My name’s Jake, and I’m (mildly) dilated to meet you

The scheduling fates lined me up with back-to-back (hot) doctor appointments this morning. I’ve gone from getting my hot-dermatologist stitches out to getting a hot-ophthalmologist vision baseline as a follow-up to my (fully dilated) migraine visit a month ago. And while Hot Ophthalmologist an awesome band name, both hot doctors have wedding rings and photos of their wives and kids in their offices. Which means we won’t be scheduling any cake tastings for the wedding reception just yet. Plus being dilated has made it profoundly challenging to type this. So please excuse any lipos.

Flashback Saturday: Underpants Edition

Seven years ago I did my second annual Chicago Undie Dash, the title of which needs no explanation or clarification beyond the fact that it was a 5K and it ended with a private party aboard a massive yacht that was moored at one of the lakefront marinas whose name I can’t remember. A few years earlier I’d sung at a wedding on the deck of that same yacht. If I remember correctly, I wore Superman underpants that I bought just for the occasion. (The Undie Run, not the wedding.)

I’m one bird-feathered fascinator and a barely attractive missing fiancé away from being Carrie Bradshaw!

Back, Biceps and

BOY I WISH THAT GUY WITH THE BALL CAP AND THE BEEFY QUADS WOULD LOOK UP SO WE COULD MAKE EYE CONTACT AND EXCHANGE SMILES AND SCHEDULE THE CAKE TASTING FOR THE WEDDING.

Also: BOY I NEED TO CLEAN MY GLASSES.

When you’re in a show

and when it’s over you race to another theater to catch the end of a show you have a bunch of friends in and then you catch the end of a wedding reception and then you catch the end of a cast party where you have a jalapeño burger you soon learn to regret and you finally get home at 2:30 am to take your Saturday pm bipolar meds really late and you carefully calculate that you should take your Sunday am meds about 11:00 to keep them somewhat evenly paced but when you go to take your am meds at 11:00 you discover that in all your careful late-night planning you accidentally took them last night and WELL SHIT:

masc4masc

I’m sorry but I went to a wedding reception after tonight’s Elf the Musical performance was all applauded and bowed and as I was getting dressed I realized I had exactly one ironed shirt and it was a difficult shade of blue which is probably why it was my last ironed shirt in the first place but I was out of time so I had to build my entire evening’s reception-appropriate ensemble around my difficult-shade-of-blue-last-ironed-shirt ... AND I KILLED IT. But nobody took my picture so I had to do it myself when I got home and YES I HAVE A PICTURE OF CINDERELLA IN MY BEDROOM SHUT UP.

Backstage at My Fair Lady!

So each week our costumes get washed and pressed and hung in our dressing areas—except our socks, which get paired and balled and put in this Communal Bin Of Delightful-Smelling Clean Socks for us to dig through every Clean Sock Day to find the delightful-smelling clean socks that are best psychographically matched to our individual characters.

I usually get here early on Clean Sock Day—as I did tonight—which affords me early pickin’s from the Communal Bin Of Delightful-Smelling Clean Socks—which I, to my present horror, totally forgot to do tonight. Because there were free tacos in the green room. SO CAN YOU BLAME ME?

FREE. TACOS.

Anyway, I didn’t even think about visiting the Communal Bin Of Delightful-Smelling Clean Socks tonight until I was tending to my foot apparel 15 minutes before our curtain. And to my eternally scarring horror, ALL THAT WERE LEFT IN THE BIN WERE SHEER-ISH, LIGHTWEIGHT, NOT-UN-PANTYHOSE-LIKE, DISTURBINGLY BREEZY LADY SOCKS.

LA. DY. SOCKS. SSSSSSSSSS. S.

So I’ve been condemned to try being SHIT-KICKIN’ MACHO as I gavotted through my deliciously florid musical all night when I secretly feel SILKY AND SEXY in my FEET and ANKLES and CALVES and did I mention ANKLES and OH MY GOD I’M FEELING SO DELICIOUSLY SAUCY RIGHT NOW DRAW ME LIKE YOUR FRENCH GIRLS DRAW ME DRAW ME DRAW ME!

