out, the experience of collaborating with Joan, my friend of almost 40 years, my first roommate in New York, was deeply moving.

In February I flew to Knoxville to see Valley High School (from Huntsville Alabama) perform my musical LIZZIE in a regional theater competition (they won their state competition!). So high schools are performing my work. High schools are performing my work.

In April, I had lunch with two friends from college, Dottie and Keith, whom I hadn’t seen in decades. Dottie was the first straight person I came out to, at 18. And Keith I had such a crush on. We did our damndest to share the last 40 years of our lives with each other. I saw in their faces, and maybe they saw in mine, the young, overconfident, terrified people we’d been drawn to all those years ago, and the older, smarter, happy, wounded people we’ve become.

C and I did get home from North Carolina early enough on New Year’s Day to throw some black-eyed peas and a ham hock in the pressure cooker. And I had some greens in the freezer, the first time in many years I’ve made this traditional good luck meal, so I’m feeling sanguine about 2020.

Photography.

I post a lot of photos, most of them from a big collection of slides my dad shot from the late 50s through the 60s and had digitized several years ago. Dad was an accomplished and talented, and, at that time prolific, photographer, and many of his photographs are by any standard excellent.

But we all loved taking pictures. My first camera was a Brownie that my dad gave me when I was around 9 or 10. I loved that camera and, in retrospect, am very moved to see all the little and big ways my parents encouraged every creative impulse I had. Dad taught me all about how photography works, how to focus and compose a shot, how to develop the film in his basement darkroom. (His inflexibility regarding what makes a good photo probably pushed me away from photography but likely pushed me toward other modes of expression that he knew less about, like visual art and theater.)

My Grandma Lenore always had a cheap Instamatic camera with her and was always trying to get everyone in the same room so she could take a “family portrait.” And I got a cheap camera too, once I got to about high school age. Growing up, there were always cameras around and there was always my dad telling everyone they were doing it wrong. And there were always lots of photos and photo albums and lots of trips to the Fotomat. Most are not what you’d call “good” photos, but I treasure them.

You can always tell Grandma Lenore’s photos because the subject is half out of the frame and there’s a big sort of blank area taking up most of the image. This drove my dad crazy. I guess they actually are pretty terrible photos, as photos — the above is not intentionally a photo of 3 ships on a wall, but I sure am glad to have a photo of those ships — still I love them I suppose mostly because they make me think of Grandma Lenore, but there’s also something wonderful and dynamic about the weird framing, like the camera is trying to escape her hands.

(The kid on the left is Mark King who lived down the street. Once my brother and I were at his house for a sleepover. In my memory it’s around Christmastime but memory is unreliable. We were in the basement, in sleeping bags but not sleeping, talking and laughing, it was very late. Mark’s father burst through the door at the top of the stairs, dragged Mark out of bed, took off his shoe and beat the crap out of him with it. Mike and I were terrified and didn’t say a word. Everybody beat their kids back then, but Mark’s dad was especially harsh. Back then, we called it “strict.”)

In the photo above, I’m wearing a sweater vest Grandma Lenore crocheted for me. By the early 70s, she’d more or less given up painting and entered a long phase of compulsive crocheting. Everyone she knew had piles of odd-shaped “blankets” in odd, unplanned, color combinations and proportions. She made ponchos for my sister, hats she called tams for EVERYONE, and sweater vests for me and my brother. Ugly is not even the word.. I knew that at 10, but it was a painful dilemma for me because I so worshipped Grandma Lenore. I had to wear them. And to school. To not would have been a serious betrayal. But I mean, look at that thing.

Grandma Lenore taught me to crochet and I also became a little compulsive about it. I totally sympathized with Grandma. Crocheting was fun, but patterns and planning and all that were not. (The most ambitious I got was, around the age of 12 or 13, I crocheted a new wardrobe for my sister’s Barbies. I liked small projects I could finish in a day or two.)

I’m guessing Mom took this one. Her sense of composition was also, by Dad’s standard, lacking, but it wasn’t as crazy as Grandma Lenore’s. That’s Grandma Lenore of course in the spider web dress. The tree is the same tree as the one in the shot above. Around the time my sister was born, we got an artificial tree which lasted well into my 20s, maybe longer.

These 3 photos happen to be from one of my grandmother’s scrapbooks, which I took when she died. She often wrote directly on photographs, dates and names, I guess so no one would forget. I used to think it was overkill, but I appreciate it now because, though I don’t forget who these people are, I often have trouble pinpointing dates.

Thanks giving.

When we were kids, we spent Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods, either at home or, alternating years, at their house in Dayton Ohio. Before my sister was born, the Bidgoods didn’t have any children so it was just my brother and me and adults. My parents and the Bidgoods had been close friends since they were newlyweds and lived in the same apartment building in Waukegan, Illinois, and they sustained their friendship with this Thanksgiving tradition, which we all loved and looked forward to. Dad and LeRoy Bigood shared in interest in aviation. Verna had been a schoolteacher and she was “educated,” a quality my parents, neither of them college graduates, placed a high, almost mystical, value on. LeRoy and Verna both chain-smoked, their humor was a little sarcastic, and they always included the kids in the conversation. Verna could be caustic at times, or so it seemed to me at that age, but I loved her. The meal was traditional, except that Verna, beside the mandatory pumpkin, made what she called an apple custard pie (I think sometimes it’s called French apple), that I had mixed feelings about. It was unusual and sophisticated to my aspirational little boy mind, but to be honest I really preferred Mom’s more traditional apple pie. I would have a slice of each.

Around the time my sister was born, the Bidgoods adopted a child, then another, then Verna, who’d been unable to get pregnant, did, and eventually as my brother and I got older and eventually moved on, my brother into the Navy, I to college and then New York, the Thanksgiving tradition dissipated. I feel a little sad not to remember if my parents and sister, who is six years younger than me, continued to spend Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods; for me it’s a memory that sits squarely in the mists of my childhood.

I think of Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods as sort of the ur-Thanksgiving. The air outside is getting sharp, the kitchen is a little too warm, the day is long, lots of conversation, laughing and conversation, and then a thrilling moment when everything is on the table untouched, the turkey, sagey stuffing, mashed potatoes with tons of butter and cream, gravy for it all, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, the amazing abundance of it.

Thanksgiving the two years I was in college at Miami, was bus trips to New York, marathon Broadway weekends, and Thanksgiving dinner at Tavern on the Green. Later, in the mid-80s, with Brian my first longtime boyfriend, we had big dinners for friends in our Fort Greene apartment with the kitchen that consisted of a sink and stove crammed into what in the original brownstone had been a dressing room over the stairs. (There was a hole in the floor behind the stove, and once our cat Sparky climbed back there and jumped through the hole onto the stove in the apartment below, scaring the crap out of the elderly Chinese mother-in-law of our landlord who was cooking at the time. A couple years later, in an unrelated incident, the elderly woman’s Rottweiler mauled Sparky to death in the backyard.) Our fridge was in the bedroom. One fall my sister was in New York for an internship, living a few blocks away with a friend. We cooked for two days and between the two of us managed to get pretty close to Mom and Verna’s version of all the traditional dishes. That was the year we had 25 for dinner.

Jay, my partner through, roughly, my 30s, and I hosted a couple of small Thanksgivings in our tiny studio on East 10th St. for stragglers and orphan friends. I remember a staggeringly good chocolate cake that one guest brought, which I ate too much of and had to lie immobile on the futon for half an hour because I thought I might actually explode and die.

Years later, when I was living in Austin — Jay and I had separated but were living in a big house with friends and my life was more untethered to anything than at any other time and there have been untethered times … oh, it’s too much back story for right now — I made a pot roast instead of turkey, and we played an epic air hockey tournament with friends that I still recall as one of the sweetest moments of my life.

I’m thankful for it all.

Now I’m older and married and probably as stable as I am capable of being and we spend Thanksgiving alternating years with my family and my husband’s family. His family Thanksgiving has moved from his parents’ home to his brother and sister-in-law’s and my family has moved to my sister’s family’s home. The year after Mom died, my sister and I made Thanksgiving dinner in her kitchen for the last time. Soon after, my father cleaned out most of Mom’s kitchen stuff, not keeping much more than he needs for the simple meals he heats up and eats. My sister is vegan now, but she gamely roasts a big turkey at her house for the carnivores. We’ll be there next year.

This year we’re with my husband’s family in North Carolina. The meal, mostly prepared by C’s brother but everyone helped, was traditional and delicious. No apple custard pie, but there was pear-cranberry. I did very little of the cooking, but I made the gravy, a task which has a high satisfaction to effort ratio.

My History of Violence.

I assume everyone has seen or at least heard about these videos of a high school boy confronting a bully. I’ve been watching them over and over. It’s — understatement! — an emotional ride, as I imagine it is for most queer people who were once high school kids, and I admit that’s why I’m a little obsessed with it, but it’s interesting on many other levels as media, as popular culture.

There’s the whole wooly conversation about who witnesses these moments of crisis in people’s lives, about surveillance, about virality, about how bullies have access to a large audience, but also the bullied have access (without or without consent) to a large audience. Smarter, more patient people than I study this stuff.

