When do you know you're a show queen?

When you realize the music stuck in your head is underscoring for the transtion between "The Destruction" and the final reprise of the title song from Carrie.

(photo lifted from Carrie... A Fan's Site)

God bless Ann Miller: The week in revue

I guess I have a lot to catch up on. Last week was pretty rough. I had taken the muscle relaxers my doc prescribed for my headaches last Sunday and I was stoned off my ass on Monday. Could barely get any work done. So I stopped taking them.

Wednesday I was meeting with my boss and could barely concentrate. I was trying to fake it but eventually fessed up to the fact that I was having major difficulties processing any of the materials we were going over. He's an MD so we talked about probable causes. I tried to blame the muscle relaxers, but as soon as I heard myself say that the side effect was lasting three days after I took the last dose, I knew that it wasn't true. (Not that that can't happen, it just wasn't the case this time.) I ended up telling him about the other meds I'm on, something I try to avoid doing ever, but like I said, he's an MD, so I figured he'd at least approach the situation clinically, which I guess he did. He asked if I needed any time off, but that seemed silly to me at the time. The conversation then turned to whether my psychological irregularities were going to affect my performance here - he threw in some jazz about the most important thing being my my well-being but, while I'm sure he (thinks he) meant it, came across as lip service. He's very matter-of-fact. It's on the the things I like about him. There are a lot of things I like about him, which is its own sort of problem but I'll get ot that some other time. Maybe. He needed to hear that I was taking some kind of action to address the situation (not crazy about that phrasing, but I was desperate to avoid the word "issues") so I figured I'd better tell him about the other meds.

Okay so that was Wednesday. Thursday I made it downtown and felt awful as soon as I stepped off the train. But I figured , What the hell, I'm already here, so I went in to work. I surveyed my desk, contemplated all the work i had to get done and went home an hour after I arrived Slept until noon. I can't really explain what was wrong, I just felt crappy. The thing that bothers me the most is that Shelby was on vacation last week, so I didn't get to see him on Thursday and maybe the whole thing was psychosomatic. Later in the day I was in the mood for some gritty crime drama and got ready to watch Hardcore, which had just arrived via Netflix, but decided to call Annika first. We ended up giggling a lot, which left me in a better mood, so I watched On the Town instead.

Friday I went to work and the headache was back. But I was lucid again, so I stayed at work. I think I took some Vicodin, but can't remember for sure. Friday night was a movie night at Paul's. Lotsa fun but very few people showed up, despite the number of positive responses on the evite. It seriously pissed me off. He puts a lot of work into these nights and people just seemed to disregard it. Anyway, it was Cult Movies 101. Started with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which was pretty fucking awesome. Then a surprisingly good print of Todd Haynes's Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was also pretty fucking awesome. I had to bolt before Pink Flamingos. Just too damn tired.

That brings me up through Friday.

When Batman Was Gay

Really amazing article The Bilerico Project.

Much of it has to do with changing national mores and an evolving economic and social landscape. In this sense, Batman's story is a microcosm for what happened throughout the entire comic book industry during that period and, to a lesser extent, some of the changes that swept across the nation. One of the most important episodes in Batman's metamorphosis centered around the startling accusation that Batman and Robin were gay and might seed impressionable youths with homosexual fantasies. Silver Age Batman was indelibly shaped by the gendered expectations of the era and his failure to adhere to those expectations incited criticism, predictably, that called into question his sexual identity.

Possible spoiler alert: I skipped any paragraph that looked like it might possibly contain anything that may be construed as a spoiler for The Dark Knight, since I haven't seen it yet. So mybe they're there and maybe they ain't.

Complete article here.

Credit: towleroad

Thank you for being Sophia.

Estelle Getty

1923-2008

http://www.estellegetty.com/main.html

Only one woman was ever tough enough to play mother to both Harvey Fierstein and Beatrice Arthur.

Two of Sophia's finest moments:

I've Got the Pain (sans mambo)

I've been having headaches lately. Also slight dizzy spells, but those are nothing new (I'll probably explain why eventually). I've had these headaches before, a little over a year ago (or something). I don't know if they're stress-related or what, but my head was fucking killing me yesterday. They could be muscular. I've been mousing a lot lately and my right arm is pretty stiff, which could have work its way up along my neck (also stiff) to my head, but I don't know if the body actually works that way. I stayed home from work and by the afternoon was bored off my ass. I tried to do some stuff at my computer, but being at the computer way too long could be (and probably is) a big part of the problem.

