I haven’t had a car payment in 15 years. BUT I DO NOW!

The transmission in my trusty silver 2004 Kia Spectra started feeling a bit iffy this week. And the rust spots over the rear tires were growing so big they’d been issued their own ZIP code.

So my sister—my sweet, sweet sister who turns into a take-no-prisoners pit bull when she buys a car—and I headed out this morning JUST TO LOOK at cars ... and five hours later I came home with a shiny new MEGA HIGH TECH black 2020 Kia Forte.

TWENTY. TWENTY. My car is so shiny and new it hasn’t even been built yet.

AND!

Once the car was all mine and I started it and turned on my shiny new SXM Broadway channel to accompany my first official drive in my shiny new car, SXM WAS PLAYING XANADU, which as we all know is the best show ever.

IT. WAS. ALL. FORETOLD.

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!

Those tears you cry? They're really mi-ine.

FRIDAY QUESTIONS:

1. Why is everyone Facebook thinks I may know either 17 or 85 or living with a pair of bra-bursting boobs in Indonesia?

2. Is there a better song on the planet than "Xanadu"? (Hint: No, there is not.)

3. How is it possible that I've already eaten an entire bag of Dove Caramel & Milk Chocolate Valentine's Hearts today and it's only 4:27?

4. Why does Bitch Kitty single me out for soul-shattering abuse when she used to love me and all I've ever done is love her back?

5. Corollary: Why does she think that's it all about her whenever I happen to be standing near the treat cupboard with my opposable thumbs and my cupboard-opening skills, neither of which she'll ever have?

6. Do you promise not to tell my mom if I drive all the way to the Target across town after work tonight to see if they have the two totally cool shirts I saw at the Target by my office two nights ago but hopefully in my size over there?

7. Is there a less clumsy way I could have written that last question? (Hint: I don't care. I'm going to drive over there tonight anyway to see if they have my shirts. But please don't tell my mom. She'll just cite some stupid "common sense" rule like I already have too many shirts or something.)

8. Do you think I can make this list go all the way to 10?

9. Was that last question just a transparently desperate attempt to keep you engaged in this post as a way to fill the soul-sucking void in my life that grows deeper and more black-holey every day I continue to not have a boyfriend?

10. Should I keep taking my meds?

Crap I have bought

A garlic press. One of the side benefits of being burgled is you find stuff you forgot you had. Last month’s burglar had torn through all the drawers in our kitchen, and as we cleaned up the mess we found a $50 gift card for the Chopping Block that said it expired in February 2009. So I put it in my wallet and forgot about it all over again … until last night when I was finally leaving the office at 8:00 and a co-worker said she had to run to the Chopping Block before it closed. I tagged along with her and learned two things when I walked in the door: Contrary to what they might say, Chopping Block gift cards never expire. And contrary to what mine very clearly said, it was actually worth $150. So I ended the day in a gleeful little shopping spree, and I stumbled out of the store with the abovementioned garlic press (I've always wanted a garlic press!), a cheese slicer, a new cutting board (the same kind they use on Top Chef! not that I ever watch that show! but still!), a Silicone pastry brush, a set of magnetic tongs (they stay shut!), a bottle of premium olive oil and an ultra-sharp cheese grater that promises to create pillows of fine cheese shavings … and wicked damage to the face of any future burglar I find in my kitchen.

A backpack with a footprint in it. I feel like my body has grown used to the protein shakes and pre-workout energizers and other related vanity potions I’ve been using since I started working with my trainer in July. So when an amateur bodybuilder friend told me about NO2, a supplement program that had given his training a dramatic boost, I spent a week researching it … and then spent a shit-ton of money to buy a cycle of the stuff. And the folks at GNC loaded me down with swag in appreciation. They gave me a huge pile of protein powder samples, a heart-monitor device and a really cool backpack. And when I got the backpack home and started digging through it to admire all its secret compartments, I found a dusty shoe print on the inside of one of its pockets. And while I don’t really care that I got a used free backpack, I am slightly concerned that I can’t get the footprint out of the backpack fabric.