But something that fascinates and puzzles me is the “performance” of the kid (and I suppose performance more generally in heightened moments like this). I keep coming back to the boy’s affect as he threatens the bully, which is very different from his (natural?) affect in the talk show appearances:

“Back the fuck up out my face, now, ‘cause I’m not playin’ witchoo.”

“Call me a fag one more fuckin’ time and I will pop yo ass.”

“Wassup?” “Wassup?” “Wassup bitch?”

Being careful not to get myself in trouble here, is his affect and language not a performance of a black stereotype? And why? Is there a general perception that this “gangsta” stereotype is intimidating? Is that a go-to “threatening character,” like how a kid in the 1920s might have taken on an exaggerated Al Capone-type demeanor?

I’m not suggesting it’s a conscious choice this boy made, and I’m definitely not accusing him of some kind of racist blackface performance. A charge like that would, I think, overshadow most of what’s interesting in the analysis of his performance. Complicated, for sure, and of course part of the larger topic of white people and hip hop, cultural appropriation, and white kids more generally adopting so-called urban black affectations.

I also wonder — though I suspect here that I’m stretching it a bit — how the possibility of this moment being videotaped and broadcast (whether or not anyone involved has specific knowledge at the time that they are being recorded, but it’s just a thing that happens these days so it must register somewhere in people’s minds) might affect the performance.

When I was in 5th grade, there was a boy named Bobby Tate who tormented me relentlessly. (He was in my class nearly every year from 1st grade, so it had been going on for a long time.) I don’t remember what he said, what he called me. I know it wasn’t “fag.” I don’t remember hearing that word until at least 7th or 8th grade, but maybe “sissy”? I did my best to ignore him — Is “ignore a bully and he’ll go away” the worst advice ever in the history of childhood? — but I think that only encouraged him. I was miserable. One day, I don’t know what if anything was different that day, I exploded. I jumped him. We scuffled and ended up with him behind me with his arms wrapped tightly around my waist trying to take me down. I managed to pull one of his arms off me and I began twisting it with all my strength. He let go, and I kept twisting his arm as hard as I could. He screamed with pain and begged me to let go. I did. He never bothered me again. I was happy to have resolved the situation, but shaken by my rage.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a boy named Bill Conrad took a mind to walking behind me in the hallway and muttering epithets. Again, I don’t think he used any f-words, but I do remember that a favorite was “woman.” (Try and tell me homophobia and misogyny aren’t the same damn thing.) Interesting background on Bill Conrad is that in 8th grade, both of us fairly often came up with excuses to get out of gym glass. We weren’t friends, but I remember feeling some solidarity in those moments sitting on the bleachers together while the other kids played basketball. (I don’t remember what our excuses were, but I’m guessing the teacher was just glad to have a reason to not deal with us. Bill Conrad was the fat kid, I was the fag.) So, anyway, I have no idea why he chose me to torment, but it went on for weeks, and finally one day I turned around and said, “You’re FAT!” and that was the end of that.

I have mixed feelings about responding to hate with violence, but I’m generally against it. I actually feel much less regret about the physical violence toward Bobby Tate than the psychological violence toward Bill Conrad. But in the case of Jordan Steffy, is socking that little asshole in the face a level of violence to be concerned about?

Years from now, when you talk about this -- and you will -- be kind.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to finish reading a book so C — because I’ve been raving about it and he wanted to read it next and I only had about 40 pages left — could take it with him on his trip to see his family this weekend, and he was leaving for the airport at 6:45. I didn’t set the alarm or anything, I’m not that thoughtful — most mornings at 4:30 I’m lying in bed awake thinking, “I should just get up,” and sometimes I do. (The book was The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide, which you’d probably call postmodernist except it was written in 1915, and it’s a ride.)

All of which is to say that by 11:30 I was already feeling like I’d had a day. I was tired of reading (after my regular morning news fix I started Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir), not ready for a nap, or lunch, or much of anything, so I decided to rent a movie. (As fascinating as the impeachment hearings are, I can only take so much at a stretch.)

I have no idea where a sudden urge to watch Tea & Sympathy came from. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the movie, I read the play in college, which was a long time ago, but I was in the mood for something cinematic and nobody does Cinematic! like Vincente Minnelli. In case you’re unfamiliar: Tea & Sympathy is a gorgeously filmed 1956 melodrama directed by a closeted homosexual about a prep school boy accused of being a homosexual (though it’s the 50s so they’re not allowed to actually say it), but who is not an actual homosexual but just artistic and sad, who loses his virginity to a beautiful older woman who loves him because he reminds her of her dead first husband who was also sensitive but not actually homosexual and, though the older woman and her second husband, whom she leaves after her affair with the boy, live the remainder of their days alone and contemplative (she) and bitter (he), the boy grows up to write a tender, sweet roman à clef about his school days and his affair with the older woman and life is good because he’s not actually homosexual. And there’s a whore who works in a soda shop.

It was great. I wish I’d bought it for $9.99 instead of renting it for $2.99, because I would definitely watch it again a couple times at least. I mean, Deborah Kerr.

You’d think I might enjoy a bachelor weekend now and then, but I just don’t. Absence makes the heart, blah blah, but my whole week every week is a cycle of him leaving in the morning, having my own time all day, and then in the afternoon looking forward to him coming home from work. I get enough absence. I don’t like sleeping here alone; there are unidentifiable noises in the walls. If I sleep with the bedroom door closed, I start to wonder what’s lurking on the other side, and if I leave it open I am exposed to … I don’t know, bad things out there.

I’ve had a miserable cold all week and just today I am emerging from the fog. I’m still coughing a lot, but I’ve turned a corner. I feel light and overstimulated. Maybe I should watch another movie. Where does one go from Vincente Minnelli? Douglas Sirk? A nap? Or Liza Minnelli! Maybe I should watch Liza With A Z. Yeah maybe not. I’m already overstimulated. All that Halston and Fosse might give me a coronary. Better go with something artistic and sad, like me — though to be clear I am an actual homosexual.

Good Morning, Baltimore.

My old friend, artist and singer-songwriter Linda Smith, who I played with in my first band in the mid-80s, The Woods, went to see a licensed production of LIZZIE in Baltimore last night and sent me a note this morning to say that she thought it was excellent. (It got great reviews.) Linda hadn’t seen the show before, and for years I’ve wondered what she would think of it. I was playing with Linda when I first started writing songs. I looked up to her and probably imitated her more than I knew at the time.

She told me that this production was in an old warehouse full of lots of artist studios, and she sent a couple photos of the venue and set that she took before the show. They reminded me of the old days at the Pyramid Club, all that performance art and drag shows — theater — with a DIY punk aesthetic.

So many circles overlapping: Linda, Baltimore, the Pyramid Club, this exact moment in my career. I don’t suppose it will ever not be awesome knowing that there are all these productions of our show happening everywhere on just about any given day, so many that there’s no way we can see them all, but I kinda wish I’d gotten on a train and gone down to Baltimore to see this one!

Scuttled.

I’ve been doing some housekeeping today, and while I was updating things on my web site I thought I’d listen to this demo we made of one of the songs I wrote for our Hester Prynne musical that never went anywhere. It made me melancholy; one, because our Hester Prynne musical never went anywhere, and two, because I still, even while daily witnessing our Democracy corrode from the inside out, I still feel all the wide-eyed Emersonian yearning I put in this song. I still believe every word of it. I don’t know what I would do or who I would be if I didn’t.

Heritability.

This started out as a comment on a friend’s Facebook post about The Inheritance, the new 7-hour gay history play on Broadway that my husband and I saw this month (part one a couple weeks ago, and part two early this week). It is, we’re told though I haven’t read the novel, very loosely adapted from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. If you pay attention to theater news or gay news or both, you have probably heard about this play, or will soon. The Broadway production is still in previews but is opening soon.

You should see it, if theater or history or literature is your thing. It’s sprawling and fascinating. There’s a lot to chew on, and I know responses are and will be all over the place, but I will say this by way of recommendation: audience members all around us were sobbing through much of it and gave it a real standing ovation, like the old-fashioned kind that happens spontaneously instead of just “oh, all right I guess I’ll stand since I can’t see through the people in front of me.”

I'm not going to get into a big critique of the show. But gay “scholar me” got the better of “politic theater professional me,” and I will share one thought because it’s stuck in my craw:

There is a scene, a moment, late in the play — I don’t think this is a spoiler really, but if you plan to go, and you don’t want to know ANYTHING before you see it, this is your alert — which reenacts an anecdote Forster related in a letter, the text of which is in the graphic above. This scene, Forster’s telling of it, is practically scriptural. It’s like a station of the cross on the way to 20th century gay history, literature, culture. Without this moment, we would have nothing. If you care about these things, you know this story. I’m especially attuned to it right now because I use it in the new piece I’m working on. Here’s my draft text, from a line delivered by one of the characters in my show:

“The novelist E.M. Forster, in 1912, visited Edward Carpenter, the Victorian socialist, nudist, feminist, vegetarian, sandal-maker, and open homosexual and his working-class lover, George Merrill, at their cottage in rural Northern England, a pilgrimage that was made for decades by artists and radicals, writers and streams of curious young men. Forster wrote in a letter that, during a visit, ‘George Merrill — touched my backside — gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought.’ When Forster got home, he wrote the first gay novel, Maurice.”

