Look Ma No Hands

Mark and I saw Billy Elliot last week. The good Billy Elliot, not the Asian Billy Elliot , or the Mexican Billy Elliot , or the Italian one. No, we saw the Caucasian, American Billy Elliot as god intended. You see because the part is so arduous, they have four kids playing the title role of an English boy living in a dying coal town, and we lucked out and saw it with the race appropriate Billy. Now I am all for color blind casting, but within reason. You wouldn’t cast Whoopi Goldberg to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, and Britney Spears as Prissy, that just wouldn’t be right. Well maybe Britney as Prissy would be okay. Anyway, it was a great show, and the kid who played Billy was fantastic. In fact, it was so good Mark didn’t have to nudge me even once to keep me from nodding off.

Going to the theater is not one of my favorite things. Mostly I do it for Mark. Yes I enjoy it, but some of the inconveniences involved tend to put it down on my list of fun things. Half time, or intermission as they call it, is never long enough. The curtain comes down, the lights come up, and I race to the lobby where I need to make a snap decision. Do I go for the cocktail before the line gets too long, or the toilets before that line is out the door. This night I chose the toilets first.

As I scurry into the restroom there is one urinal available, which I quickly sidle up to. I don’t know if women have this problem, but I tend to be pee shy in public toilets, and if anything is out of place, everything locks down. After I unzipped and prepared to go, I noticed the guy next to me was reading a program at the urinal. It was when he stood there with one hand holding the program, and turned the page with the other hand that my urethra pinched shut, and everything was sent backwards up into my bladder. I don’t know what was going on down below, maybe he had a third hand or he was just one of those straight shooters, but I decided to go up to the bar, join the folks in line up there, and pray for a short second act.

Ravinia Smack Down

Last week we went to the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago to see Patti LuPone. Ravinia is sort of a Lollapalooza for gays and snooty rich people, except that instead of getting high on pot and being mashed together with a bunch of sweaty people, the nice folks sit in lawn chairs and sip wine by candle light. It’s all quite civilized.

Most people get to Ravinia early so that they can find a decent spot on the lawn to spread out their chairs and picnic blankets, and maybe even get a glimpse of the stage. Mark and I went early and got to the park two hours before the performance, where we procured a nice location on a small rise about a mile from the ’good’ lawn seats. I didn’t consider it that bad a spot because we had easy access to the toilets, and with the help of binoculars we could see the tops of the heads of the very last row of pavilion patrons, but not the actual stage.

By the time the show started all the lawn space had been taken up, and as we sat there watching the backs of the hundreds of people between us and the actual show, two mothers with two young girls came straggling up looking for a place to camp out. I pulled our picnic blanket aside and offered them a few feet of room when one of the little girls whined, “Is this where you’re going to put us mommy?”  Mommy immediately took the girl’s hand and escorted her away, to discipline her and tell her about manners I surmised. I apparently surmised wrong. A few minutes later she came skipping back with an ice cream cone, and after a few words back and forth she blurted out, while glaring over at me as if I were some kind of alien monster, “What? We’re not moving from this horrible spot?” Once again mommy took her by the hand and led her away. Probably to buy her a puppy and a new car.

My dad, Big Al, would have never stood for that kind of behavior. His discipline was swift and harsh. A quick flash of hand was all you saw before you were seeing stars. I know most people don’t approve of physical punishment and do the nicey nice things, like time out and bribery with an ice cream cone, but Big Al’s swift justice worked on me. A time out for Big Al was the time between when you acted like a little asshole, and the time he got his belt out. In fact, I knew enough not to even open my mouth like that little girl did. Of course that situation wouldn’t ever have come up when we were kids, because my dad would never have taken us to such a snooty place to begin with.

Photo Friday

Chandler goes to the big city.                                          "Nice skyline, ahhhhhhhhh, and I like the grass too."

Video Thursday

This is not a put on. This is really Mark driving the way he always drives. I have to admit, the longer we are in Chicago, the better he is driving. However, there are no hills, or curves in Chicago.

Pray for Titties

On our little drive up to Chicago I noticed something peculiar as we motored through Florida. Just north of Orlando we seemed to enter an alternate reality. At some point the Flag of the United States was no longer displayed, and in it’s place huge Confederate Stars and Bars waved from flag poles along the highway. We had driven north into the ‘South‘, where that word is not actually a direction on the map, but a state of mind. Albeit a confused state of mind.

