My father is on Facebook and it's making me really uncomfortable.  

I live in fear of the notification:

YOUR FATHER HAS SENT YOU A FRIEND REQUEST.

You have 0 friends in common.

Exactly.

It's not that there's anything on my page that's especially racy.  It's not that in real life we don't have a workable relationship.

This is a very specific sort of Baby Boomer/Gen X kind of dilemma/collision.  Can't we just share Bob Dylan?  

Thank you for being a genius.

1923-2008

 

I found out recently that I'm actually a man.  Not only that, I was once a boy too.  According to the Social Security Administration I have been an red blooded American male since 1985.  Before that I guess, the government didn't consider me period.

These days a kid is tagged immediately- that is to say, given a social security number right at birth- but back in the freewheeling 1970's in Maine, there wasn't a rush.  Parents were too busy composting, starting food coops, and reading Thoreau.  You got a card when you needed one.  I mean, for now, let's just weed the garden, shuck some corn,  and can preserves. 

For me, the necessity came when I spent my first seven minutes of fame in a Stephen King movie and thusly began my life as a taxpayer.

Social Security hasn't been easy to convince, by the way, that I'm a Ms.  A phone call, with my most sultry female voice didn't do it.  The operator laughed actually.  On the first trip to the main office in Brooklyn, where a young lady(ostensibly) ahead of me had a scalpel confiscated, I also failed.  Despite my utterly convincing breasts practically falling out of my most feminine summer dress, I didn't have proper documentation.  And though hoisting my tits onto the counter and pressing them against the bullet proof glass made the agent laugh, she won the Mark Twain Award:

"Honey, this is New York.  I've seen some really good work."

I'll be honest, in that moment, facing an in-person rejection of my sex, I started to panic slightly.  My mom is fairly famous for leaving out big details.  For instance, "Oh pumpkin, I'm sure I told you I was married before your father!"  I was too busy hyperventilating then to answer or to laugh now.

Could she have overlooked telling me?  Was there an accident during the circumcision?  Had I been born a true blue tranny and my parents had to make a sexual Sophie's choice?  My dad is Greek, was I the real life version of, MIDDLESEX?  My mom always had said she really wanted a girl first.  Had she been trying, albeit WASPily, to tell me something?  Omigod.  This explains everything about me.  No wonder I only have gay male friends.  I am a gay male.  No wonder I like wigs and to show my boobs in public.  I am a tranny. 

So instead of trusting my mother's insistence of my gender as female, I contacted the state of Maine directly for my birth certificate.  The good friendly folks at bureau of vital records thought my story was totally shelarious.  Who knew bureaucracy had such a sense of humor?

Social Security has since accepted the document as genuine (and my vagina valid), but my sex is still pending with the state of New York.  Stay tuned.

 

HOKEY POKEY: WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

What does it mean exactly when you're poked on Facebook?  I have enough trouble decoding people in real life and now this?  I phoned a wise friend in Los Angeles hoping he could help. He only said he wouldn't touch "the Facebook" with a virtual 10 foot pole, after the therapy bills he accrued from being a victim of Friendster. 

So, I got a little Nancy Drew/Lois Lane on it and went to the faceless Facebook information page to get an automated quote on the ambiguous virtual gesture.  Amazingly, there is a section dedicated to POKES and their meaning.  I guess I'm not the only one.  

Their explanation is equally esoteric:

A poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook.  When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose.  People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings.

Cool? Sure, if by cool you mean, horrible.   What is so awesome about things without specific purpose?  That is so my anti-narrative loving irony obsessed generation.  I spend every waking moment interpreting.  The last thing I need is to come up with more of my own meanings.  

To me the poke is inherently pervy and I welcome any and all definitions from you gentle reader, just pretty please, be specific.

IF A TREE FALLS IN THE MAINE WOODS

Maine is a strange place to be from.  Imagine growing up inside a Norman Rockwell painting, but styled by LL Bean.  It's monogrammed canvas tote bags and cross country skis, wild blueberries and bug spray.  It's sailboats, it's Christmas trees, it's softball games.  It's a wood burning stove, penny candy village store kind of existence.  

To live year round in Vacationland, to be a full time native in a seasonal state breeds a very specific sort.  There is a pride that comes with sticking out the brutal 9 month winter and a singular pleasure in rolling your eyes at the prissy out-of-towners come summer.  Now I am one of the prisses.

 The unofficial motto, found just over the Kittery Bridge upon entering the state says it all:

MAINE: THEY WAY LIFE SHOULD BE.  

Not that is or was, just that it should.  As a neurotic, allergic kid without an ounce of innate rusticness, comforted only by the thought of Greenwich Village, that notion threw me into a pint size existential crisis.  WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?

 The way life SHOULD be?  The way LIFE should be?  The way life should BE?  The question becomes a horrible method actor exercise. 

And sitting here at sunrise, on a perfectly New England dock, overlooking an equally ideal little lake, pondering the trip back to New York City, I'm still asking.

Why is it that New York City is so excruciatingly beautiful whenever I'm packing to leave?  

The sky today is that 9/11 terrorist blue, perhaps the most specific color of my lifetime.