But in The Inheritance, Merrill does not touch Forster gently on the small of his back, he grabs a handful of his ass and leers. A light touch on the small of the back is incredibly erotic but also tender. It is very different from a frank sexual come-on. The subtlety of the touch is what makes this seminal moment so powerful. If Merrill had just stuck his hand in Forster's crack, would Forster have suddenly and completely understood the connection between desire and love — would he have had the sudden insight that physical intimacy between men is not just illicit lust but something deep, essential, holy — that led him to write Maurice, a radically new kind of gay story that ends happily for the two lovers?

So okay, I will admit that, of course, one reason I’m so worked up about this is that another playwright beat me to my thing. But mostly I’m shocked that he got it so wrong, in a play that is explicitly ABOUT history and literature and the transmission of culture.

The Rose Tattoo

I saw the Roundabout’s production of The Rose Tattoo yesterday. If you ever thought of The Rose Tattoo as minor Tennessee Williams, this production will disabuse you of that notion. It’s gorgeous, tense, funny, sexy, heartbreaking, chilling. I loved everything about it. Marisa Tomei will knock your socks off.

Seeing it on Columbus Day weekend heightened the immigration politics in the play for me. It's set in a community of Italian immigrants on the Gulf Coast in the 1950s. There aren’t many white people in the story, but the ones there are don’t much like or respect the Italians.

There's a character called The Strega (the witch) who lives next door. I don’t know if Williams specifies her ethnicity in the text, but in this production she’s clearly a white lady in contrast to the Italian-Americans at the center of the story. The Strega mostly lurks in the periphery, but from time to time she steps out and addresses the audience with bigoted comments on the main action. The audience we saw it with laughed with her. Not at her. Their laughter seemed to me to indicate clear identification with The Strega’s view. (Were the character Italian, her comments would of course sound very different, and mean something different, in that context.)

It almost felt like a test. The character is played by Constance Shulman (my husband tells me she’s well known from Orange Is The New Black) who delivers these lines with sharp comic timing, so you know they’re jokes, but they seem to have no other content besides ridicule. They’re only funny if you find Italians laughable.

If it was a test, the audience failed it. Their laughter was shocking and creepy.

It's National Coming Out Day.

Steven and Eduardo, summer 1983, camping near Phoenicia, New York.

This is an excerpt from Jack, the piece I’m working on:

“Here’s something on the reliability of memory, on how stories get told, and on whether or not they are true and whether or not it matters: after two years in New York, broke and not sure what to do anymore, I decided to return to Greencastle, live with my parents, and attend DePauw University long enough to finish an undergraduate degree. I was 22. But that summer, two months before I was to leave New York, I fell in love with a boy, Eduardo. This was the summer of 1983. In the fall, I brought Eduardo home to Indiana to meet my family. Both Eduardo and I had bleached our hair platinum blond and wore oversized Bermuda shorts and black boots. We looked like every other kid in the East Village that summer. But this was Indiana. I hadn’t yet told my parents I was gay. The bus dropped us off in front of the Greyhound station, which was at Marvin’s Pizza Place but not the old Marvin’s, which had been torn down. There was a new building on the same site and it doubled as the bus station. Eduardo and I went straight to the library a few blocks away to meet my mother who would drive us home. Our appearance there made a stir. A janitor at the library taunted my mother about her queer son, she cried that night and pleaded with me to cut my hair. I did. For her. A few days later, Eduardo went back to New York, and I remember waiting with him for the bus at dawn on a bench in front of Marvin’s, the smell of his shoulder, how sad I was. That’s my coming out story. My mother tells a different coming out story that takes place four years earlier during my first visit home my freshman year of college in Ohio. She and I and Dad are having lunch at Moore’s Bar downtown on the courthouse square, where they served, where they still serve, the best tenderloin sandwiches in town. Mom says I told them I was gay that day over lunch and my father told me about his father, Ed, and told me that it was fine that I was gay, that they knew already, but to be careful because there are men who will hurt you if they find out. I have no recollection of having said anything about being gay that day, but I had pierced my left ear and I remember how strongly Mom disapproved. In my mother’s version of my coming out story, which I don’t remember, there is a conversation where I say the words, ‘I’m gay.’ In mine, there is not.”

John Addington Symonds, 1840 – 1893.

Tomorrow is the birthday of John Addington Symonds. I'm sure I've gone on about him here before so I won't again. To oversimplify, when we look at the history of the "modern lgbt rights movement," all roads lead back to a handful of guys, mostly English, in the second half of the 19th century, one of whom (and for my money the most remarkable) is John Addington Symonds.

Most of Symonds’s personal papers were burned after his death by his biographer. You might or might not be surprised how often that happened. Homophobia is a forest fire raging through gay history. Vast fields of research are just smoke and cinders now. But, incredibly, Symonds autobiography survived and was published in the 1980s as “The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds.” It’s quite a read.

We stand on awesome shoulders.

Correction.

So the joke or the stereotype or whatever is that people curate what they share on social media to make their lives look full of love and fun and cake and beautiful things for which they are daily grateful, with the intention of making their friends envious, and I always kind of thought, Well, i don’t do that. I share everything.

But of course, I do, I mean, the good stuff is the stuff you want to tell people about. I don’t feel like my intention is to arouse envy, but I’m sure somewhere in the back of my mind I’m trying to present my life as enviable.

Yesterday I posted a picture of beautiful flowers I had just planted and a sweet memory that they evoked, and later I posted a brag photo of the pizza I’d just pulled out of the oven because I thought it looked gorgeous and I was proud of it. There was nothing untrue about either of those photos or the moments associated with them. I do have a pretty good life that I love and I do put a certain amount of effort into noticing the good things and feeling grateful for them.

But that doesn’t mean most days there isn’t a parade of annoying shit going by, and I am easily irritated, easily hurt, given to complaining and bad moods that spiral downward quickly. So, in the spirit of telling the truth about my Sunday, or at least painting a more comprehensive picture, here’s the other stuff.

When I got up at 7 (I can’t sleep late even on the weekends, no matter how little sleep I’ve had), I opened the dishwasher to retrieve my favorite coffee cup ( a hand-painted mug I bought in Deruta on our first trip to Umbria 2 years ago), and the door fell off. I had turned on the dishwasher before I went to bed Saturday night, but all the dishes were still dirty.

(BACKGROUND: A few months ago, we couldn’t get the dishwasher door to shut, rendering it useless, so we bought a new one. But after 2 delivery attempts (the first time the cabinet needed to be modified before they could install it; the second time, we discovered that the new one plugged into a socket but the old one was hardwired so there was no outlet where we needed one), we pushed the old one back in and suddenly the door was shutting again, so we kept it.)

This time, though, the door completely came off the hinges. C and I are both avoiders when it comes to big household projects like this. Our deal roughly is that he has to go sit in an office all day, so I take care of the home stuff. Despite its evocation of a 1950s marriage, it’s a good arrangement, and it works well. I love the cooking, hate the cleaning, don’t mind the rest of it. He doesn’t necessarily love getting up at dawn and going to the office, but he has a job he’s good at that provides us with a comfortable life. But when it comes to tasks like figuring out how the fuck to get a new dishwasher installed, we’re both like “No, you’re the husband,” “No, YOU’RE the husband.”

So the first thing I got to do Sunday morning was pull all the dishes out of the broken machine and wash them in the sink like a normal 50s housewife. It was a LOT of dishes. It was steamy in the apartment because on Thursday when I was cleaning the house I decided to clean the kitchen grime out of the air conditioner. The previous owner of our apartment put a massive a.c. unit in our little kitchen, which is probably the worst place imaginable for a massive a.c. unit. (It’s meant to cool the whole apartment, so of course in order for it to be comfortable in the living room in August, the kitchen has to be as cold as a walk-in fridge.) Every time I use the stove I have to turn the a.c. off because it sucks the flame out from under the pan on the stove. And the cold air blows directly onto whatever you put on the counter. It’s a daily pain in my ass (as if summer isn’t annoying enough). Also it basically functions as a kitchen exhaust fan, and if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant kitchen you know how disgusting those get. So I pulled it apart, cleaned the grime out of every crevice I could get to, and ordered a new filter on Amazon, free overnight delivery. Thursday evening it was pretty cool out, so I figured we wouldn’t need the a.c. anyway.

Amazon sent a big box of paper cups instead of an a.c. filter. A weekend without a.c. is not the worst thing in the world, it would have been worse if it had been July, but it was uncomfortable. Our concrete and steel building heats up all day in the sun and stays warm, and it’s been muggy the last couple of days.

