Flashback Friday: Bow Ties And Billowy Pleats Edition

This—THIS!—is what I thought was acceptable attire for setting foot in Washington DC's Kennedy Center to see Tyne Daly in the 1989 revival of Gypsy. (Early non-linear side note: You never forget your first Gypsy. And while I don't l-o-o-o-o-o-v-e the show like other card-carrying-Platinum gays, I still love Tyne Daly as Rose more than any other women I've seen in the role since then. And that includes Patti. Because she's never met a vowel she couldn't chew into a meaty, puddingy, distractingy triphthong.)

Anywho ... THAT OUTFIT ...

Nothing says "I sit down to pee" quite as efficiently as a bow tie. I taught myself to tie a bow tie when I was in high school, while all the other kids were doing more useful things like—oh, I don't know—hanging out with each other and forming meaningful friendships. I thought my little Madras plaid bow tie made me look so throwback-non-conformist hip 'n' cool that I went out and bought a bunch more bow ties in all kinds of colors and patterns. Which makes this plaid one my gateway bow tie. One reason I was so good at tying bow ties was those glasses. Their lenses were so expansively huge—like the much-ballyhooed-about-to-be-launched Hubble telescope!—that I barely had to bend my neck to look down and see what I was doing. And as we all know, efficiency is the DNA of questionable fashion. You can't see it clearly here, but I also had a coordinating Madras plaid watch band. As in a bow-tie-matching watch band made of sweat-absorbing-and-quickly-gross fabric. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! I somehow decided it was totally-probably-sexy-cool to wear it with the watch face ON THE INSIDE OF MY WRIST. Because WHO THE HELL DOES THAT? And let's not overlook those voluminous pleated khakis—not that we could ever tear our eyes away from the uncharted galaxies of animal-balloon space they occupied around my wispy little goblin hips. They were from The Gap, see, and I'd had a bit of an inferiority complex as a younger person that—and I am not making this up—made me feel not cool enough to shop at The Gap. I'd literally walk by it at the then-fancy Westdale Mall and feel awkward and panicked and a little bit resentful. Do not fear: My therapist has been alerted. Anyway, one fateful day I scrounged up the courage to wince timidly into that Gap and find the men's section (which in the gender-bendy '80s wasn't clearly delineated to me as I entered the store) and immediately found these dream pants with all their essential dream details: classic khaki coloring, heavy cotton poplin (a natural fiber! in the '80s! I KNOW!) (also: like every socially awkward fashionista, I knew what poplin was as a young gaylet ... and why it was more laid-back-casual-and-therefore-better than twill) (also: twill is for librarians who aren't allowed to sit with the other librarians at lunch), voluminous pleats, super-dramatic taper, securely tacked ankle-strangling cuffs. TOTAL MEGA COOL-KIDS FASHION. And I'm pretty sure I was wearing my white suede bucks with red fake-rubber soles with them. Because PLEASE BEAT ME UP I'M SUPER '80s GAY.

So let's review:

Face-swallowing glasses + perfectly puckered plaid bow tie + inside-out sweaty watch + pleats with their own ZIP codes + legs tapered in the shape of super-pointy ice-cream-cones = man who goes to the theater to see angsty-gay-anthem-filled musicals with his mom. Every time.

Exhibit A

I'm so thankful our family comes from hearty stock

I still have vivid memories of the night Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, the moment 30 years ago today that she came out of her anesthesia after her mastectomy, sitting with her at chemo, and repeatedly watching her take off her wig and remove her prosthetic after chemo so she could collapse into the sleep she needed to keep up the fight. But more importantly, I remember how she wouldn't let breast cancer control her life. I have even fonder memories of her traveling to DC--one of her favorite cities--with us, unflinchingly bearing the slight orange tint of a chemo patient. Of her volunteering for Reach to Recovery, a program that paired breast cancer survivors with new breast cancer patients to answer questions and act as survivor role models and give hope where often there didn't seem to be any. Of the pink-clothed and pink-fooded and the pink-everythinged celebration we had with family and friends to celebrate her 20-year survival milestone. And most importantly, I remember how we all chose to laugh instead of cry at the situation. It turns out that prosthetic breasts can be very funny, especially when they're used as a giant nose on a drawing of a face, when they make uncontrollable farting sounds against sweaty skin on a hot day, and especially when they're put away for the night on a stack of hotel towels, only to fly across the room and SPLAT! against the wall when the top towel is unknowingly pulled off the pile in semi-darkness. We're lucky as a family to have all of this--and to still have Mom with us as a living example for everyone that breast cancer CAN be beaten.

