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April 23, 2010 | 0 Comments

When the circus came to town

Everett reading at the RoadshowWalla Walla was a blur of activity this weekend, what with a memorial for the lovely Mary Hanna, who passed away last month and whose illness I wrote about a couple of times, the short-lived attempt to hunt wild turkeys, and a party on Friday night, which was the setting upon which I agreed to wake before dawn to watch someone shoot at birds. But Saturday night wasn’t the terminus of our weekend plans. Sunday brought with it the Tranny Roadshow, also previously mentioned in this blog.

I was happy to provide an interview to the local paper. Well, I was happy and not a little trepidatious. A lot trepidatious, but who’s measuring? Turns out that the article was pretty well done, even if the editor did miss a typo in the first paragraph.

I prepped food for an after-party event at our house, and wandered over to the venue for the sound check an hour before the start time. Meeting the lead organizer as I walked in, he told me that they’d just had the fastest sound check ever and they were done already, two minutes in. And now I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. Ooh, new transpeople. I should talk to them. And then I remembered.

My experience with a lot of transfolk is that when we get into large enough groups, it starts feeling like it’s and after school special of Who’s Too Cool for School? Everyone gets dressed in extremely hip ways—they’re wearing ironic clothing, like shirts with religious overtones, or they’re sporting working class wear, like gas attendant jumpsuits or trucker hats, or they’re Goth, or something that makes it very clear they are not here for a wine tour. The next aspect of WTCfS is that everyone knows each other but not you, so for me, I get stuck standing a little outside their conversation circle, trying to find an in or at least hear what they’re discussing, but this is difficult for all of the inside jokes that I have previously not been privy. The only other option here is not an attractive one: I can try to jump in and say something, but I risk either being completely ignored, which makes me feel like a braces-wearing, pimply 8th grader all over again (and puberty twice is really enough), or I may get the quick, “uh huh,” said with a condescending jerk of the head before their previous line of conversation resumes. There is a very low chance that they may find me charming enough to step aside seven inches so that I’m not stuck outside the circle like some uninvited electron.

Trust me, these things have happened to me. I had been so excited for them to come to little Walla Walla, and I figured it would be a show some people in town really needed to see, but looking at the troupe I was worried, like I’d been sitting down with the Union-Bulletin reporter. Why should they have my best interest at heart? I wasn’t a hip, urban transman from DC anymore. I was some guy with neckwear from a tiny city in the middle of nowhere.

Okay, way to make it be all about me, I told myself, thus ensuring it was all about me, at least for the time it took my dendrites to send that message across my synapses. Just relax. Ask how their trip has been so far.

We made a little small talk. Some of the performers introduced themselves. They seemed friendly enough, if not way, way cooler than me. I watched as people made their way into the room, finding seats and getting comfortable. I wasn’t nervous to read in the slightest, but I was aware that I’d been alotted 10–12 minutes. I didn’t want to read too fast, but I didn’t want to go over my time, either.

Two older ladies sat right in the front, smiling broadly. I’d said in the article that the show was reminiscent of old Vaudeville. Were they here thinking they’d get Benny Goodman and Laurel and Hardy? Oh, crap.

A man came in with his mother, who appeared to be in her 70s. He asked Susanne, the faculty adviser for the event, if he could get coffee and bring it in here. She said sure. He looked uncomfortable through the whole show, but his mom had a blast.

Then there was an older couple who looked like two hippies from back in the day, him still sporting a long ponytail of now-white hair, she in a flowing flowery blouse. Directly behind them was The Knitter, who I recognize now from bleeding heart liberal events I’ve attended all over North America. There is always a knitter, as if there’s an underground knitting community who scour the notices about local events so that at least one of them will be in attendance at each. Because we have to remember that knitting is important. Or something. I suppose I do admire someone who can watch the stage and not drop a stitch. That’s real multitasking.

Red Durkin

Red Durkin, comedienne extraordinaire

The show began, with a comedienne, who made us all laugh, repeatedly, the whole time she was on stage, which is what is supposed to happen, so I gather. I’ve watched enough unfunny comics to wonder why the industry isn’t afraid we consumers will sue them for false advertising. But she was the real deal.

Second performer picked up a guitar and sang, self-created songs except for one Sarah Harmer cover, which he did well.

My turn. The “local performer.” I approached the stage, which uh, didn’t have a step, even though it was at least 26 inches off the floor. I was certain I would wipe out before I’d even made it up there.

I was not graceful, but I made it. Ha! I was triumphant. My knees were intact, sturdy, even. I remembered I was supposed to read something. Good thing it was in my hand.

“This is a story about Becky and Bertha,” I said, “who were the names of my breasts when I still had breasts, that is.”

And we were off to the races. I got a lot of laughs and even a guffaw or two. I might have sped up toward the end a little, still worrying about my time limit, as if Jim Lehrer were there to call time.

The rest of the show was fun, with another musician—she broke out a ukelele—a juggler, a couple of spoken word performers. The audience gave us more applause, and suddenly, we were done, sans big bows from the troupe, which I thought was a little unorthodox. But what about this wasn’t orthodox?

I dashed home while Susanne helped them pack up their things, as it was my job to set out the spread for the party. They weren’t ready for our hospitality, but they were happy for it, and we met up with a few students who had brought them to campus. The conversation was great, we focused on what we had in common, and I worried no longer that I didn’t fit in. It was a long, long breath of fresh air. And it made me want to make Walla Walla a more diverse place.

April 22, 2010 | 0 Comments

Link love for Thursday

Over on I Fry Mine in Butter, I ponder the strangulation of journalism:

What does it mean if cost-cutting winds up costing us quality reporting? If all we see are shots of Paris Hilton crying on her way to jail, reports about some celebrity’s rehab attempt, the fear-mongering that Mexican citizens are infiltrating our country? If swine flu, volcanic ash, doomsday earthquakes, political scandals, global warming, health care socialism, and rogue uranium crowd out the airwaves and news Web sites? What are we not hearing?