BUT, I turned that shit around. In the afternoon, I walked down to Trader Joe’s and bought red and gold chrysanthemums to plant and I planted them. I also picked up some nice cheese, and I made cocktails, and we had a Saturday happy hour on the balcony. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and I am grateful beyond words to have a small balcony where we can sit in the shade for a few minutes with flowers and cheese and a cocktail and my husband who tries so hard to keep me content and quite often succeeds.

And then I made a truly exceptional pizza that tasted every bit as great as it looked.

September.

I won’t recycle my 9/11 story today, I’ve shared it before, probably more than once, and today isn’t really the day on which people are most interested to hear about how I was, on September 11, 2001, too preoccupied with the disintegration of my own life to feel much about the attack on New York. But now, all these years later and people around me still feeling so very sad on this anniversary, I’m sadly grateful that I had no emotional resources at the time to allow me to take on the full force of the event. As years pass, it feels less like disassociation and more like equanimity.

However, I did recently, as I was transferring data to my new computer, rediscover these photos, and I want to share them. The first 3, taken on September 10, were shot in the state park near Ithaca, New York, where we were staying that week. The other two were taken several days later, from our van I believe in New Jersey across the river, probably somewhere on Route 1/9, on our way into the city to do a show at HERE. We’d been in touch by phone with a handful of close friends but really had no idea what to expect.

They would need helicopters.

One thing leads to another and I find myself this week transcribing and scanning manuscripts of my very early writing. There was a time, 1984 and thereabouts, when I thought I might write plays, or fiction, or something. Other than journals and fragments, what has survived is 1) a play called Helicopters Landing, which I would call the opus of my great early 20s disillusionment of love. At the time I abandoned it, I was preparing to make it a film, so the draft that survives has vestiges of its life as a play along with notes about shots and camera angles, etc. I left it behind, and my writing aspirations when I started to play in bands and learn to write songs. And 2) a handful of stories I was writing for pornography magazines, when porn was in magazines and they published erotic fiction. I think my scheme was that I would make a living at it — along with the manuscripts are letters from publishers with submission guidelines — but, at $100 a story, to pay the rent I would have had to work very much faster than I did. I put a lot of effort into this project but then abandoned it also. I got bogged down in revisions and re-typing and just couldn’t keep organized. This was 1991. I’m sure somebody somewhere had a little MacIntosh, but all I had was a manual typewriter. It was a beautiful machine and I love the look of the old typewritten pages, but every time you wanted to add a comma, you had to retype the whole fucking page.

Both the play and the story are saturated with my sense of my life, of myself, my aspirations and surroundings. Me. And for the most part, they are successful, as far as they go. They still do what I wanted them to do, have the same effect now as I thought they did then. Even the porn stories have an emotional atmosphere, a sense of complex interior lives, that I still try to bring to everything I create.

Soon, I’m going to add a section to my web site, an archive of old work, but for now, here are the first couple of pages of Helicopters Landing. Actually, it’s short, I’ll just upload the whole thing. Why not?

Carol Lynley.

The Poseidon Adventure is one of those movies that is easy to mock and over time becomes sort of the sum of the jokes about it and nobody really remembers, or cares to remember, the actual film. But I think it’s a great movie. Nonnie, the ship’s singer, is the character I identified with as a kid, and still do if I’m being honest. I used to refuse to believe that she didn’t actually sing The Morning After. I was convinced that there were two versions of the song, the radio hit sung by Maureen McGovern and then the recording in the film.

I didn’t know until later that Lynley had appeared many years earlier in the film adaptation of Blue Denim. (She had originated the role on Broadway.) I think Blue Denim must have been the first “serious” play I saw, at 13, a community theater production in Greencastle, Indiana, where my family had just moved. (Looking back it’s kind of astounding that they did this play, about teen pregnancy and abortion, in rural Indiana at that time. I don’t think they could do it there now without it becoming a big political shit show.)

I’m not sure why Carol Lynley’s career sort of trailed off, at such a young age, into guest spots on Fantasy Island. I think she was wonderful.

And I still can’t dislodge her from the song in my mind, despite how gorgeous Maureen McGovern sounds singing it.

Sweet Dreams, Rhoda.

The only item from my Valerie Harper collection I can’t put my fingers on this morning is a clipping from the Sunday Indianapolis Star, a column in the entertainment section where people wrote in to ask questions about their favorite celebrities. I wrote with a question about Valerie Harper and they printed my letter. I can’t remember the question or the answer off the top of my head. That clipping is around here somewhere!

But I was obsessed. I was 15.

My mom and I went to see this touring production and waited around after the show hoping to meet her. It was Mom and I and maybe 4 or 5 others, mostly older women as I remember, waiting in the house, and someone came out and brought us all backstage. We waited just offstage in the wings, surrounded by all that beautiful old hemp rigging, for quite a while until she and Anthony Zerbe appeared, all smiles, changed and out of makeup. They must have talked to us for a good half hour. They took a moment with each person there individually. When Zerbe found out I wanted to be an actor, he took me off to the side a bit and gave me a “don’t give up on your dreams” speech. I was practically vibrating.

This venue, Clowes Hall in Indianapolis, is the same theater where I saw the Broadway tour of A Chorus Line the following year (1977) on a Thespians trip. It’s still there, I think, still bringing in touring shows. In my memory it’s sacred ground.

This must have been during the third season of Rhoda because backstage after the show, one of the women who’d waited to see her said that she was heartbroken that Rhoda and Joe had separated and asked why they wold do that, and Harper said, “Marriage just wasn’t funny.”

I loved Mary, but I identified with Rhoda. I wanted so badly to be friends with her, or just to BE her. Much of what I think of as my taste or sensibility, my idea of what I wanted my life to be like, comes from being infatuated with Rhoda as a teenager: my obsession with New York before I’d ever been here, my lifelong love of bead curtains. A sense of the possibility that insecurity could be attractive if you were smart and funny.

Status Update.

I had a physical this week. I didn’t even know people still went to the doctor for a “physical,” but my new G.P. (actually he’s an N.P — can an N.P. be a G.P.?) suggested a few months ago when I was there getting the new shingles vaccine that I make an appointment for a physical and I finally got around to it. Mostly because I wanted to talk to him about my chronic daily heartburn and, again, about my sleeplessness.

My N.P. is a nice young man, spends more time at the gym than he probably needs to, and has a big bushy auburn beard and a Scottish name. The last time I saw him we sort of had words — I’d gone in for the second of two shingles vaccine shots and found out when I got there that they didn’t have the shot because there was a shortage. I was short with him (“you could have called me to let me know — the only reason I’m here is for that shot”) and he was short with me (“you’re not the only one — literally all day long everyone is asking me about this shot”), but a few minutes later I apologized and then he apologized, neither of us had been having a good day. So now I feel like we’re close.

In case you’re wondering what a 21st century physical consists of, they don’t do the turn your head and cough thing any more, but they do, at least in the case of MSM (men who have sex with men), a Pap smear in your butt. I am not lying. It involves a tool that looks for all intents and purposes to be a bottlebrush. The HPV virus can cause cancer in men, too, and this test checks for cell irregularities. (TMI? I used to overshare regularly in my blog years ago, but I got out of the habit for whatever reasons. This is nothing.) He said, “you don’t have to do it today if you want to think about it, but I will ask you again.” I told him that if he was going to make me do it, I wanted to get it over with.

It was extremely unpleasant. Since I am in a monogamous marriage, I do not have to have it done again. This is why we fought so hard for gay marriage.

On the way out, I had blood drawn. I don’t have the results of the bloodwork yet, but I know he’s just going to tell me I have high cholesterol, and I’m going to say “I know.” And he’s going to say, “I’d like to start you on statin drugs,” and I’m going to say, “Mm, I don’t think I want to do that.” (Funny, just now as I’m writing I received an email from my doctor’s office telling me my LDL is in the high range (207) where they recommend statins to reduce it.)

I have gained 20 pounds in the last couple years, which I already knew because I weigh myself compulsively, but now it’s in the official record, thanks.

This summer has been stacked with anxiety and disappointment, and I’ve been depressed. Or I should say more depressed than usual — I would probably describe my baseline state as “kinda sad.” So my N.P. is glad I joined a gym (it’ll help with the depression and sleeplessness, too) and he said I should cut down on drinking, also to help with both the weight gain and sleeplessness. He also told me that, to help with the heartburn, instead of wine, which is very acidic — he said, “I can’t even drink rosé anymore, it upsets my stomach!” — that I should maybe have a martini or a vodka on the rocks with dinner. Don’t you wish you had my N.P.? Also for the heartburn he referred me to a gastroenterologist who will do an endoscopy. (My only experience of endoscopies is from a dear friend who has a pre-cancerous condition in his esophagus and has to monitor it closely and my father who recently had a severely inflamed esophagus caused by a hiatal hernia. So obviously I’m a big fan of the endoscopy.)

I do feel better, more upbeat and energetic, since I’ve been doing cardio exercise nearly every day since last week. They always tell you that’ll be the case, but I thought it was just a way to get you to do it. I’m not so weighed down by the lack of sleep, and my hips are not feeling as stiff as they had been recently.

