Goodnight, Jakey

When you turn down two invitations to post-performance get-togethers because you’re exhausted and in dire need to sleep but you grab an ice-cold sparkling water when you get home and turn on your Roku YouTube channel just to unwind for a few minutes and then you get sucked into a vortex of Vox education videos and Dancing Through My Broadway Résumé profiles and now it’s freaking 4:00 am and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MY SENSE OF GOOD JUDGEMENT but through it all your show hair has stayed faithfully on point.

Why I’ve done nothing more than fold laundry very slowly on the couch all night:

No dishes. No dusting. No vacuuming. No bedroom cleanup. Just hours of YouTube archives of brilliantly funny, delightfully indignant, sexily British, total-current-crush John Oliver.

Check it out!

Disney: check.
Norway: check.
Fashion: check.
Historical research: check.
Serious, meaningful discussions of underpants: check.
Fashiony stuff I might need to know for work if we ever sell 1840s Disney Norwegian royalty underpants: I’ll keep this video bookmarked just in case.

Nineteen—NINETEEN!—Democratic Presidential nominees are in my home town right now

They're here to hold individual rallies and then a civilized, intelligent, productive, meaningful debate at our US Cellular Center this afternoon. I just walked through our beautiful downtown from the Pete Buttegieg rally to the street outside the convention center where the supporters of each candidate are joyfully chanting and cheering and holding signs and high-fiving everyone who walks by—including me in my BOOT EDGE EDGE shirt—and I’ve never been prouder to be a Cedar Rapidian and a progressive and a citizen of a country that DOES have hope and DOES have joy and DOES embrace civic responsibility and DOES FINALLY SEE A WAY OUT OF THIS HELLISH DOTARD NUCLEAR DUMPSTER FIRE.

Speaking of, the last time man-boy dotard stable genius brokeahontis held an emotionally needy rally here, I stood in this exact same spot and watched multiple people walk by me carrying Confederate and Nazi flags on their way in. I don’t even have to point out that there are none here today.

OHMYGODONEOFTHEEGGSTOTALLYHATCHED!

OK, first of all—FIRST! OF! ALL!—how come nobody told me about Seth Rudetsky’s “Deconstructs” series?

It’s so awesome it makes me weep and YOU ALL HAVE BEEN HIDING IT FROM ME. Rude.

Second of all, GET OUT OF MY HEAD, SETH! The stuff he talks about here—the historical trivia, the cultural references, the musical structures, the artistic themes—is all stuff I’ve been collecting and obsessing about and devouring in my head—and sharing with everyone who’ll listen—for decades. Each episode is a master class in cultural literacy and music theory and poetic construction, all told through the tiny details I thought I was the only person who noticed. Except Seth approaches it with far more musical training and worshipful obsession than I’ve ever mustered. This stuff is total catnip to me, and I’m about to disappear from public life for decades as I get caught up on—and memorize every detail of—every episode in this series.

Thirdly, SETH IS SO FREAKING ADORABLE. His rapid-fire train of thought, his bubbling excitement over everything he wants to share, his boundless knowledge, his goofy asides ... I’m now totally, 100% crushing on him.

Finally, THIS SONG. Pamela Myers’ clarion voice. Jonathan Tunick’s layered orchestrations. Stephen Sondheim’s boundless genius. I COULD NOT LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS VIDEO EVEN A TINY BIT MORE.

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64: A concerto is a musical structure dating to the Baroque period (roughly 1600-1750) that features a solo instrument backed by a full orchestra. It’s traditionally composed in three movements with a fast-slow-fast structure. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (composed in 1844, which puts it squarely in the Romantic period) is a lighthearted delight that explores a range of happy, inarguably beautiful and requisitely contemplative musical voices in its first two movements. But its third movement--a bouncy, exuberant celebration of musical virtuosity titled Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace (starting at 22:06 in this recording)--is completely joyful and captivating and downright triumphant for any violinist who masters it. Part of its joy stems from Mendelssohn’s placement of the violin solo mere moments after the downbeat of the movement instead of letting the orchestra introduce the solo, as had been the convention for 200 years. Romantic music is about emotion--often extreme emotion--and the joyful emotions of this third movement leap at you with no room for impatience or distraction.