Archie’s comic, still in existence, features its first gay character:

I know some of you fellow Archie aficionados might be saying, “But Richard, isn’t Jughead kind of gay too?” And yes, you’d be right. Though the comics do sort of vacillate between a Forsyth P. Jones who is a rabid misogynist and a Jughead who is just sort of shy around girls, the Jughead Is Gay read is a respected one in certain Archie circles. But this Kevin character is the real deal. Like an actual homosexual who says it out loud.

Tasha Fierce’s tour de force about the dearth of black plus size models in the fashion industry:

A popular (white) misconception is that fat is more acceptable in the black community. This is patently untrue. Hip-hop culture is often pointed to when one is making this argument. If you watch any hip-hop music videos at all, it’s clear to see that the fat on the women featured is in specific places. Booty, hips, tits. As the inimitable Sir Mix-A-Lot stated, “When a girl walks in with an itty-bitty waist and a round thing [booty] in your face, you get sprung.” (emphasis supplied)

The Washington Post looks at who’s been behind the hilarious interviews with the teabaggers:

A quick look at the rest of New Left Media’s videos produces a trove of similar material — open-ended questions, attempts to drill down into activists’ thinking, and inclusion of answers that are … less than eloquent. Sometimes, the subjects acquit themselves well and give answers that simply don’t satisfy liberals. Other times, they’re made to look like fools.

Also, coming up soon, like later this week or early next week:

  • Another interview with local restaurant owners in Walla Walla
  • A recap of the very amusing Tranny Roadshow
  • The next installment of Aliens on Parade
  • Any and all chuckles from my contact with those intrepid literary agents

As Martha Stewart would say, good things!

April 21, 2010 | 4 Comments

Manscaping my manly mandibles

This is cross-posted over at I Fry Mine in Butter.

Once upon a time, I balked at the prices of toiletries marketed to women. Just the sticker shock from the tampons alone! What the hell? Little cardboard or plastic tubes of fabric cost how much? I did a quick calculation: a woman in the US with an average number of total monthly cycles could expect to shell out something around $40,000 to $50,000 in her lifetime for these damn things, and that’s not adjusted for inflation. It’s not as bad as the cost of a carton of cigarettes, so good thing I wasn’t shoving those into my own private Idaho. But where was my tax write off? If this shit happened to men, they’d have a tax shelter for it, I figured.

Flicker razorEverything else related to my personal hygiene was overpriced, too. This would have been somewhat more tolerable if the products themselves had decent quality. Not even great quality, just decent, as in don’t take a half-inch strip of my skin as a token of my esteem when I’m just trying to shave my legs. I let the stubble get longer and longer between shaves because I just wanted to avoid the pain of my shaving gel mixing with my fresh-oozing bloodstream. Ankles, it would seem, are not designed for flat, sharp pieces of metal to be dragged directly over them.

Nair was even worse. I might as well have poured gasoline on my legs and lit them on fire—the torured sinuses would have been the same, at least.

Why was I doing this? It didn’t make any sense. Except I saw how other girls in school were ridiculed for not being as feminine as possible, and I bought all the messages that were sent my way: to be beautiful, one must be hairless, wear makeup, be submissive, pretend to be dumber than the men one encounters. I wanted to be liked, and so I sold my soul to the culture for the price of my allowance.

Finally, 15 years and one sex change later I have no more relationship with women-marketed products. Bam, just like that. Okay, not really. And it’s not really full circle, but I’ve come around enough that I need to deal with shaving again, this time on my face. Men aren’t expected to rid themselves of hair anywhere else, right? Right?

Something shifted in that decade and a half. Gillette, Philips Norelco, and friends decided to go after the male consumer. But to do this they had to motivate men into buying increasingly expensive products where before a $2 can of Barbasol and a straight razor—totally reusable—would do the trick. They couldn’t have men thinking these new products would adversely impact their machismo, of course, because 1.) they really like traditional masculinity just as it is, and 2.) gay men are like beach front condos, they sell themselves. Or rather, gay men will buy all kinds of cosmetic products because they already have a solid interest in grooming, it’s like, totally part of the stereotype, all right? Geez!

Kevin Sorbo as Hercules
Lots of manly hair, very attentively groomed.

So what was poor, lonely Philips Norelco going to do to shift the frame enough that men would show up at their product party? They’re going to come up with the Bodygroom. Sounds like a helpful friend, right? Or a protector! Hey, men can be groomed too, and still be manly masculine men. It’s brilliant. In fact, if we posit them as better than the men we used to say were perfectly fine being unkempt sweat hogs, it’ll be even more brilliant. It’s not that it’s manly enough to shave off or shave down your man hair, it’s that it’s super manly! Go you, super man!

All you need is the Bodygroom. “With a hair-free back, well groomed shoulders, and an extra optical inch on my *bleep*, well, let’s just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy.” Or so says the actor in a white robe similar to the one my mother stole in 1998 from The Four Seasons in New York.

So shaving makes one’s junk look bigger? That’s the selling point. I recognize that the messaging is slightly tongue in cheek [sic], but it seems perfectly fine playing to mainstream masculinity even as it opens up a little more room in the concept, just so it can sell more products.

I’m not just harping on Philips Norelco—there is now a whole slew of products out there for men’s grooming since the Bodygroom came on the market a few years ago. And they all sell the idea that men will be more sexually appealing and don’t have to lose an inch [sic again] of their egos in the process or take on the metrosexual label. Dove, Aveda, Nivea, and other companies that have traditionally marketed to women now have products, all clearly and loudly labeled for men. And there are a whole host of products made for men that don’t use a brand name ever associated with women, that sound just like a guy’s best friend, like Jack Black, Molton Brown, and John Allen. The Molton Brown face scrub (yes, facial scrub) sells for $30.

A shaver ahead of his time.Razors keep adding blades in some bizarro world’s version of the grooming arms race. I remain content with my junior varsity three-bladed razor, and it still costs me $25 for a box of four razors. If I were to add up all of the prices I would have to procure just to shave my face with these high-end things, it looks like this:

Gillette Quattro razor: $30

True Gentleman pre-shave oil: $18

Jack Black shaving cream: $20

Nivea for Men after-shave lotion: $15

Total: $83

Of course Barbasol and disposable razors are still available, and you could get them both for about $10. But they’re not in this marketing push. If I want “the best shave,” “the closest shave,” and more importantly, the chicks (even though I’m married I’m supposed to want chicks, right?), I need to pay to play. And God forbid I grow shoulder hair because I’ll need to plunk down $70 for the Bodygroom. Friendship does not come cheap.