He suggested I try melatonin for sleep. I’ve taken it the last 3 nights and noticed no difference, but I’ll stay with it for a while. He also prescribed Zantac for my heartburn, and that has helped dramatically the last 2 days. I’ve always somewhat superstitiously resisted any medication I have to take daily. It just feels like the beginning of something I don’t want to start. But I’ve been taking Zyrtec every day for a couple years now for my respiratory allergies, because it helps. I guess the distinction in my mind is whether or not the benefit of a drug is immediate and tangible. For example, I don’t want to start taking statin drugs for my cholesterol because the benefits are far less clear.

So that’s the state of my 58-year-old self. I honestly never thought I’d live this long, but life does seem to generally get better as it goes along, so I don’t mind.

Dogs are really three-legged animals with a spare.

It’s August and a couple people I follow on Facebook are in Edinburgh doing shows in the Fringe Festival, posting photos and reviews and I’m filled with envy. Have you ever been? It’s such a beautiful city and a remarkable thing the festival, a solid month jammed to the gills with small theater productions, the streets crawling with artists and fans. It’s intense, overwhelming, the best thing ever.

I was there once, in 2002, with Y’all, at the end of Y’all. Y’all at that point was severely wounded but Edinburgh kind of put us out of our misery. Edinburgh took one look at us and said, “Why do you insist on prolonging this?”

Earlier that summer or spring, after 10 years, we had decided to let things wind down, only finish up the gigs we’d booked through the fall, and then take some time off. Our relationship was crumbling, or imploding, or maybe just evaporating, and the act — who knows which caused which — was floundering, artistically and in every other way.

A generous investor had financed our trip to Edinburgh and our show there. We booked a small theater, did our standard PR push, printed flyers and posters, ticked all the boxes. The show was an hour long, a version of what we’d been doing for years. The songs, the stories.

No one came. Not literally no one, but close. We were doing something like 6 or 7 shows a week for 4 weeks in a house that held probably 75 or less, and for most shows there were fewer than 10 people in the audience, and a handful we canceled altogether because the house was empty. Our rule was always that if there were fewer people in the audience than on stage, we could cancel. It was a two-person act.

Jay and I were Y’all, and we were in a relationship with a third partner for that last year, Roger. We were barely speaking. Other than showing up at the theater every day, the three of us spent most of our time alone. It wasn’t necessarily acrimonious, we just didn’t have the energy. One of my most vivid memories is playing a short set in a variety night at a club where acts performed to promote their shows, and the monitors had some kind of delay that threw us off. On a fast song, Jay was hearing the downbeat where I was hearing the upbeat and we knew we were out of phase but couldn’t recover, and probably because we just wanted it to be over, the tempo got faster and faster until we could barely strum so fast, and the half-drunk audience just looked puzzled. (The act either right before us or after, I can’t remember, was “Puppetry of the Penis,” which is exactly what it sounds like.)

It was during that month that we decided to end it even earlier than we’d planned. We’d do our gig in New York at Dixon Place in September and then play our farewell concert on the live radio show Bound for Glory in Ithaca. So that’s what we did.

Still I’m dying to go to Edinburgh for the festival. Who knows why I would want to return to the scene of such a sad episode of my life, but I crave it. Not the sadness, the theater festival.

Back then we blogged our travels (the word blog was not invented yet, but that’s what we were doing). i wanted to find an entry from our time in Scotland but it looks like we suspended it that month. But here’s an entry from just before we left, to give you an idea of the tenor of those times. It was heavy.

Helpful info: We’re in Ann Arbor Michigan. The producers of the benefit we’re performing in put us up in a house where the owners were away when we arrived. Roger’s dog, Knavin, had been hit by a car a few months earlier and had surgery to repair his leg. We thought he was healing well, but when he hopped out of the van at this house where we stayed, the metal pin holding his leg together snapped, and he was in excruciating pain. I think everything else probably makes sense in context.

Hey friends and family!

We're in Scotland, performing in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It's not as easy as we thought it would be to keep this diary up to date from here, so there won't be a new entry until we get back at the beginning of September. Just wanted to let you know that everyone is fine. Sorry to keep you hanging about Knavin. Roger got email from his mother a couple days ago to say that Knavin just had the staples out from his surgery and he's running around and playing and eating like a horse, or at least like a very hungry dog.

The entry below is from the week before the week we left. We'll post an account of our month in Scotland when we get back. Take care!

Diary in a Box, July 28, 2002
Ann Arbor, Michigan to Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin

Sunday, July 21

In an email, the producers of the benefit asked us what we eat for breakfast, and they stocked our hosts' kitchen with soy milk, Kashi, whole grain bread, honey, an assortment of good tea, veggie burgers, sprouts, and greens.

Our hosts left a note on the kitchen counter that said, "Please be at home! We'll see you Monday or Tuesday." I assumed these people had jobs they love and children they're proud of. Their walls are full of photos and the shelves are full of books: philosophy and religion, science fiction. A very old unabridged Webster's dictionary. The bed in the guest room was made with white cotton sheets and feather pillows. No air conditioning, box fans. The air is heavy with humidity, but not uncomfortable. The air moves. The house feels open. It feels like summer a long time ago, before I grew to hate the heat and humidity.

We drove to Pease Auditorium on the Eastern Michigan University campus at noon, parked, and went in the back door. We met Jeanne, one of the producers, backstage in a maze of hallways and stairs. She introduced us to her partner Pattie, the stage manager, Robin, and some of the other volunteers, and she showed us to our dressing room. A door opposite the green room led right onto the stage where the Chenille Sisters were doing a sound check.

Last March, a few days after we were booked at the Ark, a folk music venue in Ann Arbor that's been here since the mid-sixties and which we've been trying to get a gig at since the mid-nineties, Jeanne emailed me to ask if we would perform in a benefit concert she was producing in Ypsilanti, a small town that butts up against Ann Arbor. Back up a little further. Some time ago, I'm not sure how long, Ypsilanti passed a law that made it illegal to discriminate against gay people. A neighborly thing to do. The owner of Dominos Pizza, whose headquarters are in Ypsilanti, was inconvenienced that he wouldn't be allowed to discriminate against gay people, so he funded an effort to create a law saying that not only are all laws that forbid discrimination against gay people illegal, any such laws in the past and future are also illegal. This new law is on the ballot in the November election. The citizens of Ypsilanti will vote on it. Jeanne and two other women produced this benefit concert to raise money for the organization trying to inform people why it's important to vote no to the new law.

The benefit was called the "Love Makes a Family Concert," and it seemed the audience was comprised of families, people of all ages and kids. I think all the performers were local except us. Jeanne performed a set with her band first, then us. After intermission, the Chenille Sisters sang and last was LaRon Williams, a storyteller. At the end we all sang a song together. I don't remember the name of the songwriter or the song, but the message was that we're all one family regardless of our religion or ethnicity or personality.

We missed Jeanne's set because we were getting ready to go on, and we missed part of the Chenille Sisters set because we were wolfing down some backstage food that we'd abstained from before our performance. (We don't like to be full when we sing.) There were sandwiches and brownies and lemon bars, and some other bar cookies that tasted like pecan pie. We ran out to hear their last few songs, one of which was an elaborate number with hand props and choreography that hypnotized the half dozen kids who were standing at the foot of the stage.

We saw all of LaRon Williams' set. He sat and played a finger piano between his knees -- I didn't get a close look at it, but it sounded like a finger piano -- and shook some kind of beads wrapped around his ankles to create background music while he told stories. After hearing Jay's story about his Mamaw and the earthworms, LaRon changed the characters in one of his stories to earthworms and improvised, making necessary changes as he went along.

After the show we signed CDs and books and chatted with the Chenille Sisters who were doing the same. There was a reception afterwards a short drive away on the lawn of one of the campus buildings. When we got there a local politician was making a speech. It was muggy and we were tired. We sat down next to Jeanne and Pattie. Jeanne asked if we had plans for Monday. We didn't really, except to get Knavin to the vet. She offered to show us around town, "and if you'd like to get together and play some music, I'd love that." I took a deep breath and sighed, "Mm. Yeah..." She laughed, and I said, "I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to sound so unenthusiastic. We're just so tired. And we don't know what's going on with the dog."

On the way out, we met Robin coming in. She sat down on a low brick wall and wrote down the name of her vet, a friend who owns two clinics in town. While we were talking and she was writing, a fat squirrel ran up to where we were sitting and watched us. If one of us moved, he retreated a foot or two but came back. Robin didn't see the squirrel or ignored it, but it drew Jay's and my attention and it was hard to concentrate on what Robin was saying.

I was hungry when we got home, and after all that backstage sugar I was craving salad.. I found two hearts of romaine lettuce in the fridge, washed them, and tore them into pieces. I put the lettuce in a bowl with some olives, a handful of grated parmesan, and a can of chick peas. I made dressing with the juice of half a lemon, two cloves of garlic, pressed, and olive oil (double the lemon juice). It was a lot of salad, but that was dinner. Jay watched I Love Lucy on TV. Roger made pixie pouches and I wrote for a while in my journal and then read on the screened-in porch.

