tag- you're it

richard kearns at aids-write has tagged me and so i participate. random facts. random facts. let's see.

there is a little history of tagging if you click on the title of this post.




i "came out" in 1974 on my 16th birthday. it was more a declaration of independence than anything else. i remember feeling as if i had just joined the foreign legion and would have a life filled with adventure. i also remember feeling that i had joined the band of brothers who celebrated an expression of self while one marched to the beat of a different drummer. i lost this particular exhilaration during the first gay clone fad in 1980. this august 26 will herald 33 years of being an out gay man. (check out finetune playlist "around 1974" in sidebar).



my first trip to paris was riddled with visits by ghosts. we had an apartment on isle st. louis and i had trouble sleeping most of the 7 nights we were there. one even tapped me on the shoulder one night asking me to come and play. it was very druid-like or something along those lines. i woke up to a hooded figure standing over me motioning for me to go through a holographic doorway. naturally, i did. (btw, i hadn't started doing tina yet, so i wasn't tweaking).



i used to date a boy named todd thennes (pronounced tennis)- he loved christmas and absolutely loved decorating christmas trees. we gave him the nickname todd tennenbaum. he decorated most of my friends xmas trees long after he and i disbanded. he was sweet and saucy. we all miss him very much. my friend david left the last xmas tree he did for his house up for 10 years (ewww yes), only just taking it down this past june.



i was very drunk after a 3 martini lunch at the walnut room at marshall fields in chicago. the two friends i had lunch with and i all stopped in an adult bookstore in the loop and there was a one-legged man in one of the stalls in back. i most definitely picked up on some secret sadness in that booth and proceeded to give him a knob job. it was really silly, but it was something i felt i had to do. my friend bruce bliss was scandalized. he told that story about me until the day he died. my friend blue seemed to take it all in stride.




i won 2 spelling bees in my junior high and both ended me up on the local television show. the second year (8th grade) my mother gave me money to get a haircut and i spent it all playing pinball, so i gave myself a haircut. of course i seriously botched the job. i had definitely begun to learn how to work her nerves.



one of my best vacations was on a bare boat charter in palau. we were cruising the rock islands and the weather was absolutely perfect. there were 5 of us snorkeling in coral arch and reveling in the beauty of the nature there. we threw line overboard, caught a snapper, and had the very best sashimi i have ever had (or probably will have) in my life. the next day we snorkled in jellyfish lake. it was formed by limestone structures separating the water from the ocean and the jellyfish have evolved to be nonpoisonous. to get to the lake, one has to climb up about 100 ft of very slick limestone and then scale down the other side to the lake. to get out is the opposite action. the really crazy thing was that at the foot of the limestone, in the middle of the ocean, was a woman's red high heel just laying there. really in perfect condition.



one of my favorite meals is grilled vegetables- portobello mushrooms, beets, turnips, peppers, eggplant, served over fresh spinach with balsamic, olive oil, sea salt. this meal makes me very happy......grilled beets and portobello make me smile.




my friend blue and i spent about 2 hours circling a small area in prague looking for a gay bar listed on the map. the city was laid out in 1100 ad and is not a grid but more like a honeycomb. we kept finding ourselves at the same dead end spot and we couldn't seem to figure out why we couldn't find it. after circling for about 2 hours most of the grappa we consumed after dinner had worn off, we managed to look up when we found ourselves in the same spot again. we were in the correct spot it seemed, just about 100 feet down a straight-up ravine from where we needed to be. we ended up having a blast that night. actually we loved the whole time in prague.




when i was managing medusa's chicago, i used to have the pleasure of taking the entertainers to dinner. i got to take esg, the violent femmes(gordon gano was cool) sharon redd, and divine. divine was really pretty sweet and ordinary. he was very unassuming and well mannered. he noticed what most of the women around were wearing and commented on them. i remember admiring his lack of ego.

so i am tagging lorenzo, staggo, and firehorse. if you've been tagged already, please forgive me. just send me the link to that post. cheers...