S n a r k A t t a c k

Cover Me

The other night, still in SF, I walked down 17th from Castro. It's a particularly dark stretch of a fairly well-traveled street, and the darkness comes as a surprise.  One moment earlier you find yourself in the glare of one of the City's busiest intersections (and one of the best spots to get a cab), before the Twin Peaks Bar, known, unkindly, as the Glass Coffin, given its clientèle of silver-haired gay men sipping Irish coffees and looking out at the street.  Next you pass the card shop, a tanning salon (natch), a hair salon and then the apartment buildings which have the misfortune to be located a little too close to the bars of the Castro and whose doorways have proven irresistible to the bathroom-challenged.  Then you cross the short street, Hartford, when the light disappears. 

The two boys pulling a cart of groceries from Cala turned onto Hartford; I could hear their chatter slide off behind me to the right, the cart of paper towels bouncing up onto the curb.  And thought nothing of it.  It's an area that is lousy with multi-million dollar Victorians and cramped studios with four-digit rents and no parking and no pets allowed. 

It's also surprisingly seedy.  Meth and alcohol are doubtless to blame, and, in my less charitable moods I also blame the locals who are easy touches for the able-bodied twenty-somethings panhandling outside A.G. Ferrari and Cliff's Variety.  My liberal tendencies go down like a drunken trick whenever I see these kids who remind me too much of the Orinda and Moraga teens who hung out on Telegraph Avenue and begged for change when I was an undergrad at Cal, their clothes infinitely more expensive than mine.  I have less tolerance for them, addicted to pretense more than the beggars with real substance abuse problems.  Tina is rampant.  Tina is crystal meth for gays, even the name more fabulous than 'crank,' which was the name I grew up knowing.  Crank was the purview of the rural folk, cooked up readily and giving my father, the judge, no small degree of job security.  They kept coming, their teeth rotting out of their heads, their wild-eyed look not out of place in the basement of the Prado, all Goya and Bosch.  Painterly hells that seemed literally fantastic, but here they are, in front of you, begging for money, filthy and terrifying.

And numbing.  There are too many of them, these (not-so-transient) transients, to the point where I don't think most of us really see them anymore.  How else to explain that walking along the street, with its significant foot traffic, that I would be the only one to notice the man passed out on the staircase, his jeans around his ankles, his boxers around his knees?

I called 911 while walking to a brighter corner, passing a covered pickup truck where three men were drinking Sierra Nevadas, and made me feel like I'd walked in on their living room.  Then stood on the corner where a woman who appeared to be - and this may be uncharitable - a fag hag abandoned by her fag, stumbled into the side of the building, tried to play it off and then threw trash from her purse into the tree well across the sidewalk.  She gave me an evil look.

The 911 dispatcher asked me a thousand questions, each of them more detailed than the last, prompting me to walk back to look more closely at the guy, past the beer drinkers who watched, bemused.  Yes, he seems to be alive.  No, I can't tell how old he is.  No, I have no idea if he's been injured.  Yes, let me give you a painstaking description of the building since apparently the address is not enough.  Finally, I gave him my number and hung up, and headed home.  I climbed the stairs and paused to watch the paramedics go by, sirens blaring, feeling suddenly disgusted with myself.  My motivation, I realized, was not merely compassion for this helpless individual; I also just wanted the man gone. 

Ain't It Heavy

File under Obvious, but someone at the Chron noticed that lesbian-oriented businesses aren't doing so well.  They point towards the fact that lesbians are poorer and are more likely to have children than gay men are, but I don't think that's really it.  I think it's because lesbians hate amurka.  Oh, but I kid.   

My theory on why places called "Mama Bear" and magazines called "On Our Backs" failed?  Because their names are icky.  Seriously, these things just scream unshaven, man-hating dykes, and after college, I like to think most of us have graduated to bigger and better things.  What's the line?  "When I was a child I spake like a child..."  Well, when I was a baby dyke I thought my future was going to be a dark place filled with Lea DeLaria and the Indigo Girls.  Who knew that I could love the Pixies, cosmopolitans and have an unabashed crush on that Jonathan guy from Blow Out and still keep my lesbo creds?   And yet the retailers and club owners haven't kept up. 

Like our fellow same-sex-ophiles, we lesbians would also like to go out to nice places and buy shit we don't need.  Hell, the rumor is that los estraight folk like to go to nice places and buy shit they don't need.  But when you make it impossible to know where to go on any given night - if it's Friday, go to ___ Bar, unless it's a second Friday, in which case anyone who's anyone goes to ____ Cafe - don't be shocked if I can't be bothered to haul out my astrolabe (it only sounds dirty) and abacus to figure out where to go, and your bar goes tits up.

