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  So imagine my surprise when, as we nosed out toward the ocean, what I can only describe as a mighty rogue wave swelled up in front of the boat and made my eyeballs switch sockets.

  (FREEZE FRAME)

  This gigantic wall of water rose in a colossal swell about, I don’t know, a thousand feet higher than the boat deck. Okay, six feet overhead and five feet away. I channeled Shelley Winters, picturing that fierce wave crashing through the cockpit windows on the Poseidon. I marveled at the wave’s enormity, its stark green expanse of color, with bubbling white foam on top. I gasped when I saw two more identical waves right behind it. I went into a momentary coma, broken only by the sound of somebody screaming. It was me.

  (ACTION!)

  With a giant crash, the wall of water hit the boat, the bow rose to conquer it and we thumped up, then down like a bathtub toy. Geeze it was scary, seeing all that dark water up close and wondering, omigod, is the nose of the boat going to come back up again?.

  (FREEZE FRAME)

  If the bow didn’t come back up it was called pitch-poling – “pitch·poled, pitch·pol·ing, pitch·poles Nautical. To flip or cause to flip end over end.” I learned the term in Power Squadron boating class, or, as I used to call it, 101 Ways to Drown or Blow Up Your Boat. I know they wanted to frighten us into caution, but they scared the barnacles out of us – and I was flashing back to pitch-pole class. And of course it didn’t help in the pitch-pole department that it was my lard ass sitting up front as, once again, ballast.

  (ACTION!)

  Of course the bow came back up, but we got a thundering, frigid shower. It may have been 90 degrees out but the ocean didn’t get the memo.

  When we looked back at the captain, who was hollering a reassuring “We’re okay, don’t worry…” the second wave pounded us, sending a fresh freezing tsunami into the boat, then a third. We got glacial facials and held an impromptu wet t-shirt contest. This was now a combination of fishing and a sinus wash.

  Amazingly, as soon as the Captain turned left up the coast, the water went calm again.

  Alrighty now. I was drenched, hoping it was all sea water and I hadn’t peed myself. The Captain and First Mate were pretty wet, too. But Bonnie really got the worst of it. She was dripping wet from head to toe and I expected to see her wearing a flounder on her head.

  Three of us sopped off with towels, but Bonnie was undryable. She shed her shorts and shirt, wrapped up in a towel and noted it would be an inopportune time to be stopped by vacationing Somali pirates. We laughed and hooted and hollered. Lucky for me, my Disney fishing pole survived the incident.

  (FREEZE FRAME)

  Really, we were freezing our frames but the sun shone, dolphins swam by, we cruised along and waved to the crowds on the beach. How lucky to be invited for a wonderful cruise in the sunshine. Achoo! The season had begun and all was right with the world.

  (ACTION!)

  Now I’m off to close up the house, turn on the A/C, and over-water the plants.

  May 2009

  GOING BATS

  I was at Our Lady of Lowes last Sunday morning along with much of the other lesbian population of Sussex County when I spied two friends walking down the aisle with what appeared to be a birdhouse.

  Oh no, they said, it was a bat house and it’s all the rage now for clearing backyards of mosquitoes. Every lesbian they know is putting up a bat house.

  Now I’m as anxious as the next person to avoid B-52 mosquito squads, but the idea of inviting bats to the party to deter mosquitoes seemed rather like inviting Dick Cheney over for hot dogs in order to keep Colin Powell away. I’d rather have General Powell and a swarm of blood-sucking mosquitoes than Dick Cheney and bats. Dick Chaney and bats, in the same sentence, that’s quite appropriate.

  No, no, said my friends, bats are lovely guests, you hardly see them and they insure a swarm-free picnic on the deck. They are nature’s best insect deterrent. To me, nature’s best insect deterrent is staying in the house.

  Next, my buds told me you have to mount the bat house on a twelve foot pole, which I agreed was perfect as I wouldn’t touch anything to do with bats with a ten foot pole. My spouse just rolled her eyes and put a bat house into our shopping cart. Peer pressure sucks.

