My grandmother made this. In the nursing home. Two decades ago. It's a family heirloom. DO NOT JUDGE.

OK, you can judge. Because how did Grandma get her hands on a beer bottle for her nursing-home craft class? Perhaps the answer to that question is the key to unlocking the mystery of the uneven antlers.

Liveblogging backstage at My Fair Lady!

As Henry Higgins yammers on and on through all 73 verses of “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” onstage, drunky-boy Jamie takes a selfie backstage with Lady Boxington and Eliza Doolittle herself. Because Jamie travels in fancypants circles.

Because giant beer bottle carved out of an old tree, that’s why

Flashback Friday: Milestone Birthdays Edition

I’m not sure what’s most disturbing about this picture: the bar mitzvah clown smile, the Disney villain eyes, the dinner-plate glasses, the scarecrow neck, the weird-ass way I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist or the pink-on-white shirt that hung on me with all the sex appeal of a Mayan burial gown on an immolated corpse. The girls on my floor (Loser alert! I was living in the Foreign Language House, a co-ed dorm filled with language dorks who stayed in on Friday nights studying verb declensions!) had decorated my door with pink 21s. Probably to match the shirt. Or the homosexuality. I’m not sure where I got the wine, but I am sure I had only a sip of it to celebrate reaching such a milestone age. Because actually drinking a whole glass of alcohol on my 21st birthday would have been something the cool kids would do.

I’m not interested in your petty jealousies

My grandmother made this. In the nursing home. With a beer bottle. Two decades ago. It's a family heirloom. DO NOT JUDGE.

Flashback Friday: Hnnnnnn Hnnnnnn Edition

Five years ago this month I rappelled USING A ROPE NO BIGGER THAN MY COMMON SENSE down the side of the 31-story Wit Hotel in downtown Chicago because I HAVE NO IDEA WHY AND I WAS SO TERRIFIED THAT MY LEG WAS SHAKING LIKE ELVIS AT THE TOP AND IT WAS SO BAD THE RAPPELLING GUY ALMOST DIDN'T LET ME GO DOWN and the terror only increased as I descended so I never looked around to enjoy the view and I made a weird hnnnnnn hnnnnnn whimpering sound all the way down and even when I finally reached the sweet, sweet ground I was still so terrified and unnerved that I wend right to a restaurant and drank alcohol.

I'm pretty sure I'm not afraid of a lot of things. But I'm overwhelmingly sure I'm terrified of heights.

Flashback Tuesday: Finally Legal Edition

My sex appeal predates Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge, said no sexy person ever.

I’m not sure what’s most disturbing about this picture: the bar mitzvah clown smile, the Disney villain eyes, the dinner-plate glasses, the scarecrow neck, the weird-ass way I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist or the pink-on-white shirt that hung on me with all the sex appeal of a Mayan burial gown on an immolated corpse. The girls on my floor (Loser alert! I was living in the Foreign Language House, a co-ed dorm filled with language dorks who stayed in on Friday nights studying verb declensions!) had decorated my door with pink 21s. Probably to match the shirt. Or the homosexuality. I’m not sure where I got the wine, but I am sure I had only a sip of it to celebrate reaching such a milestone age. Because actually drinking a whole glass of alcohol on my 21st birthday would have been something the cool kids would do.

I'm back from ... um ... Europe!

I made all kinds of awesome blog posts and posted all kinds of awesome pictures while I was there. But they were in … um … Euros so they didn’t translate to most American computers. Sorry if you had gotten the impression that I’d just abandoned my blog in favor of sitting around watching TV for weeks and weeks. Because I’d never get that lazy about blogging. Ahem.

Anyway!

I have three huge announcements to make:

1. I turned 42 while you weren’t looking. My bosoms have officially drooped and gone dry. I’m currently tucking them in my foundation garments so they don’t bounce around and hurt people when I walk.

2. I stopped drinking soda. Because my trainer told me to. About ten thousand times. I had my last bubbly, delicious glass of chemical refreshment the night before my birthday. And I think I actually had withdrawal symptoms for the first week. I’m a reformed junkie! Tomorrow will mark three weeks of sobriety, and I think I deserve some kind of medal or coin or dead hooker or whatever it is they give out to mark such milestones in other reformed-junkie support groups.