Ditto the buying of stuff.  Honey, I'd love to, but honestly - and I was thinking this last night as I was trying to go to sleep - there's nothing there for me to buy.  It's all either really girly, really old and/or expensive (et tu, Faconnable?) or it's frat boy wear.  There's no tomboy chic.  I mean, how many clever t-shirts can a person wear?   (On a side note, I think there's serious bank to be made by anyone who realizes that a LOT of very butch women are - how do you say? - fat.  Do we really need to see them all wearing men's t-shirts or Oxfords?  No.  Tightly-buttoned Oxfords over giant boobs are not attractive, regardless of sex.  Let's work on that.  Where's Santino when you really need him?)

The income is there; no one's figured out a way to tap into it.

And while I find her to be a pushy old bitty - causing me to emphatically unsubscribe from her exclamation point-infested email list - I do agree with Betty as quoted in the article:

"I think the word 'lesbian' itself is problematic. It's an old word loaded up with baggage from the '70s," said Betty Sullivan, whose Betty's List Web site is a resource for gay and lesbian events in the city. She said she prefers the label "women" to the "L" word.

However, this was followed up by this slap-the-forehead line:

The Dyke March, which usually draws tens of thousands of participants during Gay Pride Week, also avoids the lesbian label.

Sure, 'lesbian' is verboten.   But 'dyke'?  Totally kosher, bra.   

I Can't Give You Anything But Love

While back home - home-home, as opposed to SF-home, or LA-home, or my-friends'-spare-room-home - I found my old journal.  As Mom would say, Oh, LORDY.

Despite what you may think of me, what with all the blogging madness over the last few years, I've not been an avid chronicler of my day-to-day existence.  I am the person who loathes buying real, leather-bound journals because they're too pretty for scribbling in.  There's too much pressure.  Look, the spine's been hand-sewn and it has all this beautiful creamy paper and - what is this?  gold leaf?  Sigh.   I can't write about Dykes on Bikes or how the dog's just shat blood all over the carpet in this.   Instead, I tend to write in cheap spiral notebooks from Staples or Walgreens which I then promptly misplace.  Or file away.  Like I've said, I never actually lose anything - it just gets mislaid.  Which reminds me of a boy I once knew.  Anyway.  The journal.

The journal is from 1991.   Fifteen years ago.  Fifteen years and I don't even know who that girl was, or why she'd decide to commit to writing, uncharacteristically, in such a beautiful journal.  Until I started reading.  It was the year that I lost my uncle and my grandfather within a month of each other.  This is why I wrote.  Of those two events, this is what I remember, unaided:

Grandpa was 87 and just decided to stop eating.  When I asked him why, he told me, in Spanish, that he was tired and he was ready.  Later we took him to the hospital.  We wheeled him out in a wheelchair and he was wearing a full suit of pajamas.  Before we got him out the door, he insisted on his hat.  ?Donde 'sta mi sobrero?  Over and over, so I just remember him in his wheelchair, with the PJ's and wearing a brown fedora.  Fast forward:  10:45 pm on a Thursday night.  The hospital called.  He had died peacefully during a commercial break for L.A. Law.  Fast forward: the funeral.  Rainy.  Rainy and appropriate.  I think I read something for the service.  I don't remember what.  And then the food afterwards at the church, with most of the town in attendance.  Sra. Valles walking around with a clutch of her homemade flour tortillas, dispensing them like a crack dealer, only to those she deemed tortilla-worthy.  Psst, tortilla? she'd ask while lifting up a corner of the dishtowel keeping the tortillas warm.  Family got homemade. The rest of the congregation could eat store-bought.   I remember laughing a LOT about Grandpa.  I remember my uncle being there.  He looked sallow.

Fast forward.  My uncle's cancer that he'd staved off for years hit him with a vengeance, or he just finally let himself relax.  It felt like he'd been waiting until his father died, not wanting him to have to bury another child.  I remember he went to the hospital and seeing him once.  After that, my parents wouldn't let me.  He looked that bad apparently; we were that close.

Fast forward.  The funeral.  Mom insisted on a open casket, again.  For once I kept my mouth shut - if he looked so bad in the hospital...?  But she was defiant, "Moira, he looks good." I remember seeing his body.  Waxy.  Not good at all.  I remember crying so hard that I had to be helped out of the church.  I don't remember laughing at all after the service.

