For Frying Out Loud Read online

  For more history, I visited the old Wanamaker’s Department Store which is now Macy’s (isn’t everything?) with its two story pipe organ and 18th century architecture. Coincidentally there was a sale and I turned history into shopping before you could say Give Me Liberty or Give me 30% off. I was, at least, using currency with Ben Franklin on it.

  Later, we sampled Philly’s gay culture. We did the nightlife. We got to boogie.

  For the Food Tour: We started in South Philly at Jim’s Steaks, family owned and operated since 1939. Sure, I’ve had Cheese Steaks, but I’d never been asked if I wanted Cheese Whiz on mine. According to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, it’s not the real thing without the Whiz. Sorry, Guv, I couldn’t go there. But the gooey provolone over steak and onions folded into a perfect roll is deservedly legend.

  Going from the ridiculous to the sublime, Bonnie and I celebrated our anniversary with brunch at the Rittenhouse Hotel. Truly, I have never had a more exquisite food experience in my entire calorie-clogged, thigh-bulging, restaurant-reviewing lifetime.

  We took the Rittenhouse tour-de-kitchen marathon. The buffet had over 40 appetizers alone, including oysters, caviar, vichyssoise with lobster, foie gras ganache, escargot fricassee, shrimp spatzle and the unlikely winner, pineapple and Thai basil soda.

  The main course took diners into the actual kitchen for a hot buffet of every kind of meat imaginable (and some slightly unimaginable) along with seafood, paella, venison sausages, Belgian waffles, Tuscan bread pudding, Brussels sprouts and, and, and….

  For dessert there was a Liquid Nitrogen station, which, I initially thought was on loan from a dermatologist. No, the smoking stuff was for submerging coconut curry foam and dark chocolate to form divine confections.

  But on to Rainbow Flags. Following the hedonistic weekend, I spoke at the National Trust for Historic Preservation Conference on the topic of “Rainbow Flags on Main Street.”

  I shared experiences about the economic rewards of gay-welcoming communities. We provided demographics about the value of the gay dollar (big!), and the many benefits to the community at large, not the least of which is a heightened preservation and design ethic.

  I had the pleasure of explaining how CAMP Rehoboth evolved, helping to bridge the gap between gay and straight residents and business owners. Dozens of attendees wanted a how-to manual for starting their own CAMP clones. As people described small towns with fledgling gay sensibilities but no central organizing leadership, I heard CAMP-envy and realized how lucky we are.

  As I was leaving the hotel to come home, dozens of city workers in bucket trucks busily installed hundreds of rainbow banners on city lampposts. The annual Equality Forum is on the horizon and the whole community will be celebrating.

  The City of Philadelphia makes a great commitment to their LGBT entrepreneurs and citizens, realizing just which side their tourism toast is buttered on. In fact the City recently launched the nation’s largest gay tourism marketing campaign, going after its share of the $54.1 billion gay and lesbian travel market.

  Their slogan says it all: “Philadelphia: Get your history straight and your nightlife gay.”

  The City of Brotherly (and Sisterly) love, indeed.

  May 2008

  FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN…

  I never thought I’d fall in love like this again.

  Gleefully giddy and blushing when I think of her, I’m in the full throes of a mad affair.

  Don’t phone the National Enquirer, Bonnie not only approves, but she introduced me to her.

  I’m in love with my car – head-over-heels with my previously owned, gently-used six-year old BMW.

  I swore off woman-car love in the disco era when my silverblue 1964 Corvette convertible was hauled off on a flat bed truck, its back wheels having fallen off. We’d been together through thick (often) and thin (not so often), but the speed bump I hit that day ended it all. I’d known her most of my life.

  I was there in 1964, on Lincoln’s birthday (when we actually celebrated it on February 12) picking up my mother’s new sports car from the dealer. It cost a whopping $4000 and everybody thought my father was nutty for buying it for his wife.