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!

When it's 5:11 am ...

and you’ve been pointlessly wide awake so long that you’re tethered to an outlet because you’ve drained your phone battery in a YouTube clickhole, you stumble on this forgotten gem of Sondheim + Liza + Pet Shop Boys gaysplosionness—which is made mega-extra fabuloso with the addition of Spanish subtitles because SPANISH SUBTITLES and there’s nothing more Sally Durant Plummer than losing your mind looking at a coffee cup as the dawn breaks with SPANISH SUBTITLES.

Beaver isn't such a new thing. Beaver started long ago.

It’s the thought that ... oh, I don’t care

Of the many things I catastrophically suck at — remembering names, canceling no-longer-needed insurance policies, winning over Bitch Kitty outside the context of her pathological desperation for cat treats — wrapping presents is the one I care the least about.

To wit (to Mom, actually): I just (poorly) (because I don’t care) wrapped this gift using paper saved from a long-ago gift (because I’m responsible!) only to notice after I was done that the long-ago gift label was now wrapping awkwardly around the edge (because I’m not observant!) (because I don’t care!) of this new gift, so I did what any other not-caring person would do in this situation: I scribbled over the old gift label with a red sharpie and then slapped a new gift label over the part of the old label that was still on the top part of the new gift. Then, since the new label was now in a place that would make no sense to put a bow (and because I don’t care!), I just found a scrap of knotted elastic, stretched it (not even remotely artfully) around the box and rushed back to watching car-crash videos in click-trap perpetuity on YouTube.

But that’s the price my dad pays for having me wrap his presents for him because he’s blind. Symbiotically, because he’s blind he has no way of knowing (or caring!) how ugly it is. (And I don’t care!)

Underpants Gnomes

I'll be stripping down to my fancy underwear again this year to raise money for the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus' Big Package Auction fundraiser at Sidetrack on May 8. I don't know if that will inspire you to show up and bid on our fabulous travel/spa/entertainment/merchandise packages or stay home and hide behind the couch with a Bible and a can of mace.

Either way, here's this year's promo video featuring underwear-clad footage of last year's event. I might also appear in it as as one of the implied-to-be-naked package-holding dudes who flash in and out of the background. Clearly, I can be flattered into stripping down for anything that involves standing around in my underwear in a bar.

In which you may call me Scrooge

Holiday traditions I really, really, really don’t like:

Gift exchanges
The domestic partner and I don’t exchange Christmas gifts. Or birthday gifts. There, I said it. We’re both men of a certain age who merged our completely furnished households three years ago and we’re STILL getting rid of stuff. So we don’t need any more. We buy what we need for ourselves when we need it and we spend the holidays just loving and respecting each other, and we’re both perfectly happy with this arrangement. Besides, wrapping paper is wasteful and expensive. And bows take up valuable storage space. And you probably think I’m some sort of misanthropic, Tiny-Tim-kicking alien right now. It gets worse. Read on:

Candy canes
Sticky, slimy, sugary, gross in your mouth, gross on your tongue, gross on your lips … plus they probably have negative nutritional value. They’re the most repulsive candy this side of Sno Balls. Their only redeeming quality: They can function as an emergency breath freshener. Which is exactly the benefit I look for most when I indulge in a holiday treat.

Mall Santas
Is there anything more disturbing than plopping your kids on the lap of a creepy out-of-work actor in a crowded shopping center in the interest of begging for free toys and perpetuating a ridiculous cultural lie? No, there is not.

Live Christmas trees


Eggnog
Oh, whom am I kidding? I freaking love eggnog!

The war on Christmas
I know it’s extremely trendy for Christians to feel persecuted when Home Depot employees tell them to have happy holidays. There’s even a retarded web site where Christian consumers can rate their Jesus-worshipping experiences at major retailers as “friendly,” “negligent” or “offensive.” And even though I find the vast majority of religious expression itself to be offensive, I am profoundly appalled that people who call themselves Christians actually trot out this intellectually and spiritually repugnant abortion of logic and importance year after year after year.