When I was hoping hegemonic masculinity would change, it wasn’t like this. And it sure wasn’t for shaving. I suppose I could go all Mountain Man and grow a beard.

And women will still have to pay way more for feminine hygiene products. Nothing like a captive audience.

April 20, 2010 | 2 Comments

Interview with the Colville Street Patisserie Owners

Cain and ChristensenTiffany Cain and David Christensen represent a new generation of restaurant owners in Walla Walla. I’ve been curious about the people behind the newer eateries in downtown, so I decided to ask a few of them to give interviews about their lives as business owners, gourmands, and as part of a revitalized, local food community here. Taking over the Colville Street Patisserie in 2008, Cain and Christensen quietly began updating the items in the shop, giving the windows a new look, and making the place their own. David previously was the pastry chef at Whitehouse Crawford and Tiffany was the owner of The Weinhard Cafe east of town, in Dayton. I sat down with them last week to talk about their adventures in cooking, or more precisely, baking. French style.

EM: Talk about how you found your way into the kitchen.

DC: I started cooking just to feed myself. I’ve had a lot of fast food jobs, since I was 14. Diners, French fry stands, other places. Then I moved to Walla Walla. Cooking was something I turned out to enjoy. My mom cooked a lot when we were kids. It was all pretty good. She definitely made an effort to teach each of us how to do it.

TC: It was really a calculated move for me. I don’t like offices. I first started out baking. My mom was really strict with our diets, so I really was excited about making desserts! So that’s how I learned to cook. I just really love being around food.

EM: Tell us the difference between a patisserie and a bakery.

DC: A patisserie is a pastry shop. The emphasis is more on dessert, whether it be cookies, tarts, baked goods that aren’t breads. They definitely have a French technique, but my spin is that there’s no point in just replication.

EM: What is your typical baking day like?

TC: The sobbing starts.

DC: I try to get here at 4:30. Start the ovens, start with things that aren’t yeasted, like the macaroons, the paris brist, then the things like croissants go in around 7. By the afternoon we’re making ice creams and doing assembly for things like the individual tarts, mousse, and other fillings.

Fruit tartsEM: I kind of want to know how much butter you go through.

DC: You want to know?

EM: Yes.

DC: It’s 24–30 pounds of butter for the croissants, and 30–50 pounds for everything else.

EM: Where do you go for inspiration?

DC: Part of it is just having a fairly good understanding of what the classics are and how I can duplicate the spirit of it with a twist. Like the chocolate filled congolais. That’s not how it is classically made.

TC: It makes sense, though. Mounds bar.

EM: Maybe you could put an almond in the middle, too.

TC: He was able to do things like this when he was a sous chef at Whitehouse Crawford.

EM: Tell us what you’re going to bring to the case this summer that we haven’t seen before.

DC: More big, fruity desserts. Crunchy, more crumbly pastry shells. More melon, some other fruits.We’ve also been thinking about a fancy but low-brow s’mores idea, with homemade marshmallows and the macaroon cookie. And we use the blow torch, like for the crème brulée.

EM: Oh?

TC: We had some lemon marshmallows left over one day and we heated them with the blow torch, melting the outside but leaving the middle solid. And we tried them and said, oh wow, that’s good!

EM: What flavors or ingredients are you most excited about using?

DC: This time of year I’m really excited about strawberries. I’m really tired of using apples all winter. Welcome Table Farm has an early berry coming out soon. So does Klicker’s. Actually they have strawberries all summer long.

TC: I think we’re also excited to be making all of the gelato out of local milk from Pure Eire.

DC: They’re the only grass fed raw and fresh pasteurized milk producer around here.

TC: We can’t use the raw milk for the gelato. It’s flash pasteurized. And it’s really good.

EM: I see people bring their goods into the shop. Talk about the environment here for food producers, growers, and restauranteurs.

TC: It’s really changed in the time I’ve been here, about 15 years. The farmer’s market downtown was really small. Now there are lots of young couples in their 30s who own little farms. That’s really changed in the last 5 years here. You don’t have to look hard for them because it’s obvious they’re here. So 15 years ago people moved here or moved back. Back then there was My Grandmother’s Garden, that’s always been here, and they had herbs and other produce. Now there are a lot of places to go, and a nice camaraderie of owners here.

EM: What would you tell others who are interested in doing what you do?

TC: Idiots! No, no. If you want fame but not fortune, do it.

DC: Go find a place you like, bug them until they let you work, for free if you have to. You don’t have to go to culinary school to get started.

TC: Yes, find out if you like it before you make an investment.

DC: It’s good to familiarize yourself with how kitchens and restaurants work.

TC: I’m always a fan of the shortcut.

EM: As long as there’s chocolate inside.

TC: Yes!

The Colville Street Patisserie is located at the corner of Alder and Colville Streets. For hours, check their Web site.

April 17, 2010 | 3 Comments

The turkey shoot of 2010

My godfather took me out to hunt deer when I was 12 or 13, I really can’t remember. I was some shade of newly pubescent, because I was getting a bit moody in those days. I knew he had a big freezer filled with venison, which always made me wonder why people changed the name of the animal when it was just the animal’s meat. Steer, beef. Sheep, mutton. Deer, venison. Some animals don’t get that distinction, like rabbit or duck or buffalo. What’s up with that?

Traipsing as quietly through the woods of Clinton, New Jersey, which yes, Jersey has woods and mountains, in fact, which is what we were on, the side of, more precisely, we each had a rifle. I have no earthy idea what kind of rifle, because I know absolutely nothing about guns. I know more about quantum mechanics than I know about guns, and I know shit about quantum mechanics. There are quarks and there are bullets. Until popular opinion decides to call the Bullets the Wizards and turn them into the crappiest team in the NBA, but I digress.

