Race. Matters.

So Joe Biden, the Democratic senator from Delaware, is running for president. We know this because he's announced his intentions so many times, his wife now wears a t-shirt that says, "I know!"

Good for him, because that's about the closest he's going to get to the White House without a special pass or an invite to a state dinner.

In a New York Observer article, Joe does a little assessment of his potential Democratic opponents. No surprise, he takes good aim at Hillary and Iraq. Like Hillary's biggest worry is what he has to say on the subject. There are far bigger fish hoping to fry her.

But then he gets to Barak. And compliments him. Or does he?

In what can only be the first of a lamentable string of back-handed racial slurs, Joe says (emphasis mine):

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Oh, Joe. Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe. The terms "house slave" and "field slave" are so 400 years ago.

To their credit, Barak's handlers simply say that Senator Biden's comments speak for themselves. And indeed they do.

Four-foot Woman. Fifty-pound Beef.

In prepareation for Amazing Race Allstars, I'd like to share some of the best moments ever from past seasons.

At the top of the pack has to be Charla, a four-foot dwarf, who when faced with carrying a 50-pound side of beef took one look and yelled, "Put. It. On. My. Shoulder!"

She then took off like a shot ... trailing cow and hauling ass. America, in all its voyeuristic glory, stood and cheered.

They talk about the experience here:

View Charla & Mirna on innertube now

One Month To "Amazing Race Allstars"!!!

I'm so excited! Team Hillbilly, Team Cha Cha Cha, Charla & Mirna and Uchenna & Joyce all in one race? I just can't stand it, people. It might be the best night of my life.

And that's rather sad.

But don't judge me. Just watch it. You'll be a-thankin' me later.

Bush Pilot

Think that Bush doesn't do his own thinking? Suspicious that he's being spoon-fed every line? You're right.

And here's proof:

Jose Rivera's 36 Assumptions About Playwriting

You probably dropped by to see if I was going to be funny. And I'm going to disappoint you on that front. Instead, I'm going to share the thoughts of Jose Rivera (Cloud Tectonics, Marisol, References to Salvidor Dali Make Me Hot, et al) on playwriting, a subject near and dear to my heart (not to mention my master's degree and my student loans). These are some of the most compelling thoughts about the subject I've ever read. And while it's long and probably not a topic you give a flip about ... read it anyway. It's provocative, and I promise you'll find something to think about.

Jose says:

Over the years, I've had the good fortune to teach writing in a number of schools from second-grade to graduate school. I usually just wing it. But lately, I've decided to think about the assumptions I've been working under and to write them down. The following is an unscientific, gut-level survey of the assumptions I have about writing plays, in no particular order of importance.