And why does that last Tasti-D-Lite before the schlep to Penn Station, taste so much better than any of the other thousands I've had before?  This morning I had a large custom Peanut Butter with a Milky Weigh(yes, weigh not way) floater and devoured it as though it was my last meal on earth.  

It's true that the only way to live in NYC is to go away often, but I wish I could do it without leaving the Upper West Side.

Where are you now John Mark Karr?  

ALL YOU NEED IS LARRY KING LIVE

Ringo Starr was on Larry King Live last night.  I admit it, I'm huge into LK.  And while I'm being honest, I like Donny Deutch too.  And since we're now judging, I've been known to watch Tavis Smiley as well.

It was the single most depressing hour of television viewing since Girls Next Door (which I had just finished gagging through).  You know Girls I hope- the "reality" show shadowing the octogenarian nympho, Hugh Hefner, and his three live-in girlfriends, who's ages put together make them collectively still younger than him.  The episode followed the ladies trials and travails of making a workout video at the manse.  Quality stuff.

Back to Lare.  Ringo was on celebrating his 68th birthday.  It's not like he was ever the most understandable of Beatles, but he has gone from out-there-groovy to first-stage-dementia-loony.  It was funny and sad, sort of in the same way my great Uncle Yianni is prone to exclaiming(loudly and publicly), "Mamma Mia!" or to tell people, albeit politely, they are boring.  Ringo kept repeating, "Peace and Love".  He claimed the Fab Four inspired Cirque du Soleil show was amazing.  He even said he was happy that Yoko Ono called in to sing Happy Berf-day De-ah Rin-go.  Crazy time.  Even Larry was rolling his eyes.

It's just plain sad to see a Beatle get old. 

Bea is for Blogging!

THE PAN(GS)T SUIT

I'm having a really strong reaction to pantsuits.  It's when I see one, when someone mentions them, even when I think of the two-piecer, unprovoked.  

It began after the Patti Lupone dream.   Something about that nightmare- being beat down by a stage legend with rabies- left me feeling demoralized.  And when I feel hopeless, I go to the utterly more active emotion of anger.  And with no place to put my newly recycled rage, my brain made a non sequitur-ial jump to pantsuits.  I don't why this is, but it is.  

Perhaps I'm still mourning the loss of Yves Saint Laurent.  Maybe I'm reflecting on Hillary Clinton, or more precisely, having been battered all this past primary season with the same old dumb chauvinistic jibes at her fashion choices.   

Either way, it's time to get back into therapy. 

The definition of insanity is going to Herald Square over and over and expecting a different result.

-Albert Einstein

THE PATTI LUPONE PROPHECY

I had a dream, a dream about you baby.

It's gonna come true, baby.

They think that we're through...

GYPSY! The Musical

I had this horrible dream a couple nights ago, starring the Tony winning toast of New York, Patti Lupone.  It was the classic actor's nightmare- I had to go on last minute for Gypsy Rose Lee and didn't know the lines, couldn't remember if I knew how to sing, or how I had somehow ended up as an understudy for a Broadway musical in the first place.  To complicate things, instead of fessing up to the pitbullish stage manager demanding I go get fit for my costume, I decided I would fake it instead.  How hard could it be?  

And as is true with all my anxiety theatre dreams, I searched for a script backstage to learn the lines before curtain but it was too dark.  I'm too blind to find anything by the red lights that all actors nocturnal eyes have adapted to navigate "the wings".

I never have actor dreams when I'm actually doing a show in real life.  I dream of waitressing.  And likewise, if I'm waiting tables in real life, I toss and turn all night with visions of choking on stage.  It's classic transference.  There's probably some actor having it right now as I type.

But there's one way in which this dream was different.  After realizing there was no way I could pull off learning a play, numerous musical numbers, and various dance routines in 30 minutes, Patti Lupone appeared.  She was warming up- doing scales and stretching- saw that I was frantic, and asked, "What's up kid?", in that salty old NY stage actor way.  

Omigod, I thought Mama Rose is talking to me.  Evita just asked me a direct fucking question.  She looked more Italian up close somehow, older.  This is one of those weird disappointments, seeing a face up close that's meant to seen from the back of the house.

And maybe it was because I was starstruck, perhaps it was sheer admiration, or maybe I didn't want to ruin the show, I blurted out, half crying, 

"Patti," the P utterly popping in my ears, "Patti, I don't think I should be here.  To be honest, I have no idea how I got here.  I'm not prepared.  I don't know how this could have happened.  If you knew me at all, you'd know I'm the consummate profession-"

But before I could finish groveling, Ms. Lupone forcefully slammed me up against the wall.  Knocked the wind straight out of me.  I was more shocked by her superhuman strength, than being assaulted by Broadway star.

I don't remember her exact words, only that her verbal assault was even more powerful than her body check.  

I closed my eyes, prepared to take it.  She was right after all.  How dare I?  Who did I think I was?  Yes, Ms. Lupone, there were indeed thousands of girls ready to take my place.....

And here's the truly terrifying part, as I timidly opened my eyes with the  snarling Patti berating me, she was foaming at the mouth.  Completely rabid.

And that's where I decided to wake up.  It was one of those swimming through honey, trying to reach the surface for air kind of waking up panics.  And two days later, I'm still thinking about it.