This was in the Miami Herald this morning. It’s part of an on-going exercise in inanity and lameness, but today’s guest diva is someone I admire, and as part of my new year’s gift to you readers (more to come later) I pass it on in its entirety.

How does one become a true artist?

By the fact that you want to be one. I believe that anyone who wants to be an artist can be an artist. It all depends on your outlook on life and about yourself.

You have to know that you have in you all the possibilities that you want. You realize the possibilities by saying to yourself that you are an artist. Start from there and if you do not want to believe that, then why should anyone else believe in you? I always think rejection is temporary. You have a long life and the world is going to go on and on anyway, so you don’t have to be in a rush. Don’t be too impatient; life is very, very long. Realize that now as we speak, and all of a sudden things will happen; good things will come true and the right things will happen. You will get a lot of blessings and sometimes you don’t realize that they are blessings, because they often come in disguise. You are a person with big power and that power has to come out.

By letting it come out, you are actually doing a favor for yourself, the world and the universe.

Yoko Ono

But only on my tongue. In my steadfast belief that one should always get back on the horse that threw you, I spent last night drinking tangerine martinis with the PDB. I think I got up to five, but who's counting?

I did not get sick, despite the fact that dinner consisted of Shorty's BBQ (ribs, vinegar sauce, cole slaw and an ear of Very Greasy corn). I did not even get to the point of laying on the floor.

We drank and paid homage to our fathers and got weepy. We talked about the difference between art and craft. We looked at vintage magazines and analysed the styles, layouts and illustrations. We had fun, in a way that only art-school refuges can have fun.

Chin-chin, sweetiedarlings.

Tomorrow night, RJ is having a birthday par-tay for herself. I've promised to make a cake. I have no idea what cake that might turn out to be, but she's turning 50 and there seems to be a flamingo theme coming on.

I'm thinking that whatever I make, it will have pink icing. And probably be pink inside as well. This is the perfect time for me to find the ultimate marischino/red velvet cake recipe, but I'm not counting on the universe unfolding in quite such perfect synchronicity.

And for the rest of the three-day weekend, I will be sequestered with my code-writing books and I WILL (she says, shaking her fist at the sky) get this damn blog flipped to Expression Engine, because I am back to about 100 spam messages a day, and that, gentle readers, has gotten fucking old.

The Miami Herald's headline, the Boosh White House spin, the AP feed all claim that Gerald Ford "healed our nation" or "united our country" after Watergate. To which claims I call bullshit.

Excuse me, but Mr. Ford's legacy is not some sunny, morning in America era of peace and prosperity (that would have been Bill Clinton). No. Gerald Ford's contribution to American history is: he pardoned that rat bastard Richard Milhouse Nixon. Oh. And he launched Chevy Chase's career.

Let's review. Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in disgrace after it was revealed that he took bribes from contractors while he was Governor of Maryland. Took said bribes IN HIS OFFICE. And then, continued to accept them IN HIS OFFICE in the White House while he was the elected Vice President of the United States. Resigned in disgrace. Replaced, not elected, by Gerald Ford.

Then Richard Nixon, ditto. Forced to resign in disgrace after his role in Watergate and the subsequent cover-ups, stonewalling, demonizing, etc. (Karl Rove learned everything he knows about running a government in the Nixon White House.) was revealed.

And then, Gerald Ford pardoned him... PARDONED the rat bastard. And THAT unified a nation? In outrage, maybe. No, it was just the thin edge of the wedge in the virulent partisanship we see in our country/government today. After the slime and crime of the Nixon era, the Republicans managed to somehow claim the high ground and moral authority they so clearly did not and do not deserve.

Another state funeral for Boosh to preside over, and try to look like a worthy successor to the dearly departed. Considering what a failure Ford was, and what a devious, lying sack of shit Ronald Reagan was (Iran/Contra? Hello? Oliver North? AIDS?), one would think that even the asshat Shrub could look Presidential in that company. He fails completely, even by such low standards.

