"A Guest Post from My Pal Jim Who Grew Up in Wisconsin, Spent Many Years in Minnesota, and Now Lives in Palm Springs"

So, yes, the post below is the latest pinch hitting by my friend, Jim; in past times, he's also written about performing in GREASE and seeing Elizabeth Taylor. In this latest, he considers his move to California a couple of years back. Enjoy his musings, as I jet off to Colorado this weekend to help my sister organize her clutter! (I've been practicing a severe expression as I announce, "You don't need that. You don't need that either. Get rid of that. Take that one to the Goodwill. Burn that.")

My only addition to Jim's post are a few quotes about the phenomenon that is Governor Schwarzenegger's state:


“As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.”--Alison Lurie

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”--Edward Abbey

“Southern California, where the American Dream came too true”--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
-----------------------------------------------

"A View From the Porch"

It’s been two years and three months since I arrived in the desert. High time I wrote some thoughts about living here.

I’m sitting on what I’m going to start calling my “Writing Porch.” It’s one of three patios at my apartment. And I’m sitting in the sun, laptop on the table, and the sun is so bright the apple on the other side of the screen is showing through. Do you think I’ll write more if I call it the Writing Porch? Michael Chabon has a writing studio in his back yard. Just sayin’.

I’ve been such a crank lately, bitching over cocktails about everything from problems at work to my dismal love life. (No offense to the two guys who have dated me this month; not talking about you.) I better get some thoughts in about what is good about living in this beautiful area.

For the beauty of it, I will just give you this photograph.


There is little more beautiful than the view of snow from a distance.

(Photo by Tony DiSalvo)

Okay, just took off my shirt. (Take that Michael Chabon.) Yep, it’s warm here in Palm Springs. Eighty-five degrees on November 1st is, let’s just say, insane. In a nice way--not like Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, more like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Puerto Vallarta.

What’s really insane, in the way of ET having a frontal lobotomy against her wishes, is this place in the fracking summer. Alex: “June, July, and August.” Jim: “What are the best three reasons to be a teacher?” Not so much here. Three to four months of heat in the 120 degree range. It’s a dry heat my mother’s aunt! An oven’s an oven, sweeties.

Having lived in extreme cold, though, I can tell you this: extreme heat is more bearable. You can sit still on a hundred-degree day if you’re in the shade and drink a nice shandy. Outside. Then you can go into your air-conditioned apartment and watch Keith Olberman. Can’t do that in the tundra of Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Maine (other places I’ve live) when it’s 30 below. (Okay, you can watch Keith if you have cable, a hot toddy, and a snuggie.)

It’s no use, you northerners, saying how much you like the cold or value the Change of Seasons. You might as well say you enjoy the Change of Life. My stalwart brother even posted on Facebook the other day the opening line to “California Dreamin’”: “All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray.” I couldn’t help but reply that he knew where and how he could be safe and warm.


The view from my Writing Porch.

On the other hand is the bitching. A couple of years before I moved here, a friend talked about weekending in Palm Springs. Well, talked is a bit generous. He ranted: “There’s nothing to do there! There’s NOTHING to do there.” And he’s pretty much right. Sure, there’s hiking in the mountains, drinking in the bars. And tennis for those who play. And that Scottish game that takes up all that lovely parkland. But nightlife? Forget it. One museum: good. Movies: good. International Film Festival: two weeks in January.

There’s no one under sixty who is single (see above re: love life). Why even yesterday there was a rather fetching guy my age getting his haircut next to me. “I think he has a partner,” says my Guy with Scissors. Natch.

So we’re saved from boredom by our proximity to Los Angeles and the coast.

But Jeeves! I think my laptop’s overheating.

And did you see those mountains?
----------------------------------------------

Epilogue: just this week, Jim decided to start his own blog, Long Slow Distance. If you have a minute, please go visit him and his post at their new crib:

http://jimbergsblog.blogspot.com/

"Herein My Former Dean and Always Friend, Jim, Gives Me A Guest Blogger Assist During a Week Where I Might Lose My Mind Otherwise"


Sometimes helping a friend and engaging in public navel gazing are the same thing. In this case, I offered to write a guest blog for Jocelyn because I know she’s just started school, has all her junk all over the house, and can’t find her Triscuits.

Recently I was remembering an annoying woman I met in college, and how one particular branch of her annoying tree reminded me of the film Slumdog Millionaire.