Now you have to realize that this is my knee jerk opinion. This opinion is based solely on what I observed within eye-shot of the Interstate highway system that runs through the Confederate States of America. What I found is that southerners love Jesus in a very public, and scary sort of way, while at the same time they patronize titty bars, and love to blow up firecrackers. At least that’s the impression I got from the billboards along the highway. If I were to make an assumption about what they love the most based upon the number of billboards, I would say titties. Titties by a long shot, followed by a scary form of Christianity, with firecrackers running a distant third.

Oh, and there is one more thing I discovered about the south. They have very dirty bathrooms. Just ask Mark, he grabbed for a paper towel at a roadside gas station, and came up with a used baby diaper. We actually got into a fight about that one. He said it was my fault because I chose the gas station. Personally I don’t think we could have found one much cleaner than that. After all, if it’s clean enough to change the baby’s diaper it must be clean enough to take a leak.

Gods and Gas

I think my dog has a serious problem with religion. Why else would he always choose as his pooping spot of choice, church yards? Back home in Florida he always poops down the street at the hippie church, and now here in Chicago he has decided that the best, and most attractive plot of land to take a crap on is the front yard of the Buddhist Temple. It’s not like he occasionally poops at the church or the temple. He always and without deviation poops in front of the church and the temple, and nowhere else. I have noticed that the Buddhist temple has a large statue of a woman in front of it and people leave offerings below her. Today it was fruit, and the other day somebody left a six pack of bottled water at her feet. Maybe Chandler is just offering up his steaming pile of crap to the Hindu god.

Chandler’s first offering to that god, Sid Hasta La Vista, or whatever her name is, was huge. That’s because he hadn’t taken a poop for over forty eight hours, the entire length of our drive to Chicago. The McDonald’s hamburgers we fed him in the car probably didn't help things, and that brings up another subject, road food. Mark’s notion of our ride up north included stopping at quaint mom and pop roadside diners, and sampling the local fare. Although I had reservations about a gay black man and a gay white man sauntering into various diners across the deep south, it did seem intriguing. Sadly we didn’t get to see how the Klan lives up close, because the actual reality is that you can’t take a wild, eighty pound dog into such places. No, our dining experience was a series of McDonald’s drive thrus, all of very even quality, meaning they were quick, and greasy. A by product of this situation was a car full of dog and human gas which Mark insisted was all Chandler and me, but I know better. Mark has simply perfected the art of the silent killer.

The Long and Grinding Road

Almost every summer when we were kids, my dad would take a week of vacation, load his burgeoning brood into the station wagon, and take us to a lake in some exotic place such as Wisconsin, or Indiana. The weeks leading up to the trip were filled with increasing excitement as the big day of travel neared. It was not the prospect of swimming and fishing however, that excited me. Sure, watching my mom fry up the little fish we had caught earlier in the day, and then gagging on the pin sized bones when we ate them, was tons of fun, but I always found the long drive to get there much more entertaining. That was when we would see strange wildlife splattered across the pavement, and could listen to my dad's entire repertoire of cursing as he smooshed dead skunks under the tires.


It was those fond memories that caused me to agree when Mark suggested a road trip to Chicago this summer.
“We can take the dog with us, and we’ll be able to cart all the crap I buy back home in the car.”, Mark added.
He was very smart to put the dog part of his proposition ahead of the shopping part. He knows how I hate to leave Chandler when we travel. The only drawback I could see with his plan, was the fact that I don’t drive, and the guy who would be driving, Mark, is the worst driver on the planet Earth outside of a few Chinese people. Despite those obvious problems, the road trip was on. So this past week Mark, Chandler, and I piled into the car, along with enough luggage for Mark to live for a year, and drove to Chicago.

Riding with Mark is intense. He cannot navigate interstate highways unless they are in an arrow straight line. Curves make him go into a panic and slow down to a crawl. Now Florida wasn’t too much of a problem, but as we made our way through northern Georgia Mark would vacillate between hysteria, and intense anger at the highway designers who “Made these damn roads so goddamned curvy.”. I have to admit, at one point I did reach over and give him a knuckle rap against the side of his head because he tried to stop on the interstate while a semi truck was tailgating us. Mark’s driving is so erratic, and he screams and shrieks so often while driving, that I found I couldn’t get a moments rest. It was like I had driven the entire way, I was so exhausted from him waking me up. At least Chandler took it well. He slept almost the entire time in the back seat, oblivious to how near he had come to death.