1. Good playwriting is a collaboration between your many selves. The more multiple your personalities, the further, wider, deeper you will be able to go.
2. Theatre is closer to poetry and music than it is to the novel.
3. There's no time limit to writing plays. Think of playwriting as a life-long apprenticeship. Imagine you may have your best ideas on your deathbed.
4. Write plays in order to organize despair and chaos. To live vicariously. To play God. To project an idealized version of the world. To destroy things you hate in the world and in yourself. To remember and to forget. To lie to yourself. To play. To dance with language. To beautify the landscape. To fight loneliness. To inspire others. To imitate your heroes. To bring back the past and raise the dead. To achieve transcendence of yourself. To fight the powers that be. To sound alarms. To provoke conversation. To engage in the conversation started by great writers in the past. To further evolve the artform. To lose yourself in your fictive world. To make money.
5. Write because you want to show something. To show that the world is shit. To show how fleeting love and happiness are. To show the inner workings of your ego. To show that democracy is in danger. To show how interconnected we are. (Each "to show" is active and must be personal, deeply held, true to you.)
6. Each line of dialogue is like a piece of DNA; potentially containing the entire play and its thesis; potentially telling us the beginning, middle, and end of the play.
7. Be prepared to risk your entire reputation every time you write, otherwise it's not worth your audience's time.
8. Embrace your writer's block. It's nature's way of saving trees and your reputation. Listen to it and try to understand its source. Often, writer's block happens to you because somewhere in your work you've lied to yourself and your subconscious won't let you go any further until you've gone back, erased the lie, stated the truth and started over.
9. Language is a form of entertainment. Beautiful language can be like beautiful music: it can amuse, inspire, mystify, enlighten.
10. Rhythm is key. Use as many sounds and cadences as possible. Think of dialogue as a form of percussive music. You can vary the speed of the language, the number of beats per line, volume, density. You can use silences, fragments, elongated sentences, interruptions, overlapping conversation, physical activity, monologues, nonsense, non-sequiturs, foreign languages.
11. Vary your tone as much as possible. Juxtapose high seriousness with raunchy language with lyrical beauty with violence with dark comedy with awe with eroticism.
12. Action doesn't have to be overt. It can be the steady deepening of the dramatic situation or your character's steady emotional movements from one emotional/psychological condition to another: ignorance to enlightenment, weakness to strength, illness to wholeness.
13. Invest something truly personal in each of your characters, even if it's something of your worst self.
14. If realism is as artificial as any genre, strive to create your own realism. If theatre is a handicraft in which you make one of a kind pieces, then you're in complete control of your fictive universe. What are its physical laws? What's gravity like? What does time do? What are the rules of cause and effect? How do your characters behave in this altered universe?
15. Write from your organs. Write from your eyes, your heart, your liver, your ass -- write from your brain last of all.
16. Write from all of your senses. Be prepared to design on the page: tell yourself exactly what you see, feel, hear, touch and taste in this world. Never leave design to chance, that includes the design of the cast.
17. Find your tribe. Educate your collaborators. Stick to your people and be faithful to them. Seek aesthetic and emotional compatability with those your work with. Understand your director's world view because it will color his/her approach to your work.
18. Strive to be your own genre. Great plays represent the genres created around the author's voice. A Checkhov genre. A Caryl Churchill genre.
19. Strive to create roles that actors you respect will kill to perform.
20. Form follows function. Strive to reflect the content of the play in the form of the play.
21. Use the literalization of metaphor to discuss the inner emotional state of your characters.
22. Don't be afraid to attempt great themes: death, war, sexuality, identity, fate, God, existence, politics, love.
23. Theatre is the explanation of life to the living. Try to tease apart the conflicting noises of living, and make some kind of pattern and order. It's not so much and explanation of life as much as it is a recipe for understanding, a blueprint for navigation, a confidante with some answers, enough to guide you and encourage you, but not to dictate to you.
24. Push emotional extremes. Don't be a puritan. Be sexy. Be violent. Be irrational. Be sloppy. Be frightening. Be loud. Be stupid. Be colorful.
25. Ideas may be deeply embedded in the interactions and reactions of your character; they may be in the music and poetry of your form. You have thoughts and you generate ideas constantly. A play ought to embody those thoughts and those thoughts can serve as a unifying energy in your play.
26. A play must be organized. This is another word for structure. You organize a meal, your closet, your time -- why not your play?
27. Strive to be mysterious, not confusing.
28. Think of information in a play like an IV drip -- dispense just enough to keep the body alive, but not too much too soon.
29. Think of writing as a constant battle against the natural inertia of language.
30. Write in layers. Have as many things happening in a play in any one moment as possible.
31. Faulkner said the greatest drama is the heart in conflict with itself.
32. Keep your chops up with constant questioning of your own work. React against your work. Be hypercritical. Do in the next work what you aimed for but failed to do in the last one.
33. Listen only to those people who have a vested interest in your future.
34. Character is the embodiment of obsession. A character must be stupendously hungry. There is no rest for those characters until they've satisfied their needs.
35. In all your plays be sure to write at least one impossible thing. And don't let your director talk you out of it.
36. A writer cannot live without an authentic voice -- the place where you are the most honest, most lyrical, most complete, most creative and new. That's what you're striving to find. But the authentic voice doesn't know how to write, any more than gasoline knows how to drive. But driving is impossible without fuel and writing is impossible without the heat and strength of your authentic voice. Learning to write well is the stuff of workshops. Learning good habits and practicing hard. But finding your authentic voice as a writer is your business, your journey -- a private, lonely, inexact, painful, slow and frustrating voyage. Teachers and mentors can only bring you closer to that voice. With luck and time, you'll get there on your own.