Then, the journal.  It was worse.  So much worse than I'd remembered.  But what strikes me is that what I wrote about was mostly administrative stuff: the deferrals on papers, the changing of grades, the trips home.  Like if I kept talking about the day-to-day business of life that I could just get over all of this death.

For weeks, that's all I wrote about - school, what major I'd choose and so forth.  But that summer, I finally had something to get my mind off of everything else.  That summer, I met someone.  That summer, I realized that I might just be gay.

Good lordy, indeed.   I kind of can't finish reading this.  Mostly because I know what comes next.  Maybe I'll give it another fifteen years.

The Drama You've Been Craving

Just when I think I'm not obsessive, it turns out I am.  A little.  Of course, when you're in the throes of your obsession, there's nothing 'little' about it.  Which is how I found myself pulling two all-nighters in a row without really meaning to.  It began with me deciding to do a quick clean-up of this thing I was writing.  You know, just give it another close read, brighten the corners and so on.  And then it was 2am. 

And then 4am.

And then 6.

I took a nap, went for a run and then - I did the same thing the next night.

But wait - there's more.  You see, it's not about the all-nighters or the adult-onset-OCD.  It's about me driving from LA to SF after two all-nighters.   Having done the drive a million times, I joke that I could do it in my sleep but frankly, I never thought I would actually do it. 

I do not remember the drive.  I do remember focusing so hard on staying awake, by playing really loud and upbeat music and by talking on the phone, everything and anything to maintain forward momentum.  Do not stop.  Keep the top spinning, Moira.  Move move move.

Incidentally, best stay awake music?  Fountains of Wayne and Jimmy Eat World.  Channel your inner frat boy, and ye shall stay awake for 386 miles, no problem.  (I ventured ever so briefly into Radiohead after seeing a few cars with 'Radiohead or Bust' scrawled on the window - from San Diego to Berkeley! - but I only had OK Computer and of that, you really can only listen to Paranoid Android as the rest of the album is far too atmospheric to keep the synapses firing madly alone I-5.  I digress.)   

The drive was (apparently) all well and good:  pass, signal, pass.  Focus.  Focus.  Focus.  All well and good, that is, until I stupidly 'fessed up to my mom that I was doing the drive on four hours' sleep and then she did that thing - that mom thing - where she let out a long worried sigh, a sigh which lasts for maybe one whole second and yet somehow manages to encapsulate a thousand years of maternal worry, the worry that I know will keep images of fiery wrecks, rain-swollen ditches, maniacal 18-wheel drivers and tire-blow-outs (all four tires!) cycling through her head until I call her to say that I've made it to my destination in one glorious piece.  Following the sigh, my mother did the unthinkable:  "What if you fall asleep?"  Oh.  No.  You do NOT introduce the idea of falling asleep to the person who is dedicating every available server to the one process of 'staying awake.'  The field must be clear, the counter must be wiped clean, the disk must be re-formatted - all must be about the Idea.  The Idea of Staying Awake. 

And so it was, sleep-deprived, that I made my way into SF for a weekend of Pride.  Cranky Friday night, and still exhausted Saturday, I didn't hit my stride until yesterday.  Honestly, I think next year I'm just going to forgo the parade and the civic center and just go directly to Zuni.  Zuni is, for the uninformed, where the lipstick lesbians all congregate post-parade and is, accordingly, the best place to find all the women you've ever dated or wanted to date or who've dated someone you had dated or who - well, you get the idea.  It's a beautiful disaster.  With cocktails. 

I'd write more but discretion being the better part of valor, blah blah.  (And my memory these days just isn't what it used to be.)  I will say that I did manage to dodge a few bullets over the course of the evening, at Zuni and later at the Cafe.  And that is a very good feeling indeed.  Talk about pride.

Miniature Disasters

The dog is wearing a pink lei made of nylon flowers.  The dog is ready for a luau and will wait patiently on the couch, making sure it doesn't suddenly fly away, until I deign to take her for a spin around the neighborhood.   She's good like that: ballast.  Ballasty.  Ballastronic.  Sometimes, when I sleep, she tries to sleep with me and stands on top of me, turning around until she discovers a position that will guarantee that I will lose all circulation in my legs, my dreams filled with images of me in a wheelchair, my legs reduced to nubs.  How did you lose the legs, people will ask, and I will describe a lei-wearing retriever determined to get comfortable.  I will then be put in a home.