I'm reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. It's about a season he spent as a ranger in Arches National Park in southern Utah, what was then a remote spot, before the park was developed and, from Abbey's point of view, ruined. It's a pleasure to read because the prose is beautiful, and it's one of those books that seem to change the air or the light all around me because I've learned something new about something that's been right under my nose my whole life. It's one of Roger's favorite books. I thought I should read it now, in case he takes it with him when he goes.

Before I went to bed, I went back to my journal. I typed on the porch with all the lights off except the light from my computer screen. At first it was silent, but my ears adjusted to the quiet and I started to hear the sounds of this neighborhood at night. A baby crying, teenage girls laughing, the ringing thud of a basketball bouncing on concrete, a window sliding open close by, a fan humming next door, something rustling in the bushes a few feet away.

It was warmer than last night, but breezy. I brought a white cotton blanket and a pillow from the guest bedroom down to the porch and folded the blanket in half on the couch like a sleeping bag. It was almost one o'clock and the girls laughing and the basketball I'd heard before had stopped.

Monday, July 22

Last night I had a vision of myself happy and not famous. It shocked me. That can't be me, can it? I looked closer and it was. Me.

I was half awake when Roger came out to the porch carrying Knavin, set him down, and went back inside. Last night Roger told me he planned to get up at seven and call the veterinary clinic at eight when it opened. I thought, since Knavin is in pain, the vet would want to see him right away, so I assumed it must be some time between seven and eight. I dozed. Knavin whimpered. I woke up. I found yesterday that if I softly said, "Shhhh," Knavin would stop crying. I tried it. It worked. When he stopped crying, I fell asleep and stopped "Shhhh-ing." He started crying again and I woke up. And so on. I got up, folded the blanket and went inside.

Lying down I hadn't noticed how warm and humid it was. I broke out in a sweat from the small exertion of walking from the porch to the bathroom. Lately I'm in a constant state of shock and indignation about the weather.

Monday is Y'all business day. There's less and less business to do since fall is pretty much booked and we're not looking beyond that. I took a cold shower, turned on my computer, answered some emails. Ate a bowl of cereal, made coffee. Jay and Roger went to Sam's Club to buy printer cartridges. Roger is preparing a press mailing to the Northeast. He's been printing out press kits for three days. Over a hundred packages.

When the sky got dark and two big drops of rain smacked onto the skylight over the kitchen, I hoped for a pull-out-all-the-stops thunderstorm. An all day racket. I was in the mood for it. But a half hour of heavy rain, some thunder, and a hint of a cool, fragrant afternoon pleased me enough.

Jay and Roger took Knavin to the vet at a little after 4. I made another pot of coffee. Better use that half and half before it goes bad. I sat on the screened-in porch. A blue jay lives in the back yard. He makes a buzzing clicking sound like a cicada when he flies. Either that or there's a cicada here who buzzes and clicks when the blue jay flies.

The humidity rose again until I felt like my skin was gathering moisture just by moving through the room. And then another storm, this one longer, less thunder, more rain. I ran upstairs to shut windows but too late; the corner of the bed and the carpet in front of the window in the guest room were already soaked, and there was a puddle on the bathroom floor. Rain was blowing into the porch, but the couch on the inside wall against the house was dry. I sat there and watched water gush out of the drainpipe on the corner of the neighbor's house and then skip the pipe altogether and spill up over the gutter.

The house next door has the same wide green siding I remember on the house I was born in. It's the color of patinaed bronze. Yesterday I sat here and watched the neighbor scrape mud from a path along the garage with a pink plastic toy shovel and carry it slowly, one pink shovelful at a time, to a flower bed at the base of a tree at the back of the back yard. Back and forth for at least half an hour.

Jay and Roger and Knavin got back from the vet near seven o'clock and Jeanne and Pattie and then Ayron arrived a few minutes later. Knavin won't lose his leg after all. The doctor is going to put another steel plate on his bone. He'll go into the hospital on Tuesday and have the surgery on Wednesday.

Ayron took us out to dinner with Jeanne, Pattie, and Bill, a graduate student who was one of the technical staff for the benefit concert. Ayron drove us all, except Bill who met us there, to the restaurant in her van. It was raining hard. The restaurant, called Seva, reminded me of the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, the mother church of vegetarian cuisine, not just the menu but the decor, lots of unpainted wood. I had asparagus lasagna which was delicious but, as Pattie, who sat on my right and ordered the same thing, said, not lasagna. It was a thick layer of melted white cheese, a cheddary sauce under it, and under that a few thin stalks of asparagus, and not much pasta. I didn't pay attention to what everyone else ordered except Jay, who was on my left and had a burrito, but the plates were mostly clean when the waiter cleared them.

Someone asked, "Where are you headed from here?" This is the start of a conversation we've had many times in the last few weeks which goes something like this:

"We're playing in Chicago and northern Indiana and Wisconsin later this week."

"And then?" or sometimes just raised eyebrows and a nod.

"Then we're spending two days with Steven's family in Indiana. After that we're driving to Pennsylvania where we'll drop off the trailer at Roger's parents' house and fly to Scotland for the whole month of August.

Here we have a conversation about Scotland, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, how we got the gig, the folk festival we performed in last year on the Shetland Islands, etc.

"And in the fall we're touring the northeast, the southeast, and Texas, and then we're taking six months off."

I don't mean to say this conversation is tedious or unwelcome. I think the first questions that come to mind when people find out we live on the road are "where have you been?" and "where are you going from here?" We love sharing our experiences and plans. We write about them on the Internet for god's sake. But since we're with a new set of people every few days, there is some repetition in our conversations, and some of it gets to be almost rehearsed.

When we got back to the house where we're staying, the garage door was open, so we knew our hosts were home. We knocked on the front screen door. Cassie came to the door, wiping her mouth with a napkin. She and Ayron hugged, and Ayron introduced us. Cassie said, "Well, come in. We were just having our supper." They had driven all day from Maine where they were visiting family. Cassie's husband Corty and a friend, Martha, were at the table. Corty said, "Pull up a chair. Would you like a glass of wine?"

"That sounds great," I said. I think Roger and Jay passed.

Roger said, "I guess you met Knavin." (We'd left him sleeping on the porch when we went to dinner.)

Cassie said, "Yes. He's not doing too well huh?"

Roger told them the whole story. Cassie said, "You and Knavin can stay here as long as you need to."

I slept on the porch again. It rained hard all night.

Tuesday, July 23

Roger brought Knavin down to the porch early. Knavin's pain must be severe and constant. He hasn't stopped crying for more than a few minutes at a time since Sunday night. He circled and whimpered. I tried to sleep through it but couldn't so I got up.

The vet yesterday referred Knavin to a surgeon at a clinic about an hour away, near Detroit. Roger and Jay took Knavin there in the morning. Roger thought he would stay overnight and have the surgery Wednesday morning, but they were back a few hours later, with Knavin. It would cost over $100 for Knavin to stay at the clinic overnight, he would be in a strange place away from us, and they wouldn't be doing anything for him other than giving him pain medication that we could give him at home.

Knavin would, after all, have his leg amputated. The surgeon had given Roger two choices. She could repair Knavin's leg again with another steel plate and a bone graft. He would have to stay in a cage for three months to recover, and the low estimate was around $3,000. Or she could amputate his leg, he would heal in a few days, and the low estimate was around $1,800. The vet brought a dog, another lab, who had had a front leg amputated the day before, into the examining room to show Roger and Jay and Knavin how well he'd adjusted already. She said, "Dogs are really three-legged animals with a spare."

Knavin, despite his pain -- he cries with every breath -- has been sweet and steady, helping all of us through this.

We went to the Ark at 6 for a sound check. When we walked in, the room was dark except for stage lights, and quiet. Frank Goodman, our co-bill, met us back stage. He'd arrived early and finished his sound check. We did our sound check and found our dressing room next door to Frank's. Frank introduced us to his girlfriend, Annie Gallup, a singer/songwriter who lives here in Ann Arbor. Frank is from Nashville, but we never met him there.

By 7:45, the room seemed nearly full. The last Tuesday of every month at the Ark is "Take a Chance Tuesday." The Ark and a local booking agency sponsor the show. They present acts, like us, who don't have a following in the area. The concerts are free. The idea is that people might take a chance on an unknown act and the act has a chance to win over an audience that's predisposed to like their style of music. It seems to work. There was a good-sized crowd. Performing in that benefit on Sunday helped attendance too.

We heard bits and pieces of Frank's songs from backstage, but we were preparing for our performance so we didn't listen closely. (We've missed a lot of great live music while putting on our costumes.) The audience loved him and they were relaxed and happy when we got out there. They were a laughing crowd, loud howling, screaming, but listening. Linda and Herb, our friends from Estes Park, were in the front row. Linda's has business and family in this area and travels back and forth often. Ayron, Cassie, and Corty were behind them.