Nobody's Gonna Rain on My Parade

I laughed so hard at this, I had snot running out of my nose.

It's all you have to see to understand what it's like inside of my head. All of the time.

Seriously. I love this more than oxygen:

Soup's On!

I was just tagged by the Lady Miss Cheryl, challenging me to keep the following meme alive. And fearing that some horrible fate will greet me if I don't comply, not to mention being constantly challenged to find something ... anything ... amusing to blog about (lest the natives get restless, and trust me I never hear the end of it when they do), I'm game.

So here goes:

· Find the nearest book
· Name the book
· The author
· Turn to page 123
· Go to the fifth sentence on the page
· Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
· Tag three more folks.

Nearest Book: The Joy of Cooking, 75th Anniversary Edition (4500 recipes for the way we cook now).

I really don't know why this is sitting on my coffee table right now. I bought it at Costco after seeing an article in the New York Times, which talked about:

The Authors: Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker

Irma was the orginal author back in the '30s, who threw herself into chronicling her recipes as a way to distract herself from her husband's suicide. So I'm thinking the original version may have been titled The Joy of Cooking Sure Beats the Shithole That's the Rest of My Life. Or something like that. My hope is that Mr. Rombauer didn't kill himself out of financial concerns, because after Joy's publication, ol' Irma got richity, rich, rich. Plenty of joy to go 'round.

Marion was Irma's daughter. She's dead. Ethan is Marion's son. And heir to the throne. Somewhere along the publishing line, they got in bed with Scribner, who now mostly controls the rights and has been known to bring in a food editor to reimagine the whole thing for a new edition. As happens with most children who see the change of something their family was a part of as a change to the actual family ... instead of, say, just an update of a cookbook ... Ethan has been pretty pissy about each version since his mother and grandmother were no longer deeply involved.

To which I say, Ethan, honey ... seriously. There are only so many uses for cream of mushroom soup that the market needs these days. And we have these amazing things called microwaves and food processors. Not to mention frozen puff pastry. Let's not keep looking back, okay? Also not to mention that grandma is dust. Worm food. Pushing up daisies. She doesn't give a damn, and you look like an idiot. Go count your fortune and shut it.

Turn to page 123, go to the fifth sentence on the page and copy out the next three sentences:

No matter what the soup, a small quantity of salt pork, a ham hock or a few slices of bacon will add flavor and depth. As for stocks, there are three simple methods for removing fat from soup. If you chill the soup, the fat will solidify and it is then easy to spoon it off; or float a paper towel on the surface of warm soup, and when it has absorved as much fast as it will hold, discard.

A good friend, Michael Hambone, once told me that there's no food that can't be improved by the addition of gravy, cheese, bacon or frosting. It's got to be heartening for him to be validated by this venerable tome.

And this defatting thing is a pickle, let me tell ya. The chilling trick really works the best. But whoever cooks with enough time to chill his or her stock probably also completes his or her Christmas shopping by July in order to fully "enjoy the holiday season." These people can't be trusted and must be destroyed.

I'm also pretty sure they're the same people who devised the urban legend that floating a paper towel on top of a hot liquid would result in defatting it ... instead of the real-life version where you frantically plunge your hands into scalding liquids in a futile attempt to retrieve a paper towel as it sinks like the titanic to the bottom of your soup pot.

"Is that rice?" they'll ask you as they pick soggy white bits from their molars. "No," you'll say with a smile. "Bounty."

I'm a tagging:

The professional ex-wife.
The Christmas Queen.
The Little Dutch Boy.

Jim & Tammy Faye's Prodigal Son

Oh. My. God.

The Sundance Channel is airing a series called One Punk Under God, an original documentary about Jay Bakker, the son of Jim and Tammy Faye.

Run to your f*ing Tivo right now. Right this very second, I tell you. And snap up every episode that you can. This is some amazing TV.

Seriously.

Okay. So. Jay is a punked out preacher's son with a lip ring and tattoos. His cup runneth over with ink, and he has full sleeves done on both arms. Heaven only knows what else there is and where, but I'm hoping for the t-shirtless scene where we get a little more information on the subject. Then there's the chin scruff and his geeky glasses.