I got the lei outside a bar in West Hollywood, this being my first stab at Pride in LA.  So here's the thing: the women in West Hollywood are much more attractive, on the whole, than they are in SF.  They are also ice-ice cold.  Impossible to talk to, period. I know what you're thinking:  that I was trying to get all sexy-sexy with them, but truth was I just wanted to be all friendly-like, in the way that's so nice about Pride: we're all in it together, etc.  Instead they made me feel, initially, like the Precious Moments figurine on a shelf full of Boba Fett action figures.  I felt naive and dumb, with only my big brown eyes to save me, not a jet pack to be found.  Of course, the boys could not have been sweeter, and I mean cute boys, not just the ones that were so fugly that no other boys will talk to them so they start talking to the lesbians.  (I feel like I give you so much insight into gay culture, people.)

So, I don't expect to post much over the next week or so as I am rapidly closing in on finishing this project of mine.  Funny thing about focusing on a writing project:  my eating and sleeping habits are completely destroyed.  For one, I get up at odd hours.  The other morning I awoke at 3:40, wide-awake.  Secondly, I eat weirdly.  I find booze completely unappealing, crave salty-salty things and am drinking crazy quantities of water.  With all the sodium and water, by next week I expect to look like a tick at a Sopranos BBQ.  (So much flesh, so many places to hide.)   

As Bad as I Wanna Be

Say what you will about Tahoe, it is a small town. Not small like the town I grew up in, but small enough where it's tough to get things done quickly. That's the price you pay - time. I read once about the big difference between being truly rich and merely rich is that the truly rich can pay to have anything done NOW, whereas everyone else has to wait before they can have their driveway redone with imported white pebbles that won't damage the tires on their Maybach. Plus if you're really, really rich, you can just have the servants lie down in the driveway and roll over them, being all soft and squishy which will just coddle the fine automobile. (I saw one once. It's like butter on four tires.)

Thus, living in a small town is like not having the big bucks because you have to wait for everything, which is why it took two weeks before I could have my car looked at by one of the five garages in town, all this due to the Check Engine light turning on right before Christmas and then later doing a disco/flashing thing which is like Defcon 2 or 3. This was later followed by a sputtering thing where the rally car got all herky-jerky which coincided with a lovely thing I like to call a Highly Suspicious Smell Which Heralds the Imminent Explosion of Your Car During Which Time You Will Be Immolated. In order not to be made into a Mexi-melt, I stayed at home, got some writing done, read a lot and then basically kept to myself.

Here's the thing. I am an introvert. I will go out with my friends and have a great time - not a shrinking violet or anything - but then after a couple of days of having dinner out, visiting with people and so forth - I need to come home and recharge my batteries. If I don't, Terrible Things Happen.

Here's the other thing I've discovered recently. When an introvert is left alone for too long, she becomes MORE introverted.

My god I need to get out and hang with people my own age. (I say 'my own age' because spending time with your parents invites its own species of disfunction which is not appropriate for discussion on any kind of website because one day - one day! - the nice orderly with some semblance of technical skills will help the old couple in the room at the end of the hall and he will print out every page of this blog and that is when I will get a phone call that will last several weeks and from which none of us will ever recover.)

What worries me - aside from that phone call - is that I like being alone. I like having my space and doing things the way I want. But I have to nip this trend in the bud, and cut my fingernails and take a shower so that is why I'm finally - finally! - heading down to LA this week. Oh, social contact! Come to me! Don't be scared! These bottles? Heh heh... Why they're full of, ahhhh, ginger ale...

I tease.

You see I am currently reeling from a series of betrayals. First it was that lovely JT Leroy being found out to be a fake, and then it was that spazzy James Frey being shown to be a Mister Pants-On-Fire which just goes to show that there is payback for never indenting your paragraphs. Apparently, everything my English teacher said was true. Given my penchant for never properly using quotations and overly capitalizing things (a la Christoper Robin), I know that I will contract the dropsy by the age of forty.

In other news, I know you want to hear all about the L Word which started its season this week. Here's the thing:

It's a train wreck of a show. Too often the storylines came and disappeared without resolution, apparently because they were able to get a high-profile cameo or two (and last year high-profile equaled Camryn Mannheim Steamroller, so that gives you an idea of what we're up against). Other times the stories are just ridiculous.

Somewhere, the head writer for Passions is going, Dial it back, girl!