We were walking to my godfather’s hunting bluff and I started having flashbacks of Bambi, and promptly began crying. I didn’t want to kill Bambi’s mother. I just couldn’t be that guy. Godfather Henry inquired into the cause of my blubbering, and I admitted I was chickening out. Quietly, he took my rifle and handed me instead a camera. Maybe I could just shoot pictures, that could be fun too. He didn’t mock me, didn’t tell me I was a wimp, didn’t embarrass me in any way, and I am eternally grateful for that. So thank you, Uncle Henry. He built his house with his own hands, hewing rough logs and giving up his own blood in the process. He was not, for all of his masculine endeavors, a macho man. He had a sensitivity for creatures, as when he brought home a rescue dog, a Golden Retriever named Rugby who was the happiest dog until you wore gloves, and then he’d back into the nearest corner, growling and whimpering. So Uncle Henry gently reminded everyone to take their gloves off before coming inside. He wasn’t gruff about it, he wasn’t righteous about it. He just had a dog who got upset about gloves, so he requested no gloves on his dog’s behalf.

He was quite happy for me to take pictures. We brought home no venison that day. If it frustrated him I didn’t know it.

I have fired a gun in my life, but not in the last score of years. I remember being in camp and having rifle practice, using little brass-like bullets that popped more than they boomed, surprising me with their light sound the first time I heard it. We learned to fire from different positions: standing, kneeling with one leg in front like we were proposing to the targets, and lying on our stomachs. I considered it fun enough but liked horseback riding and tubing down the Delaware River much more. It was, as an activity, way more fun than calisthenics. Nothing sucked more than calisthenics, and nothing was more 70s.

Truth be told, I don’t really like guns, and I don’t get gun collecting, but I don’t understand collecting in general, unless the objects under collectment have value only as a collection, like say, the full run of mint-condition Sandman comic books, or  have utilitarian use, as in place settings made from pottery. But to collect for the sake of collecting, well, I for one keep that thing to a minimum. So I really can’t wrap my brain around the difference between collecting guns and stockpiling weapons, but I don’t have a love of guns. Perhaps the distinction is there.

At a party last night, I had the chance to commiserate with a member of the faculty at my wife’s college who is a hunter. Turkey season just opened two days ago, he was telling me, and he hadn’t bagged one yet. Sure, there were several wild turkeys running around town, half a dozen in another colleague’s back yard, in fact, but there is not hunting allowed within Walla Walla proper. How unexpectedly restrictive of them. That crazy government control! Couldn’t this guy head over to that guy’s house with a net and get a couple of turkeys, take them out to the county line, set them free and shoot them? He looked at me witheringly. What a sap I was. No no, he knew of a place where they run around, where there are plenty of them, and he was planning on going before dawn the next morning.

And then, he invited me to come along. Of course he figured I’d laugh him off and decline somewhat politely, but I said sure! Turkey shoot! Let’s do it, man! Really, he asked. Oh yeah! I was full of exclamation marks!! I’d love to! It’ll be 5 in the morning, he said. I’m a morning person! Awesome, dude!!! I just walked into Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure! Gnarly!

Throughout the rest of the evening, he dropped me details about The Hunting, and I only got more revved up. Wear green or camouflage. Well, I had green clothes, sure. I pointed to my green hounds tooth sweater vest. Get ready to lie on my stomach for a while. Oh, I was a prince at lying down! I could lie so well, especially after tripping and falling! Perfect! He asked me to bring a camera. He was only allowed to kill one turkey. Hunters, as they pay for the privilege to kill an animal before the hunting season begins, really are motivated to get something killed. And at $60 for the hunting license, that is one expensive turkey. I didn’t point out that my grass-fed, all-organic, free range, 16-pound turkey of a few years ago only cost me $50. This was going to be a gamy, thin, unknown-thing-eating turkey dumbass enough to get shot by two big men wearing green and lying on the ground. That did not sound like a good deal to me.

So perhaps it was in the experience. The overall, big picture. I would soon find out! We left the party at 11PM, and my friend had negotiated me down to a 4:30AM start time. I had to get to bed! Okay sleep, I thought, rush over me, take me away! Any time now! Wow, I’m really going hunting! You’d have thought I was a starlet the night before the Oscars. This really didn’t require such a level of revved up-ness, did it?

I dreamed about turkeys. And shooting them dead, hearing a gobble cut off mid-gob. I dreamed about what I would select out of my wardrobe for the hunt. Green things, warm things, things that can get dirty, things you say on the $60,000 Pyramid. I dreamed about putting on my cargo pants. Oh, maybe I could put ammo in them. I dreamed about words like ammo.

At 3:50, I could sleep no longer. I switched off the alarm and began getting dressed. I was going hunting. I pulled on my favorite cargo pants only to find out that the last trip through the wash had shorn off the button. I grabbed a safety pin, made it through one layer of fabric, and stabbed myself deep in my index finger. I yelped and cursed, all in one sound formation. Trying a couple of times more, I struggled and gave up and then rummaged through my clothes for another pair of cargos. Socks. Brown shoes with good grips. Thermal shirt. Sweatshirt. Half gloves that had no finger coverings. Camera, wallet, phone set on vibrate, keys. I was set. I poured a bowl of Cheerios and saw that it was the end of the cereal, so I left it for Susanne. I found some other food in the kitchen and checked the time, and went outside to wait for my rendezvous partner.

He didn’t show. I played with my phone, sending texts to people three hours ahead who were up with their children already. I needed to do something as I waited. 4:47. Maybe he thought we stuck with 5AM as our meeting time. I could see the sky lightening up and agreed that the 4:30 start was a better time. Maybe now I’ll always equate 4:30 with The Time When Turkeys Are Sleeping. 4:50. I went inside, brushing off tree debris from my ass before I crossed the threshold. I opened up my laptop and checked my email. The downstairs lights were on and I listened for the noise of a truck engine. Heck, I listened for a Prius engine, too, anything motorized. Maybe he’d be arriving by lawnmower.

At 5:10 I climbed upstairs and settled back into bed. I might have to slap him upside the head with a rotisserie chicken the next time I see him.