Xanadu. We saw the fabulous Xanadu stage musical on Sunday, and I haven’t stopped singing the theme song all week. Or threatening to leave my husband for the guy playing Sonny Malone. But I hate to ruin a happy marriage, so I did the next best thing: I went on Amazon and bought the Xanadu Broadway cast recording. And since I think it’s a waste to order one thing from Amazon when I could easily order two, I also bought the Xanadu movie soundtrack. And since I think it’s a waste to order two things from Amazon when I could easily order three, I also bought …

A camera. Thanks to all the suggestions and recommendations from you fabulous people, I narrowed down my search and finally bought a shiny new silver-and-blue Canon PowerShot SD1100IS. It’s loaded with features! It fits in my pocket! It actually takes pictures! So now I can finally go on a cruise and come home with more than a sunburn to help me remember it.

Team shirts. I’m racing up the John Hancock Center stairs a week from Sunday. But while Hustle up the Hancock is a pretty cool event, its official shirts are, to put it charitably, lame. The palette is kind of feminine, the design is uninspiring and even the shirts themselves suck. They’re almost as wide as they are tall and they look good on exactly nobody. Luckily, we’re not expected to wear them in the race. Even luckilyier, I’m racing up the building with a team of co-workers. And one of our co-workers is a graphic designer. And he made us a logo. And I just ordered logo shirts for all of us … logo shirts that actually fit. And because our shirts won’t suck, we’re gonna be the kick-assest team next Sunday. See for yourself why all the other climbers will have no choice but to bow down and worship our awesomeness:

Oh, hi!

Remember me? I used to write a blog here. Back when I was brimming with time and ideas. Brimming! But for the last couple weeks I’ve just been brimming with deadlines. And 14-hour workdays. And that bloated, greasy feeling you get when you eat fast food twice in a row because you barely have time to wash all the pee off your hands, much less sit down for a decent meal.

Unfortunately, deadlines and 14-hour workdays aren’t exactly a wellspring of interesting blog content. Unless you want to hear about the web site and the branding guidelines and the relaunch collateral I’ve been writing. Which I’m pretty sure you don’t. Trust me. Brimming!

But! The fiancé and I did sneak off to Iowa this weekend to help celebrate my uncommonly photogenic nephew’s ninth birthday. And his idea of a celebration was a good old-fashioned roller-skating party. Which I think I was more excited about than he was. But only because I own Xanadu on DVD and he doesn’t. Yet.

Before the party, though, we all had to carbo-load, which we did by stuffing our bellies full of my sister’s delicious gluten-free sour cream waffles:
And why did we eat gluten-free? Because my sister is gluten intolerant. Which is exactly like being gay intolerant except without the lack of logic or the angry, unhinged diatribes on the local editorial pages. Click here if you want to buy some of my sister’s company’s delicious you’d-never-know-it-was-gluten-free gluten-free baking mixes. They’re gluten-hostile! But gay friendly! And the more you buy, the sooner my sister can surprise me with a nice retirement mansion in Barcelona.

Once we were coursing with gluten-free energy, we packed up and headed off to Super Skate, where I hadn’t stepped a single wheel-booted foot since my feathered hair and I had celebrated endless grade-school birthdays on its endless expanse of reasonably smooth flooring:

Super Skate, I was a little disturbed to discover, has not changed much since the late 1970s. The skating floor is still cracked. The carpet is still puckery. The check-in area still looks like the visitors’ lounge in a medium-security prison. The whole place still smells like mildew, wasted youth and spilled soda. And the giant macramé owl still hangs on the wall outside the bathrooms:
But—despite the deejay’s unforgivable lack of access to a recording of “Xanadu”—we had a blast. My nephew, who is usually pretty mild-mannered, proved himself to be a bit of a skating prodigy. But my normally fearless niece just could not convince herself that stiff-limbed marching plus a death grip on her uncle does not equal skating. She clung to me like Mike Huckabee to his hubris through the entire Hannah Montana songbook, threatening to bring me down every time the forces of inertia and gravity got the best of her. Eventually, I just realized I could hoist her off the floor whenever she was about to lose control and then lower her back once her frantic kicking stopped. It was just like Olympic pairs skating, except with dumber choreography. And fewer sequins. And no National Anthem at the end. But it was still awesome, though our time on the rink left me with the lingering LCL knee pain I usually get after a long training run.