I’m home

After a week filled with dear friends both old and new, a new dog you’re all lucky I didn’t dognap, favorite haunts, new museums, historical learnings that I’m still processing, a 5K along a gorgeous ocean boardwalk, delicious cooking, gallons of Diet Coke, the endless magical convenience of Uber in an unfamiliar city, and a Charlotte-to-Cedar-Rapids flight that looped over to Omaha to avoid what looks to have been an epic storm, I am home and happy and thankful and sleepy and ready to resume my regularly scheduled adventures at dawn. Good night!

So ... burning man ...

Sometimes carefully laid plans for a weirdly cool Burning Man exhibit at the Renwick followed by a pilgrimage to see the Obama portraits at the National Portrait Gallery turn into a mostly-chatting-and-half-paying-attention-to-the-arty-stuff wander through the Renwick followed by three hours of catching up at (don’t laugh) TGI Friday’s (I SAID DON’T LAUGH) with a long-lost high-school friend who is now a hella-cool adult friend who will corroborate your story that your TGI Friday’s waitress was probably the shittiest waitress ever to work on a Friday or any other day and I seriously can’t remember the last time I’ve ever left a bad tip for anyone and I used to wait tables so I ALWAYS tip extremely generously and Gareth was my first-ever crush and I just had lunch with him but I’m burying this information deep in this blathery run-on sentence so you probably skipped over that part and saved us all a bottomless swamp of paralyzing awkwardness how ‘bout them Hawkeyes I’m on vacation puppies are cute THIS PART IS IN ALL CAPS anyway where was I oh yeah the Burning Man exhibit was truly cool and breathtaking and informative for those of us who until today had no earthly idea what the hell Burning Man is even about and I totally recommend it but we both heartily do NOT recommend the nearby TGI Friday’s (STOP IT WITH YOUR DERISIVE LAUGHING) especially the slimy booth that had a metal plate over the junction box where the sconce had mysteriously been removed Exhibit A: First Selfie and catching up with Gareth was truly an awesome way to end a truly awesome vacation even through we never got to the National Portrait Gallery but we did get a selfie in front of a nearby George Washington bust Exhibit B: Second Selfie don’t worry I told him a long time ago that he was my first-ever crush and his wife has reportedly come to terms with it and is totally not threatened by me OR IS SHE and he swears it’s not awkward anymore but let the record show HE WAS THE FIRST TO BRING IT UP TODAY BUT IT’S TOO LATE THAT SHIP HAS SAILED SO STOP MAKING IT WEIRD GARETH and the Obama portraits will have to wait until next summer but except for our gaspingly inept waitress today this trip has been pretty awesome.

Another day of DC architectural touristing begins!

THERE IS SO MUCH GOING ON IN THIS SELFIE!

1. Mike.
2. Oops. I probably should explain that Mike is a friend of mine who has many cats.
3. Oh—and he’s one of my many super-awesome DC friends, and I can’t imagine coming here without seeing him.
4. We toured the National Museum of African American History and Culture—which I have SO MUCH to say about—this afternoon and then had dinner and then took this selfie before we parted ways.
5. But look at that little dot that’s artfully centered at the vanishing point of the streets between us ...
6. It’s the dome of the Capitol!
7. We did that because we’re both artsy and civic-minded.
8. But not because Mike has three cats.
9. THREE.
10. Also: Notice the artful placement of Mike’s head ...
11. IT’S TOTALLY BLOCKING THE STABLE GENIUS HOTEL!
12. You’re welcome.
13. Let’s see: Mike ... unmanly amounts of cats ... totally cool friend ... Capitol with an O ... artful vanishing-point composition ... the hotel that shall not be named ... THREE CATS ... hmmm ... what’s left?
14. Oh yeah: I TOTALLY STABBED A DUDE.
15. I mean with my straw.
16. I mean with the placement of my straw relative to the locations of my iPhone and the orange-shirted dude behind me.
17. So not STABBED stabbed.
18. So don’t call the police.
19. THREE CATS.
20. None of which he brought with him today.

