I was in fourth grade when John F. Kennedy was assasinated. We had come in from lunch, and I was staring out the window at the Catholic School across the street and saw someone come out and lower the flag to half-staff. I asked Mrs. McSweeney who had died, because we had learned flag etiquette and knew that was what the lowering signified.

She didn't know, yet. It was announced across the school intercom shortly thereafter. I remember sitting on the floor watching his funeral on our black and white tv. I guess my mother kept me home, or, good Southern Democratic town that it was, school was suspended for the occasion.
I was sitting on a hotel bed in Kingston, New York, right off the NY State thruway, when Howard Cosell broke into the Miami Dolphins game to tell us all that John Lennon had been shot. I called The Coolest Person in the World, and we cried together.

Howard Cosell? That's who broke the news to me that my idol was gone? How much did that suck. And the Dolphins were winning? Losing? Winning, I think. I think it was an important game, maybe one that determined if they went to the Superbowl that year. I don't remember anything about the game, just that I'd come down out of the top of the Catskills where I was holed up, to Kingston, so that I could see the game on cable. All I remember is Howard Cosell and the horrible, horrible news.

Yesterday, there was a photo of some old geezers in their uniforms, the handful of survivors of Pearl Harbor. It was buried in the Herald, somewhere in section A, but not on the front page. Not even a banner over the title, like they do for the first day of Kwanzaa. The most horrible throwing of the gauntlet of war of the last generation, and it doesn't even get a nod.

Today, there's a little something on the wires about it being the 25th anniversary of John's death at the hands of "a deranged fan". Huh. Yeah. Sort of obvious, isn't it? I mean, a normal fan isn't going to kill the person they adore, are they? But it has become part of the myth, part of his name: Mark David Chapman, a deranged fan.

And back in November, on the 23rd, to be precise, there was no mention in the Herald at all of what anniversary of a national nightmare we were recognizing.

Time heals all wounds, they tell us. But I think that sometimes, we need to pick at the scabs, and never let the hurt heal altogether.


PS: CBGBs is safe until next year. They got a year's extension on the lease. At least I don't have to go into mourning over that.

I've been saving this story for a while. The other day, the RLA and I were coming home around dusk, and we pulled up to our gate, put the car in park, and the RLA got out to unlock the gate. It's not that we're Luddites, but we rely on a lot of old-fashioned technology: manual can openers, a gate troll instead of an electric gate, a chain-link fence to keep the dogs in the yard instead of zapping them with electroshock... like that. So, the RLA gets out to unlock the gate, and as he does, a big-ass SUV (a Cadillac, I think) driven by a guy with a blue light in his ear goes whizzing past at a much-too-rapid-for -a-one-lane-road clip... almost clipping the side mirror off our car.
Well, it's a small neighborhood, and we know everybody in it, and what they drive, so we knew that this guy was probably lost. And he was, evidenced by his hitting the end of the street, making a u-turn and coming back up the one-lane road, still at a clip, and still almost removing my side mirror.

Well, the RLA lost it, and yelled at the driver that he was a jerk, and that we live here, and he doesn't and we're unlocking our gate, and he can just wait a second, because the RLA is NOT moving the car.

The Cadillac SUV screeched to a halt. The middle-aged driver threw it in reverse and stopped next to us. He reached under his seat (I'm thinking... oh, fucking great. A gun. Now we're in for it.) but only to roll down the window.

He proceded to yell at the RLA and called HIM a jerk and a few other names before coming to the crescendo of his response:

"You," he shouted at us, "are like a spaz!"

Well, that just set us back on our heels. Was blue light man saying that the RLA is a spaz, or was he saying that the RLA is merely spaz-like?

We debated this for several minutes, with me offering the opinion that maybe the word like was just an interjection, as in; "it's, like, you know", even though there was no audible comma or pause. We also opined that the driver was like a Borg, in that he had a piece of electronics embedded in his ear and it was lit up with a blue light. We never did get a definitive answer from the SUV driver, because once we started parsing out his sentence, he seemed to loose interest in us entirely.

But this phrase has crept into our vocabulary, so that everything is now "like". It's like a bridge. You know, it's sort of bridge-like, in that it spans a body of water, but maybe it's not totally a bridge.

I'm like hungry. I could eat, but I'm not ravenous, so I'm hungryish. I'm close to hungry, but I'm not exactly hungry, so I'm only like hungry.

We have been entertaining ourselves and our friends with this for like a month. It may not be a real month, or a whole month. Maybe it has been longer than a month, in which case it is only like a month, not exactly a month, but sort of a month. Similar in time to an exact month and yet, not.

This entry is like done.

I had lunch with the RLA today. He met me after his class and we went to a nice little bistro in the courtyard of the tower across the way. We were unable to have any sort of conversation over our burgers, however, because behind me was a woman having lunch with her friend, and her conversation was conducted at such a pitch and such a volume that all else was drowned out.

