Throwback Wednesday: Old And Dysmorphic Edition

When you’re feeling old and invisible at your Pumped-Up Unabridged Encyclopedia of Hotness Gym, instead of working out, do something actually productive and emotionally healthy: Re-post a pic of yourself and your shirtless shoulders and your saucy instep from a long-ago gay cruise.

Flashback Friday: Big Gay Disco Pants Edition

Big gay cruises = big gay costumed dance parties

I don’t miss the cruises, but I’m deeply sorry I returned those pants to my possibly gay neighbor's disco-pants library.

Shoes before cruise!

The domestic partner and I decided to take this year off from gay cruises … so of course 2011 ends up being Atlantis’ 20th anniversary of cruising and of course it books the mega-hella-massive Allure of the Seas for its epic 20th anniversary cruise and of course all our friends in the known universe will be frolicking beSpeedoed on that ship next month without us.

But! Gay cruises are expensive once you factor in airfare and hotels and port adventures and glitter. We figure we’ve spent up to $3,000 each for every cruise we’ve been on – and we don’t even drink alcohol or have to carry bail money for drug busts.

So while our friends booked the best balcony rooms and stopped eating carbs and invested in new Speedo wardrobes, we stuck to our financial guns. And we’ll be landbound next weekend when they all set sail into the warm Caribbean.

Plus we’ll also be $3,000 richer than everyone else.

And there’s only one way to celebrate saving $3,000 on a cruise: spending $400 on clothes!

To assuage my disappointment in not cruising this year, I gave myself a $200 $300 $400 allowance to go hunting for some new shirts, pants and shoes that were 1) appropriate for the casual-funky-slightly-dressy sartorial look I’ve imposed on myself for work, 2) comfortable to wear and easy to wash, and 3) big enough to accommodate my slowly (very slowly) growing physique.

And thanks to the awesome deals at Filene’s Basement and Nordstrom Rack—not to mention the attitude and/or incompetence of the Puma Store employees that alienated me, the almighty consumer, into not spending $260 on their full-priced stuff—I eventually stumbled home with two pair of shoes, two pair of pants and ten (twelve? fifteen? I honestly lost count) shirts.

As usual, I wanted dressy gym shoes I could wear to the gym without looking too dressy and to work without looking too gymmy. And I found these fabulous Pumas (but not in the attitude-and/or-incompetence-riddled Puma Store) marked down to $49 from $80:

My years of brutal personal-trainer workouts and mountains of chicken breasts and gallons of protein shakes are slowly (very slowly) paying off, because I’m slowly (very slowly) growing in all the places I’d hoped I’d grow. And a lot of my short-sleeve shirts that looked merely questionable for work two years ago now look downright desperate the way the shoulder seams ride up and the sleeves barely cover my arms. So I made a point to buy (still fitted) shirts in sizes bigger than you typically find in the American Girl Store.

But! This week when I was searching online for synonyms for the word “plus” (for a client’s product-naming brainstorm! honest!), thesaurus.com made some rude assumptions about my motives when it placed its paid advertisements on the results page:
Dear thesaurus.com: Suddenly wearing bigger shirts does not make me a big girl. I’ll thank you for keeping your interpretations of my shopping and/or word-searching habits to yourself.

While I was updating my look (and abandoning Atlantis) I also decided that the formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange Atlantis gym bag I’ve carried around with me every day for the last four-plus years was looking kind of … um … tacky.

I leave the house at 6:00 every morning and carry my whole day in that bag—including clothes, dopp kit, protein shakes, water, pain relievers, healthful lunch, healthful snacks and reading material for the bus—so it’s a permanent part of my person. And formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange doesn’t really match my classy, not-frat-house-dwelling personality. I wanted to find a plain black bag with no logos on it, but that’s like finding an article of the Constitution Michele Bachmann has actually read. So I settled for the bag on the right, which is significantly classier and more not-frat-house-dwelling than the formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange thing on the left, which found a new home in the garbage can moments after posing for this picture:

So now I have two (three? I honestly lost count) weeks of cool new clothes to wear and a new bag to carry and two new pair of shoes to choose from—which means I'll embark on an exciting new sartorial adventure every morning for at least two weeks—so who needs a stupid cruise with stupid hot men in stupid Speedos on a stupid mega-hella-massive ship with live performances by stupidly hot Cheyenne Jackson? Harumph.