Her name was Rachel Katz, and I use her real name, because I believe everyone googles themselves occasionally (or, in my case, daily) and should find their name somewhere unexpected. So, yes, Rachel, you were bright and funny and a good dancer, but you were also amazingly annoying. To me, anyway. I’m sure the rest of the cast of Grease that summer at the University of Wisconsin-Superior all loved you. (See, now Joce will get Google hits with many other types of searches.)

Rachel was dance captain of said musical, and I played one of the lesser greasers, Doody. I know; I have been typecast from the beginning as good boys, priests and whatnot. One reviewer, bless him, mentioned my “baby-faced Doody,” which is better than being a doody-faced baby anyday. I was twenty; I looked fifteen; I am now forty-five and look forty-five. (This is what forty-five looks like, as Gloria Steinem would say.)

I’m wearing my own clothes (second from left)! That may be Rachel Katz immediately behind me. Jocelyn's editorial: the gal in the middle looks like Susan Lucci to me; did Erica Caine get her start in Wisconsin musical theater?

One day in the green room a bunch of us were playing Trivial Pursuit. I don’t remember who else was there but probably Doug Ronning, our Danny, who I was crushing on since high school. We were all good in the entertainment category, natch, and it was a close game.

Rachel was in the habit of explaining why or how she knew every answer she got correct. “I only know that because when I was in the fifth grade my mother gave me a scarf that was this amazing color of orange and she told me that it was actually saffron, and it comes from the spice saffron, which is really expensive and you only need a little bit of it in the rice to make it saffron rice, and so now whenever I see that color I know that it’s actually saffron. Plus I really like Indian food, so…” (I’m sure she said “actually” a lot, and her explanations were invariably in the form of the run-on sentence.)

This went on for the entire game. “The only reason I know that is because I was in New York last year and toured the U.N. and so I met the ambassador from Swaziland who told me about the net worth of their exports. So…” I ground my teeth and tried to catch someone else’s eye to share my pain. I don’t think anyone else was irritated, which shows that I was a crank when I was twenty and that my irritability did not come on to me in middle age.

Even then I recognized Rachel’s mannerism as more of a nervous tick than anything else. It was probably a result of being a smart girl in school and trying to minimize that intelligence, making herself more ordinary as if to say, “I’m not smarter than you are really, I just know this because…” Sort of the way smart girls in the Midwest often end every sentence as if it is a question? With a little raise of the voice at the end? (“I know my paper is late? But my boyfriend is in jail? And my mom threw my dad out of the house? And my dad was my daycare provider? So…”)

Rachel had the opposite effect on me, however. Not only did the needless repetition ruin the fun of the game, the subtext of her remarks (the “I’m not smarter than you” part) came off to me as a slight dig at the rest of us, sounding more to me like “I am smarter than you and this is why.”

What does this have to do with Slumdog Millionaire? I’m just getting to that. You’ll recall that our slumdog, Jamal, is a contestant on the Indian version of the gameshow, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He’s condescended to (and worse) by the show’s host, who continues to refer to him as a Tea-Wallah. (You’ll have to google that one yourself, it’s fun.) The entire plot of the film is structured around Jamal’s memories: whenever he gets a question right, the film flashes back to his memories of (yep) why or how he knows that particular bit of information.

Thus we get thrilling, beautiful, horrific scenes of Jamal’s life, from swimming through a fecal swamp to get a glimpse of a matinee idol to scamming tourists (and stealing shoes) as a fake tour guide at the Taj Mahal. And he does all this in order to find Latika, whom he refers to as his destiny. “I went on the show because I thought she would be watching,” he says.

It’s a brilliant narrative move by screen writer Simon Beaufoy. One of those I-wish-I-had-thought-of-that moments. So I couldn’t help but wonder, what if I hadn’t just been annoyed by Rachel Katz’s stories but instead had seen them as a creative way to tell a story? Would I have developed my own version of Slumdog Millionaire? Okay, so mine wouldn’t have the lovely Dev Patel and Frieda Pinto, in her long saffron scarf, doing their Bollywood dance in a train station.

And I only know that because…

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3946185497/

"Twenty-Three Years and Thirteen Days"

In terms of female friendships, I have sixty-eleventeen inspirations but only three true Women of My Life. One of these three I met in 1985, in a dorm lounge, where she was being way too cute and cynical and cutting for her own good. Intimidated, I decided I didn't like her.

She kept being cute and cynical and cutting, however, and at some point, I realized I loved her. Eventually, I went with her to Ireland for a semester; I listened with her to The Pretenders; I cried with her under a sink; I stood up with her at her wedding; I learned new dimensions of pain and guilt from her during her divorce. Twenty-three years later, she can make me blow open a kidney with laughter and provide the comforting feeling that someone in the world knows everything about me and still doesn't make a citizen's arrest. She and I? Lifers.