Confession being good for the soul, do I think he's hot? Hail Mary! Bless you, Jesus!

But in case little skater punk Christians aren't your gig (and I can't imagine why not, but it's your choice and I won't stand in judgement) ... is the show any good? Hell to the yes.

Tammy Faye dotters around in the late stage of cancer. Even through the copious layers of mascara, she looks like death's knitting in the next room. Jay's wife is doing everything she can to get him to leave the ministry. (Oh, yes. He founded his own church called "Revolution" in 1999. It caters to youngsters and cashes in heavily on his street cred, but is funded deeply by the ultra-conservative fundamentalists. Sneaky Petes.) And his father, the disgraced Mr. Bakker, has Jay on his show just to serve his own needs. (Fancy that.)

In case that's not enough, the episode (#2) that I'm currently obsessing over has him saying things like (while leaving for the airport to see his father), "They're never gonna let me on [the plane]. I've got too much crap. It's because I'm carrying way too many Bibles."

Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. I gotta love one punk skater Christian fundamentalist til I die. Watching him navigate his past by way of his present is fascinating stuff.

But even more interesting? Unbeknownst to anyone ... including the TV show ... he decided to use the attention of the show to announce that he's pro-gay marriage. And the cameras follow him to several unfriendly congregations where he does a sermon basically saying, "Hypocrites."

Incredible stuff. Go now!

Mystery Date!

Cute, cute, cute. For those of us who secretly played our sisters' Mystery Date when no one else was watching (oh, like I'm the only one), here's the version we were really fantasizing about.

Elf You!

Alas, I can't get this to play inside the blog, but I'd like to send my holiday wishes to you all by doing a special little dance.

Hey, Old Friends. Whaddya Say, Old Friends?

A shout out to my former Gappertons, the professional ex-wife and T-Dawg, for the cocktails. You two are the best that place has left to offer.

Word.

And my professional ex-wife's fiance is a pipin' hot little dish. Oh my god, that boy is adorable! I'd make a play for him myself if I didn't have so much hair on my breasts. But alas, I do. So take him with pride, sister! Take him with pride.

:::smooches:::

Spring Awakening

Every few years, a new show comes along in the Broadway season that suggests the bloated, over-produced, over-hyped mega-musicals are not the only things that can survive ... that there might be room for something smaller and different ... that there might be a group of people out there who want to push the form forward instead of just throwing a pile of gold-plated, $10 million piece of shit on stage.

In the past, it's been quirky little odd ball shows like Avenue Q or The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, both of which started off-bway and met with enough critical acclaim to warrant a move uptown.

This year the little show that could is Spring Awakening, a musical about teens coming into sexual awareness. A big ol' hit for the Atlantic Theater Company last season, it's opening on b'way tonight. And it's the one show I'm most looking forward to. Check out this business:




They've got their own little video of one of the production numbers. This shit is tight. Check it ooooooot. It's called "The Bitch of Living," which if you listen to the lyrics is a direct reference to ... uh ... masturbating. Rock on!!!

And then buy some tickets to it. Show the world that we can enjoy an evening in the theater that doesn't include a flying car, house, helicopter or chandelier. Please.

Beaches

Did I ever tell you you're my hero?

Sorry. Wrong beaches.

I'm coming to you live this week from Maui. So it's more like this beaches. The webcam for that live, streaming video is hanging off the edge of my balcony. Life is fucking tough, bitches, and this is what it looks like:



Just to prove how tough it is, on the first pic below is of The Christmas Queen, The Little Dutch Boy and I waving from the ocean this morning. The Husbear took this pic from the balcony of our condo:
















Which was shortly thereafter followed by me crashing and burning in the surf in a moment of what can only be described as Delicious Irony to all who were watching. This pic captures me trying to get the sand out of my ass during what can only be described as a Graceful Recovery.


It's gonna be a hard week. Brace yourselves.

A First Time For Everything

In case you didn't notice, this is my first time to print a retraction ... and my last. (If the Little Dutch Boy is still reading ... that obscure reference is for you, baby.)