I'm sure that her friend felt exactly the way I did, because there were little bits of twisted napkin shreds on her side of the table when they finally left.

The non-stop talking woman was on about her boyfriend Frank, Frank's ex-wife, Frank's kids and how they sleep in the same bed as him, even when he's at her house on the nights that he has custody of the two kids, how the kids are brats and it's all the fault of the ex-wife, how the ex-wife has a skanky boyfriend who smokes a) in front of the kids and b) in her -- the ex-wife's-- house. I heard all about it. I heard all about how unattractive the ex is, how much the speaker spent on her Christmas tree decorations, because it's her first Christmas (ever? alone? in her own space? she didn't elaborate) and she needed all the ornaments she bought. I heard about how the ex works at her parent's beauty shop. Or maybe it was body shop.

I heard way, way, way too much. And did I mention that she NEVER SHUT UP. Not for a sip of water, not for a breath, not to shovel food in her mouth, not to let her friend even murmmur uh-huh, or really? or oh, that's too bad.

In conclusion, I would just like to say, with all my heart and all my soul, and I feel certain that I speak for everyone within a twenty foot radius of you today at lunch:

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Thank you. I'm done now.

Special thanks and shout out to RJ, who supplied today's entry.

Today is World AIDS Day. I am wearing a scarlet dress, and my White Party pin. I am thinking about my friends, and I'm going to do something I never do on this site: name names.
I lit a candle on the virtual candle site for John Borella. I didn't try to light more, one for every friend I miss. And anyway, unless I go to another computer, the site won't let me. But for every candle that's lit, Bristol Myers Squibb will donate $1 to HIV/AIDS research.

Let's light up their map, shall we?

Here's to my friends:

John Borella
Nick Cannon
Shel Lurie
Scotty Neail
Richard Neail
Ken Cutthoff
Alan Mark Wayne
Adam
Rick Whitley

and to the celebrities: Rock Hudson, Alexander Godunov, Liberace, Freddy Mercury

Oh, I know this isn't a complete list. How could it be? But it is a list of people I loved or admired, and who are now gone.

Jewish tradition holds that as long as you remember them, people live on. It's one of the reasons we name our children after our dead.

Today, I name names, because that's how people live on.

This weekend was a time trip. The job of clearing out the family home has fallen to me, and I'm doing it slowly and painfully. On Sunday morning, I sat down on the floor of my old bedroom, and opened up a desk drawer full of cards and letters. Pretty much every one I'd ever sent to my parents, individually or as a parental unit.
Before I could throw the letters away, I had to skim them. Most of them were jejune and embarrassing, but some of them were interesting to me, even from this perspective.

This is the text of a letter I wrote to my mother on January 25, 1977. I was 23, and living in New York City.

"I went to a meeting last night of the New York Radical Feminists. It was TERRIBLE!! All it was was about 8 very butch-looking INTENSE rhetoric-spouting women... and Kathleen and me. Kathleen accounted for something because her mother is one of the founders of the movement. But I didn't. Anyway, we were immediately suspect because we weren't gay. It was very upsetting. I thought the movement was based on a belief in alternatives and choice and educating the masses. They seemed to want a separatist Woman-state. Personhood is no good. They want women-ness without maleness. I don't understand. They also seemed to me to not realize that for younger women, we've already reaped certain benefits from their early struggles and we want to move on from here. Like they want to re-write the manifesto. But that's all words and unneccesary. The thing to do is to LIVE it, not write it. I was the only one in a skirt. O.K. They won me the right to wear construction boots. It's also my option to wear a skirt and not see it as a symbol of "my oppression". Am I making myself clear? I was very upset by last night. It seemed to me to have broken down and lost touch with what it had done and was trying to do. Yuck. Maybe I'm just a radical human, but that's what I thought the lib movement was about. The right to be human... I think it's turned into a lesbian movement. Does this mean there has to be still another lib movement for straight people? Shoot. I'm REALLY depressed by their TRULY sexist attitudes. One woman flat out said "I can't trust women who can have relationships with men. How can you befriend your oppressor?"

I've never BEEN oppressed. How can I view all men as my mortal enemy... MAYBE "the system", MAYBE "big business". Mostly, though, to me, my enemy is ignorance and prejudice. And I think I found THEM to be prejudiced. Is this some kind of rude awakening? I really BELIEVED in the women's movement, but how can I believe and identify with this reality..?

Ah, never mind..."

I remember how upset I was. The meeting was in Gloria Steinem's apartment in the West Village. It was lovely, and book-filled, with oriental carpets and windows over the street, and I watched the snow fall outside. Gloria wasn't there. I remember that I yelled at the women before I stalked out. I told them how, as a young girl in a tiny Southern town, reading about the movement in Time Magazine had opened my eyes to possibilities. That they had put me on the path that led me to New York, and to that very meeting, and how could they now reject me out of hand just because I slept with men? What had they won, what had they preached, if not equality? And now they were preaching separatism, and that was something very different.

Plus ça change, plus ça meme chose.