  By 1968 I was permitted to drive the car to college, 250 miles from New York City to Washington, DC. Sadly, I’d learned to drive in Manhattan, meaning I could parallel park like a champ but had never driven over 30 mph. You can imagine what happened when I hit the Jersey Turnpike. By the Delaware Memorial Bridge I’d lost count of the number of middle finger salutes I’d gotten for creeping along in the right lane. It took me nine hours to get to DC and I arrived on campus shaken and needing controlled substances. Fortunately, in 1968, campus was awash with them.

  I re-learned to drive in that sports car, and adored her, even as she fish-tailed away from stop signs, skidded wildly in the snow, and, in her later years, required an entire roll of Bounty Quicker-Picker-upper paper towels stuffed above the visors to keep me dry on rainy days. It was true love.

  Together we campaigned, then cried, for Bobby Kennedy, drove to the hinterlands of Wilmington, Delaware to Hair at the DuPont Theater and sat transfixed by the car radio as men walked on the moon. My love drove me to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to march against the Vietnam War, waited outside countless theatres while I rehearsed shows, honked for joy when Tricky Dick Nixon resigned, witnessed the dawn of disco and breathed her last just about the same time my heterosexuality did.

  After that, my personal affairs turned happy, but I pined mightily for that car. What followed was a succession of unsatisfying relationships – a station wagon I called the Trashmobile; an old Dodge that was so broad in the beam I once ripped off the door handles on both sides getting into a parking space. Then I had some kind of American Motors contraption with no braking system whatever, which had me doing wheelies at red lights. Enter the cute little blue 1980 Chevette Bonnie drove when I met her. The very name Chevette, so near and yet so far.

  By then I was out and proud, with Martina Navratilova telling me to buy a Subaru. I liked the Lesbaru. What followed was a bout of serial monogamy, as I purchased one Subaru after another, winding up with a 1998 anniversary edition Outback. We were comfortable together. Not exciting, but a marriage of convenience.

  But one day that damned Subaru turned on me, blew a head gasket and left me in the lurch. For a while I made do driving Bonnie’s Tracker, but it rode like a farm vehicle, skated across multiple lanes in the wind and was, to be honest, above me. So far, in fact, I had trouble climbing into the cockpit.

  But Bonnie and I couldn’t decide what kind of car I should get, and frankly I was not about to pay what it used to cost to buy a house, for a car that didn’t send shivers up my spine. “I want my old car back,” I’d whine and Bonnie knew I was talking about a 42-year-old Corvette.

  One could be had, alright, but only at the cost of a new Lexus. Besides, the phrase “high maintenance girlfriend” clearly applied.

  Even if I could have paid the ransom for a mid-century Corvette, the thing would have added twenty minutes to my daily commute: ten minutes to get myself down into the buckets and another ten minutes to pry myself out. Those were the days, my friend, and they were over.

  Finally, one morning we stopped at a well-known luxury used car lot. My favorite salesman introduced me to a sweet little sea foam BMW convertible on the lot. One look and I heard violins. I instantly wanted to load it into a U-Haul and have it move in with me.

  Surprisingly, its price tag was less than I’d pay for a new General Motors sedan and a loveless marriage.

  So off we went, my Beamer and I, on our honeymoon – a drive to Broadkill Beach as I recall. Along the way I realized the two of us had some issues.

  First, my garage was impenetrable. Subarus and Trackers are hardy outdoor machines, not requiring the designation “garage-kept” after their names in ads. But for the new baby, shelter was a priority. And our garage was a solid waste landfill. I called 1-800-Got-Crap and divested ourselves of eight years of pack
rat debris.

  Then I determined that my love and I needed prophylactics–protection from the still overstuffed tool and book filled garage. A Beamer condom?

  Bonnie and I headed downtown to find the next best thing: noodles. Not Chicken Lo Mein, but the Styrofoam noodles that keep me afloat in a swimming pool. At the store, we picked out several pink and purple perpendicular noodles and marched to the cash register. “What kinky things are you girls up to?” We just smiled.

  Back home, I stapled the noodles to the pertinent book shelve edges, blunting every possible surface where a car door could connect. I gave her wide berth. Then I screwed my decorative Schnauzer plate to the front bumper and adhered the rainbow cling-on to the back.

