Welp. Here we go.

Operation: See If Jake’s Damn Hip Injury Is Better is about to deploy. I’ll either make it to the end of the block or the end of the next block. Or I’ll slog out three miles. But as The Book Of Ivanka’s Totally Authentic Totally Profound Made In America Chinese Proverbs says: The first step of the journey begins with the first step of the journey. So off I go ...

#HowToTurn50 #AndNeverLoseHope

Come to Brie, Bend to Brie

Seeing an opera company perform Brigadoon at a gorgeous outdoor theater with a picnic of deviled eggs and hard-to-pronounce cheeses and residual glue in your hair from the matinee of your own show is an opportunity that presents itself only once every hundred years.

And there you have it

When your character is repeatedly—REPEATEDLY!—defined by his blind eye and escaped-convict manacle and your blinding contact pops out and your manacle falls off before you even get to the end of scene 2 and your mind is racing to try to figure out how you’re going to act your way around not one but TWO missing items when they eventually get brought up by actors who don’t yet know they’ve disappeared all while you try to stay focused on the lines you’re currently saying but when you get home you find a funny cartoon:

Music To Build A Bookshelf By And By The Way Notice That My Music Library Isn’t ALL Show Tunes Just Mostly Show Tunes Because My Tastes Are Wondrously Diverse And Uber Manly Yo

Wwww. Zzzz.

Wonder Woman shirt. 

Weapons-grade hair.
Wready for bed.

This, people—THIS!—is why you’re coming to see our last weekend of Fuddy Meers:

It's not because of our endlessly inventive fold-and-change set (though it IS pretty awesome). It's because of our almost-too-referential-to-be-in-good-taste house music (please register all complaints with someone else). It's not because of my Grammy-nominated, Canadian-trade-war-breaking, delicately nuanced portrayal of an honorable-but-faintly-flawed, unfairly stunning man who’s cruelly afflicted with alarmingly spiky hair and perhaps a mildly unsightly blemish or two (though thousands of ancestors of fallen Korean War soldiers are begging me from their graves to bring their children home based on the singularly stirring power of my comforting skin and my collective acting choices).

NO! None of that meaningless garbage is why you’re coming to see the last weekend of our show! Because THIS is why:

See these stairs? They go DOWN. To the BASEMENT. Of the THEATER. Where it’s NICE AND COOL. And these are just the actors’ stairs; yours have CARPET. And HAPPINESS. And OTHER CAPITALIZED THINGS.

And THEY’RE why you’re coming to see our show this unbearably hot Iowa weekend.

So get your hot, sweaty selves to our nice cool show NOW. You have only three more chances to see us before my Grammy nomination and my mildly unsightly blemishes are gone for good.

I’m the youngest one. In curls.

Well, shit. I clearly got trump’s old phone number.

Today's Moment Of Pure Ridiculous Joy: "I Just Wanna Dance"

Fun fact: There is a 2001 three-act opera exploring, parodying, mocking and even sympathizingly understanding the cultural underpinnings and social normalizations of The Jerry Springer Show. It is called (if you can even believe this name wasn’t already taken) Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Its breakout song—at least for gay men at massive circuit parties in the early 2000s—was “I Just Wanna Dance,” in which a stripper who is done being belittled and called a whore takes ownership of the actions and choices her circumstances have offered her and proclaims “I’m tired of all this trying / I wanna do some living / ‘Cos I’ve done enough dying / I just wanna dance / I just wanna fucking dance!”

Yes, there is swearing. It’s about JERRY SPRINGER.

But back to us gays and our massive circuit parties (which are massively massive dance parties with laser light shows, rampant shirtlessness, speakers the size of industrial refrigerators and deafening remixes of awesome dance songs, with the exception of Madonna’s appalling rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” which is in every conceivable on this and all other planets way the polar opposite of awesome and you are to NEVER MENTION AGAIN). Anyway, we gays OF COURSE made many deafening remixes of “I Just Wanna Dance,” which is an awesome dance song. Plus it’s about wanting to dance. TOTAL TWOFER.

Speaking of twofers, here’s one of the remixes paired with dance clips from every awesome genre of awesome movie musical from West Side Story to Xanadu. IT. IS. SO. AWESOME. Watch it. Love it. Sing along with it. If it doesn’t make you wanna be gay, it will at the very least make you wanna dance. I mean wanna FUCKING dance!

Flashback Friday: Ragnar Insanity Edition

One of the coolest things my much smaller waist and I have ever done is run a 200-mile, 36-hour relay from Madison to Chicago with 12 eventually-sweaty-and-oh-so-stinky friends and got-to-know-each-other-extremely-well-extremely-fast strangers. We made our non-stop journey through blazing sun and pitch-black night with two vans, one wrist-slap baton, reflective vests and headlamps for the pitch-blackness-on-lonely-rural-roadsness of night, plenty of pluck and determination and encouragement and Gatorade, and a huge collective sense of adventure. It was both awful and awesome, and if any of you run another Ragnar race and need a slow old man for your team, I'd be very interested in doing it again.

My hair is SO! ON! POINT! right now

Oops—I mean SO! POINTY! right now. Sorry. Typo.

And you have three more opportunities to see its relentless verticalness in person. So get your Fuddy Meers tickets NOW!

CedaRound: Kingston Village Coolness

I'm all hip and cool, yo

It’s time for my first (and ideally my last) physical therapy appointment for my stupid hip injury—with the physical therapist that literally the entire population of Facebook recommended within mere seconds of my first mention that I’d injured myself running. In anticipation of whatever physical torture awaits me, I wore gym shorts to work today ... which felt positively subversive and deliciously scandalous!