I did, however, get a good chance to look at the stars. The stars, at 4:30 in the morning were so bright I couldn’t tell which was Venus. So if all of this was for star gazing, then I’ll take it. No stars, or turkeys, were killed or hurt in the making of this blog post.

ADDENDUM: Coming out of my house later today, I discovered the following note:

(6:55am)

Dear Ev—I am soooo sorry and feel woooo woefully inadequate as a friend! Over –> Bad planning. A worse alarm plan. Alcohol. Please let me know if you would like to try again tomorrow.

April 16, 2010 | 2 Comments

A life without poop

Sherman Alexie, writer of War Dances and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and many other books of every writing style out there, came to Walla Walla last night. I hadn’t seen an Indian perform in oh, a year or so, not since Tomson Highway came to town, singing and telling stories. Actually, with so many native folks around here, it’s interesting that I don’t see them more often, not that I expect them to have neon signs over their heads, blinking “I’m an Indian!” That’s only for my fellow middle easterners, because we’re the terror threat. So Alexie came to town.

sherman alexie, authorHe’s self-deprecating, earnest, childlike, but also a touch cynical, down to earth, pretentious (admittedly so), and very literary. He’s also really prolific, having authored something like 628 distinct works of writing. Okay, it’s not that many, but it’s a lot. Every time I’ve seen him he’s been dressed like an absent-minded English professor, slightly worn sports jacket, dress shirt, open at the collar, jeans, khakis or some neutral chino trousers, and no tie. Tonight he had on a tie and a velvet smoking jacket, and all I could think was, I’ve never seen him in a tie. Won’t he get hot in that jacket?

I convinced Susanne to leave early because even though this reading would be taking place in the largest auditorium on campus, it was going to be packed. It’s not like Walla Walla also had a jazzfest, an opera, two staged plays and one movie on the green to compete with. And people absolutely revere Alexie, as well they should. She gave me one of her “Ev’s being funny again” looks and we left with 15 minutes to go to the performance. This was probably okay, as everyone in Walla Walla is late to everything. It’s as if everyone gets a 10-minute grace period. The only time this rule isn’t in play is when approaching an intersection with a yellow and sometimes even red, traffic light. At that point, grace periods are not in play and one must proceed to move as quickly as possible, through said intersection.

So we walked the block from our house to the lecture hall, and really, there was a stream of other people walking from all directions, direct to the hall. We were suddenly book zombies, being called by our leader to watch him turn printed pages and move his mouth with sound coming out. Susanne noted all of the others going to see him and told me I was right, to which she quickly added, “in this one instance.”

We got pretty good seats, smack in the middle of the room, roughly halfway back from the stage, and I was pleased as punch with myself (and actually, I don’t know what that means), until two others came and sat next to us, absolutely reeking of cigarette smoke. Cigarettes are bad enough, but when the smoke gets stale, like beer that’s been left to soak into a carpet for a week, it is gut-wrenching. A few minutes into sitting there, and we both had headaches, although I suspect it was just me with the bad college flashbacks. There was an open seat one chair away, so we moved over, hoping not to cause any drama.

He started off by reading some of his poetry, which I can appreciate but not replicate in any meaningful fashion. I like some repetition, I love the idea that poets could sit for days and weeks trying to isolate that one exact word that would perfectionize the poem. I don’t have any time for that nonsense, honestly. I love rewriting and I love craft, and I genuinely want to play with phrasing and word choice and meter, and I aim to do those things, but I can’t just suffer the slings and arrows while scrambling in my dictionary for perfection. I want my writing imperfect. I’m imperfect. But I do appreciate poets, and Alexie is a very good very good poet. He’s good enough to stop time for the duration of one small poem.

He pauses after a poem and begins this cycle of self-ridicule that is really a critique of white America. Why is he in a tie, he asks. Indians don’t wear ties, right? I tell myself I noticed the tie for different reasons, due to context and my own experience standing under stage lights. I wouldn’t wear one by choice. I tune back into him because he’s turned to another poem.

He stops to tell a story. He feels like he’s home, because he too is from eastern Washington. I suspect his eastern Washington isn’t going to make it to the cover of Wine Enthusiast anytime soon. He tells us what he likes about farm girls, including their calloused hands. He reads a poem about a farm girl he liked, and he clearly revels in the memory of it, or maybe that’s just for show. It’s hard to tell.

He tells us about a time when he crapped in his pants, as an adult, no less. This is because he couldn’t get everyone to raise their hands and admit they poop. So in true Alexie fashion he goes straight to the worst imaginable poop story in his personal experience, which is a little like the Jesus narrative if it was a lot more excretable. Or about excrement. I pooped for your poop, perhaps. He is raising his hand for all of us.

He tells the college students they’re smart, like every reader I’ve seen here tell them, but he quick fires straight away that they have massive amounts of privilege. They’ve probably heard that, too, and they laugh about it like people do when they’re embarrassed but not about to change their behavior. The most magnificent moment of the night, however, came after he was supposedly done reading, during what was a laughable Q&A. You’ve got Sherman Freaking Alexie on your stage, on your campus, and you can ask him anything.

And, silence. Then, out of the ruffling of the crowd, a frat boy-type shouts, “I love you, man!” Alexie looked at him, and in the quiet I felt his message: That is the stupiest thing you could say right now, man.

“I . . . love you too,” he said, raising his voice ever so slightly, as if the possibility of a interrogative would serve to call the entire exchange into question.

Then, another voice, this time rising out of the nervous chuckling making its way through the audience. It took me some effort to attach the voice to a person, but I found her, speaking in a crescendo as she tried to find a volume that would be heard by Alexie.

“Mr. Alexie, I have come all the way from [I couldn’t make out the name of the place] to see you. Your poems mean to much to me. You have saved my life.”

Again, he spent a few seconds taking in all of her and what she had said. He put his hands together and bowed, and then read the poem When Asked What I Think About Indian Reservations, I Remember a Deer Story. He read it to her, just for her.

April 15, 2010 | 2 Comments

Some Twitter time

I spend more time than I care to admit over at Twitter, posting less of the what-I’m-doing-right-now and more of the insipid insight variety of content. While the latest three posts are shared on this blog, I wanted to take a look to see what I’ve posted just over the last, oh, two weeks or so. Here is what I found.