  Having spent the past two decades driving unloved and dangerously unwashed vehicles doubling as trash cans and fast-food wrapper repositories, I’d have to change my foolish ways.

  I vowed there would be no trash in my car. No eating. No coffee drinking. No scratching off scratch-offs. I would wash the car weekly and have it detailed frequently.

  And I’ve done pretty well. I get a senior citizen discount at the car wash (my first, but I’m so cheap, I don’t mind). I remove all debris from the car nightly. And as soon as my auto obsessed friend Julie tells me I need to get the dirt off my wheels, I attend to it.

  I love my new car. Long may she wave. If you see me driving around, you wave too, please.

  May 2008

  THE HANDWRITING IS ON THE WALL

  As it turns out, I’m not particularly Scrabulous. For a wordsmith, it’s amazing how much I suck at playing the online version of Scrabble.

  I got into this frustrating cyber game as a consequence of my foray into the baffling and relentless world of social networking. And it seems to be taking over my life. Social networking is like an online social disease. I don’t know how I got it and it won’t go away.

  It started when I got an e-mail invitation from a friend to join Facebook. You know me, I hate turning down invitations. Once I joined, I was instructed to ask all my friends to join as well. After days of adding myself as a friend to folks with Facebook pages and then inviting old and new friends to my own fledgling Facebook page, things started to spin out of control.

  I began hearing from people from the great beyond – like back in college or even high school, plus I was getting invitations to become friends with people I didn’t even remember. It was the invitations to become friends with friends of friends that started making me crazy. I was so busy inviting friends to join Facebook and then My Space, I got confused and started inviting people to join My Face.

  And was that face red when buddies asked me what Facebook was all about and I had no bloody idea.

  The next thing I knew, I received cyber Petunias from a site called Green Patch and was invited to send people cyber shrubbery to help raise money to save the rain forest. I tried to figure out how to forward flowers to a bunch of folks but at the end of the day I got so flustered I’m probably responsible for the loss of several hundred acres along the Amazon.

  And speaking of Amazon, there’s a Facebook thing called Bookshelf, which somebody invited me to join. For the next several days I used every waking moment clicking on books I’ve read and writing mini-reviews of them so the Bookshelf geeks – whoever they are – will understand my reading preferences to recommend books for me. I checked off everything from Catcher in the Rye to Kite Runner. At one point, in the upper right hand portion of my screen appeared the words YOU ARE NOT READING ANYTHING RIGHT NOW. Of course not, you cyber poops, I’m filling up my virtual bookshelf and wasting time writing book reports when I could have been doing something productive like playing online Scrabble.

  It’s bad enough when you put your hand in the Scrabble bag and pull out all vowels in a regular game, but when the computer sticks you with iiieeoa who do you bitch at? One afternoon the dogs found me screaming at my flat screen monitor and wondered if it had peed in the house.

  Meanwhile back at Facebook, friends and acquaintances are inviting me to join all kinds of communities, like college alumni associations, sports team groups, The National Sarcasm Society. That one was a temptation. And I just got invited to spend time answering movie quizzes and writing movie reviews. This will be a great way to fill my time when I’m in the rest home, but right now there’s stuff happening in the real world and I’m sitting here writing a review of Spaceballs. Somebody help me.

  Best I can tell, cyber social networking is a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you do it right you have no time for real life social networking.

  I finally located the “cancel” link for the movie quiz thing and so far I have confined myself to joining just four Facebook groups – Saints & Sinners Authors (writers who participate annually in a New Orleans LGBT literary conference), One Million Strong for Marriage Equality (it can’t hurt), and Six Gay Degrees of Separation, which is a group trying to get one million gay people to sign up so it can make use of our cyber muscle to fight for our rights.

  And in the middle of all this social networking somebody poked me. It didn’t hurt, but I had no idea why I’d been poked.

  Apparently poking is the online equivalent of somebody sticking their index finger in your shoulder. I hate that for real, so getting poked online is especially insulting. On the other hand, cyber hugging, another Facebook activity, is less irritating but no more satisfying. Hugging should be a contact sport, dontcha think?