  So I did some research. All you have to do to attract bats is to provide them with a bat-friendly structure. Apparently bats like crowded, warm spaces, so we’re lucky we don’t attract them to women’s happy hour on Friday night. And they like it to be 80 to 100 degrees where they can bask in the sun. Perhaps they’d like an Olivia cruise.

  Experts suggest putting a thermometer atop the pole along with the bat house so you can check if the temperature is right to attract occupants. I can barely stagger to the TV in the morning to check the weather channel, so there’s very little chance of me shimmying up a pole to check the bat climate.

  Here’s good news: “a single brown bat can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes in one hour.” I imagine that a single gray schnauzer can eat one bat in the time it takes for me to hit them both with a broom to break up the feast. This concerns me.

  “A single bat consumes up to 3000 insects a night – a third of those are usually mosquitoes!” Good god, what are the other two thirds, locusts?

  “Bats kill mosquitoes that spread West Nile Virus.” Oy, something else I never worried about that I can obsess over now.

  Here’s a great fact. In Austin, Texas there’s a place called Bracken Cave, which is the summer home to between…ready…20 to 30 million Mexican free-tailed bats. Like I needed another reason never to go to Texas.

  On the internet I found a pamphlet called Attracting Bats, which, along with Field Guide to Moose Dressing is something I figured I never would have to read. Apparently, using lures like bat guano doesn’t work, thank god. Did I ever think I’d be typing the words “bat guano?”

  Holy Bat Box Batman, this attracting bats thing is much like field of nightmares – build it and they will come. Eventually. We should have put the bat box up this past spring, before the bats came back from their winter hibernation. That’s good, actually, since Bonnie can have all the fun in the world installing it now and I won’t have to worry about going bats for at least a year. Now that’s a project I can encourage. I bet the bats hibernate in Ft. Lauderdale like the rest of Rehoboth.

  Another bat book warns that it could be three to five years before I get a healthy contingent of bats. At that rate, when we sell the house the bats will convey. This project is sounding better and better.

  I wound up on the internet half the night looking at bat stuff. I especially liked the site with advice on getting rid of nuisance bats. At this point in my reading, there seems to be no other kind.

  But no, there are a zillion varieties. According to the Bat Conservation Organization you can even sponsor a bat, choosing from big brown bats or Vampire Bats. They even have names, like Gandalf the Egyptian Fruit Bat. I wanted to know whether I would get a welcome kit and wallet-sized picture of Gandalf if I sponsored him. Can we e-mail and get updates? Is my sponsorship enough to feed and clothe a bat for a year?

  I made the mistake of posting my little bat project on Facebook and immediately started getting all kinds of dire warnings.

  Most began with, “Are you crazy???,” followed by the advice that building a house for Purple Martins would work just as well against mosquitoes. Then somebody suggested I forget the Purple Martins and go directly for purple martinis which suited me fine. I could get back to the bat project later.

  But then came the most dire warning of all. “Careful! They love coming in the house – and I don’t mean the mosquitoes! Ever try catching one as it fly dives from room curtain to room curtain? We did – finally had to call a bat catcher to do the job.”

  Okay, now I’m picturing having to call Dracula Exterminators for a bat geek to prowl around my darkened house with a giant fish net while the dogs and I check into a motel.

  That did it. I sent Bonnie, the bat house and the twelve foot pole back to Low
es with instructions to return with Citronella candles and Deep Woods Off. I’m relieved there won’t be bats at Schnauzerhaven any time soon, but I’m seriously worried about all those lesbians in Rehoboth trying to lure bats into their belfries. Give it up, girls. Maybe this summer, to get up close and personal with bats, we should skip the Michigan Womyns’s Music Festival and go to the Annual Great Lakes Bat Festival on August 28 and 29. At this one, I hope to hell nobody gets naked in the woods.

  Now I’m off to get a purple martini.

  June 2009

  THE GAYEST WEEK EVER…

  For me, last week may have been the gayest week ever.