Trying to take a normal, respectable, youthfully handsome selfie in this town is impossible with all these damn monuments everywhere you look

This sunken sculpture garden is my favorite place—which houses my favorite sculpture—in DC

It's hidden in plain sight on the Mall side of the Hirshhorn, and it provides quiet sanctuary—and welcome shade—on molten, touristy days like today. I'm not really sure what started making this sculpture—Rodin's epic "Burghers of Calais"—so particularly meaningful to me. It’s most likely the piece that finally unlocked the aesthetic, artistic and historical secrets of the broader Modernist movement for me when I took a college art-history class: its raw, muscular composition ... its marriage of Realism (which sought to represent human figures as they are instead of idealizing them) and the last dying gasps of Romanticism (the very emotion-wrought idealization that the Realists were striving to overcome) ... its accessibility from any educational and even physical perspective ... it’s just so many things on so many levels, including my newfound levels of understanding the movement. I should state that this dual Realism/Romanticism classification is solely my interpretation of the genres and the transition between them, but you cannot deny that the oversized figures in this sculpture are muscular and handsome and to a large degree idealized while still being rough-hewn, misshapen and out of proportion.

The figures are six men being led to their death to liberate the French town of Calais in the Hundred Years' War, which adds layers of fascinating historical content onto the reasons I love the work. I find it all at once intimate and epic, unfinished and uneditable, and abstract and representational, the latter of which has always been my preference in art and especially sculpture. So I make a pilgrimage to see it—I even sit in the same shady spot to contemplate it—every time I come to Rehoboth and DC. It's always a beautiful way to rest and rejuvenate and think and remember and see these decades-old friends in relative peace before my vacation ends and I head home.

WHEELS DOWN! At the correct airport! Whose name is just NATIONAL, damnit!

The Lusitania is still afloat! My watch is still on Iowa time! Saying WHEELS DOWN just made me sound like a seasoned aviator!

Let the beachhousities begin!

My last vacation adventure started with a 19-hour-four-airport-plus-an-impromptu-four-hour-drive-with-total-strangers nightmare commute

This vacation adventure is starting with no Diet Coke in the you’re-trapped-here-and-this-is-your-only-option-I-hate-my-job-so-I’m-going-to-mumble-at-you-that’ll-be-shrvkorsln-dollars-please airport-gate kiosk.

I don’t know which is worse. All I can say is the damn Lusitania better not sink at the end of this book.

Also: Our gate agent just told us we have “free wi-fi available for purchase” on our flight.

Plus she just said we’re now boarding for our flight to Charlotte O’Hare.

Plus she pronounces it conci-air.

This commute is immeasurably worse.

My entire six-day DC/Rehoboth Beach vacation is somehow fitting into these two gym bags

But we all know the real reason I’m posting this photo is to show everyone my gorgeous on-clearance-ten-years-ago rug that I love so much I’m still hesitant to walk on it. Plus to show you that I’ve laid out my IOWA NATIVE T-shirt to wear on the plane to REPRESENT! Plus to give everyone a peek-a-boo look at the underpants I’m going to wear too. Because we all love saying underpants. Plus maybe to brag that I’m starting a six-day DC/Rehoboth Beach vacation tomorrow while you’ll continue to live your mousy-gray-blah lives of quiet desperation. Underpants!

Check out my Atlantic-beach-house-vacation-starts-in-23-hours-and-I-want-to-look-distractingly-handsome-in-all-the-photos haircut!

Also: new STUDIO N T-shirt! Because NOWLEDGE! Or maybe NORDSTROM!

When vacations collide!

Cedar Rapids meets DC via Central Park West. Woot!

#HowToTurn50 #WithALittleHelpFromOldFriends

And so it’s here: the last night of my 40s

I feel like that ominous, grainy photo of the Titanic sailing away from the White Star Dock in Southampton that’s always accompanied by a caption saying something about it being the last time the ship would ever see land. I was born at 6:30 am, so when I close my eyes tonight it will be the last time I see my bedroom as a 49-year-old because by the time I wake up I’ll be 50.

Turning 50 is bugging me WAY beyond the expected complaints of a certain age milestone making someone feel old. I know I’m not the only person to turn 50 or to feel profoundly older because of it ... and I’m certainly not the first person to complain about it. But 50 brings with it a mathematical sense of mortality that even 49 didn’t: I’m well over halfway done living my life. But I don’t feel like I’ve even STARTED living it by most measures. There’s so much about living that I worry I haven’t even started thinking about, much less doing ... even though I’ve consciously and purposefully been living by the motto “someday just began”—meaning someday is here, so stop putting things off (like tattooing “someday just began” inside your arm where you can easily see it) until some far-off-procrastination someday—for well over two decades.

So in that spirit—and flying in the face of the defeated spirit of the 50-year-old man I desperately don’t want to be—I’ve mapped out a pretty rigorous Summer Of Running Away From Being 50 that includes multiple vacations to favorite destinations including New York City and Washington, D.C., and multiple races including two half marathons, the second of which winds through the parks of my beloved Walt Disney World in November.