That night we had a celebratory dinner at a place called Fiesta del Sol, which is español for “You have some nerve coming into our restaurant and asking us to bring you food. We are very busy right now doing things that, quite frankly, do not need to involve bringing you food. Things like leaving our Precious Moments® crèches on display in March. Right next to our creepy collection of dusty Mexican witch dolls. Which are really the remains of the last people who came into our restaurant and selfishly requested that we bring them food. Just like you! Let this be a lesson to you, you arrogant and disruptive food-asker-forers. By the way, we have exceptionally delicious blended strawberry margaritas with sugar on the rim.”

Who from my labors rest

Last April, when I was a "Xanadu" dancer backing up a fabulous drag queen in the always spectacular Who's That Girl?, one of the other drag queen's choreographers saw me perform and asked me to be a backup dancer in the far more prestigious Miss Continental Pageant over Labor Day weekend.

Flattered beyond description and thrilled that I'd get to work with one of Chicago's leading dancer/choreographers, I of course screamed said yes and ran home to put it in my calendar.

The choreographer and I kept in touch over the summer, but as Labor Day approached I realized I'd never heard another word from him about doing the show. I finally called him last Tuesday to see what was up/when rehearsals were/etc. And he said: "Oh, your drag queen dropped out."

So were ya gonna call and tell me, buddy?

I was very disappointed and more than a little frustrated, but -- thinking strategically that I wouldn't want to alienate him and blow any future chances at doing more of this go-go boy stuff (which is TONS of fun) -- I played it cool and started making friendly small talk with him.

And after about the 10th time he turned our conversation to the topic of me fucking him, I realized that perhaps I was being strung along only for a sexual encounter that just wasn't going to happen. So I cordially ended our call and turned to face an ugly new reality: I'd kept my Labor Day weekend completely open for the show and now I had nothing to do. No parties. No barbecues. No weekend getaways. Nothing.

Sigh.

But then I started thinking about all the unfinished projects on my to-do list, and I decided to tackle them all. So -- big breath -- here's what I accomplished this weekend:

• I finally stenciled the bathroom, and it looks hella cool. The pattern is this swirls-and-squiggles thing that looks part Keith Haring and part Aztec and totally sweet marching joyfully around the tops of my walls.

• When I realized how wicked handsome the chocolate-brown-and-sparkly-silver stencil paint combination looked on my walls, I used it to repaint my new cubey candle shelves that Jeff made me. So now the bathroom has thematic continuity.

• I headed down to Fleet Feet on Sunday to get a new pair of running shoes so they'd be all broken in in time for the marathon. While I was there I also got padded running socks, BodyGlide to protect against unsightly chafing and a FREE moisture-wicking shirt available to every shoe-buying customer who's running the Chicago Marathon. I swear, the Fleet Feet staff is so friendly and so knowledgeable, I'd buy my crack and hookers there if they'd let me.

• Since I was in the neighborhood, I popped over to the new CB2 to look for a shelfy thing for my piano music. I not only found something I kinda liked, but I fell in love with the store's whole aesthetic. Now I desperately want to remodel my entire house in Post-Ironic Sturdy/Industrial Danish Modern -- mostly so I can casually set out troughs of fake grass and mean it.

• While I had my credit cards out, I wandered over to The Container Store so I could stare at all the crap organizers they sell and rub myself longingly. (Is their catalog little more than organizer porn or am I just writing this sentence so I could introduce the phrase organizer porn to the masses?)

• I didn't find any organizer stuff I wanted, but I did find some brushed steel box shelves on sale that would look super sweet in my bedroom. For the last three years I've had framed album covers of "A Chorus Line" and "Evita" and a framed poster of "Les Misérables" hanging over my bed, which has done very little to persuade the endless parade of muscular blond men with melon-like buttocks and thick, kissable lips in my bedroom that I'm not a bottom. I've been thinking for months that they (the show tune art, not the muscular blond men with melon-like buttocks and thick, kissable lips) needed to go, and these box shelves were exactly the kick in the bedpan that I needed to make that happen.

• When I got everything home, I realized I'd need more than a few empty box shelves to complete my over-the-bed transformation, so I dug through my box of unhung knickknacks and found a few other things to hang artfully with my shelves. I also found a bunch of crap I'd been saving that looked much better in the dumpster.