So yesterday I suggested that Michael Richards was a racist but on the grand scale of racism through the ages, he probably ranked above your mother locking the car doors a little too quickly when your father drove through certain parts of town and just below ... oh, let's say ... the Grand Dragon of the KKK.

That was before I actually saw his apology on Letterman for myself, thanks to my Tivo unit that clearly is out to teach me a thing or two about tolerance in the American entertainment industry.

I'm seriously taking it all back. Seriously. Because of two things.

First, in his apology he said he said some pretty bad things to some "Afro Americans."

No, really. "Afro." I turned up the volume so loud and pushed the repeat button on the Tivo so many times to make sure, my neighbor started banging on the wall.

I suppose the word "wearing" in his sentence was silent. But come on, Michael. Out of touch much?

Second, as it all soaked in a bit, it occurred to me that had he tossed around the word "nigger" like Paul Rodriguez tosses around the word "faggot," he'd probably be a garden-variety racist.

Like Paul Rodriguez is. Oh, it's true. I wouldn't blog it if I hadn't heard it myself.

Instead, the very first thing out of his mouth was to pine for the old days when an uppity black would have been lynched. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where Paul Rodriguez (and it pains me to say it) is right. There is a line you can't cross in speech, and that's the line where you in any way hint that someone should be ... uh ... taught a lesson.

Strange fruit, hanging from the Southern trees. Blood on the roots and blood on the leaves.

That's not to be dismissed so handily. I was wrong.

Godspeed, Mr. Altman

Robert Altman died today at the fabulous age of 81. Had it been up to a vote, I would have given him 81 more, as I'm certain he had so much more for us to see.

And just because this is all about me, he's the guy who inspired me to always have some place in my plays where people are intentionally talking all at the same time. When (if?) you ever hear my stuff and you notice it happening, give a little smile to honor his genius.

Godspeed, Mr. Altman. Godspeed.

But Some of My Best Friends are Spear Chuckers!

Michael Richards is not a racist. How do we know this? Because he says so. Not because he got heckled during a set at West Hollywood's Laugh Factory, prompting him to suggest to a black audience member that 50 years ago we'd have him "upside down with a fucking fork in your ass."

You could almost hear Mel Gibson sigh with relief.

Not content with this, Richards went on to toss "nigger" around more often than two teens on the 38 Geary bus. His current behavior notwithstanding, he dutifully went on to Letterman to make sure we all know he was not a bigot and was "deeply, deeply sorry."

What you really have to know he's sorry about is the invention of the video cell phone, which someone quickly trained on him to catch the majority of his rant. I have to admit, the printed version pales in comparison.

Is Michael Richards a racist? Of course he is. But probably not in the burn a cross on your lawn and wear a white hood while doing it sort of way. I'm betting he's the same type of racist you and I are.

Oh, that's right, buddy. You're a racist. Want proof? Look no further than Avenue Q, the Tony-winning musical, and its show-stopper tune "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist."

And I quote:

You're a little bit racist. And you're a little bit, too. I guess we're all a little bit racist. Admitting it is not an easy thing to do. But between me and you, I think everyone's a little bit racist sometimes. Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes. Look around, and you will find that no one's really color blind. Maybe that's a fact we all should face: Everyone makes judgements based on race.

'Nuff said. They're right. Michael Richards was stupid and showed bad judgement. But so did that guy in the audience yelling "That's uncalled for, cracker ass," and you don't see anyone turning the camera on him.

Then there's Paul Rodriguez, also on the bill the same night, who found a news camera as quickly as he could to say, "Once the word comes out of your mouth and you don't happen to be African American, then you have a whole lot of explaining. Freedom of speech has its limitations, and I think Michael Richards found those limitations."

Oh, Paul. Puhleeze. You use the word "faggot" like it's punctuation. And unless your hairdresser knows something we don't know ... you've got a whole lot of explaining to do, buddy. So how about you shut yer yap, my nigga.

Or someone's bound to get offended.

Sleeping With The Enemy

So Ken Mehlman, the newly deposed head of the Republican National Committee, is rumored to be gay.