This dearling gel, called Colleen, has spent the last few decades shedding her armour of cynicism and allowing kindness and vulnerability their rightful place.

She is so cool.

Who better, then, to relate a pivotal moment for the U.S., the moment when millions of citizens felt--hokey as it sounds--a renewed sense of possibility?

I refer, of course, to the recent presidential election. Colleen lives in Chicago with her beau, Tim, and threw her energy on election day towards hope. Of that historical day, in an historical place, she writes:

-----------------------------
I spent the afternoon of Nov. 4 curled up next to the elevator on the floor of the tiny lobby of a nondescript downtown Chicago office building, peering at a list of Pennsylvania voters, clutching my iPhone in one hand and plugging my ear with the other to block out the cheery voices of a dozen others who'd fled the steamy warren of basement offices crammed full of Obama campaign staff and eager volunteers. I left lots of cheery voice mails reminding people to vote. A few of the people who picked up the phone were curt; two hung up on me as soon as I said "I'm a volunteer with the Obama campaign" (which I found thrilling to say), but most were delighted to tell me that they'd voted for Obama.

Making calls did what I hoped it would: distracted me from my anxious, audibly-whamming heart, and made me feel like I'd done some little thing besides sending money to fight the good fight. I hopped the El to Tim's office at 5:00. We sat at his desk eating takeout sushi and obsessively refreshing news Web sites until we joined the river of people heading to Grant Park around 7:15.

It's impossible to be a misanthrope in the midst of an enormous, good-natured crowd. Nobody shoved, nobody was drunk or obnoxious, nobody bitched about the long lines for the metal detectors, everybody joshed good-naturedly with the cops, everybody was smiling and laughing. As the field slowly filled, people were glued to the Jumbotron screen showing CNN. (Seriously, Bill Bennett, shut your giant head the fuck up. Best comment of the night, from an incredulous James Carville: "After the last eight years, I hardly think y'all have any authority to tell Barack Obama how to govern.") Roars went up every time CNN projected a state for Obama. Boos for each state called for McCain. Roars whenever the screen showed the live feed from the park. That's us! Wave! Woooooooo hooooooo! We're in the middle of history! When the California polls closed and CNN declared Obama the winner, people screamed, cried, hugged strangers. I felt a funny mixture of giddiness and gravity: We did it. Take that, haters. I can finally let go of eight years' worth of anger & embarrassment over what's been done to my country. Oh, god, there is so much to heal and to fix.

The crowd was surprisingly quiet during McCain's concession speech, booing only when the camera shifted to Sarah Palin. We waited another hour for Obama to come onstage, turning to one another every few minutes and saying incredulous things: Holy shit, this is real. I can't believe I'm here for this. Oh my god. Yes, we can.

I said the Pledge of Allegiance and really meant it.

When Obama and his family appeared at 11:00, a quarter of a million people whooped and cheered and hallelujah'd. I'll never hear anything like it again as long as I live. I teared up at the sight of him and his young family, beautiful and smiling and willing to take on this tremendous task for us. When he began to speak, I started to flat-out weep, big gasping sobs of joy and pride and relief (and a little bit of fear for him, too). Yes, we can, everybody chanted along with him. Yes. We. Can.
----------------------------

Here's a picture for you. Tim is dead center in the "frame" formed by the two flags; Colleen is to his left, leaning on him.

(Note: If you didn't read the previous post by my guest blogger, Jim, you'd best do that before reading this one.

No, seriously. Go do it.


Stop skimping on every facet of your life. Just go read it, for the love of Mary Kate and Ashley. Then read this one.


Still here?

Kee-rist, slacker, is it that hard to scroll down and do the teensiest bit of background work? You won't understand what's going on in this post unless you put in the three minutes it'll take you to read the previous post. Love it, baby.)
--------------------------

"The Night Elizabeth Taylor Didn’t Kiss Me"

I am visiting L.A. for a working weekend: Chris and I are putting the finishing touches on our book Love, West Hollywood. I didn’t bring anything to wear. No problem; I borrow a jacket from Chris, and we go shopping for an appropriate shirt. I drive to Tom’s house in Beverly Hills, and we take his vintage Mercedes convertible to the Paramount lot. After we arrive, we walk along the red carpet where a TV actor (from E.R.?) is doing the step-and-repeat.