The only bright spot in this is that Betty Ford will be too classy a dame to pull a Nancy and kiss the coffin. Just make sure that Betty doesn't have a thermos and all will be fine. Maybe Chevy will get a couple of minutes in the spotlight, too.

I grew up in a Very Small Town in the south of Florida. My (extended) family was the entire Jewish population of said small town, and had my grandparent's house burned down in about 1956, the entire shtetl would have been eliminated, since we all lived in that same house.

Christmas time would come, and we would decorate our store (AFTER Thanksgiving, thankewverymuch) for same. We would drive down to Miami to the display wholesaler and pick up garlands, and bells and snowflakes and order our supplies of wrapping paper and ribbons. (Actually, this would happen way before Thanksgiving, the ordering and shopping for decorations.)

By Thanksgiving, my GirlCousin and I were making boxes, and curling ribbons, in preparation for the Christmas rush. Boxes. Hundreds and hundreds of shirt boxes and dress boxes and thousands of curled ribbon balls, neatly ordered like green and red checkerboards inside the tops of said boxes. All of them neatly stored under the display counters. The wrapping table would get set up. We would race each other to see who could wrap a box faster, tighter, and with the least number of pieces of tape. I think the record was 3 pieces of tape and under 30 seconds. Everyone in the store answered the phone by saying "Merry Christmas, Stuart Department Store."

My parents would pile my brother and me into the car and we would drive around town to look at the Christmas lights in other people's yards. Nothing says Christmas like a lit-up coconut palm, and don't try to tell me different. One good hard frost and the oranges would sweeten up on the trees, too.

For some reason, however, my whole life, my Christian friends thought that I "had no Christmas" and took it upon themselves to give me one. I have probably decorated as many or more Christmas trees than any Southern Baptist. I would get an invitation to one friend's home and then another. Come for eggnog and decorating the tree! Come for hot cocoa and tree decorating! Come and help us put up the tree! OK. Sure.

The Sistergirlfriendgirl and her family had Tiggywinkle ornaments. Those were the little hedgehogs from Beatrix Potter books. I LOVED the Tiggywinkles. Flash's family had delicate old glass balls from her grandparents. Another friend made popcorn strings. One year when I lived in New York, Bean and her mom decided that decorating the tree wasn't enough Christmas for a nice Jewish girl, and they took me out in a snowstorm to pick their tree out from a lot on Sixth Avenue, and then Bean and I then had to drag the damn monster all the way across the Village to their WestBeth apartment. Brilliant. One of my favorite Christmases, ever.

On Christmas Day, I always made sure that I had an invitation to the most Southern of my Southern friends' homes, because that meant a slice of left-over ham, pan fried and served up with red-eye gravy and grits with enough butter and tobasco sauce to choke the original pig. Or me. Yummmy. Red eye gravy.

Those are great memories. Thank the baby Jesus that nobody had become so brow-beaten into political correctness that I didn't get to have them. I was not, and my parents were not, hell, even my GRANDPARENTS were not offended that I was asked to be part of someone's Christmas celebration. Nobody thought that my friends were trying to convert me. Especially since I returned the favor by teaching them the freakin' dreidle song, and handing out chocolate Chanukkah gelt.

There was no breast-beating and fretting over whether or not we should say Merry Christmas to our customers. Well, in all honesty, probably because we knew for certain that we were the only Jews in town and so a Merry Christmas would not be unwelcome, but also because in those dark days, it was considered polite to express recognition of another's beliefs rather than trying to pretend that we all worship the same nebulous concept of holiness in some non-specific way that could offend nobody and everybody.

I am growing tired of political correctness, can you tell? I think we need a new definition of it. I think that political correctness should be me telling my Christian friends Happy Channukah and them telling me Merry Christmas and we all smile and say "YESH!" Does it matter? The bottom line is that we are wishing each other peace and joy.

Namaste. The god in me recognizes the god in you. We are all one. Merry Christmas to all, unless you prefer Happy Channukah. Or a bountiful Kwaanza. Or whatever.

Namaste.