Then there's our friend Ted Haggard, the Colorado minister who admitted (or denied) he had (or didn't have) sex with a male prostitute. Actually, a side note about Haggard ... for this isn't my point here, but I can't help but mention it: When the shit really hit the fan, rather than admit he had sex with a man, Ted swore it was a drug deal instead. And crystal meth at that.

Oh. Thanks for the clarification, Ted. Hand jobs now rank above drug dealing on the mortal sin continuum. I'll make a note of that. But you've confused the hell out of me, because when I came out, my mother said, "Of course I still love you. It's not like you're a drug dealer."

So between my mother and God, there seems to be some disagreement. Great. And even then, I have the sneaking suspicion neither of them have it quite right.

Anyhoo.

To round out the holy trinity of self-loathing is Mark Foley, the alleged pedophile and self-professed alcoholic homosexual who was smart enough to blame it all on being a cocksucking booze hound but not bright enough to know about things called chat logs.

This is almost all too much for my smart-ass heart to take. But the exposure of such hypocrisy is a hollow victory this time around. Because I want to just riff and riff and riff on it, but I can't bring myself to do it. And doesn't that just suck?

Because it's wrong to preach against and legislate against and politicize gay civil rights. It doesn't make it worse if you're gay and doing it.

No, really. It doesn't. You're not more evil for sucking dick while publicly railing against dick suckers. You're just more sad. You're just profoundly, inexplicably tragic. And lost.

Not to say that you get a pass. You step on the rights of gays? You should have no power. No matter what you're doing in your bedroom. You must be stopped.

But to wind up in a place where you're relentlessly tearing down the very thing you are? Then you're sleeping with the enemy. And you have far worse problems than the rest of us in the community.

I don't hate these men. I pity them.

Better Late Than Never

Well, finally.

It only took six years of the current administration and 12 years of Republican domination of the House and Senate before Democrats managed to regain control of congress. Six years of this administration before we collectively woke up from the "stay the course" haze that had somehow made us very, very sleepy. Not to mention very, very stupid. And now very, very in debt in every conceivable notion of the word and every far-flung corner of the world.

Granted it was done in a very dramatic fashion, which came as a bit of a shock to our Republican brethren and sisteren. And shocking Republicans is one of my favorite past times, don't get me wrong.

But excuse me for saying that while I'm thankful for the tourniquet to stop the bleeding, I can't help but remind everyone that we had the chance to save the rest of the leg a couple of years ago but somehow thought it better of it. And me being me, I'm not so thankful after thinking that. I'm just mostly annoyed. But all the same ... welcome back from the abyss, Ohio. All is forgiven.

Hail, Mary!

Gotta love a Fast Forward on the Amazing Race. Mary and David get a reprieve. Long may they reign.

Marked For Elimination

It's happened. We knew it would. So we just have to buck up and say it: David and Mary are in some deep shit on Amazing Race.

Unless they come in first tonight ... and let's face it, I have a better chance of accomplishing that, and I'm not even in the damn thing ... they'll have 30 minutes of waiting at the end of this next leg to find out if they're out of the running.

And I know those bastards at CBS will have edited the thing so I have no fingernails left. I'm not sure if I hate them more for manipulating me, or me for falling for it, but the drama may wear my frazzled nerves right out, I tell you.

So in case they flame out and have to return to the hills of Kentucky sooner rather than later, I'd like to say:

Oh, David and Mary. We hardly knew ye. But what we've seen, we've loved. And I personally thank you for showing that it's not just the rednecks that have their prejudices to get over. Being a card-carrying pinko cocksucker, I admit I read your bio and heard your accents and immediately assumed you'd be loud-mouthed, narrow-minded trash, threatened by anything and everything that wasn't 1) white or 2) sold at Wal-Mart. But you were not. And you met the gays, the blacks, the asians and a bowl full of fish eyes with open arms.

I salute you. And in your honor, I vow to once in a while not have my mind closed to people I'd usually have it slammed shut for. Until they open their mouths and say something so homophobic that they must be destroyed.

And when you head into those hills, keep your heads high. And please, Mary. Please, oh, please. Don't beat the shit out of David.

In the event they survive tonight by some miracle, I'm taking it all back. Until then, I'll be conducting a prayer vigil. Join me, won't you?