I took Tylenol. I took Advil. I toox Excedrin Migraine. Nothing helped. I finally took a Vicodin and even that didn't do much. Mummy thought I was acting especially goofy on the phone last night, so I suppose I could have been on a Vicodin high, but I didn't feel high and - much worse - I was still in pain. Occasionally excruciating, but that could have been the episdode of Reba I watched (I was raised on marginal family sitcoms and wanted to reminisce).

Finally I took some Tylenol PM around nine, turned off the light at ten and proceeded to lay there, wide awake and in pain for at least two more hours. For some reason I came to work today and the sedative that did nothing for me last night maybe wore off about twenty minutes ago. And the earliest I can get in to see my doctor is Friday.

Music stuck in my head even though I'm not listening to anything: "Join the Circus"/Barnum, Original Broadway cast recording.

Quotable me: I'm not gay, I just like the taste of cock. - to a (non-sexual) chat room

My Weekend

Friday night I watched the first act of the 1983 Broadway revival of Mame, with Angela Lansbury. very good video for its age. A really splendid production that only lasted for a month and sent Lansbury off to Cabot Cove. I also spent a lot of that evening chatting. I'm trying to not write about my adventures in that chat room for a few reasons: my handle there links directly to this blog and I keep forgetting to change that; it just doesn't seem right to reveal the activities of an invite-only chat room; and, most important, the more I write about it, the more seriously I take it and the more seriously I take it, the more embedded I become in that particular microcosm. And I fucking hate microcosms.

Anyway, my whole point for bringing the chatting up is that I'm having difficulty with other gay men who seem to be much better at adulthood than I am. It brings out my insecurities - not hard to do, granted - which have been really hitting me hard this week. And they flared up again on Friday night over some nonsense that I can't even remember today. I needed a friend and luckily Annika was home. We ended up giggling a lot. We do that sometimes.

Oh, I also referred to the fact that I watch Family Guy. A chatter made a snide comment about the fact that I watch television and I told him to bite my shiny metal ass. Later it occurred to me that people who don't watch TV are probably not going to understand Futurama references, but that's his problem.

Just sort of hung out on Saturday. Spent a lot of time cataloguing cast recordings. Finished watching Mame and realized that the second act really devolves into drag queen camp but is still enormously enjoyable. Had dinner with Josh, who is moving to Vega$. Got home and watched Chicago.

Somehow Chicago has acquired the reputation as one of the less-worthy Oscar winners. Bollocks to that. It was a brilliant fucking musical then and it remains so. It actually looks better in retrospect, considering the stage musical adaptations that have come since: Rent's problems began with most of its cast being way too fucking old, but certainly don't end there. Dreamgirls's book scenes were woefully lacking the energy present in the musical numbers. Sweeney Todd had Helena Bonham Carter acting brilliantly but singing in head voice. I was disappointed in Hairspray, which was a great deal of fun, watered down the racial context of the stage musical, which really watered it down from John Waters's original film. I think of all of those films as missed opportunities, which makes Chicago all the more remarkable, even with its occasional overzealous editing.

Yesterday was just lovely. My friend John split up with his partner earlier this year and they had season tickets to everything. So he took me to see Ain't Misbehavin' at the Goodman and it was outstanding. The original cast album of the show is easily the most played album in my entire collection, and that's saying something. I've listened to it hundreds of times and have never gotten sick of it. I brought it with me to work at the Alley and even they loved it.

John is the biggest stud I've ever met. I don't know anyone who gets laid as often as he does. It's mind-boggling. We couldn't do anything after the show because he had to go meet up with someone else. He's hooking up with two guys from Cypress tonight that he spent part of the weekend with. Crazy.

(And yes. We do.)

Will they all be showtunes?

Pick an Album for Every year You've Been Alive (or, This Oughta Kill Some Time)

A new meme from The AV Club:

You're supposed to pick a favorite album for each year you've been alive. You can pick a record based on what you like now, or what you would havem picked that year assuming you were old enough to care.