I don't remember what we had for lunch, but we had it at around noon. The day passed quickly and I didn't think to plan an early dinner or even a snack. I was famished by the time we started our set. So much so that I felt woozy about halfway through the first song, Fancy Pants, and my strumming arm felt like I was shaking a piece of rubber. I bounced back though. Sometimes extreme hunger can create a mix of relaxation and lightness of touch that makes for good performance energy. It worked Tuesday night. After the show, Roger, Jay, and I, and Bill went around the corner to the Ann Arbor Diner. Jay and Roger drove to Cassie and Corty's to check on Knavin and give him a pill. Bill and I went straight to the diner to wait.

I asked the waiter for a cup of decaf. She said, "It's instant and there are no refills. Do you still want it?"

"No, I'll have regular coffee."

When Jay and Roger got to Cassie and Corty's, they found Cassie and Martha and Ayron sitting with Knavin on the living room floor. Knavin was wrapped in blankets. While we were out Knavin had pushed the porch door open and wandered into the back yard. The door had shut behind him and he couldn't get back in. They found him lying in the wet grass shivering. Ayron heated some towels in the microwave and wrapped him up. He was snoring when Roger and Jay left.

Roger and I ate eggs and hippie hash (fried potatoes and vegetables) with toast. Jay had a Greek salad. Bill had steak and eggs. Jay and I had eaten at this smoky diner before. The first time was around 1995 when we planned a "Christmas in Indiana" tour which took us through New England and the northern Midwest in December. A blizzard followed us. Half the shows were canceled. I got the flu. We beat the storm to Ann Arbor and the weather was wintry but fine, but when we called the venue (I think it was a cafe called "Not a Cafe") for directions, they told us their sound system had been stolen the night before, so we didn't do that show either.

Wednesday, July 24

Corty and Cassie are early risers. Knavin was due at the clinic, over an hour away, at 9, so we got up at 6. Corty made scrambled eggs with cheese and chives, toast, and tea, and we all sat and ate together, except Roger who had no appetite.

At the clinic, there was another yellow lab in the waiting room. He growled and barked at Knavin. Knavin swung his tail back and forth and walked halfway to the dog to say hello but turned around and lay in front of the door, looking out. A few minutes later a technician came out. Roger asked her if he could speak to the surgeon before we left. She said she'd ask, and she led Knavin down a hallway and away. A woman in pink scrubs came out.

"Hi, I'm one of the technicians who'll be helping with the surgery today. You had a question?"

Roger said, "This may seem like an odd question, but I wanted to know if it would be possible to have the leg."

She opened her mouth, scrunched her forehead, closed her mouth.

Roger said, "I understand if it's not allowed, but I thought I'd ask."

"I don't think that's allowed. What we do is we send them to a crematorium. I can ask if the remains can be saved and sent back for you. I know they do that for people whose animals have died, but I don't know if they would do it for a leg."

"OK. Well, whatever you can do, I appreciate. Thank you."

"Someone will call when he's out of surgery."

All three of us took naps when we got home. When I woke up, Roger was typing and printing press kits at the dining table. Cassie told us she had a potluck dinner meeting at 6:30. They'd be using the porch, so we cleared our stuff from the table and couch out there, books, computers, some clothes.

Corty and the three of us were on our own for dinner. Just the guys. Corty made gin and tonics, and we sat in the living room and told family stories. Then Corty broiled a steak and sliced some mozzarella cheese. There were no tomatoes, so he sliced an avocado instead and arranged the slices on a plate with the cheese. Roger made pasta with butter, garlic, olives, and onions and a green salad, and he sliced a loaf of semolina bread.

After Cassie's meeting, her guests went home except Susan who is Martha's partner. Cassie asked Jay and me if we'd sing a song or two since Susan missed our show last night. Susan called Martha and told her to come over. We sang The Far Side Banks of Jordan, Don't Laugh, Bright Morning Stars. Roger insisted we sing The Baby Tree. Cassie got out copies of Rise Up Singing and we muddled through Moonshadow (the Cat Stevens song), Turn, Turn, Turn, and a few others.

Thursday, July 25

The trailer was parked at the curb across the street in front of Cassie and Corty's house, a fine place for it to sit until next Tuesday when Jay and I would be back to pick Roger up. But when we woke up Thursday morning, a road crew was laying asphalt on our side of the street, working their way toward us. The trailer would have to be moved so they could pave under it when they got to that side of the street. This side would be finished and the asphalt would be set enough to park the trailer on it in a few hours. We could move it while they were paving the strip down the middle of the street. But Jay and I had to leave sooner than that to get to Chicago and off the highway before rush hour.

Jay tried to back the trailer into Cassie and Corty's driveway but the hitch hit the concrete and would've dug a hole or torn the hitch off if we'd kept going up. The driveway isn't steep, but when there's an incline and then a level spot and then another incline (driveways in the city often slope up from the street to a level sidewalk and continue their grade on the other side), even if the grade is not steep, the hitch hits the ground.

Corty remembered that Chicago is on Central Time, so we got an extra hour. Cassie called her neighbor two doors down. The asphalt in front of her house was dry enough to support the trailer, so Jay moved it, we unhitched, and left for Chicago in plenty of time.

Jay switched back and forth between the alternative rock station and an oldies station. We passed a whitewashed panel truck converted into a camper. I thought of Fats Kaplin touring Europe with Tom Russell's band in a bread truck in the 80s. It was winter, and the band was lined up on a couch in the back of the truck with no heat and no seatbelts, just piles of blankets and coats. But when I looked over at the driver, he smiled and I thought, "You look happy. Can I have your life in January?"

"Amy" by Pure Prairie League came on the radio. A couple years ago, Fats was playing with the re-formed Pure Prairie League. Jay turned it up. A plastic grocery bag flew up over the car in front of the car in front of us, caught on the antenna on the car in front of us which shook it like a dog shakes a deflated basketball. The antenna released it and it sailed straight at us, then straight up, stalled, and spiraled over and behind us.

When we turned off the highway onto Lake Shore Drive, I called Dan on the cell phone. He said if we couldn't find a parking spot on the street, call him and he'd get us into the parking garage in his building. We did find a spot, right across the street. Dan lives on the block between Lake Shore Drive and the next street west, half a block from Lake Michigan.

Dan rode with us to the No Exit Cafe. He had a date, a woman he met on the Internet. I don't think he knew much about her appearance except that she was blond and small. He knew her name was Jo. Throughout our sound check and the opening act, every time the door opened all three of us turned and if it was a small woman or a blond woman we waited -- with expressions that we hoped said, "Jo?" -- for a sign. Twice, a woman smiled and walked toward our table, but as we all started to rise, she stopped short of us and hugged someone at the table in front of ours.

During our sound check, a black woman who struck me as conservatively dressed though I don't remember what she was wearing sat on a couch in front of the window, facing us. She wore glasses. She watched the whole thing, as engrossed as if it were the show, with a half-smile, "What is this?" look on her face. Believe me, I'm used to that look, but not when we're out of costume. I wonder what she was thinking? I didn't see her afterwards or I would have asked.

Scott Free, the host of what he called a "queer coffeehouse," sang three songs, anthems one, two, and three, he called them. After Scott, a writer read two or three short stories. I didn't listen closely. The settings were urban I think, fast-moving and densely populated.

Scott introduced us. The tables were full and people leaned against the bar opposite the stage, 30 people tops but it's nice to play to a full house even when it's small. While we'd been changing in the bathroom, Jo arrived. She was not blond, but she was small. She looked a little like Tori Amos, but smiled more. We did a 45-minute set, the same set we did at the Ark. Everyone faced us and listened. Piece of cake.

Jay and I and Dan and Jo went to the Heartland Cafe two blocks away for late dinner. Mostly vegetarian menu. I had a quesadilla with beans and cheese, avocado, greens, and tomatoes. Dan ordered a burrito, and Jay had a tostada. All the same stuff, just assembled differently. The Mexican entrees came with a choice of mashed potatoes or brown rice. I had potatoes, which were chunky and garlicky. Jo ordered an artichoke. She'd never eaten one before, and Jay demonstrated how to scrape the meat off the leaves with his teeth.

We all went back to Dan's apartment. This time we parked in the garage. The pipes running under the ceiling looked close to the roof of the van, but there were no signs prohibiting vans and parking garage ceilings always look closer than they are, so Jay drove in, slowly. When we passed under a garage door opener hanging from the ceiling, the roof made a soft kachunk sound like buckling metal. Jay looked up at an attendant standing 20 feet in front of us in the garage. He held up the back of his hand and wagged his fingers. Jay moved forward. A low scraping noise. Then we passed under a pipe. Another kachunk.

We went upstairs and watched a tape one of Dan's students had given him of Eddie Izzard. (Dan teaches acting students at DePaul University.) Very funny and smart and original. I was inspired and could tell that Jay was inspired. I thought, "Jay could do this. He could put together his stories and tell them in this style, this format, just stand in front of a crowd and talk." And I thought this is essentially what I want to do also. I want to include music, but I also want to tell stories alone on a stage, something along the lines of Laurie Anderson. And I don't know why I am so afraid sometimes because I have no doubt that what I have to say would be interesting, smart, and entertaining. I wouldn't take my material to comedy clubs. More likely to artsy venues, performance art places.