I would gingerly venture to say that the casting of Margot Kidder as crazy Jenny's mother was inspired and now Margot can afford to add another room to her House of Kooky. I will give Crazy Jenny this: while everyone was out getting their teeth whitened and growing out their hair in the off season, Crazy Jenny was getting it done. Crazy Jenny did not dawdle. Crazy Jenny did not putter. No: Crazy Jenny found a skinny butch lesbian, in Skokie and she finished a novel. People, do you have any idea how rare skinny butches are? Really. Hats off to Jenny for that.

Oh, and here's the funny bit: the butch lesbian is named Moira. Thankfully she pronounces it Moy-Ra, which I do not, and her hair looks like shit. So we'll never be confused. And she's twelve. And she's super butch. (I don't even think I own flannel, except maybe ironically.)

But as I've said repeatedly before, the show may make us cringe and may do what the so-called Christian Right has failed to do (by filling us with self-loathing) but lesbians will watch. It's all we've got. Cue that maudlin k.d. lang song and play us out! What? Well, just pick one. Whaddaya mean you left it in the Subaru? Then play that Tegan & Sara weepfest! Can't find it? Oh, hell: "Okay, Sinead. Hit it."

Now, When You Say "Genuflect"...

I have this really hot cousin who's gay.

Actually, I have a few gay cousins but he's the one who, when he came to visit, got all the girls at the town swimming pool all hot and bothered and a-coming to call, which is country-speak for giggling on our doorstep as their hormones rendered them as mute as an Ellen Jamesian. The other gay cousins never had that effect on the locals. One of them could actually use an updated hairdo, now that I think of it, as she's got the same earth mother thing going on now that she did then, and this was - what? - 20 years ago. Here it is 2005 and she still looks like an extra from the Age of Aquarius.

This reminds me that one of the other gay cousins and I actually shared a hair salon for a few years though we never saw each other as we were on different hair cut cycles. He went to the guy on the other side of the mirror from my guy, Kenny. I know what you're thinking: Kenny, too, is gay. You hear "male hairdresser" and you just assume. You assume! But you just put your misconceptions away in that fanny pack of yours, Mildred, because Kenny was - and presumably still is - one hundred percent hetero-SEKS-shual. Which, in my book, meant he had to be extra good.

But as I was saying: hot gay cousin. So, hot gay cousin was a seminarian when he came out of the closet, and we all filed it under Not Terribly Surprising News. I was thinking about him when I learned that the Catholic Church is going to do the equivalent of nightly bed checks for its seminaries and try to weed out all the homos - even if they're celibate.

Here's what I don't get - as I was fighting for my eternal soul, I discovered that I could be as gay as I wanted to be, just so long as I didn't act on it where not acting on it equalled not having sex with a woman. I was presumably free to marry a man, thus ruining both his and my life, and then have children in a joyless orgasm-free marriage, drag my children to church every Sunday so they could learn that God hates them too and then pray every night that the Rapture comes so I could finally have some GODDAMNED PEACE AND QUIET.

And yet. It now appears that chaste seminarians will get the boot just for being gay. All I can think of is that if they do away with these guys, there'll be no one left to don the gaily colored robes, surrounded by widows - the original fag hags - and nuns, lesbians all. You can only imagine what sort of nasty tests the Vatican will devise to weed out the gays. Cue up the scene from In and Out where Kevin Kline's character attempts to butch up with a self-help tape:

"What a fabulous window treatment!"

"That was a trick!"

Typecast

Apparently unafraid that this blog will turn into nothing but a digest of television, parties and dogwalking, I will tell you that I am, at this very moment, watching Logo, the gay t.v. network. Well, the other gay t.v. network as I've given up on NBC and the animatronic Will & Grace, et al.

Logo gives me a Sarah McLachlan concert which I'm watching more out of curiosity than any real love of Sarah's music. I was a Sarah early-adopter, for what it's worth, and like any music that resonated with you at a particular time of your life, to listen to her now is to remember a time when I lived in Alexandria in a townhouse with two very dear friends who I wish I saw more of now, with whom I threw fabulous Cinco de Mayo, Halloween and Fourth of July parties, with whom I sat on the blue striped Ikea couch and drank fiendishly strong gin and tonics while enduring the wet heat of a Virginia summer, and with whom I trudged through the snow to the Hard Times Cafe on King Street for a steaming bowl of Cincinnati Red chili.

But now I'm just struck by the back-of-the-throat yowl of Sarah, and how her voice, while still gorgeous and distinct, no longer speaks to me, except as an aural version of the ten-year-old photograph stuck in a pile by the phone because I never was one for photo albums. I look and all I can think is: I looked like that? And then: that was me once.