Secular Christmas carols
File this under gray areas, but I’m the least religious person you know who loves sacred Christmas music. And I loathe most of the secular crap that pollutes every store and radio station from Halloween through Epiphany. I’ll happily enjoy “And the Glory of the Lord” or “O Holy Night” or even “The Little Drummer Boy”—and I’ll joyously sing along with every Messiah chorus at the top of my lungs—but I fight the urge to strangle children every time I hear “Holly Jolly Christmas” … and I’d rather join a convent than listen to “Here Comes Santa Claus” ever again. There is one secular song I actually love, though: “Carol of the Bells.” But probably because it's all dramatic and dour and it never once mentions Santa Claus. Merry merry merry MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I think something peed on my shoes

Seriously. Ever since I got home from Thanksgiving in Iowa with my family, I’ve noticed a vague catbox-like effluvium wafting around my person. Except for yesterday, when I didn’t wear the shoes I wore all during Thanksgiving. Clue!

It’s especially noticeable when I take my shoes off before climbing into bed. And when I open my gym locker after my shoes and gym bag and coat (and lunch, the implications of which I don’t even want to contemplate) have been cooped up there together for over an hour.

My folks and my sister’s family both have cats. Non-Jake-liking cats. (Non-most-everyone-liking cats, for the record.) I always make gestures of friendship and love when I see them because who doesn’t want the affection and good graces of a cat? And their cats always rebuke me with all the fire and brimstone their malevolent little feline selves can muster. So this trip, figuring I had nothing to lose, I got kind of hostile with my folks’ cat … the cat that had the most unsupervised retaliatory access to my shoes during my trip. Clue!

I emailed the basic facts of this case to my mom and sister this morning, and they both responded in indignant defense of their adorable little non-shoe-peeing-on kitties. But I still have my suspicions. And my clues. And my personal cloud of shoebox-whiff.

I just moments ago stitched these clues together, and since I’m a little averse to bending down and smelling my own shoes—especially at work—I’m going to wait to do the sniff test when I’m in the privacy of my own bathroom tonight. In the mean time, I’ll walk around terrified that other cats—especially office cats—will walk up to me and feel compelled to mark me as their own once they smell the (alleged) malevolent Iowa cat pee all over me.

But to show I’m not bitter—at least as bitter as I probably smell—I’m ending this post with a cat-positive YouTube clip featuring people who sing way better than an alleged shoe-peeing cat I won’t name here:

One year ago today

I officially succumbed to the plague of aging gay male vanity and I met with my personal trainer for the first time. I had one goal: get huuuuuuuge. Plus not look 40. Plus maybe get a modeling contract with Hot Topic.

And since I was forking over staggering amounts of money in personal training fees anyway, I used what was left of my credit card to invest in a private warehouse of hardcore training supplements too. And I hired a nutritionist to make sure I wasn’t sabotaging my gym efforts every time I stuffed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich down my throat. (It turns out my three-sandwich-a-day habit wasn’t the best thing for my personal transformation, but it wasn’t the worst either. And if I just cut down on the jelly, my nutritionist assured me I could still enjoy my thrice-daily fix without much guilt.)

Right before I hired my trainer, someone forwarded me this time-lapse video of a guy going from noticeably out of shape to distractingly in shape:


It was the perfect complement to my vanity binge, and I decided to record my progress in my own video … which would probably get me right in with the Hot Topic people once it went globally viral on YouTube. I also thought I could make a WAY cooler video because I’d QC my surroundings so it didn’t look like I lived in a Dumpster. Plus I’d use something ironic for music. Like I Feel Pretty. Or You Must Love Me. Or Ladies Who Lunch. Or I’m Still Here.

So I dug out my tripod (an impulse purchase I’d made years ago that finally had a purpose!) and set up my camera and snapped a picture of myself in my gym shorts the night before my first training session. Then I waited until the next Friday and did it again. I decided I’d take my pictures on Friday nights since I get up early to run on Saturdays so I usually don’t have Friday-night plans. Like a loser.

But after two months, the pictures I’d pulled off the camera didn’t show much progress. Plus we actually had a surprising number of Friday-night plans so I kept forgetting to take more pictures. Plus we didn’t have room to set up the tripod in a permanent location with permanent footprints taped on the floor, so I wasn’t ending up in the same place in every picture I took.