  Then there’s the wall thing, where your online friends can leave you messages. I haven’t written on the walls since I was five years old. Okay you boomers, remember the TV show Crusader Rabbit where you got a plastic thing to put on the TV screen and you could trace the rabbit’s whereabouts? One day, with my burnt umber crayon I wrote right off the screen, onto the floor and up the wall. The parents were not amused.

  But now, in my dotage, I’m being asked to write on people’s walls. If texting is the new phone call, writing on somebody’s wall is the new e-mail. Every day I get messages from friends who have written on my wall.

  Naturally, I feel compelled to write back, since everybody can see your site and see who wrote on your wall and see the time when they wrote it and know if you have been prompt in answering or, instead, you are blowing people off in favor of your online Scrabulous game. The pressure to be responsive and clever is positively crushing.

  Then there’s the “Fay is…” at the top of my Facebook page. You’re supposed to write what you are doing at the moment, but nobody writes “Answering this question on Facebook,” which is what they are all doing, because like me they are hooked on this idiotic social networking site. I can’t even write that I’m playing online Scrabble because I had to forfeit my turn because I had all vowels again.

  Frankly, I can’t be doing anything else, like reading the paper, doing the laundry or finishing my column, because these Facebook questions are requiring so much of my time. So once again I answer “Fay is…trying to keep up with Facebook….”

  Oops, it’s my turn in Scrabulous. I get a whopping three points for the word “ass.” Yes indeedy.

  Your move. And make it snappy. I’ve got to go write on several people’s walls, recommend some books, fill out a questionnaire about my taste in music, and see who else is friends with all my friends so I can add more friends and write on more walls and recommend more movies and….

  Somebody poke me in the eye and get me off this Facebook page. My column is due by midnight tonight and I still haven’t started.

  “Fay is…panicking.” Somebody help her.

  June 2008

  IS IT REAL OR IS IT “MEMOIR?”

  There’s a fight going on in the publishing industry and I was briefly part of the dust-up.

  Perhaps you are aware of writer James Frye who wrote a best-selling memoir of his life on drugs, in prison and other unsavory experiences which led to the New York Times best-seller list and a spot on Oprah’s couch.

  The only problem was, much of his
book was fiction and he was verbally spanked throughout the publishing world and almost literally spanked by Oprah. Fiction is fiction and memoir is memoir or so it would seem.

  Not so fast. Since the new millennium began, memoirs have been flying off bookstore shelves (okay, not literally flying, but being purchased, so the essence of the sentence is still true) hundreds of times faster (a slight exaggeration perhaps, but still mostly true) than fiction books.

  Got a book to write? Memoir is the key if you have dollar signs in your eyes. Or, in my case, if you couldn’t write fiction even if a publisher put an Uzi to your head. Okay, a slight exaggeration but still true. I could write hideously bad fiction rather than having my ears blown off but you get my point.

  Memoir means memory. You remember the stuff you write. If you invent entire escapades and lifestyles, it’s fiction, dammit.

  Well last month I made my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans for the Saints & Sinners LGBT Literary Conference. There, I had the honor of serving on a panel with other memoirists to discuss the meaning of the genre. The title of the 10 a.m. session was Truths Stranger Than Fiction: Lives Revealed in Memoir.

  After partying much of the night before on Bourbon Street, drinking innumerable Hurricanes and stumbling back to the hotel while singing show tunes, a 10 a.m. panel was cruel and unusual punishment. Okay, I had exactly four Hurricanes, not innumerable. I’m trying to stick to the truth here. By night’s end I could enumerate the number of drinks I had but not pronounce innumerable.

  Well, the session on memoir turned into quite a brawl. Hell, nobody actually wrestled anybody to the floor but to substitute the phrase “loud discussion” would have readers snoring. I will stop with the wordsmithing now. You get my drift. You can be creative with language but not facts. With that thesis in mind, the panel and the audience did indeed have a lively and provocative hour and a half.