Your undoubtedly incomplete reference guide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_music

You can also go to castalbum.org (http://www.castalbums.org/recordings/?date=1976&page=1) and just change the year as needed.

I was gonna keep this private until I finished, but I may save it publicly for the hell of it.

1976: Pacific Overtures (Original Broadway cast recording)

1977: Annie (Original Broadway cast recording)

1978: Ain't Misbehavin' (Original Broadway cast recording)

1979 (tie): Evita (Premiere American recording)
1979 (tie): Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Original Broadway cast recording).

1980: 42nd Street (Original Broadway cast recording)

1981: Merrily We Roll Along (Original Broadway cast recording)

1982: Pac-Man Fever (Buckner & Garcia)

1983: My One and Only (Original Broadway cast recording)

1984: Sunday in the Park with George (Original Broadway cast recording)

1985: Theatre of Pain (Mötley Crüe)

1986 (at the time): The Phantom of the Opera (Original London cast recording)
1986 (in retrospect): True Blue (Madonna)

1987: Into the Woods (Original Broadway cast recording)

1988: The Premiere Collection: The Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Compilation)

1989: Batman (Prince)

1990: I'm Breathess (Madonna)

1991: Beauty and the Beast (Soundtrack)

1992: Erotica (Madonna)

1993: Patti LuPone Live! (highlights)

1994: The Threepenny Opera (London Donmar Warehouse cast recording)

1995: Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette)

1996: Rent (Original Broadway cast recording)

1997: Much More (Betty Buckley)

1998: Ray of Light (Madonna)

1999: magnolia.: Music from the Motion Picture (Aimee Mann et al.)

2000: American III: Solitary Man (Johnny Cash)

2001: 42nd Street (Broadway revival cast)

2002: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling (Television soundtrack)

2003: Blackout (Dropkick Murphys)

2004: Fine and Dandy (Studio cast recording)

2005: The 25th Annual Putnam County Speling Bee (Original cast recording)

2006: See What I Wanna See (Original Off-Broadway cast recording)

2007: Legally Blonde (Original Broadway cast recording)

2008: South Pacific (Broadway revival cast recording)*
*This is the only 2008 album I've purchased this year and have actually listened to. I've heard a live boot of Adding Machine and suspect that I will love the album, but since I haven't actually heard the album, it seems unfair to add it to this list.

I was going to add some notes throughout, but decided to let the list stand on its own, with the exception of 2008. The difficult thing with the past few years is that most of the albums I buy have been around for a while. So far, my favorite acquisitions of 2008 is Diahann Carroll Sings Harold Arlen Songs (1957) and Alan Jay Lerner Revisited (1969). Also, much of what I listen to has not been commercially released, including one track of 2008's South Pacific.

On the way to work...

I've been making scads of acquaintences online lately, but most of them either live nowhere near Chicago or end up as really bad dates. So I was delighted this morning to see Red Glasses on the el. His name isn't Red Glasses, nor is that his handle. But he does wear red-framed glasses and that's how I recognized him. And we both watch House, so Red Glasses is like Cutthroat Bitch. Only nicer.

There's not much else to this story. We had a lovely chat until we got to my stop. He's a cutie but has a partner, which didn't bother me this morning as much as it has recently. It was just a nice way to start the day.

Music: "Blow a Fuse"/Betty Hutton (remade as "Oh So Quiet" by Bjork)

Did everyone else has a happy Passive-Aggressive Day?

So, after I wrote this post, mentioning the showtunes chat room in which I spend far too much time, I returned to said chat room, where the folowing exchange took place (in proper play format):

NOT ME

I thought you were going to bed.

ME

I was, but I did the dishes and blogged.

When I am in that chat room, my name links to this blog.

Idiot.

(Non-sexual) Things That Keep Me Awake at Night

The term, "the full monty" entered the American vernacular with the release of the film, The Full Monty.

In the world of the musical The Full Monty, that film does not exist. And yet, they use the term.

I like it when my paradoxes involve strippers.

This can't be good.

My mind has been all kinds of screwy lately. I've been way too honest with people, but that always been kind of a hallmark with me, so I can't really call that a symptom of anything. I have been especially needy and that really bothers me. I find myself telling people the kind of truths best saved for a diary (the paper kind you genuinely don't want others to see) in order to elicit a reaction and I'm settling for pity.