I was surfing around on the internets just now, and as usual, ended up on Go Fug Yourself, because those girls are a stitch, and I can never get enough of snark about celebutards. They have advertising on GFY, and I don't mind, in fact, now and then I click through to cute clothes or stuff. Today, though, the top ad is from PETA and it's some claptrap about the "horrendous cruelty in the Australian wool industry."

You know what? Fuck 'em. Fuck every one of those PETA assholes. I mean, what? Shearing sheep is cruel? Is it cruel to cut your own hair? Granted, sheep generaly don't go into the whole shearing process voluntarily, but horrendously cruel? Uh, no.
I am so over PETA. I am over people who think it's OK and desirable to ruin a perfectly good fur coat by tossing paint on strangers. Assault is OK? I don't care if it's assault by cream pie or assault with a deadly weapon, assault is assault is assault. Matters of degree don't matter to me.

I am over people who believe that they have the right to dictate how I live, how I dress, how I eat. It's still, although just barely, America, people. That means I have the right to wear a shearling coat and you have the right to be appalled. You do NOT have the right to make it illegal for me to wear it, nor do you have the right to damage it because you don't like it.

If only that were true, there would be a lot of women on the Metrorail with their makeup bags torn from their hands, their capri-pants-with-spike-heels ripped off their bodies and their weaves snatched from their heads. Not to mention the veritable rainfall of cell phones that I would single handedly cause. But I digress.

If I want to eat fois gras, I should be able to plunk down a thick wad of cash at Chef Norman's and dine on a tender morsel of delicately seared fatted goose liver, by G-d and Ben Franklin, I should be able to. Fuck PETA and their isms. Go chew on your own granola, assholes. I'm with Tony Bourdain on this one. There is something fundamentally wrong with people who don't enjoy food.

And yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that it's really bad for me to wear fur, as much as I love the stuff. Maybe that's why I live in Florida, so I can't give in to temptation. Although, in my own defense, the only fur I own is older than me and came to me from my husband's maternal grandmother. It's a lovely black Persian lamb car coat with (on me) 3/4 length sleeves trimmed in black mink. Or maybe black unsheared beaver. Soft. Thick. Furry. Warm. And, hello? economically speaking, a hell of a lot more efficient than a woven cloth coat. It has lasted 60-some years. It is still in pristine condition and doing a good job of keeping me warm. Find me a down vest with those credentials. Oh. Right. Down is probably cruel, too. So if down is bad, and wool (where the animal fucking lives after its resources are harvested, hello?) is bad, and fur is bad, what are we furless humans supposed to wear to keep warm in the winter? Should we crank up the heat on our non-renewable resource gas or oil or coal heaters? Should we use electricity from the same non-renewable, corporate whore-owned sources? Should we just hibernate?

Just believe and live the way you want, and stay the fuck out of my pantry and my closet. And my bedroom. And my womb. And my liquor cabinet. And my face.

And just so you know? Leather is lovely and pleather is just nasty.

What the fuck is wrong with me? I had two and a half martinis last night at Star's house, along with some yummy latkes and apple pie and I went from loquacious drunk to laying on the bathroom floor to puking out the car window all the way home... in five minutes flat.

On two and a half martinis?!

What is wrong with me? Is it age? Is it her brand of vodka? Is it my liver, finally saying enough is enough?
The last time I tried to keep up with Star, much less Star and her sister, I ended up in a 16-hour power nap. I blamed it on drinking margaritas in the blistering sun on Sarasota beach, but I may have to rethink the drinking with Star.

I just wish I knew what happened. Oh, I mean, I know what happened. I drank too much and had to answer for my bad judgement. But how it happened? How did I go from jolly buzz to sick como un perro in a (literal) heartbeat? If I'd been in a bar, I would have sworn I was dosed. But since I was among family and friends, I just have to sack up and admit that I simply couldn't hold my martinis.

Woof. I remember telling the RLA on the drive home "you've never seen me like this." He was worried that I was going to make a habit out of it. To tell you the truth, the last time I was sick like that was 30 years ago, before I learned that gin and I are not friends. In fact, gin and I don't even like to be at the same parties.