Inside the lobby is a crush of people. “Do you know anyone?” I ask Tom. He says no. But we see Mary McDonnell (love her) and Maria Shriver (looking better than expected) and, who’s that really tall guy? Kareem Abdul Jabar. I smile and say hello to Mary McDonnell who returns the smile and the hello. I love her all the more.



It takes us 30 minutes to identify the TV actress trying to hide her bad cosmetic surgery behind long blonde bangs: Joan Van Ark. A particularly Hollywood tragedy.






















Our seats are third row center, reserved for Tom and his boyfriend, an Internet gazillionaire. Next to me is seated a middle-aged man, dark hair, and next to him is, I presume, his boyfriend. The man turns to me eagerly and asks, “Are you Tom?” I say no and indicate Tom next to me. “Are you David?” he’s very eager now. “No, I’m Jim.” The man then engages Tom in discussion over me, never again to address me, refer to me, or look me in the eye. The man has some relationship to ET, and Tom is happy to talk to him. Liz’s man clearly wants Tom’s money for her foundation and offers to set up a meeting with Elizabeth for Tom and David. Score for Tom!

I wonder if Liz-man thinks I am Tom’s whore for the evening and marvel at my sudden invisibility. (“You haven’t been in L.A. long have you?” a friend asks me later.) Neither famous nor rich, I better get used to it. Still, I’m used to the L.A. attitude of being friendly with everyone, since you never know who might be on their way up. I like to believe that ET wouldn’t act this way to anyone and that she wouldn’t approve of her man’s treatment of me either.

Up on stage there is a raised platform with a table on it. On the table top are two script holders. Love Letters by A. R. Gurney is a two-character play that is usually presented more as a reading than a performance. There is only one chair at the table. I mention this to Tom. “Wheel chair?” he asks.

Soon speeches are given to honor Elizabeth Taylor for her AIDS activism and fundraising. The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation is the organizer of the event, and it was ET’s idea. She hasn’t been on stage in 25 years. Without anyone saying so, we all understand that she isn’t likely to ever perform on stage again. Eventually the side door opens, and Liz herself is wheeled out to the auditorium, up the stage and to her place at the table.


She looks good. Old, but good. Her hair is dyed jet-black, as in the old days. Her face is thin, with sharp angles where it used to be heart-shaped. She is Dame Elizabeth here. I look for some remnants of Maggie the Cat, finally finding it in her smile and the glint in her eye. She’s wearing a long loose dress (one couldn’t in good taste call it a caftan) and a shawl. We all stand and applaud wildly. She nods appreciatively. James Earl Jones comes out too.

The play starts out with letters between Melissa Gardner and Andrew Ladd as children. They are playmates and neighbors who become teenage sweethearts, college lovers, and adult correspondents. In middle age they rekindle their romance and become lovers again. Elizabeth is good with the girlhood letters, all flirtatious and rebellious. She has clearly prepared although not enough to get her over the French words in the script. She loses her place in the text a couple of times but she gets over it.

The most gripping part of the performance is the shawl. Midway through the first act, Elizabeth’s shawl has dropped from her right shoulder. She continues her lines as she tries to put the shawl back on. I can’t stand the thought that she is cold or uncomfortable on stage. I want to help her out. You’re sitting on it, I whisper to her. I try not to look at Tom next to me, but I feel the whole audience is riveted to Elizabeth and her struggle with the shawl. James Earl Jones, help her! I scream in my head. He continues with his lines. Finally, the shawl does her bidding, and I relax. I feel a sigh of relief around me. We will not mention this, we silently agree.

Andrew and Melissa’s affair resumes after he is elected to the Senate, and she has become a successful artist. Her success, however, comes with divorce, alcohol abuse, and mental illness. Although I think Gurney packs a lot of clichés about successful East Coast establishment figures into the play, the last half of the second act is good, tense, and funny. The ending is a disappointment and, I think, an artistic cop out. But it gives Elizabeth a final bravura performance: Maggie the Cat lives!

Standing again, we cheer wildly. Elizabeth beams. She is tired. For nearly two hours, she’s been on stage, working hard, and it shows. James Earl Jones graciously steps aside and applauds for her. She nods to him and takes his hand. Then she turns back to the audience and nods again. Slowly she puts her hands on the wheelchair arms and boosts herself up. She inches up until she is in a half-standing position, supported by the wheelchair. She nods again at the audience, once, twice, three times. Slowly she sits again. Dame Elizabeth, having made her appearance, is ready to go. The assistant wheels her off.