And when I finally decided to get the video started, I fired up the free iMovie software on my computer … and promptly accomplished nothing. iMovie is NOT very intuitive. Even when I read through the tutorials, I still couldn’t figure out how to upload my photos, move them so my body was generally in the same place in each one, and create a movie that scrolled through the images at a fast, even, wow-look-at-that-dramatic-transformation speed.

So by the fourth month, my grand video project had become little more than a folder of pictures hogging space on my hard drive. And while I was definitely growing, I wasn’t growing dramatically. So my dreams of hugeness, YouTube stardom and Hot Topic celebrity modelhood died. As they should. Because I probably would have made a 40-year-old fool (OK, a bigger 40-year-old fool) of myself by making this video and then actually showing it to people.

But! One year later I’m in the best shape of my life. I have more energy, I feel healthy, I sleep well (possibly too well), I fill out my shirts like I’ve never filled out my shirts before … and I seem to have advanced a level in You’re Cute So I’ll Talk To You®, the silent blood sport that takes place everywhere gay men gather in tight clothing. Which is not necessarily an accomplishment, but when you’re terminally shy around strangers, bar talk with a vapid social climber is far more fun than hiding in a corner behind a leafy plant.

Plus! Today is just the first of a string of epic anniversaries I’m celebrating in July. (Actually, it’s the second. Sunday was the two-year anniversary of my proposal to the domestic partner. But we both forgot about it and he was out of town anyway and we still haven’t nailed down what we want to do for a wedding so we’ll just celebrate that anniversary the next time around.)

I like chasing cars

The domestic partner is about to divorce me for watching this SNL clip so often. But after about 40 viewings, it still makes me laugh until I can't talk.

Audio! Images! But not at the same time!

We may not have been broadcast on TV, but one resourceful chorus member managed to capture our National Anthem performance from the radio and post it on YouTube, where the announcer got our name right—as opposed to the live announcer at Wrigley Field who called us the Chicago Gay Men's Choir, even though we're really the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus. There is a huge difference. Don't get me started. Oh, and that roaring sound you hear at the end of the song is not a battalion of club-wielding Republican presidential candidates beating the will to marry out of us—it's a military flyover. Presumably as a show of might and not as a recruitment tool:


Another chorus member who's a professional photographer took some great pictures, the grainy thumbnails of which I'm posting here for your viewing pleasure.

Here's what we looked like marching in in our not-gay-at-all red-and-pink ties. Fellow marathoner Matthew is on the far left. I'm the tiny little head fourth from the left:

On the way in, we passed a Pirate doing pushups. You know, just like every day:

Here's what we looked like waiting to sing in formation around home plate. Some of us need to learn what "stand still with your hands at your sides" means:

And here's our view into the stands as we waited to sing. Or your view of our butts as we waited to sing, depending on what you prefer to look at. Again, some of our members have no concept of standing still and looking professional in performance. These people will never get my extra kidney, no matter how much they need it. My extra kidney is reserved solely for non-fidgety people:

I have discovered YouTube

And I have further discovered how YouTube can suck the hours out of your day faster than you can say, "I wonder if they have that one Carol Burnett clip I used to love so long ago, way before the Internets." Which, of course, they do.

Of all my new YouTube discoveries, I keep coming back to this one. Which in some cultures makes it my favorite:

I especially love the Susan B. Anthony verse, mostly for its epic poetry.

Be sure to play this clip every day for the next few days because it's all you're gonna get from me. We get up at five freakin' o'clock tomorrow to run 14 miles, and then I hop in the car for a five-hour drive to Iowa where I will 1) hope I don't fall asleep on the way, 2) sing in a reunion choir assembled to honor the long-retired music director at my folks' church, 3) help my folks move out of the house they've lived in for the last 30 years, 4) help my sister's family refinish the floors, replace the kitchen and move themselves in to the house my folks just vacated, and 5) run in the 5th Season 8K, which passes in front of said house on the morning of the fourth. I'm pre-exhausted just thinking about it all.

Happy Indepencence Day if I don't talk to you before I get back!