3. I switched from plastic gym water to metal gym water. My trusty plastic water bottle had seen me through two marathons and almost two years of lifting. It was really just a Powerade bottle I hadn’t thrown away because it had a built-in grip that was easy to hold through the sweatiest runs and a wide mouth that was easy to refill from any drinking fountain or hose or municipal toilet. Despite my best attempts to ignore the obvious, though, the inside of it had started to smell as sour as George Rekers’ boy-hooker-stained underpants. And I kept stumbling on more and more scary reports that my well-used bottle was already leaching polyethelene phthalates into my uterus and giving my unborn children mushy little Palin brains. So I finally broke down and bought a non-fetus-deforming stainless steel bottle in a hypermasculine gunmetal gray color to complement my hypermasculine demeanor and gunmetal gray pallor. Here is a candid shot of the two bottles meeting right before the old one went to the “retirement home” next to our garbage can. It just puts a lump of heartbreaking sorrow in my polyethelene phthalate-drenched uterus:

P.S. How awesome is our toaster? It has a digital toast setting … in a hypermasculine blue!
P.P.S. If I ever formed a drag band, I would totally call it Polyethelene Phthalates and the Estrogenic Compounds.
P.P.P.S. I wasn’t really in Europe. But I totally have a girlfriend who lives in Canada.

How I drink alcohol at a street fair

Step 1: Carry a water chaser:
Step 2: Give alcoholic beverage to a friend after about ten sips.

I drank more alcohol today than I've ever consumed in an entire month. Which is still only about three drinks. How much do you want to party with me right now? I spent the weekend trolling the Andersonville (a used-to-be-Swedish neighborhood in northern Chicago) Midsommarfest (which inexplicably happens before summer even starts) street fair (which is just an excuse to sell non-Swedish tchotchkes, drink outside and snarl up traffic) this weekend. I did all of Saturday on two Diet Cokes. Or maybe it was three. But today my friend Peter was on a mission to get me drunk. I've never been drunk in my life and I had no intention of starting today, but he didn't believe me so he kept buying me drinks ... and I kept drinking parts of them and then quietly passing them off to other people while I discreetly nursed my water. It cost me nothing, and I got to try a lot of drinks I've never tried. But don't be impressed because it's all the drinks you normal people have on a regular basis, or at least the ones you tried in high school and quickly moved on to more adult beverages: vodka/7-Up, vodka/soda, flavored vodka/cheap juice. Seriously. I am the definition of party. Drop what you're doing and come shake your flowing rocker hair with me.

Speaking of, I hurt my neck tonight shaking my imaginary rocker hair to the earsplitting song stylings of something I think was officially called the Hair Band. They were the closing act of Midsommarfest, and I'm pretty sure they were good, but they were so damn loud it didn't matter. In any case, I chugged my water and shook my fists and waggled my butt with all ten million people crammed into the street in front of their stage for a good hour tonight. But I was quickly worn out and as far as Peter knew I was drunk and my husband, who is out of town this weekend, called in the middle of it all and I just wanted to go home and chat with him after at least 15 hours of collective street-fair fun. So I said my goodbyes, passed off my last drink, threw my water cup in an overflowing trash bin and worked my way through the crowd toward the relative quiet of my condo. But not before one last defiant fist punch in the air and one last shake of my shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen hair. Dude.

Out with the old

Just as I was packing up at work to start the holiday weekend, I got a call from AMEX. It seems that yet again some mouth-breathing cousin-fucker has gotten ahold of my credit card information and tried to make a DMP (Dumbass Major Purchase) guaranteed to trip the fraud alarms. Thankfully, those fraud alarms work, but until I get my new card (and contact every company who auto-bills to my AMEX), I am credit cardless—and I’m not earning cash back on everything I buy. I hate you, mouth-breathing cousin-fucker!

But on to cheerier things: The boyfriend and I were invited to three parties on Friday night, but we committed to only the first two invitations we got. The first was a goodbye party for one of his former coworkers, who is embarking on an exciting new career. The party was at the Grotto, whose lounge décor is almost as cool as its bathroom décor—which will totally influence the bathroom renovation of the Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo the boyfriend and I are buying. Once we scrape up enough money to renovate the bathrooms. But that’s not the point of this paragraph. The point is this: I’ve finally found a big-boy drink I actually like, and I’m ordering it more and more when I hang out with the big kids. So on Friday night I ordered a vodka tonic as though I’d been drinking them all my life. And when it came, it was even more drinkable than the last one I had—meaning it was the first vodka tonic I finished all the way to the bottom. Just like a big boy! Curious as to why this vodka tonic tasted more like grapefruit Kool-Aid than the last two I’d tried to choke down, I asked the waitress what the house vodka was. She told me it was Gordon’s. Having never heard of Gordon’s, I told her that I really liked it—in the tone one might use to describe an exciting new wine or an innovative lamb dish. She smiled at me as though I had just shown her the contents of my nose, and when I relayed this story to the boyfriend, he told me that Gordon’s is so cheap I could probably fill a bathtub with it for under $20. I made a point to avoid the waitress when we left. From there we headed to a party thrown by one of my former coworkers, where I rediscovered the endless deliciousness of Doritos and brownies. Urp.