On the way home, we dissect her performance and her appearance. Tom refers to Elizabeth Taylor’s reputation as the “most beautiful woman in the world,” saying she was “the most beautiful YOUNG woman in the world.” I feel somewhat sacrilegious but remember my own view of her when I was young. She was 32 when I was born, an age I no longer find old, and her movie-making peak was soon behind her. But her work continues and her stardom endures.

Sometimes we see our craziness only in retrospect. Ah, hell, not sometimes. Pretty much always; I mean, if we realized how off kilter we were at the time, we'd probably tame our wilder impulses.

Right, Britney?

My most recent crazy decision occurred in mid-December, when I agreed to teach a class this upcoming semester that is entirely new to my pedagogical repertoire: English Literature: 18th Century to the Present. Sure, it trips off the tongue nicely and all--but the truth is that I haven't even thought about this stuff (things like the Romantic poets, the Victorians, the poets of World War I) for 22 years, since I was a freshman in college. And even then? When I was still impressionable and unformed and sopping up the world?

I didn't so much like it. In fact, I trace my longstanding poetry ambivalence to that year, when I found myself worn out with trying to parse meaning out of meter. In the intervening years, I've amused myself by reading everything but Good English Major works.

So now I find myself, crazily, spending my winter break between semesters trying to reteach myself a ton of material that I never mastered, even way back when Reagan was president. Hence, I'm in a tizzy. A panic. A whirlwind of lyrical ballads and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and writings about the abolition of the slave trade and Marxist manifestos and me pulling my armhairs out with a tweezers.

In short, even though a part of me is glad that I get to meet all of these authors again from a point of more maturity, I'm gasping a bit.

And isn't it at just such moments that friends kick in? As I plot how to stay just one damn day ahead of my students this semester, I find relief: my pal Jim (known in the comments section of this blog as iJim) has stepped up as guest blogger for me this week so that I can begin to ferret out the mysteries of the attraction between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Although the jury is out on the Brownings, I yuv Jim.

While he lived in Duluth for the last three years (serving as my dean, no less!), he now has moved to hotter, drier, sexier (if a culture NOT based on fleece clothing can ever be sexy) climes in Southern California. His two guest posts, starting with the one below, give us a peek into his current Gilded Age:







"Elizabeth Taylor’s Dress"

I have been a fan of Elizabeth Taylor for about 20 years. That’s a comparatively short time for a gay man in his forties. But when I was growing up, Elizabeth Taylor was an old woman with her best work behind her. Who’s this and what’s all the fuss about? I wondered. After all, I was born in 1964, and ET is two years older than my mother.

My views changed around 1985 when I saw the film of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer. I thought the movie was dreadful, but ET was gorgeous. I understood her appeal then. Later, I saw ET’s other major Williams screen role, as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I was hooked.

By 1990, I was a graduate student, studying Williams’s plays, and I wanted to write a paper about ET and her relationship to the gay community. The paper would note her friendships with Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson but would focus on ET’s identification with Williams’s screen heroines. I would focus on imagery and iconography, and there was no image more powerful to me than Elizabeth Taylor wearing a white dress with Paul Newman in the background. It wasn’t the slip she sauntered around in, by the way. I never wrote the paper, but I did come up with a good title: “Elizabeth Taylor’s Dress.”

My fascination has ebbed and flowed over the years as ET has limited her film and television appearances, introduced fragrances and jewelry, and become the first lady of AIDS fundraising and activism. For her 75th birthday last year (February 27), I threw a party at my home in Duluth, asking guests to contribute money to AmFar, which ET helped found in 1985. (Okay, so the birthday and fundraising were tie-ins; the party was for me and my friends.)

Then I moved to southern California, and I figured it was only a matter of time before I was able to meet Elizabeth in person. After all, I’d been visiting LA for years and had a social network there. I had met or at least seen many celebrities on my visits. (Assistant Director Skinner IS hot. Who knew?)

So I wasn’t particularly surprised when I was offered a ticket to see Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones in a one-time-only performance of Love Letters on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2007. A friend of a friend—okay, a fabulously wealthy friend of a very thoughtful friend—had an extra ticket: Tom invited Chris, and Chris deferred to me. Score!


Next: "The Night Elizabeth Taylor Didn’t Kiss Me"
------------------------------------



This is Jim, our guest blogger. He took this photo with his cell phone after he got a new haircut and I begged him for a glimpse. I am glad he lives in California now, or else he'd come to my house right now for posting this photo and shove his cell phone down my throat. And then he'd have the temerity to ask me to make him a martini.