#HowToTurn50

Who IS that smoldering, eternally youthful, delicately-nuanced-character-portrayer eye?

You have four more opportunities to find out, so don't blink and miss our show.

Happy anniversary to my parents!

In the midst of our country's paralyzing uncertainty, I want to take a moment commemorate a ray of enduring joy: My parents are celebrating their 54th wedding anniversary today. Like their parents before them, they continue to set a quiet example of unbridled altruism and unquestioning kindness, whether they're securing food, clothing and shelter for people in need; providing comfort and care for sick friends and strangers alike; prioritizing their lives around the needs and activities of their grandchildren; taking in their broken son and working fiercely to repatriate him through endless ups and downs; or simply providing a freshly baked pie for someone in need of delicious homemade goodness. They face challenges like my dad's blindness head-on, invite lonely people to join us for Christmas dinner and good-naturedly endure constant ribbing from their children. The example they set for us is so genuine and so high that I fear I can never do it justice in the way I live my life. They love us unconditionally and we gratefully love them back. I'm proud to call them my parents and I'm thrilled that I can laud them publicly so the people who are important to me can celebrate their anniversary with us.

31.12 feet

Though I was living in Chicago at the time, I was in Cedar Rapids 10 years ago today to visit my folks for their June 14 anniversary. My boyfriend at the time and I had heard stories of looming flooding, and even though the rains and the swollen rivers diverted us north from highway 30 at Mt. Vernon and sent us into Cedar Rapids on Mt. Vernon Road, we still never believed Cedar Rapids could have serious flooding. I mean, it's CEDAR RAPIDS. I grew up here. How could anything bad happen?

By the time we finally got to my folks' house late on the 13th though, the flooding had become serious enough that the city's last intact water pumping station was in such danger of being breached that the urgent call went out on the news for volunteers to sandbag it. Though we'd had a 5-hour drive we wanted to go out and help, but by the time we had a quick bathroom break before heading for the door, the news announced that they'd already gotten all the sandbaggers they needed. Which was a clear harbinger of the resilience our city would soon show. But at the time it was dark and late and we were 32 blocks from the river so all we could do was go to bed and wait.

The next morning, the footage on the news was devastating. The river had crested at 31.12 feet--19 feet over flood stage--and our entire downtown was drowning, as were 1,300 blocks of the city on either side of the river. Office buildings and banks and stores and my beloved theaters were almost up to the tops of their doors in water. All three bridges that cross May's Island and connect the east and west sides of the city were completely submerged. The Time Check and Czech Village neighborhoods were destroyed, with many houses underwater to their rooflines. The highly elevated I-380 was the only way to get across town, though all of the entrance and exit ramps in the flood zone were submerged. We--like seemingly everyone else in the city--drove slowly along the highway and peered out our windows to survey the devastation as the flood waters rippled mere feet beneath us.

As the water slowly receded, the city reeled over the destruction of homes, the closing of businesses, the undermining of infrastructure ... but never the loss of spirit. The city leaped almost immediately into action to tear down what was unsalvageable, repair what was repairable, clean up what was messy and dangerous, reimagine new life and purpose for what was destroyed, and start to recover and relocate and rebuild ourselves into a newer and better and more thoughtfully redesigned shining city on the river. We now have our vibrant and ever-expanding NewBo neighborhood, we've literally picked up and moved an entire museum to higher ground, we've creatively and beautifully incorporated new levees and berms into inviting public spaces, we've used the opportunity to upgrade and restore historic buildings, we've turned our once-desolate-after-5:00 downtown into a destination area bustling with restaurants and entertainment ... and we've salvaged and restored and improved and polished up my beloved Paramount and Iowa (home of Theatre Cedar Rapids) theaters.

The flood was awful and heartwrenching and devastating. Many businesses never recovered. Many homes and families and lives have been forever changed. And our renaissance is far from complete. At any given time there are at least three massive construction/renovation projects happening in the downtown area, and I adjust my travel to and from work to check on them almost daily. Seriously. (Currently: The towering modern addition to the American Building, whatever the hell Skogman is going to build on the just-demolished Bever Building site (don't mess this up, Skogman--build something we can all appreciate and be proud of), the multi-lot demolition on Second Street between Second and Third Avenues, and the massive condo/apartment building that's covering more than a city block on the east side of I-380 at Diagonal Drive)

Aside from the before-and-after photos of my dad's office, where he thought two levels of concrete blocks would protect his antique roll-top desk from the floodwaters that eventually submerged his entire office past its ceiling, the pictures I'm posting here aren't mine. But they show the depth and breadth of the destruction we all faced and make a great reminder of how amazingly far we have come in the last ten years.

So happy floodiversary, Cedar Rapids! May we keep our recovery and flood-protection development speeding along forevermore. (And don't forget to wish my folks a happy 54th anniversary tomorrow.)

Rule #1: Never leave me alone with my iPhone in the mannequin graveyard

Welp

Another Tony Awards has come and gone and I still haven’t won anything AND I’M NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER, AMERICAN THEATRE WING but I had an awesome second weekend of Fuddy Meers WHICH YOU HAVE ONLY FOUR MORE CHANCES TO SEE OR BETTER YET TO SEE AGAIN and even though my hip injury prevented me from doing today’s six-mile training run BECAUSE GETTING OLD AND FALLING APART ISN’T FUN PEOPLE YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST, I did find a good reason to wear my JAKE The Musical! T-shirt tonight. So there’s that.

Sconys, bronys, holes of donys

Sparkle-glittered for the Tonys!

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.