Plus wispy socks = slip-slidin’ in my shoes. WHICH IS WEIRD AND DISCONCERTING.

AND DELICIOUSLY SAUCY.

Plus—PLUS!—once you and your character psychographically match yourselves to a pair of delightful-smelling clean socks from the Communal Bin Of Delightful-Smelling Clean Socks, YOU’RE STUCK WITH THOSE SOCKS UNTIL THE NEXT CLEAN SOCK DAY.

And since this is our final weekend of My Fair Lady, MY NEXT CLEAN SOCK DAY WON’T HAPPEN UNTIL ELF THE MUSICAL OPENS IN NOVEMBER.

NO. VEM. BER. SSSSSSSSS. S.

* * * * *

HORRIFYING ADDENDUM: I just accidentally caught the bouquet at the end of “I’m Getting Married in the Morning.” Though it’s always a toss-up (ahem) regarding who catches it onstage, it’s never been launched anywhere NEAR my general direction before. It’s like there was some mysterious force drawing it to me like a magnet. A SHEER-ISH, LIGHTWEIGHT, NOT-UN-PANTYHOSE-LIKE, DISTURBINGLY BREEZY MAGNET.

I am now and forever cursed with silken deliciousness. Which I guess might come in handy since my bouquet and I are getting married next.

Actions beget consequences, Sarah

And feigned victimhood begets FUCK YOU. You can't deny your cake and eat it too.

What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

On this, the Gay High Holidays of the Tony Awards, I offer again my annual explanation and celebration of what gay pride means from my own journey and my own experience and my own big-ol’-proud-gay-man perspective:

We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when communities and cities and entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay. We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and drive and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act have collapsed in on their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations—and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as frankly boring.

We’re proud because especially this month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, you’d-never-even-know-they-were-queens queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

Charcuterie couture!

Well, shit

Just when I thought I’d successfully shamed the sartorial horrors of halter necklines from all fashion now and into the infinite future, Meghan has to trot in front of the cameras in a wholly unnecessary second wedding dress with a halter silhouette and make the look seem royal and admirable and therefore the inspiration for a new generation of copycat dresses that make women look like they’re being choked by tapered murderer hands. I’LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR DRESSING POOR HAPLESS MEGHAN IN A MURDER WEAPON, STELLA McCARTNEY.

The early bird gets the parking spot. And all the time in the world to blog about it.

GOOD NEWS! I got Doris Day parking for this morning’s Marion Arts Festival 5K (the second race of my epic, internationally celebrated, cooler-than-a-stupid-royal-wedding Summer Of Running Away From Being 50!) because I not-very-good-at-guessing-how-many-people-would-be-running-the-race-ingly got here 75 minutes early to avoid the inmates-loose-in-the-madhouse-level lines at the packet pickup.

SUBSEQUENT GOOD NEWS! I’m so early that there’s nobody here yet so I have nobody to talk to and therefore plenty of time to take (multiple!) selfies and write ridiculously-long-compound-adjectived Facebook and blog posts.

BONUS! The race bags that we get at the packet pickup for this 5K contain free samples of (respectively) BioFreeze menthol gel and Udderly SMOOth skin cream, which you usually get only for half and full marathons where you’re all but guaranteed to get (respectively) cripplingly painful muscle injuries and cripplingly horrifying chafed, cracked, unstoppable-fountains-of-bloody nipples. So this 5K might be pretty badass. Or badnipples.

ALSO BONUS! My bib number is 99, which is somehow really cool to me. It’s very symmetrical. And it’s unmissably safety-pinned to my chest. Like my very-symmetrical-unmissably-safety-pinned-to-my-chest-and-apparently-a-looming-threat-in-this-5K bloody nipples.

LET’S SAY IT ONE MORE TIME! Nipples!

#HowToTurn50 #Nipples!