  We visited NYC to attend a fundraiser and have a gay old time (adj. “having or showing a merry, lively mood”). First stop, Chelsea Pines Inn, the gay (adj. “indicating or supporting homosexual interests”) B&B operated by my delightfully gay (noun. “A male homosexual”) high school boyfriend.

  While waiting in our gaily (adj.) adorned room, before meeting our gay (noun) son for cocktails, we flipped on the TV to find Turner Movie Classics playing Judy Garland’s Meet Me in St. Louis. How gay is that? (Okay, I have no idea what part of speech covers that one).

  On Saturday night we had drinks at The Ritz lounge, saw the spectacular gay-themed play Next Fall, and wound up at gay ground zero, Christopher Street, to kick off the 40th anniversary celebration of the Stonewall Inn Rebellion. There’s something about standing in a dark, dingy piano bar, surrounded by a hundred musical theatre queens and belting out “Oklahoma!” that positively screams GAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

  The bar, Marie’s Crisis, has been there for over 35 years and quite possibly the gin-soaked piano player has been there that long as well. It’s the only kind of place I can “sing out, Louise” without fear of sending listeners into seizures.

  But Sunday evening held the weekend’s signature event: Broadway Bares – the 19th annual fundraiser for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. The collective chorus boys and girls from all the Broadway musicals rehearsed for months on their days off putting together this giant burlesque show. The dancing, singing, costumes and lights, fabulous as they were, took a back seat to the buff, beautiful bodies, male and female, stripping, teasing and showing off their um, assets. Charitable giving has never been such fun.

  Recuperating back home in Rehoboth after all this gay culture, we switched gears from fundraising to activism.

  Finally, after 13 long years of painful and futile efforts, a bill (SB 121) to add the words “sexual orientation” to Delaware’s anti-discrimination statute seemed poised to pass in the Senate on Tuesday, June 23. By doing an end-run around some anti-gay legislators, the plan envisioned the bill passing in the Senate, with our Representative Pete Schwartzkopf ready to run it across the hall, suspend House rules and take it up instantly for passage.

  Man plans, God laughs. It was an end-run alright. As I was on the way to Dover for the 2 p.m. session I received a call that the President Pro Tem of the Senate, Thurman Adams, the man who’d locked the bill in his desk drawer for years, passed away mere hours before the bill was to have its hearing. Forgive me, the old coot said it would pass over his dead body, and….

  Suffice it to say, we feared he’d managed to scuttle the bill once more, this time from the great beyond.

  Fear not, Senator Sokola and Representative Schwartzkopf managed to reschedule the bill for 3 p.m. the next day.

  Readers, you are lucky you weren’t there. The opposition attached three ugly amendments to the bill, essentially saying that the bill would make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation unless individuals or businesses had deeply held religious beliefs against homosexuality, and then it would be fine to discriminate. Really. Passage with that amendment would be worse than having no protection at all. The right to discriminate against gay people would be the law of the land.

  We sat in the Senate hearing, listening to four miserable hours of insulting, mean-spirited, ignorant testimony from a handful of legislators and their witnesses, favoring this and other heinous amendments.

  Since it’s 2009, not 1999, our unworthy opponents felt compelled to compliment gay people as good tax-paying citizens, even calling some of us their friends, before trying to stuff their religious values down everyone’s throats.

  Frankly, I liked it better when bigots were out of the closet. It would have been easier to listen to folks in white hoods saying, “I hate homosexuals so we shouldn’t enact this bill.” At times I found myself gnawing on my knuckles to keep from screaming.

  I also blogged on Facebook:

  - Killed one amend of three. Keep u posted.

  - A woman with “a Christian bakery,” whatever that is, says she should have the right to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

  - Killed second stupid amendment.

  - Now Sen. Venables is yammering that “lesbians can be made.” Gay men, not so much. What the hell does that mean?

  - I wish I had a catheter.

  - If a student has two mommies, there’s a yutz saying that the school should not even acknowledge it.

  - My god, these people are scared that protecting gays from being fired will lead to teachers being instructed to teach tots about homosexual sex. I’m practicing abstinence–I’m not shrieking!!!!!