But it doesn't mean that it wasn't awesome.

Because it was.

All That Plus Bearded Ladies

I came home yesterday afternoon to let the dog out and took the opportunity to wash my face (cherish your pores, ladies!) and to return a call from my parents.

Me: Hey, Dad, it's gay pride day here in San Francisco. I was in the Women's Motorcycle Contingent.
Dad: (long pause) Don't they just call that Dykes on Bikes?

This is what I get for trying to soft pedal my parents.

Indeed, this weekend was full of Gay Pride fun and hijinks for the whole family, especially if your family is partial to calling each other 'sweetie' and drinking tremendous quantities of vodka while wearing glitter. This Pride was the best I've ever had, partially because it started early for me, back on Tuesday with the premiere of the documentary I helped produce and direct, in the Frameline film festival. A sold out show, afterwards we retired to the 500 Club where, to my great relief, people said they liked it. I could tell that they weren't just being nice either because they're horrible liars and I was stone cold sober. (Until I was feted with Maker's Mark, which resulted me in forfeiting my 2005 Award for Awesome Enunciation, Northern California. It's a small award, I know, but dear to me especially following the mumbling debacle of 1989 when no one understood my salutatorian speech. It's the cutest little trophy too, what with - okay, the bronzed pair of lips is a little nasty looking, but A for Effort, eh?)

Friday was a lovely evening at 2223 with some friends where we discussed Tom Cruise losing his shit, later cleansing our palate with dancing at the Sound Factory, a monolithic labrynth of various rooms, hallways and bridges, all designed to keep me as far away as possible from a working toilet.

I'll spare you the blow by blow of the rest of the weekend, but suffice to say that out of some 60 hours of Pride in San Francisco, the absolute highlight was the ride from Market and Spear to Civic Center Plaza. Friends I know who've done the Dykes on Bikes bit tell me what a high it is, but I misunderstood and thought it was all about being on the bike, being surrounded by women on bikes and so forth, but really it's about seeing the tremendous number of people waving, smiling and who are simply just so happy to be there.

I also never once came close to falling off the back of the bike. Now you want to talk about pride...

Next week: Pie Charts

'Tis the season of Pride and that apparently means that every article in the Sunday New York Times must be all about the gays. Frankly, it was a little too gay, especially the infernal Sunday Styles section which did yet another pointless story that just went on and on and on and yet still has me thinking about it, if only because I want to know how on earth some freelance writer managed to pitch this fetid pool of pablum to a NYT editor before I realized that this section of the NYT is scientifically designed to be the section most likely pooped to. "We need light, dumb and quotable for our BM demographic," quoth the editors. "Give us pointless stories that allow us to use photos of hot celebrities and - and - and - a chart would be good too! Poopers love charts!" And thus the Sunday Styles section was born.

This week was all about the post-gay/post-metrosexual look. Let me sum up: straight men now dress better and man is it fucking with people's gaydar. (Apparently most people's gaydar was based on detecting whether the man's shirt was purchased at Old Navy or not.) They helpfully produced a chart because charts are fun. Nice, boring stuff to ooh and ahh over, while enjoying the pre-bathroom blowout Sunday blintzes. Or, you can see the real chart found on the lovely TMFTML that was ultimately ditched because it uses the word penis.

Oh, and speaking of gays, I have to say I admittedly found Mena Suvari's turn as Claire's lesbian love interest on the Eeyore-rific Six Feet Under to be less than compelling.

Well.

Perhaps I should revisit those eps, as they seem to have awakened Mena's inner k.d.

In movie news, my little documentary premieres tonight at the Frameline film festival and I'm pleased to say it's sold out. As this is the only scheduled screening, I can truthfully say that we sold out our initial run. We are insanely fancy that way. Also, one of the stars of the film has been publicizing the crap out of this, going so far as to make posters for the screening that I feel people may be disappointed to learn that Frameline had the audacity to lump our docu in with three lesser docus. Yes, people, you will have to sit through some crap film about female construction workers before we may all adjourn to the delightfully divy 500 Club for the after party. Patience, my poppets. I must admit I'm typically anxious - not that people won't like the flick, but that there will be some minor and yet annoying technical glitch that I will blame myself for. I think it's a recovering attorney thing - you're trained at law firms that no matter how obviously your secretary is to blame for some error, you, as the attorney, are ultimately at fault. While it's hardly my responsibility now to review everything my cohorts do, I will still feel responsible for any errors they make. Given that my title in the credits is apparently spelled "Execitive Director," you might understand why.