We managed to avoid the paparazzi on our cruise!

When you live the glamorous life of a world-famous blogger, ubiquitous celebrity spokesperson and A-list gadfly, you get really good at avoiding the paparazzi that hound you everywhere you go. Or so I hear. I mean it's a constant struggle.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard. And we somehow managed to avoid pretty much every camera on our cruise. And since I carried my camera with me everywhere but used it to take exactly 15 pictures all week—three of which turned out dark and blurry—there isn't a lot of photographic evidence we were even on the good ship Solstice.

But! Thanks to the miracle of the Internets and the stalker photo-stealing capabilities of Facebook, I've been able to assemble a bunch of other people's photos—some of which actually include us—into a picture directory I can call my own!

So let's cruise (ahem) through our borrowed trip memories, shall we?

First of all, here is the beautiful Celebrity Solstice, our home away from land for a whole week. See the row of orange lifeboats? Our private balcony—and now that we've sampled the charmed private-balcony life of people who scrimp and pinch so they can afford to sail in rooms with private balconies, we are never going back to the prison-like confines of an interior stateroom—was one floor above the space between the leftmost two lifeboats:

Before we set sail, we were docked in a space crammed with other cruise ships, including this one that sounds like it might be expensive:

Gay boys on gay cruises are compelled to decorate their doors in gay ways. I think we succeeded gaily:

We set sail the night of the Academy Awards, which were broadcast on a giant screen in the giant theater on the ship with a couch full of sassy drag queens and raunchy comedians sitting below the screen making catty comments. Here's my husband and our fabulous friends Curtis and Chris hanging out in the theater in the moments before the broadcast ... and before we discovered just how excruciatingly painful unrehearsed commentary can be, even when it comes from sassy drag queens and raunchy comedians:

The cafe on the ship is open 24 hours a day, and—in contrast to the formal dining room—it's very casual. Here's what a gay cruise looks like on the first morning. And for those of you who aren't gay, here's our secret for always looking so young and fresh:

Our first port of call was Coco Cay in the Bahamas. We couldn't pull our massive ship up to the island, so we had to drop anchor a couple hundred feet (or knots or ripples or whatever unit seafolk use to measure distance across water) away from shore and ride smallish boats called tenders to get to land. Here's the view of our mighty ship from one of our tenders:

Coco Cay, though lovely, has a distinctively Disney flair to it. I'm a huge Disney fan, so I'm not saying this as an insult. But I have a hard time thinking we experienced Coco Cay the way the pirates did:

Here's the view from our tender as it pulled up to the boat slip on the island. Notice how easily I throw nautical terms like tender, slip and aaaarrrrrgh! into this blog post.

Coco Cay beach is stunningly lovely:

And here's the view from our beach chairs:

Back on the ship, we had our first themed party: the Dog Tag T-Dance. A t-dance, which is often spelled tea dance, is just an afternoon dance where you're as likely to find tea as you are to find teabaggers and their misspelled anti-black people Obama signs. Here's a crowd shot I stole from someone's Facebook page. It illustrates nicely how useful my tattoo is when I'm trying to find myself in photos of giant crowds of men:

Here's another crowd shot I stole from the t-dance. It contains two of the five guys I drooled over all week but never got the stones to walk up and say hi to:

Our second port of call was St. Barth, which, like practically every island in the Caribbean, features charming architecture echoing a history of Dutch, English, French and/or Spanish occupation; stores dedicated to selling overpriced jewelry and dustables to tourists; pre-Revolutionary buildings with pre-Revolutionary cannons in front of them; and giant nautical objets d'tourist that you can use to lend drama to your vacation photos:

St. Barth has dramatic mountains and huge bays filled with giant private yachts. We asked a local to take a picture of us in front of both as though we were mega-wealthy yacht-and-mountain-owning moguls. But he cropped us too tight so for all you know this picture was taken in front of a flooded Walmart parking lot in South Carolina:

We tendered back to the ship in choppy water after sunset. Here's the best my intrepid little camera could do to capture the majesty and grandeur of the good ship Solstice without aid of natural light or terra firma:

Our next t-dance was disco themed. And the gays NEVER pass up a chance to dress in ridiculous polyester:

We met a lot of fun new friends on the ship, and we went out of our way to coordinate dinners with everyone in the ship's grand dining room. There was only one night where we couldn't scare up dinner dates so we asked to be seated at a table for four and play dinner-companion roulette with another couple. Unfortunately, we didn't specify that we wanted to be seated with an English-speaking couple, so we and our German dinner companions spent a whole hour gesturing at our food and making nummy sounds at each other. I broke out in a cold sweat from the awkwardness of it all. But! Most of our dinners were more fun, like this one with all our new best coastal friends who hail from New York and San Francisco:

Only on a gay cruise can you get away with wearing cheesy matchy-matchy shirts. Justin got to be Partner A because he's bigger and he can beat me up:

My favorite part of the gay cruises is hanging out by the pool and meeting new people. Here we are with our new best friend Ron from New York, who has actual Broadway connections. Which is like catnip to us. Sparkly, marabou-trimmed catnip. We might as well be posing with Sondheim himself here:

There is goofy poolside entertainment on the ship every afternoon, like spoofs of Project Runway or Dancing with the Stars. Those of us in the know stake out good deck chairs so we can watch all the goofiness without standing on our tippy-toes. And once in a while we get captured in strangers' photos that get posted on Facebook:

Here's a closeup of that last shot, which shows me sitting tantalizingly close to some distractingly attractive men:

Gay boys in speedos socializing in a giant pool. It truly is heaven on earth. Except for the love handles that glow so loudly from my lower back:

More socializing in the pool. More proof that I don't suck in my stomach hard enough when cameras are around:

The last t-dance of the week is called Splash, and it has a nautical/poolside theme. Unfortunately our cruise wasn't the epitome of warm Caribbean weather, and people actually bundled up instead of parading around in skimpy costumes for this dance. But not us! Because we had adorable outfits!

There are huge themed parties almost every night on the ship. We packed fabulous costumes to wear to the FantaSea party and the Lost Island party, but they started too late and we were too tired to go to them. But we did stay up past our bedtime for the week-ending White Party, where people dress any way they want as long as they're in white. And our $25 white nerd costumes were pretty fabulous, despite the fact that my pocket protector kept sliding down like it was some kind of kitten-sized messenger bag:

Atlantis, the company that charters these cruises and makes them fabulously gay, knows how to throw a party ... with lasers and fog machines and massive speakers and top-name deejays. Here's a shot of the White Party crowd dancing away to thunderous music on a gorgeous ship in the middle of the Caribbean:

And here's a shot taken without a flash, which shows all the cool laser effects:

The guy on the right went to my high school. I used to deliver his family's newspaper. He's five years older than I am but he looks 10 times younger and hotter. Life is so not fair:

I leave you with one more look at us in our fabulous White Party costumes as we flank our distractingly tattooed and distractingly hot stateroom neighbor:

And let me point out that micro-spray SPF is about as useful as a Sarah Palin opinion. I applied my micro-spray SPF 45 every 45 minutes or so on our cruise and I still turned bright red on the first day I was in the sun. Unfortunately, that's all the sunscreen we'd packed. But rest assured I'm going back to the thick goopy SPF 45 that's kept me reliably pasty white for all my smooth, relatively wrinkle-free years. Sunburns are for nerds.

We're back!

But our luggage isn't. While we wait for it to be delivered so we can fire up the washing machine and start scrubbing all that sun-drenched happiness out of our cruisewear, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I was a big dork for carrying my camera around the whole damn trip but taking pictures with it exactly 15 times.

But!

We did get someone to take a picture of us in our fabulous costumes for the fabulous week-ending white party. And while everyone else on the ship dressed as angels or sparkleponies or tiny little underpants wearers or people in basic white garments, we very cleverly went as nerds, complete with white high socks, white support underpants, white bow ties, contrasting white-or-black taped glasses (because I couldn't find two pair of white ones), and clear pocket protectors (because I couldn't find white ones). But they were packed with brightly colored pencils! Arranged in the order of the rainbow! Because we're gay!