So tomorrow’s my new someday. The beginning of my sixth decade. The dawn of my summer-long celebration of that milestone. The onyourmarksgetsetGO! of my sprint toward everything that awaits me between here and 60.

And the moment I wake up tomorrow, it’s only just begun.

#HowToTurn50

Happy 47th birthday to Follies

... the glorious, epic, mold-breaking 1971 musical by Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Harold Prince and Michael Bennett that ended up being too lavish and probably too jarringly mold-breaking for its own good. The most expensive Broadway production to date when it opened, it drew effusive critical praise but didn't get the musical-theater-pantheon foothold it deserved and closed after 500 performances without recouping any of its investments.

I was unfortunately three when it opened and I couldn't get tickets, but my heart and endless fascination and I were eventually--inevitably--pulled into its magical, inspiring, gorgeous, heartbreaking world when I saw the 1987 London revival, which gave Eartha Kitt a much-needed comeback when she replaced the broken-ankled Delores Gray (just like what happened to her in 42nd Street!) to belt the iconic "I'm Still Here"--which, as coincidences never cease, was the song in the 1971 production that brought Yvonne De Carlo back from the brink of terminal embarrassment after playing Lily Munster on TV.

Thankfully--inevitably--Follies has since then finally achieved the musical-theater-pantheon stature it deserves, and I've been fortunate enough to have seen more productions of it than I can count in New York, D.C., Chicago and beyond. I'm obviously overflowing with fanboy knowledge and trivia and opinions and lyrics (oh boy, am I overflowing with lyrics) about the show, but if I even want to come close to sharing everything about its brilliance that's waiting to burst out of me, I'll have to schedule a six-week subscription-series symposium at a local college to get it all Jakesplained to you.

Fun fact: It opened at the Winter Garden Theater in NYC, where--again with the coincidences--I just so happened to see my first-ever Broadway show (Cats, the fact of which I am hard-stop-sun-comes-up-coffee-cup unwilling to discuss).

29 years ago today

I'm so thankful our family comes from hearty stock. I still have vivid memories of the night Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, the moment 29 years ago today that she came out of her anesthesia after her mastectomy, sitting with her as she got her chemo, watching her take off her wig and remove her prosthetic breast after her chemo so she could get the sleep she needed to keep up the fight. But more importantly, I remember how she wouldn't let breast cancer control her life. I have even fonder memories of her traveling to DC -- one of her favorite cities -- with us, and of her smiling in all our pictures with the slight orange tint of a chemo patient. Of her volunteering for Reach to Recovery, a program that paired breast cancer survivors with new breast cancer patients to answer questions and act as survivor role models and give hope where often there is none. And most importantly, I remember how we all chose to laugh instead of cry over the entire situation. It turns out that a prosthetic breast can be very funny, especially when it's used as a giant nose on a drawing of a face, when it makes uncontrollable farting sounds against sweaty skin on a hot day, and most especially -- and this is one of our family's favorite stories -- when it's put away for the night on a stack of hotel towels, only to fly across the room and SPLAT! against the far wall when the top towel is unknowingly pulled off the pile in semi-darkness. 

We're lucky as a family to have all of this -- and while we celebrate that my mom is still with us, we will always mourn the loss of the people who aren't.

ArtThrob: The Burghers of Calais

(Original French title: Les Bourgeois de Calais)

1889

Auguste Rodin

Impressionism (1872-1892)

The relatively short-lived period of Impressionism in art was as defined by what it wasn't -- clear lines, plausible composition, realistic depictions of figures and the space they occupied -- as by what it was: impressions of visual perception told through explorations of changing light and color and even through the rough-hewn textures created in paint using varying brush strokes. A radical departure from the longstanding -- though always evolving -- rigors of academic Realism, the fresh ideas of Impressionism on canvas quickly inspired similar reinterpretations of artistic norms in music, literature and sculpture.

Enter François-Auguste-René Rodin.

Classically trained and well-established in creating representational art, Rodin saw Impressionism's dreamy figure studies and craggy, dimensional textures as a vocabulary he could use to render bold ideas, subjective emotions, and plays of shape and light in sculpture. His raw, turbulent works brought new, profound depth to the revolutionary cacophonies that had so far been constricted to the flat canvases of Impressionistic paintings, and his most riveting use of this complex, muscular multi-dimensional language is in his mighty Burghers of Calais. The sculpture depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to liberate the French town of Calais during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin sculpted the figures with such a masterful mix of romantic realism and primitive rawness that you can see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and arguably unfinished in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions.