Benny Goodman would have really loved Twitter.

even when she’s 98% asleep, my wife can have a regular conversation. I wonder what this means about all of our conversations.

I have yet to see a Hoarders episode where the homeowners utilized the Space Bag.

Walla2 Freecycle offered chickens last weekend. Today someone is asking for chicken feed on the list. COINCIDENCE?? I think not.

ahem, Tea Party people? are you listening? that US Government you hate? it’s all founded on that CONSTITUTION thingy you love. just saying.

every day, I have one search hit on my blog for the phrase “evrette maroon.” aw, that’s one faithful and inattentive reader right there!

Been spending a lotta time #blogging and not #writing. Going to conduct fun food interview in a couple hours, which should be fun.

Welcome to the Walla Walla freecycle list. Need a ferret? We gots ferrets!

I don’t know, I don’t really get the point of Wednesday. It’s just like, sausage filler for the week.

Roberta Flack’s entanglement with cabbing it in NYC: http://wp.me/pQHmS-oY

working on a blog for my unpublished #memoir. since it’s humorous, the whole site will be tongue-in-cheek. it’s either crazy or genius.

Jane Lynch is my hero. Erm, heroine. Whatever. She rocks.

I just realized that the guy who played Dracula in BtVS is the one who killed Kate on NCIS. Excellent…!

Hey, if a literaryagent says in a rejection letter that my work is “compelling and powerful,” can I still quote them on my blog?

Ooh, two rejections in one day! That’s a personal best for me.

working on 17 different blog posts. perhaps I should focus.

John Tesh and Oprah, sittin in a tree. . . http://www.nbcaugusta.com/news/local/90716434.html

wait, when did Kimora have another baby???

what would cause an otherwise regular-seeming young guy to wear tiger striped cycling pants? they’re really the worst things I’ve seen.

Sure, I’m a #writer in residence. My own residence, you got a problem with that? We’re really really selective.

George Lopez has got to be the happiest guy in latenight TV right now. I wonder if he wet himself when he heard the news about Conan.

watching Life, narrated by Oprah. after some of these statements, I wonder if she paused to say, “wow, really?” probably a lot.

someday I’ll break the 200 followers mark on Twitter and the 500 mark on Facebook. and then I’ll buy a balloon to celebrate.

April 14, 2010 | 2 Comments

Note to self: chai means spicy

I’ve got a reading coming up Sunday evening as a local performer in the Tranny Roadshow, and thus I wasn’t terribly surprised when the Union-Bulletin, the local rag here in town, contacted me for an interview. I mean, it would never have happened had I remained in DC, unless one counts the Mirror company as a reputable newspaper. As it is, the “U-B” as people (affectionately) call it, is a bit more than a stone’s throw from being a paper that one retrieves gratis from the brightly colored  bins that litter the sidewalk like plasticized hawkers near a carnival. Apartment Guide! Great Jobs Listing! FREE Yellow Pages!!

It’s not that I have anything against the U-B, it’s that people I like have things against the U-B. Their Web site needs an overhaul, for one, with a one-inch column in the middle for the actual article content, and a thick bar at the right advertising things I will never buy, even if I live for 100 more years. I just can’t get worried enough about my nonexistent prostate, and I am not going to learn some random mom’s secret for white teeth. I suspect malware is part of her solution, see. But really, my indifference to the U-B is that there doesn’t seem to be any real reason to get a copy. I hear everything I need to from word of mouth or my news feeds. I know when the WW Balloon Stampede is coming, and I’ll be there. The rodeo happens the same Labor Day weekend every summer. If a resident of Walla Walla knows more than 5 people in town, then she probably will hear about every event for the next upcoming weekend that she cares about. If I wanted to know what the Elks Lodge is up to, I need only walk three blocks over and ask them. It’s just not that big a town. And I’m sure they know that’s a stumbling block to keeping revenue up.

So maybe I’ve been missing out by not procuring the U-B regularly, and now that one can’t read their articles online anymore without subscribing (even the New York Times is cheaper), perhaps I’m too cut off from the goings-on in my own city. After all, Walla Walla is light years away from having any interest in a Wallist-type blog.

The other thing that concerned me when I got the reporter’s email was that my bleeding heart liberal friends tell me the U-B is unflinchingly conservative. Now, I don’t care what they do in their own home, but I don’t want that stuff shoved in my face, know what I mean? Just what kinds of questions were they going to put to me regarding something called the Tranny Roadshow? On the other hand, I’m the one peddling my sex change memoir to every agent I can Google, so I’m not exactly hiding in a cave.

I thought about her offer, and talked to a few people, and said okay, let’s meet up. We agreed to meet at Cafe Perk, in the middle of downtown, which granted, is two blocks wide by six blocks long, but it has a heart, damn it. I tend to go to this place only when I’m having a meet up with someone, because the Patisserie has too many people I know in it, and I don’t want to blow the feeling of just rightness that I have when I’m trying to bang out another chapter or short story with memories of invasive questions and avoidant answers, the kind of repartee that Sarah Palin wishes she had with Katie Couric.

I got there a little early on Monday morning, and ordered a nonfat chai. I forgot to specify a vanilla chai, since out here in the Pacific Northwest, “chai” means “burn your mouth out” and true to form, I felt the tastebuds on my tongue sizzle and die. For some reason this made it a little difficult to speak, like I’d experienced when I’d gotten my tongue pierced at 28 and the thing had blown up to twice its normal size. Three days later I was fine, I swear, but in the meantime I sounded like I was wearing vampire teeth. Great. Maybe my mouth would settle down in the next 8 minutes.

It did not.

She seemed extremely young, like 4, so maybe she was a prodigy or maybe she would just ask softball questions, not wanting to get into the nitty gritty of What It Means To Be Transgendererer. I smiled. She looked like she was from Minnesota. Very Nordic. I guessed her father’s name was Thor.