Friday, July 26

Dan took us to breakfast at a place called Orange. The staff were all showing their belly buttons, even the busboy. Dan said maybe their dryer was too hot. At the top of the menu it said, "If you want to build you own omelette, go to someplace with "Golden" or "Nugget" in the name. We don't do that here." There were 6 or 8 items on the menu. Jay had pancakes with berries, Dan had an omelette, and I had plain eggs with potatoes and toast.

I feel an infusion of energy here. I first felt this when I was a little boy and I'd visit my grandmother in Waukegan, Illinois. She lived downtown in an apartment. In the storefront of her building there was a candy store where she'd buy us bags of caramel corn. The Great Lakes Naval Base was in Waukegan and at night there were sailors in tight bell bottoms walking the streets in pairs and threes, some of them with girls on their arms. Grandma loved the city, the noise and people. In the morning she'd say, "Let's go out bumming," which was window shopping and lunch at "the dime store."

She told me that some people belong in the city, and I knew I was one of them. I couldn't wait to grow up and move to New York. I knew when I was 10 years old that I would live in New York. And I did love it there. But as soon as we left, and even more so when Jay and I left Nashville and started spending most of our time in nature, discovering real silence and open space and darkness, and I began to hear myself think, hear my own voice, I felt awake and whole. I thought I would never go back and live in a city again. Was that just the exhilaration that comes with a change? Was it no more than the feeling you get after you rearrange the furniture and you want to just sit and look at it, your whole new room? Would going back to the city be like rearranging the furniture again? Or would I lose that part of myself that flourishes in the silence?

Jay and I watched the last 15 minutes of the Eddie Izzard special, from the point where we'd started to doze off the night before. We left Chicago at 2:30. By 4 we were in Valparaiso. We killed 2 hours at a bookstore before we went to the Front Porch. Jane was sitting in her van eating a taco when we pulled into the parking lot behind the store.

Jay said, "Taco Bell?"

"No, Burger King. Two for 99 cents. They're really hot, which I like, but they're so hot, they make me sneeze."

"How's business?" Jay asked when we'd brought in our instruments and Jane was arranging folding chairs around the cafe tables which ring the small stage.

"Not good. A few months ago, we were talking about finding a way to end it gracefully. But things have picked up a little."

The Front Porch is a music store and a hub of creative activity in Valparaiso, Indiana, a small college town about an hour southeast of Chicago. They sell instruments, all kinds. They offer private and group lessons. (Jane said later when she was introducing us that over 400 students a week take lessons there.) And the basement is a coffeehouse-style venue. The best performers on the singer-songwriter circuit have played there since the early 90s when it opened. Jane introduces the acts and sells candy bars, little packages of cheese and crackers, coffee, and tea.

"I'm really looking forward to your music and your storytelling," Jane said. We've performed at the Front Porch a few times. We never have a very big crowd, but Chad, who does the booking, makes decisions based on the quality of the music, not the quantity of money. And Jane likes us.

Fourteen people came to the show. Two of them were fans from South Bend who travel to anywhere we play in northern Indiana. The others hadn't seen us before.

Jane arranged for us to sleep at her friend's house across the street. We usually stay at Jane's house but her son is visiting. We followed her home and she showed us into the guest room in her neighbor's house. I don't think anyone was home. I don't think anyone was home in the morning when we left either.

Saturday, July 27

It was raining hard when we woke up. We tip-toed out in case our hosts were sleeping. We knocked on Jane's porch door and walked in. Her daughter Ellie was in the kitchen and said hello. "My mother is getting dressed." Jane came down the stairs.

"Ellie is meeting a friend and they're going to Chicago for a concert. I need to drop her off at her friend's house. There are banana nut muffins in the oven. Eat slowly and I'll join you when I get back." She poured us over-sized mugs of coffee and she and Ellie vanished.

When Jane came back we talked about our plans. When we see people like Jane, whom we've known for years and whose interest in us has shaped our creative life and work, I want to tell them what's going on. But what is there to tell? The only certain plan we have is a plan to stop planning.

The country highways and even some of the freeways are flanked with tall stalks of Queen Anne's Lace. Unmowed fields are thick with it. Did you know that in the middle of each of those white lace umbrellas there is a single dark purple blossom? I like the landscape of southern Wisconsin more than any other I've been in. If I liked the climate as much, I wouldn't think twice about moving here.

Cafe Carpe opens at 5 and we pulled into town at 3. There was a sidewalk sale, so we parked and walked around downtown. All the stores had tables out front piled with things that wouldn't sell inside. It was all marked down enough to make us stop and look, but it was still a lot of stuff nobody needed or wanted. We passed Satchel, Bill and Kitty's son, walking with his friend Rob and stopped to talk. Bill and Kitty own Cafe Carpe.

When we got back to the van it was still only 4. Jay looked in the front window of the cafe. Bill was cooking and the door was unlocked, so we went in. We've played here twice before, and both Jay and I have written a lot about the place, so I won't write a lot now except to say that it's one on a list of many places, each unique but that all feel like home. Our first time here, it was December and snowy and we slept upstairs in one of several run-down rooms in a ramshackle apartment. Satchel used one of the rooms as a bedroom and band practice room. Bill and Kitty and Savannah, their daughter, were living across the street. Last summer when we were here, the upstairs was gutted and dusty with drywall and newly sanded floors. We changed amid the construction but we slept in our trailer at a campground a few miles away.

Bill said, "Have you been here since the upstairs was finished?"

"No."

"Well, come on up."

They moved some of the original walls and removed others to create an open living room and kitchen with a view through French doors of the river that runs behind the building, bathrooms, an office, and bedrooms. There was a weathered 2 by 6 across the outside of the French doors. Bill said there would be a deck there, but now it's a sheer drop-off to the back yard two stories down. Bill said, "Make yourself at home." Jay checked his email while I read.

We went downstairs at 5 and Bill made us dinner. Salads of mixed greens and vegetables with sauteed portobella mushrooms, garlic toast, and Caribbean-style vegetarian jambalaya -- Bill's recipe, with pineapple and coconut milk. After we'd eaten our salads, a man came in with a little boy maybe three or four years old. They sat next to us at the bar. Bill and Dennis, the waiter and bartender, knew this guy, a friend or regular customer. Dennis was telling him what was in the kitchen that wasn't on the menu. "We have jambalaya -- "

"Is it the real jambalaya or that girl jambalaya you had yesterday? I'm sorry. That stuff is for girls. What's it got in it? Like fruit or something? No thanks. There was this woman sitting here last night, and she asked about it and Bill brought some out for her to try to see if she liked it. I could tell by looking at her that she was the type who was going to like it. And she did."

The kitchen is at the end of the bar, and Bill had been listening. He brought our plates out to us and said, "Here's your vegetarian Caribbean-style jambalaya."

The guy slumped and blushed and said, "Oh my god. I can't believe it. I'm so embarrassed."

I said, "That's OK. We're vegetarians. We're used to people like you."

He said, "Oh god. I saw those empty plates and I thought you were done eating. I thought I was safe."

"Hey it's really OK."

He and his son got up and moved to a table.

No one came to the show. Well, not no one. Jay and I have a rule that we don't do the show if there are fewer people in the audience than on the stage. The room was empty at 8:15; the show was supposed to start at 8:30. We decided we wouldn't change into our costumes yet. We'd wait and see if anyone showed up. I wasn't optimistic. At 8:35, a man and a woman came in together, each holding a pint glass of beer. Jay and I were sitting in the stairwell next to the entrance to the listening room. They walked past us, sat down, and talked softly. At 8:50, Jay told Bill we were going to cancel the show. Bill said, "Yeah, let 'em off the hook."

I walked over to the waiting couple. "I'm sorry. We're not going to do the show tonight.

She said, "That would be really hard huh? To do a show for two people."

I said, "Yeah, for us and for you. I hope it wasn't too much trouble to get here. Did you come far?"

"He's from here. I'm from Waukesha."

The man looked past me into the middle of the room. He wanted out.

"Well, we really appreciate your coming. Sorry."

They stopped at the bar on the way out. Bill gave them their money back and chatted with them for a few minutes. Then they left.

I asked Dennis for a piece of carrot cake. Kitty makes it. She makes all the desserts I think. I have the recipe, but I haven't made it. I will as soon as I have a stationary kitchen with an oven. It's good. Jay sat down and had a piece of chocolate cake with cream cheese icing. It wasn't enough. I had a beer, a pint of a local amber ale. Jay had a pint of something darker, also local. A half hour later I was hungry again. Dennis said there was vegetarian pizza, two slices ready, just had to be warmed up. Bill makes small dense deep-dish pizzas in a rich pastry crust shaped like a bowl. The vegetarian version is stuffed with broccoli, zucchini, and onion. Before they heat it, they ladle homemade tomato sauce over the top. It's like a pizza/lasagna hybrid.

Savannah had a cold and wanted Kitty to sleep in her room with her. Bill made up his and Kitty's bed for Jay and me, and he slept on a cot in the laundry room.

Peace,
Steven