What the fuck, man?

I don't think I'm doing it consciously. Someone says something that prompts a response and I respond. It's just that my responses have been a little too revealing for my taste. The people in the showtunes chat rooom don't need to know that I have a worse track record than Shirley Devore.

What bothers me the most is that I'm recognizing behavior patterns from when I was in college. That's what I meant by the title of this post. I'm not friends with anyone I knew in college, by mutual decision on all sides. (I double-majored in Playwriting and Brooding) Granted, the friends I made in (no, that's not redundant, shut up) college were pretty fucking lousy but they were the only friends I had at the time and I needed them. Just as much as I need people now (and it don't feel so fuckin' lucky, Mr. Merrill). But I don't know how to need someone. I mean, the only time it's really acceptable to actually tell someone you need him is when you're physically impaired. But to be that emotionally naked and honest with another human being... how the fuck do you do that and then face that person the next day?

In the words of Amish Barbara Cook, "This is all very new to me."

Angst, etc.

This blog has been giving me angst lately.

Granted, as a full-blooded German Lutheran, I thrive on angst.

(Don't do that. No jokes. Or at least be funnier. )

See, I've been wanting to blog more lately. I don't know if it's a desire to write, a desire to express... who the hell am I kidding, it's because I just don't have anyone to talk to. I know that sounds sad and maybe it is sad - it sure as hell feels sad - but I'm not trying to elicit sympathy, just state a fact. I've never been especially popular and simply don't have many friends. And the ones I do have all have someone else. Not other friends. Boyfriends. Or husbands. Or wives. Some have children. And I don't. And I never have.

I mean, my God, the only person that I can completely count on is my shrink. Isn't that pathetic? That I have to pay someone to trust? And I can't exactly call him up whenever I need to hear a friendly voice. He has other patients and a life of his own. But where does that leave me?

I've been making more friends online lately, but none of them live anywhere near me and it just takes so long to break in someone new. The narcissism, the mood swings, the never-ending identity crises, the constant angst, the sarcasm, the insecurity - my God, the insecurity... I am not an easy pill to swallow and I constantly marvel at the tenacity of the people who put up with all my bullshit.

So why is my blog giving me angst - right. The point.

I had a different blog that I kept up pretty regularly for a couple of years. It started as a movie blog and as I became braver, it became more personal. I liked having the outlet. Only a few of my friends knew about it and it wasn't on a website known for blogging so I was able to maintain a modicum of anonymity. I'd kind of like to start that kind of blogging again and just sort of distance myself from it as the known contributor. But the url has been in my signature for ages - one of my initial goals for starting this blog was to develop some (undefined) stuff under my own name. And if I'm going to write very personally, I don't want people knowing who I am.

Because they judge you.

And because I want to write about people I know with the freedom of not worrying about hurting anyone's feelings.

And I'd like to add sex, which should be kept private anyway. (Not out of shame or prudence. It's just tacky.)

I probably shouldn't even post this, but what the hell. I've said all this to Paul already and I would say it to Annika and I'm pretty sure those are the only two reading.

I'm trying to throw a lyric in here. It just seems like it's needed. Usually when I'm all muddled like this, my unconscious develops its own soundtrack and starts throwing songs at me, but nothing's coming at the moment.

Fuck.

Between the One and Three There Is This YouTube Clip

Carol Channing.

Singing "That's How Young I Feel" from Mame.

On The Dean Martin Show.

With the cast if Seesaw.

Led by Tommy Tune.




God bless you, Otto Preminger.

Vitamin V

About a year or so ago, I started having tremendous headaches. (not migraines). I went to a doctor. he gave me Vicodin.

In February, I slipped and hit my head (I have no idea if I ever blogged about that) and my doctor gave me more Vicodin. I filled the prescription, but didn't really touch it, since I had some left over from before.

Yesterday and today the headaches have been back. I went to my stash and now I am off my ass.

Not much of an update, but who the fuck cares?

Showtunes of the Day:

Kurt Weill Revisted. (Just listened to Ann Miller sing and tap "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed")

Kurt Weill Revisited Vol. II.

(courtesy: Greg)