We had the official inspection of the Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo on Saturday morning, followed by a ton of errands—including poking through the going-out-of-business-sale remains at Bad Boys, where generations of gay Chicago boys have bought trashy underwear, sexual-innuendo-laden T-shirts and up-to-the-second fashions of dubious taste. I stumbled out of the store half an hour later with two new swim suits, three foo-foo trendy shirts and 10 pair of Calvin Klein (which makes them not trashy) underwear. All at 50 to 70% off!

New Year’s Eve Day was one of those magical days best described by the poets. But I’m going to try anyway, without ever resorting to haiku: The boyfriend and I stayed in bed all day—literally until the sun went down—getting up only to forage for food and to pee. But we didn't sleep there all day; we watched TV. For seven solid hours we took in a marathon of Law & Order reruns on his TiVo and a couple random things we stumbled on as we flipped through the channels. There was a point, though, where he went to check his email and he left me alone with a Lifetime TV Movie that promptly sucked me into its gaping maw. I will never get that half hour back. Or those tears. Since none of our friends invited us to any NYE parties (harrumph), we sauntered over to the nearby Cheesecake Factory for an early dinner and then walked a mile round-trip to the closest Jewel to burn off what we just ate … and to stock up on ice cream. Then we spent the rest of the evening back in bed watching a Sex and the City DVD marathon and fattening ourselves on creamy frozen goodness. We ushered in 2007 on his rooftop deck, watching the Navy Pier and Grant Park fireworks from our wind-whipped perch 64 stories in the sky. And discreetly aiming our ice cream burps away from one another.

And yesterday, the boyfriend had to work, so I did laundry (somehow losing one of my new swim suits in the process), paid bills, cleaned out emails and went to Sidetrack for show tunes, where I developed a migraine that kept me up most of the night praying for death. But I survived long enough to blog about it, so it looks like 2007 is off to a good start. Yay!

Let's hear it for the Rainbow Tour!

Wow. OK, this post is gonna be long. But I was in Europe for TEN FREAKIN’ DAYS, so quit your whining and get reading I have a lot to tell you. I’ve peppered this post with links to fabulous pictures and other enriching supplemental click-throughs, so you should be entertained until the bitter end. And if you can’t wait to see all the dark, grainy pictures my cheap camera took, you can just go here and check them out all at once.

Otherwise, I humbly present you The Rainbow Tour (now in low-carb digestible chunks!):

We’ll start at the very beginning, with …

AIR FRANCE
Aside from our early problems with lost luggage (which were more than compensated for with prompt, free found-luggage delivery and a well-stocked lost luggage kit that even included a condom), I really have no complaints about Air Chance France. The food they served was pretty good, the crew was attentive, our flights arrived more or less on time—and even though our seats were a little on the cramped side, they included individual entertainment centers that offered movies, TV reruns (including old episodes of “MacGyver”), music (including “An American in Paris”—GET IT?) and that spellbinding display of GPS ingenuity that uses cartoon maps and a little cartoon plane to show you exactly where you are, how high you’re flying, what you’re about to crash into flying over and even when you should expect to arrive at your destination.

OUR HOTELS
Our Madrid hotel was filled with fabulous basement catacombs (and free access to the Internets!), Barbie Dream Showers and curious, inescapable peek-a-boo displays of roommate toilet activities. Our Paris hotel was waaaaay less high-tech (and waaaaay less fastidiously clean), but it provided plenty of room for all my fabulous new shoes, and it could not have been more conveniently located for gay tourists who like easy access to shopping, pastries, charming little out-of-the-way restaurants, gay people, museums, walks along the Siene, piña coladas and walks in the rain.

AND SPEAKING OF PINA COLADAS …
You know how I never drink? Well, that kind of … um … changed in Madrid. You see, my friends ordered a pitcher of sangría at our first dinner … and I’d never had sangria … and I’m never opposed to just tasting alcohol (you know, just to see what I’m missing out on) … and it was kind of tasty … and before you could say Jake’s dancing around with his underwear on his head! I’d had a full glass of sangria every night with dinner—along with a shot of some syrupy apricot-and-cinnamon schnapps thing my last night (which I sipped like the dainty little princess I am)—for three nights in a row.