But! Nobody told me my pocket protector had slipped well below my shirt-pocket area for this picture, lending a saggy-bosom effect to my otherwise awesome nerd costume. Which made me look totally nerdy:

I'm in the process of stealing other people's cruise photos off the Internets so I can present you with a more complete Atlantis cruise photo portfolio ... and to give you the impression that I am actually capable of remembering to use my camera. Stay tuned!

Gratuitous Nipple Shot

Here we are looking all macho and stuff in our adorable matching camo shorts (camo = très butch!) on last year's Atlantis cruise:
And we're about to go back for more! And compared to last year, this year really is all about the more: More adorable matching outfits! More tattoos! More body mass! More speedos! More gay!

We board the good ship Solstice in Ft. Lauderdale on Sunday and I'll go an entire week without access to blogger, facebook, gmail or joe.my.god. I just hope there's something to see or do on the ship to keep me entertained.

And I'll be sure to tell you all about it when I get back. Be good while we're gone.

Recipe for shredded abs:

102º fever + hacking cough + uncontrollable night sweats

I don't know why I wasted the last eight months lifting weights, doing cardio and denying myself delicious, delicious cookies when I could have achieved all my cruise goals with one well aged jar of sun-dried mayonnaise. My six-day battle with the flu has been hell on earth—well, the tiny percent of it I was actually awake for was—but I emerged looking more abtastic than my best day on the big gay cruise. So. Not. Fair.

But one benefit of this unplanned cruise-recap delay is the additional cruise photos I've received through the miracle of the Internets. And with the partial reconstitution of my bizarre sense of humor, I think I'm finally ready to show show you all the evidence of our Caribbean adventures.

First of all, the Celebrity Solstice is only a few months old, stunningly appointed and fabulously elegant on the outside …

… and even more so on the inside, as represented here by one of the ship's breathtaking atriums (atria?):

We sailed with 13 friends, and we wore a rainbow of Chicago Boystown shirts to make our boarding all the more festive. But getting us all in the same place at the same time was like herding big gay kittens. So here's more or less a quorum of us right before we got on the ship:

The first order of business when you get on a ship is the lifeboat drill. So we donned our custom couture and headed to what all those swarthy in-the-know sailor-types call "muster stations."

Unfortunately, we discovered that muster couture was anything but custom. Imagine our embarrassment when an entire ship showed up for the boat drill in the exact same outfits we were wearing:

A big gay cruise can be a blood sport—a friendly blood sport, at least in front of the children—right down to the way you decorate your door. And while our neighbors took the easy route—cheap rainbow decorations and tacky underwear photos—we decorated our doors in a customized and highly relevant Pirates of the Caribbean theme. So we totally won!

The Solstice is designed to maximize the rooms with balconies. I've never had a room with a balcony, and I have to say now that I've tasted the good life, I'm never going back to the windowless steerage I've barely tolerated on the handful of cruises I've taken before. We didn't realize that the cheapest balcony rooms in the Solstice had lifeboat-obstructed views of the ocean, but we've already booked next year's cruise on a higher floor (for only $40 more!) so we should never again have to endure such demeaning horrors as a view like this:

But! Being so low did give us a dramatic view up the side of the ship from our balcony:

Atlantis cruises are basically week-long themed dance parties with occasional breaks for costume changes. The first party of each cruise is called the Dog Tag Tea Dance (for those of you not completely familiar with gay terpsichorean nomenclature, "dog tag" indicates a military theme while "tea dance" means an afternoon party where you can search high and low but will probably never find any tea). Here's what the Dog Tag Tea Dance looks like from above:

I know! Fun! Before our Chicago quorum entered the fray, we met for our all-important photo op. All costume themes for the week are merely suggestions, and you can see from this photo that we Chicago boys took wide interpretational latitude outfitting ourselves for the Dog Tag Tea Dance:

We also took dramatic couple portraits against the side of the ship, and since we were on a higher floor for this photo shoot the domestic partner and I didn't have any pesky lifeboats ruining our shot:

Here's one more with our adorable friend Shane, who managed to eclipse eight months of our workouts with one $40 bathing attire purchase:

My favorite port of call on our Atlantis cruises is Labadee, a slice of Haiti purchased by Royal Caribbean/Celebrity, walled off from the poverty-stricken locals (we choose not to think about that part too much) and outfitted with inflatable beach toys for grownups. The blue thing on the left of this picture is a three-story waterslide … the same waterslide that cruise headliner Chita Rivera herself watched me go down. In the middle of the picture are smaller slides, teeter-totters and trampolines floating in a charming little bay. And on the right are huge inflatable icebergs you can climb up and slide down. It's all so much fun it will probably be declared illegal by the pope once he finishes ridding the world of gay breathing or whatever holy mission is currently taking up all his valuable, important, socially relevant time.