Gosh, she was just so excited to write this article, to run in Thursday’s edition. Usually she got to write about things she knew. I could picture the small and worn-out newsroom: buzzing fluorescent lights in the ceiling, desk calendars filled with notes (buy ham) and doodles (Obama with horns on his head) dotting the desks, a ripped section of carpet fixed unceremoniously with duct tape, and one very tired entertainment editor contemplating retirement as he reads the press release that just came over the fax machine. Trans what? Give it to the pre-schooler, I’m not handling this.

I decided to give her a break. If I was the first trans person she’d ever met, maybe I shouldn’t be a total card.

We talked about how I’d come to know the Roadshow even existed. It’s not a very interesting story, and hopefully it will be revealed in tomorrow’s paper. It’s true that I met my future wife there, but it wasn’t our first date. I was still in the wake of a crappy breakup with a crappy person who’d spent two plus years being crappy to me, but I noticed that there was a cute, smart woman at the show. So what if our first date wasn’t until 10 months later? When she asked me why I thought people should go to the show, I had regular, plain, somewhat accurate things to say, but I did flippantly include the “you never know, you could meet your future partner there” line. I’m curious to see if that made it in there.

She didn’t ask either of the two worst questions to ask a trans person, which, for everyone’s edification, are:

1. What was your name before?

2. Can you come to the ladies room and drop your pants so I can see your hee haw?

Both of these have been asked of me, one on many occasions. I won’t say which.

She did ask, however, how I identified, and I didn’t want to answer that one, mostly because I didn’t think it was relevant to the article—it would be like asking the bronco riders how they identified as rodeo participants—but also because I didn’t want to be pinned down for all of my fellow residents to read, at least, not until they all jump on some list that gets hung on Main Street listing their most embarrassing moment, because that seems about equal to me. But her manner of asking was nice, almost apologetic. So I said that these terms are in contestation within the trans community and that they have different meaning in mainstream culture, and I didn’t want to take all of that on in this one article as my personal legacy.

See? I should go be a politician. We moved on to the show and I said it would be a lot of fun, tickets aren’t usually free, and people should check it out. She asked why I’d pointed the show organizers to the local liberal arts college. The smart ass in me wanted to reply that I thought it better than sending them to the local Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints church. But honestly, I don’t know about venues in town outside of the college. The Fairgrounds seem a skosh too big.

The reporter was nice, nodded a lot, didn’t seem to want to make me out to be a laughing stock—which we all know I do quite well enough on my own—and I felt pretty good after it was over. Now we’ll see, tomorrow, what the editors have done to the story. And come Sunday night, I’ll know how much of a success it was. For all of the LGBT folks in town who don’t get a lot of open air gay time, I think this will be a good thing.

And yes, I’ll pick up a copy of the U-B tomorrow. It’ll be the first one I’ve bought.

April 13, 2010 | 0 Comments

Requiem for a job

smurfette in her declineI spent a lot of time thinking about what I should do, occupation wise, when I grew up. I had a poster of a smiling Smurfette sliding down a powerfully bright rainbow, exhorting that girls can do anything. Being a precocious 8-year-old, I aimed straight for the top, Icarus or no Icarus, and settled on POTUS. Why not president, after all? After a time I saw reason, and selected doctor instead. This wasn’t as big a leap as it might seem, since I spent a good amount of time as a child in hospitals and medical offices, and doctor clearly equaled boss. Which is who I was. I was boss, at least until I stepped out of the house to wait for the bus and came into uncomfortable proximity with the bullies from my neighborhood, and at that point I was pretty much clear that they weren’t responding to my personal sense of leadership.

For a decade, I had picked physician, and it’s difficult for me to explain why I was quite so attached to the concept for so long. I was a kid who thought that there would come a point in my life during which I would have learned everything there is to learn. I hadn’t thought about the progress of humans, clearly, but I also hadn’t given any quality thinking time to the space after I’d absorbed it all. What would I do then? Reread it all? Become a globe of light?

Someone at some moment exposed me to the idea of histology, and my dreams of Dr. Maroon evaporated. That just seemed too hard. I went with the wave of young women giving up, perched as we were, at the precipice over the ocean, quietly taking our turns leaping in. So willing, those lemmings. My friends had gone from talking about fighting fires and scuba diving to find new marine life to being secretaries and nurses. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with office employment or nursing. There is something wrong, in my book, with giving up on one major life goal due to insecurity, but to add the arbitrary nonsense of insecurity from one’s gender, race, or ethnicity, and the world starts to go off the rails a little.

And yet, even as I write this, there are four women in orbit around Planet Earth. Clearly the confines of the 1970s have relaxed quite a bit. I only had the Space Camp movie and Sally Ride as models and hell, I was a long in the tooth teenager by then, my fate already sealed. Okay, of course it wasn’t but I also believed, having not yet acquired a distrust of stupid talking people, everything adults said to me, even when they were clearly incorrect or limited statements. For example, upon graduating high school after 12 years of Catholic education, I honestly believed that people were only ever one of the following:

  • Catholic
  • Jewish
  • Protestors

I have no explanation; we all had to take world religions our third year of high school. I read about Confucius and Hinduism and the Qaran, but I didn’t see those kids in my world, so they must not have been in the United States, or at least, New Jersey. But these contradictions didn’t worry me one bit; I bought what was told to me soup to nuts, and trusted that I was not science-y enough to be a physician. I did get praise, however, for my writing.

rorschach inkblot testWriter, however, was not a word that instilled happiness in my parents. It sounded to them like a straight shot to poverty and narcissistic delusion. Before I could blink my mother whisked me off to Philadelphia to take a battery of tests otherwise known as career counseling. I sat in a wooden chair for 6 hours filling out Myers-Briggs questions, a Stanford Binet IQ test, ink blot and other occupation-oriented tests. And voila, a couple of weeks later, a lovely letter came in the mail with the answer, as if a civil servant and a carnival fortune-teller had a love child with a fixation on material wealth.

I was strongest in expressing myself, I had a genius ability to handle spatial relations, and I was scraping genius on verbal ability, with an exceptionally average ability at math. So of course they decided I should be a lemon grower. Okay, they didn’t say lemon grower. And sadly, there is no Lego Building major at our institutions of higher education, anywhere. The letter said I’d be good at mass communication, journalism, writing, and oh gosh, this was probably the worst news for my parents. And now they were out $400 to boot.