Go on. You know you want to. Just let it out. Let that giant YAWN out over my sangria story. “Woo-hoo,” I can hear you say. “Jake had a glass of alcohol with dinner. Alert the media!”

Well, I AM the media—at least as far as your eyeballs are concerned at the moment—and it IS news. I had more to drink during my three nights in Madrid than I’ve had collectively in the almost 37 years I’ve minced walked this earth. And while I’m not about to do anything crazy like order a beer or something the next time I walk into a bar (crazy!), I actually kind of liked my sangría. I didn’t feel like the alcohol did anything to make me slur my speech or tell my friends how much I loved—LOVED!—them, but it did apparently make my face quite red.

Some people drink and get laid. I drink and turn into an Oompa-Loompa. Sexy!

THE INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
The TVs in our hotel rooms—when they weren’t bringing us dubbed reruns of “Charlie’s Angels” and “CSI” (which in France is called “Les Experts”)—kept our brains fed with a steady diet of CNN and BBC world news. (Note to Not My President Bush: The international media report every word you say and everything you claim to think as though you know what you’re talking about. Please make sure that you do.) And to our horror, these otherwise rational, relatively reasonable news sources that brought us political and economic information from around the world focused their American coverage on … the Michael Jackson trial. In all seriousness.

I am SO embarrassed that we have a kid-diddling circus freak as the sole noseless face of America in the international media. Seriously. I could just die. (See the reference to red-faceness above.)

FRENCH MEN
Before I move on to touristy things, let me just get this out in the open: I have a new fetish. Move over, muscular blonds with meaty butts and thick, rubbery lips—I’m now in love with wiry little Frenchmen with their tiny waists and angular faces and dark complexions and deep brown eyes. But damn do French men jam my expertly calibrated gaydar. Every single man in that country looks queer, from his manicure to his fastidiously trendy wardrobe to his impossible-to-resist-grabbing ass.

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, it’s on to the touristy stuff:

THE EIFFEL TOWER
What magic! What charm! The Eiffel Tower is just as fabulous as I’d imagined—though I’d actually pictured it being a little taller. We went up once during the day on Wednesday (apparently missing Rod Stewart’s third marriage proposal by mere hours) and then again on Thursday night, where we were treated to hookers! hookers! hookers! tacky kitten souvenirs gorgeous views of the city and the on-the-hour sparkling light effects that literally make everyone in the city gasp and applaud and reach for their cameras.

VERSAILLES
For some reason I’ve never been that interested in Versailles—though I’m a huge sucker for over-the-top architecture and vulgar displays of grandeur. Versailles delivers all of that and more—even managing to fuse my twin fascinations with rococo excess and wig-wearing human heads in a fabulous way I’d never even imagined. I was surprised to discover that large parts of Versailles (and, actually, there really are no small parts of Versailles) are in a state of formidable disrepair, though there is a lot of repair work underway. The famed Hall of Mirrors is currently undergoing a thorough rehab; we could see only about a third of it through the construction.

I even got in a bit of trouble at Versailles. See, there was this huge statue of Napoleon (who I’ve always thought was kind of hot) so I jumped in front of him and asked Matt to take my picture. But then I noticed that from where I was standing, you could pretend to look up his robe as though you were admiring his massive marble member. So I reached up and did just that. And just as Matt snapped a picture, The Angry French Lady of Death appeared in a cloud of smoke and started chewing me a new delicious chocolatey profiterole asshole. I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble for touching the statue, disrespecting the patron saint of French military might history or actually using soap in a European country, but I was definitely embarrassed for being caught doing tacky American tourist things.

NOTRE DAME
Again, not as big as I’d expected—but just oozing (literally!) with soaring Gothic charm. We climbed the claustrophobic little winding stone staircase to the top (I had to climb carefully because if I turn around and around too fast I might accidentally turn into Wonder Woman), where we were treated to spectacular views of the city and up-close-and-personal encounters with the church’s famed gargoyles. But since it was gray and overcast and COLD (it was pretty much like that the entire time we were in Europe) our rapidly shriveling nuts didn’t let us stay too long.

THE LOUVRE
I know this is sacrilege—and maybe it’s just because I was well beyond the stage of cultural overwhelmitude by the time I got there—but I found the Louvre to be kinda boring. (And this is coming from a man who habitually spends entire days in art museums in every major city he visits.) The building itself is GORGEOUS, but the sheer volume of art it contains is so overwhelming it’s almost nauseating. (Kinda like that time in fifth grade when I chewed five whole packs of grape Bubblicious in one afternoon—to this day I can’t even stand the smell of the stuff.)