Our second port of call was Alto de Chavon, Casa de Campo—a Tuscan-inspired village in the Dominican Republic that's so freakishly picturesque you have to wonder if you've accidentally wandered onto the set for Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean IV: Try Our Unlimited Breadsticks. Here's the castle that greets you when you get off the tour bus:

Walk a little farther and you stumble on costumed historical interpreters performing ballet-inspired folk dances in front of the rustic church in the middle of the cobblestoned town square:

Climb the steps to the bell tower and you start getting a nagging inferiority complex about the view from your 1920s vintage courtyard building back home:

But ask a hunky stranger to take your picture from the top of the bell tower and you at least get a custom souvenir:

Back on the ship, the parties keep coming. Here are a few Chicago boys rocking out at the ’80s dance party while a certain photographer finally admits to himself that even though they were the backdrop for his Extremely Awkward Phase, the ’80s did produce some fabulously fun dance music:

Our final port of call was Curaçao, which, like every Caribbean island, features British Colonial buildings and antebellum cannons you can be photographed riding in inappropriate poses:

Curaçao was our only rainy day the whole week. Here is less than our Chicago quorum dodging raindrops in the charming shopping district:

They must have known we were coming, because they put out a very welcoming sign for our friend Jim:

My sign wasn't nearly as fun, but at least it was in a nicer part of town:

The gays of Curaçao even gayed up one of the shopping districts for our arrival:

Though I did some gaying myself in front of a shuttered Art Deco theater. You know me and the stage; get us together and I just can't stop myself from being fabulous:

Our ship was docked in Curaçao in such a way that we got even more fabulousness in a photo op as we reboarded.

My favorite party on the ship is the ’70s Disco Tea Dance, where people are not afraid to make themselves look silly. For instance:

Unfortunately I didn't realize just how silly we looked in our sparkly round Brett Somers glasses until after the photos came back. But we did have shiny silver shorts and disco ball necklaces to distract people from that fact. And we also had all that fabulous disco music.

Every cruise has a surprise headliner. In the past we've had Charo, Wanda Sykes and Joan Rivers. This cruise we got to spend an evening with the fabulous Chita Rivera, who put on a killer show of songs from her long and storied career—she was the original Anita in West Side Story, the original Velma in Chicago and the original Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman, for you Philistines and heterosexuals who don't follow these things—and she even told stories about her auditions and her famous costars that reduced to puddles those of us who are inclined to swoon over such things.

The Atlantis White Party marks the culmination of a week of dance parties, and people come up with some pretty spectacular costumes. For instance:

We opted for something easier to wear on a crowded dance floor. The Chicago drag queen I choreograph for made our costumes for us this year. And I have to say we looked pretty fabulous:

The pants were kind of warm, though, so we parked ourselves on the pool edge of the dance floor to take advantage of all breezes that came our way. You can see us shaking our satyr booties just to the left of the center in this photo:

The day after the White Party is the final tea dance, which they call "Splash" or some such pool-related term. Here's a random picture of me I found while scrolling through random strangers' Flickr photos. Flickr can be both creepy and cool that way. Either way, notice the disco-ball necklace theme we managed to carry through the week:

Here's another less-than-quorum picture of us on our last night on the ship. We were all smiles, though we knew from experience the horrors that awaited us in the real world less than 12 hours later.

To mitigate those horrors, we stocked up on my favorite cookies ever back at home. And even in my flu-induced delirium, I managed to eat two entire packages of these delicious masterpieces within 36 hours of getting to Chicago.

We've given ourselves one week to be pigs (and have the flu) and then we're back on our cruise diet and workout regimen; marathon training starts in four weeks and Matthew reportedly has a new camera to record every second of every training run. And I want to be bigger and even more self-absorbed for next year's cruise!