French law decrees that no more than twelve original casts may be made of any work by Rodin, which means The Burghers of Calais tells its weighty story in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands resolutely at the entrance to the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building.

I make a point to see my reproduction of the work every summer on my annual pilgrimage to visit friends in Washington, D.C. It stands with other Rodin masterpieces in a relatively austere corner of the sunken sculpture garden behind the Smithsonian's relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum. I usually stop there on my way to the airport at the end of each visit. I walk around the sculpture a few times to take note of specific details Rodin included -- like articulated toes to help propel the walking figures through space -- and specific details he didn't include -- like eyeballs to help the figures see where they're going. Then I sit in my same spot on a little concrete ledge to take in the piece in its weighty enormousness, to contemplate the explosive change Rodin and the Impressionists brought to the way we see and understand and interpret art, and to take comfort in the fact that my Burghers will most likely stand caught in their time and this place, waiting for me year after year every time I come to visit them for as long as I live.

Flashback Friday: Terrifying Halloween Costume Edition

Nothing says "I sit down to pee" quite as efficiently as a bow tie. I taught myself to tie a bow tie when I was in high school, while all the other kids were doing more useful things like—oh, I don't know—hanging out with each other and forming meaningful friendships. I thought my little Madras plaid bow tie made me look so cool that I went out and bought a bunch more bow ties in all kinds of colors and patterns. Which makes this plaid one kind of a gateway bow tie. One reason I was so good at tying bow ties was those glasses. Their lenses were so expansively huge—like the Hubble telescope!—that I barely had to bend my neck to look down and see what I was doing. Big glasses + small bow tie = man who goes to the theater with his mom. Every time.

Fun fact: This is me in my dinner-plate glasses and pleated pants that were wider than the rest of my body in the lobby of the Kennedy Center when my mom and I went to D.C. to see Tyne Daly in Gypsy when I was in college. She got her kids out!

Seizing the day

I was supposed to leave this morning for my annual summer vacation to visit friends in D.C. and stay at their best-porch-on-the-planet beach house in Rehoboth, DE, but I had to cancel a few weeks ago due to work issues. A lot of cool things have popped up on my calendar here in Cedar Rapids this weekend though, so I'm more or less OK with missing my trip.

But I still missed work this morning thanks to a rough descent into a bipolar depressive episode that started last night. I talk a lot about being bipolar on here and on social media, and every time I think I should stop someone messages me out of the blue to thank me for being so open and honest about it. Enough people have confided in me the stories of their struggles with mental illness that I sometimes worry I won't remember everyone in my mental checklist of kindred, struggling spirits. I've developed close, supportive friendships with a lot of these people though, and our check-ins and conversations and even drives across town just to give hugs are so dear and so valuable to me that I'll probably never stop talking about my own struggles.

So here's this morning's report: I woke up at 6:00 in a motivational black hole with a fiery headache and enough disorientation that I knew enough to skip the gym -- which is huge because some days working out is the only thing that keeps me human -- and to let my boss know that I'd come in after lunch, if at all today. Then I went back to the kind of non-sleep that feels like you're staying awake getting more and more exhausted compounded by the stress of feeling worried about getting more and more exhausted. But when I woke up around 11:00 my head was clear enough that I could look at the episode objectively and summon the coping and pushing-through skills I've learned over the last decade and I showered and ate and made it to work, where I've been surprisingly productive ... albeit profoundly exhausted.

So to all the people I know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the people I don't know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the rest of you curious enough about my struggles today to have read this far: You will fight this battle all your life. You will get meds that don't work, you will get meds that actually make things worse and you will find meds that you'll notice start to make improvements ... though you'll spend ages waiting cynically for them to fail you. In the mean time, learn what helps you stabilize yourself and what helps you push your way out of the wet wool blankets and the rolling fogs that trap you. As soon as I felt coherent this morning, I texted one friend who right now is in a bottomless depressive episode so we could both not feel alone in our struggles and I texted another friend who as far as I know is not having an episode just so I'd know that someone who deeply understands what I'm going through is at the very least thinking about me. And then I picked out a shirt that says carpe diem on it and I know that it's totally goofy bordering on stupid, but if I'm wearing a shirt that means something to me on a certain day or in a certain situation, I feel compelled to go out in the world and show it to everybody. 

And after what my head put me through this morning, I need everyone to know -- no, I need to SHOW everyone -- that I'm seizing the hell out of the rest of my today.