I considered a career as a book editor. That was steady salary and I still got to play with books and words. And suddenly, it was my career path, until I realized that I could easily lose my mind doing such a thing.

I hit college and realized I’d been letting everyone else make my decisions for me, however well intentioned they’d been. I took classes in television writing and directing, only to learn that collaborative writing entails other writers, who are sometimes burned out, sycophants to someone else, or mind-numbingly closed off to learning new stories. One workshop had Sally Field’s son in it, and he was a good writer, but the professor couldn’t do enough to rave on and on about every word he farted out of his ass. For what it’s worth, I thought his work in the workshop was boring and a little too misanthropic for me, but hey, we were all there to learn and grow, right? Over time the prof started showing up drunk, and then he stopped coming altogether. Word in the Hall of Languages was that he was going through a divorce. I just wanted feedback on my story, or for some of his colleagues to help him out. Neither happened.

I realized the end of my college career was fast approaching, so I did what any reasonable person would do, I took the Graduate Record Exam and went straight into graduate school. Even deferring the real world for two years was better than nothing, and when that was over, I looked at my 24-year-old self and still wasn’t sure what the hell to do with my life. I knew I was tired of living on a $9,000 stipend, but I didn’t—still—feel any confidence in my skill set. So I puttered around my college town for a few years and finally took a job selling and buying books down in the nation’s capitol.

It was a terrible, painful, unproductive job, with overworked staff who wanted to know why the boss had hired outside of them, who the fat white girl was, and how long I would last. Anyone who’d placed a bet on less than a calendar year, I hope you made some good money off of me. Ten months later I was out the door, scrambling to find anything in the very-more-expensive-than-upstate-New-York city. Four months into my search—it was well before the tech bubble burst—I found a job as a publications coordinator. This started me down a waterslide of jobs into the heart of information technology, and 8 years later, I was pretty much at the top of the technical ladder. None of this had come from an ink blot.

Moving out to Walla Walla, the people who read this blog regularly already know, has been a helluva big adjustment, and not just because I haven’t found a single decent job lead since we moved. But I do think that it’s given me some things I haven’t had before: time to write and work on my craft, a sense that I can really sit back and think about my next career move, absent the kind of heart-pounding pressure I’ve felt before, and an opportunity to re-evaluate self-evaluation. Maybe I am not my career. Maybe I don’t have to take job names: usability specialist, bookseller, writer, and pretend they are all I am. Those are good things.

I’m not sure what my next move is, although I did get a call from the Census (two, actually, which makes me wonder how many people they’re actually about to hire this spring) to do enumeration for the next ten weeks, and I may have a job with Microsoft, which up until this move has been like spokesperson for Satan. And yet I know that if I go with either of these options, I don’t have to make them about me. I can just be me.

Smurfette taught me I can be anything, after all. And while I didn’t really take any vocational advice from her, that rainbow in the picture? It made me kind of gay.

April 12, 2010 | 0 Comments

The likes of others

There’s a scene early on in Juno where the audience meets Allison Janney’s character, Bren MacGuff, and learns about her dog obsession. She’s got sweaters of knit dogs, a dog mouse pad, dog statuettes galore, they’re everywhere. I at least appreciated the absurdity of her character’s predilections, but it also served a purpose in Diablo Cody’s script, namely to knock us off guard. For she is the last person, this stepmother, who we all know are supposed to be evil doers in the world of the protagonist, to support the pregnant teenager. And then, she does, wonderfully, in fact.

And that is why I like absurdity, and humor writing, or in this case, a comic screenplay. It helps of course, that Allison Janney played her, because the woman has some really good timing, as evidenced throughout her Emmy-laden career on The West Wing. For what it’s worth, I would really love to see a series about congressional staffers and the polarization of the political parties, told in the same quickfire and witty way. I hear NBC has a few time slots they could use.

But seriously, humor is not easy to write. Good humor, anyway. Often, it demands accessible cultural reference, or audience identification with the situation and punchline. Some of the funniest stuff out there takes a common experience and turns it around, creating a completely new take, like making an origami swan out of a greasy KFC wrapper and giving it to one’s older brother as a lunch treat, since one had previously eaten the chicken inside that he was expecting to receive. Or something.

I was not a regular viewer of Seinfeld, but Larry David is very funny to me when it comes to showing the annoying side of people, and laughing through it. Elaine, stuck in a toilet stall, begging her neighbor for just one square of tissue paper, George’s unintentional killing of his fiancee because he insisted on buying the cheapest invitations to the wedding, and those came complete with toxic envelope glue, these are moments I remember even though it stopped airing in the last millennium. There’s also something about how humor makes for a full and breathing character—it takes loving big parts of George for viewers to be okay with the fact that he’s relieved he doesn’t have to get married, because otherwise, he’s an abhorrent person. Well, he’s kind of abhorrent anyway, but he’s still got his lovable parts. For me, David sometimes gets a bit too mean-spirited, so I can’t be counted among his big fans, but that’s okay, there’s a long list of folks I have to admire for their contributions to comedy.

All of this is to say comedy writers and humorists are supposed to make it look easy, to tap into our frustrations or insecurities and turn them inside out, exposing the fluffiness on the inside, if our experiences were like socks. My experiences have a couple of holes in them but mostly look okay, thanks to OxyClean. I just try to remember that my goal isn’t to make writing funny, it’s to reveal that finding life funny in general should be documented, in case anyone else agrees with me. I didn’t venture out to be a humor writer because most young writers really, really, powerfully want to write the next great novel, American or otherwise. But the humor kept showing up, like Uncle Lloyd at our Friday night dinners, and we never really knew why he kept hanging out with us until we realized his wife made really awful Van deKamp fish on Fridays and he was just looking for a non-fishy-smelly house. Two weeks in a row of Gorton’s finest imitation cod and we were free. No, I haven’t found a way to banish humor, but I’m not looking for one.

I am the prepackaged fish dinner of writers, and I’m okay with that.

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