  - Three amendments down and roll call to go

  - Bill passes in senate! 14 YES, 5 NO.

  - Get me to the ladies room!!!!!!

  - Pete called House back into session. Same crappy amendments introduced.

  - Another hour of ridiculous hate speech.

  - Spooky: the rain outside just stopped and a giant rainbow is over Legislative Hall. Somebody saying “not so fast” to those ugly amendments? Judy come to help?

  - It passed!!!! 26 YES, 14 No. Tears of joy! We’ve been sitting through this battle for 13 years. I just congratulated Pete Schwartzkopf for being an incredible advocate and a man of his word.

  - Over and out, kids!

  So gay people in Delaware are now protected in employment, housing and public accommodations. That’s a relief. I hope the religious bigots know that the bill also protects them from being discriminated against for their peculiarly hurtful religious views.

  Saturday was the capper on the gayest week ever. The Delaware Stonewall Democrats hosted a joyous party celebrating the 40th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Inn Rebellion that launched the gay rights movement. Governor Jack Markell attended, made moving remarks and announced his commitment to sign the anti-discrimination bill at CAMP Rehoboth the following Thursday.

  Thanks to Governor Markell, our wonderfully supportive legislators, and everyone who has worked to make this happen for 13 long years.

  Great day. Great week.

  I am very, very gay (noun and adjective).

  July 2009

  I’M ALL ATWITTER…

  I’m being followed. All the time. I feel like I’m in Witness Protection, with the mob gunning for me. In fact, I know exactly who is following me and to date there are 157 of them – just waiting to know what I am doing every single moment. It’s scary.

  Who’s guessed? Ta-da! I am Twittering!

  FayJRB: It’s July 5. I have laryngitis. Why is everyone laughing?

  Now if you have been under a large rock for the last year, or simply go catatonic at the mention of 21st century technology, here’s a primer.

  Twitter is a communications network – minus anchors, commercials, studios or high definition. Best of all, no talking heads come uninvited into your living room.

  Mary Matalin and Rush can stand in a forest and Twitter, but thank goodness, to me it doesn’t make a sound.

  FayJRB: I am sitting, covered in hard-shell crab debris, picking crab meat.

  Is this something inquiring minds want to know???? Joining Twitter means developing a network of twits you want to follow and see which twits want to follow you back. Oh, and the tweets you write are only allowed to be 140 characters long and are only allowed to answer a single qu
estion: “What are you doing?”

  FayJRB: Oh, crap, I’m wiping Old Bay seasoning off my Blackberry.

  Twitter allows you to fritter away your day twittering. Everybody’s Clark Kent at the Daily Planet. Not only are people living their lives, but they are tweeting about them in real time.

  Now it’s one thing to tweet “I’m at Aqua drinking a Cosmo” and entirely another to tweet “I’m driving 45 mph around the circle on Rehoboth Avenue.” I have seen this scary thing–a moving car with the driver balancing an iPhone on the steering wheel and twittering away. Please god let the next tweet say “got pulled over before I killed somebody.”

  FayJRB: I’m procrastinating. Went to play 9 holes instead of writing my column about Twittering.

  Here’s what I don’t understand. Why should somebody except my editor care if I’m golfing instead of completing my work? Some people use Twitter to give a running commentary on their entire lives. Along with a great big who cares, how can they pay attention to what they are doing while simultaneously tweeting about it?

  Back in the early part of this century (2002) I thought that the crawl on the TV while the anchor was talking was distracting. Ha! That’s nothing compared to somebody playing hoops and tweeting about the last 2-pointer. This is happening. Maximum multi-tasking.

  FayJRB: Got up early to finish column so editor doesn’t strangle me.

  So just how did I become such a twit? I downloaded something called Tweet Deck, which is not at all like a tape deck, which is, I hear, totally obsolete. In addition, the word Tweeter itself reminds me of Woofers and Tweeters – those parts of your stereo speaker system (I think that whole concept is obsolete as well) that used to be housed in walnut cabinets the size of a dining room table.

  No, this is the new kind of tweeter alright and I’m trying to determine if it’s for me.