• I also decided to prime and paint the extra cubey candle shelves from the bathroom with silver stencil paint and incorporate them into my over-the-bed tableau. (I know -- it sounds like I'm hanging an awful lot over my bed and I'm clearly in danger of having things fall on my head as I sleep overdecorating, but trust me: I'm an enthusiastic disciple of Less Is More. So it's gonna look cool. Play your cards right and you just may be invited over to see it. Plus, I have a pretty big bed, so there's plenty of room for visitors who compliment my decorating skills to romp between the sheets with me hanging things with judicious restraint.)

• While I had the primer out, I decided I should also prime and paint the ugly white conduit that was installed around my bedroom walls when the building got cable a couple years ago.

• While I had the furniture pulled out, I realized I really should thoroughly vacuum along the baseboards in the entire house. After all, it had been 3 1/2 years, and the dust buffaloes were starting to herd.

• And since the house was pulled apart in every direction, I also decided it was the perfect time to do a bunch of laundry as well and let it hang to dry from every available surface.

Whew. As of this writing, some things aren't totally finished -- that stencil paint takes longer to dry out than Rush Limbaugh -- but I slept a very satisfied sleep last night knowing that it didn't really matter that my crappy friends didn't invite me to any of their crappy Labor Day barbecues. Because I had important decorating things to do.

(OK, I did go to Jeremy's last-minute get-together on Sunday night and a nice last-minute dinner with Bob, David and Steve on Monday night. But the operative words here are "last-minute." I am a Boy of Destiny! I want my social life scheduled in advance!)

I made it safely to the other side of 36!

My birthday weekend was just PACKED with fun, and I still have the groggy incoherence to prove it.

Friday night, Bill (whose birthday is the same as mine) rented a corner of Lizzie McNeil's and celebrated with tons of people from our office and his wife's office. The bar is right on the tourist-friendly riverfront in an area filled with fountains and brick walkways and gorgeous views of the city, and it was really cool to just hang out and chat (and bitch about work for a bit). Best of all, when your co-workers get drunk, you get to hear all sorts of things they usually work so hard to keep inside -- from office gossip to how much they really, really like you. It's good to feel the love -- even if it comes from lovelorn straight women and macho-bluster straight men, and takes a couple of pints of Guinness to get it all out.

Saturday was a gorgeous day in Chicago, and the perfect opportunity to take my new custom-fitted running shoes out for a spin. It was my first outside run since the Shamrock Shuffle a few weeks earlier, and I was excited to see what kind of a difference $95 shoes can make in the real world (instead of the boring old treadmill world where I'd been sweating off my advancing age for the last couple months). I'd planned on pounding out only three miles, but the day was so beautiful and the shirtless men on the running path were so plentiful -- and my shoes were so comfortable -- that I got in a full five miles.

Flush with the pride of accomplishment, I hit the showers and then headed out for some pre-birthday errands: getting makeup and clearance-priced decorations for the evening's Easter-drag-mandatory birthday dinner at Pepper Lounge. The dress and hat I'd bought didn't exactly match, see, so I had to buy buttons or bunnies or flowers or something to sew on them to make them look more like an ensemble. And I found some little plastic eggs and stuffed bunnies and fake sprays of tiny flowers that really gave the outfit a certain flair once they were artfully arranged and secured with a few feet of sturdy darning thread. The dinner was a hoot, and all the girls looked fabulous in their Easter finery (including Jim and Jeff and Terry and Kent, who have repeatedly pointed out that I've neglected to mention them in my Christmas letter every year since I've known them, so they're getting a whole parenthetical mention in the blog until I can rectify the Christmas issue). I also got some fun presents, including a fabulous designer purse from Truly Scrumptious. The purse was adorned with a large H, which I assumed was the initial of some hot new designer I'd never heard of -- but Truly just laughed and laughed and laughed as she explained that the H was for Heidi Holes, my endlessly clever nom de drag. After dinner we all paraded through the Cubs game crowds (who never failed to smile and wave and whistle at us -- but who doesn't love a drag queen when she's all holiday-pretty?) over to Keith and Steve's house to admire the progress of their kitchen renovation and watch some TiVo, then I headed home to scrub up and de-drag so I could hit Sidetrack for some birthday fun as a boy.