I’m also not a huge fan of the genres that dominate the permanent collection. There’s an awful lot of dark Dutch paintings (Rembrandts are like Eros lube—a little bit goes a long way) and waaaaaay too much rah-rah Northern European stuff (there are acres of canvas dedicated to long-dead French royalty—who are similarly enshrined in virtually every other museum you visit in Paris—while there isn’t a single work by an American painter … at least not that I saw, and I traversed the entire museum last Friday). I do, however, have a fascination with heroic statuary and virtually anything Medieval, both of which are available by the ton (literally!) at the Louvre. Which was also part of the problem: While I stood in silent reverence in front of the first 400 marble statues that I saw of Greek gods clad in delicately veined muscles and draping robes, I found myself all but sprinting past the next 400 of them, trying desperately to spare them the fate of the doomed grape Bubblicious.

I also wasn’t a fan of I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid the first time I saw it—and I’m usually the first to jump on the grand-old-architecture-meets-funky-new-architecture juxtaposition bandwagon (wasn’t that a Beatles album?). But it grew on me immensely about the fourth time I walked through the courtyard. And once I entered the pyramid and discovered its role in making the museum so accessible I became a huge fan.

One of the reasons I was in the courtyard (and not in the building itself) so many times was because of …

THE STRIKE
I’m already not a fan of unions, and on Thursday when all the collective museum staffs of Paris staged a massive strike, my carefully planned vacation was torn asunder. I am the almighty tourist! You must bow to my whims and show me your national treasures and sell me overpriced trinkets on MY schedule, you selfish museum staffery! Actually, when we found out later that one of the reasons for the strike was to oppose a proposition to extend the grueling French workweek from 35 hours to 40, we did become arrogant, unsympathetic American tourists. But since there was nothing we could do, we turned to Plan B. And my personal Plan B was …

MONTMARTRE
There’s this obscure little tavern in the Monmartre district in northern Paris called the Lapin Agile where poets and writers and artists have met and exchanged ideas for over a century. There’s even a brilliant little play by Steve Martin about a hypothetical meeting between Picasso and Einstein at the Lapin Agile right before they burst into the worldwide consciousness. I’ve always wanted to visit this tavern, but it was pretty low on my priority list—until the museum strike moved it instantly to the top on Thursday.

The Lapin Agile kind of hard to find, and my wandering journey accidentally took me through Montmartre’s pretty revolting sex district, where trannie hookers—who had a preternatural ability to sniff out my Americanness as I walked by—literally HOUNDED me on the sidewalk. I quickly learned that if I pretended like I spoke only Spanish, they were pretty powerless to bug me with their pidgin English and their manly features and their tarty little outfits. Lo siento, Guapa. No te entiendo.

THE OLYMPICS
Both Madrid and Paris are vying to host the 2012 Olympics, but Paris wins by a kilomegamelometer mile in the self-promotion event. There’s a massive Parisian campaign on subway walls, candy wrappers and even entire sides of beautiful old buildings to create buzz and influence location judges. The logo in this picture adorns the magnificent Hotel de Ville, which was just a few blocks from our hotel. It also appears on a couple other buildings we couldn’t identify and even the Eiffel Tower itself. And it’s totally freakin’ cool—Eurocool, even!

OUR FINAL NIGHT IN PARIS
The four of us had enjoyed dinners all week at a range of charming little restaurants within blocks of our hotel (including one called Pain Vin Fromage, which served a lot of bread, wine and cheese in a spectacular catacomb-like basement), and we decided to mourn celebrate our last night together with warm cups of chocolat at a neighborhood pub. And when the bill came and we were forced to spend vast sums of Euros for tiny little cups of melted chocolate, we knew it was time to head home.

The next morning, I arrived at the airport with exactly 11 Euros in my pocket. And I was able to cobble together a meal in one of the snack shops for exactly 10.95 Euros. Best of all, after I finished my snack, I found a Unicef donation bin to throw my last .05 Euro in. And, after curing the hunger in my tummy AND in the world at large, I boarded the plane satisfied that I’d used my powers only for good on this trip. Except for that little Napoleon incident. And all the trashy souvenirs I bought.

Anyway, I’m home. And this post is more than FIVE freakin’ pages in Microsoft Word. So I’ll stop typing and let you get back to work.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other vastly important stuff I wanted to include here. So stay tuned for the next chapter, which will NOT be this long. Promise.