Sunday -- the actual big day -- was comparatively low-key after the previous two nights of excitement. I slept late, got serenaded over the phone by my folks and my sister's family, read some of the paper, watched some TiVo, and then met Paul for a nice lunch at Nookie's. After lunch, we decided to walk "just a few blocks" to Abercrombie & Fitch so Paul could stock up on underwear (he's apparently started donating his underwear to guys he meets, but that's a story for another time). I couldn't picture where there was an A&F near Boystown, but I trusted Paul's description of its location -- and 437 miles later, in brand-new flip-flops that shredded my poor feet, we arrived there. Now, I've always maintained that there's nothing more pathetic than a grown gay man wearing A&F as though he were down with the kids, yo. So there is a profound irony in the fact that I ended up spending a bit of my 36th birthday clomping through one of its stores on the bloody stumps that used to be my feet. But Paul replenished his underwear stock and we headed back to Boystown, enjoying the beautiful day and talking about everything and nothing -- and then we stopped in a record store with a cute clerk who smiled back and forth with me for a good 20 minutes as he chatted with other customers. But I had to head home to get ready for rehearsal, so I took off -- and I hadn't gone half a block before Paul called to tell me that the clerk practically broke his neck watching me walk out the door and down the street.

An hour later I was riding with Truly Scrumptious and two other dancer boys to a dance studio to learn Truly's guaranteed-to-be-fabulous "Xanadu" number for Who's That Girl? The show is an over-the-top Vegas-style drag revue that raises TONS of money for some of the most visible gay-related non-profits in Chicago. This is my third year doing it, and this time I get to be a hot dancer boy in tight black clothes, doing lifts and shaking my honey-baked ham like the Solid Gold dancer I am. We had a blast choreographing the number last night, and I honestly can't think of a more fun way to celebrate my birthday than dancing around to "Xanadu" with a bunch of hot guys in a sweaty studio.

And now the weekend's over, and I'm sitting at work a little bit tired a little bit sore from all that running and dancing and high-heel wearing. But I take off early tomorrow for NYC for a day of business and then a day of vacation with Arno. Be good while I'm gone.

Birthday buildup

It's shaping up to be an Arvo Pärt birthday. I became fascinated with Pärt's work when I first heard his ethereal "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" at an otherwise unremarkable Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performance a couple weeks ago. I mentioned him in my blog, and Arno -- ever the proud Estonian -- promptly sent me a bunch of information on Estonia's most famous composer.

My parents got me Pärt's Sanctuary last weekend for my birthday, and I came home one night this week to find a box with three other Pärt CDs waiting for me courtesy of Arno. Who knew I'd go from never having heard of this guy to owning what is most likely his entire oeuvre in less than a month? (And how fun is it to repeatedly type a word with an umlaut in it? I hope it's coming through OK for you poor unfortunate souls reduced to reading my blog on a PC.)

Other birthday weekend plans are shaping up well: Tomorrow night is a joint celebration with Bill. We've been working out together for almost a year, and we just discovered we have the same birthday, so Bill invited the whole office to a shindig tomorrow at some bar near here that he likes. Saturday night is an Easter-drag-mandatory celebration with 12 of my most not-afraid-to-wear-a-dress-in-public friends at Pepper Lounge. I found a $10 waffle-knit shift in '60s-mod shades of orange and yellow, and I'm going to try to find some fake daisies or huge buttons to sew on it and make it even more hideous. Top it off with a not-quite-the-same-shade-of-orange sun hat and a scarf I stole from my mom when I was home for Easter, and I should be the prettiest large-boned, gym-built birthday girl in the room. Then Sunday -- the day I actually bid my early 30s goodbye -- I have a Who's That Girl? rehearsal with Brent (aka Truly Scrumptious). I'm gonna be a backup dancer (as a boy this year) to his (aka her) big "Xanadu" number. And I can't think of a better way to turn 36 than shaking my honey-baked ham with Olivia Newton-John and ELO in a place where nobody dared to go, the love that we came to know. They call it Xanadu.