I’m kinda really excited to report that I’m jumping back into the world of choreography, but in baby jumps (the metaphor, not the actual choreography)

I’m choreographing “Jitterbug”—the only real dance number in The Wizard of Oz—for Jefferson High School’s spring musical (which, as some of you might guess, is The Wizard of Oz). I start teaching tomorrow—just as soon as my tiny-armed assistant and I figure out what the hell to do with the second bridge of the endless dance break. And I’m a stalwart opponent of box steps, so don’t even think about suggesting those.

The entire family is up at the sparkle fingers of dawn to volunteer at MoShow, the epic show choir competition at my (and then my sister’s and eventually then my nephew’s and now my niece’s) high school

Every year I end up volunteering in the kitchen, which is next to the gyms, which are where the trophies and athletic-hall-of-fame pictures are ... and my state-winning gymnastics team photo still hangs in all its glory there, where generations of fully wowed students have paid homage at this fading shrine to my JV-lettering pommel-horse athletic grace and stylings:

That’s right, kids: In addition to my award-winning high-school sparkle-fingering, I’M ALSO A SPORTSY LETTERMAN.

You may all now bow and exalt.

It’s not a day at EPCOT without a reunion with some high-school friends

Aloha!

My intrepid, brilliant, humanitarian-minded niece is as we speak flying to Guatemala with her Spanish class to do community service work and then explore the country from the valleys to the volcanoes. Meanwhile, her white, privileged, North American-insular, US-resident uncle has found himself humbly obligated to do some googling to learn that Guatemala is NOT, in fact, in South America but is five countries north of Panama on the Pacific side of the narrowing continent.

Fun fact: Guatemala is also in the central time zone—though it doesn’t have stupid Daylight Savings Time, so I’m sure my niece and her Spanish class have wicked jet lag. ¡Qué lástima!

I am now in the temporary possession of a well-worn hockey stick and a Cedar Rapids RoughRiders jersey -- just like in my senior picture!

If you're wondering exactly WHY I'm now in the temporary possession of a well-worn hockey stick and a Cedar Rapids RoughRiders jersey just like in my senior picture -- because of course you are -- you're just going to have to come see the Orchestra Iowa Holiday Spectacular pops concert at the architecturally extravagant Paramount Theatre this weekend to find out. It's guaranteed to be a Christmas touchdown!

Get your tickets right now this very minute by clicking here.

My sister literally asked me to take a selfie with my niece outside the auditorium after Newsies tonight

Out of the blue. With no warning. I wasn’t even aware that my phone had selfie capabilities so I obviously wasn’t familiar with the technology, but fortunately there were some “tech-savvy” (as the students say) students (as they call themselves) nearby who patiently taught me how to use the selfie functionality on my phone correctly, safely and responsibly. So here is my first-ever attempt, which I wouldn’t even have if it weren’t for the supportive wisdom of my sister:

But anyway. Newsies. Wow. Disney selected my high school’s theater department as one of five in the country for their first school licensing of the show, no doubt because of the groundbreaking work I did there when I had the lead in Oedipus Rex when I was a senior and we all know that emotionally and morally labyrinthine Greek tragedy + unworldly high-school actors = transcendent theater magic and I hate to brag but it’s staggeringly obvious that you can draw a straight line from the sticky stage blood matting my eyes shut on that stage in 1985 directly to tonight’s epic “Seize the Day” sung on that same stage by kids whose parents weren’t even old enough to drive in 1985. So you’re welcome, Disney.

But the torch has been passed. The kids in Newsies tonight grew up with my niece and nephew or are the children of my friends. Some I’ve known forever. Some I just recognize by sight after having watched them sing alongside my niece and nephew over years of school concerts and shows. And I feel so parental and proud of all of them ... and thrilled that they have this opportunity — this AMAZING opportunity — to be a part of this amazing show ... and so proud that my high school was selected for the national honor of field-testing this delightful, brilliant, challenging material. And I can safely say the kids and the staff and the teams of parent helpers and the entire department rose mightily to meet the challenge and blow away the expectations. They’re all the kings of CR.

We're seeing my little niece in The Great Gatsby!

Fun fact: One of Zelda Sayre's nephews was a literature professor of mine in college. Other fun fact: I'm wearing a super-cute new shirt I got on sale. I couldn't be more East Egg if I rouged my knees and rolled my stockings down.

My stupid high school yearbook didn't let us have senior quotes

A Hughe compliment

So tonight after my nephew's concert, one of the cool kids -- who ended up being the son of one of my high-school friends -- ran up to me and called me Wolverine. Which is better than running up to me to call me a hearse, I guess. I used to get called Wolverine a lot, and though I still don't see it, I will never turn down a date with Hugh Jackman. I mean a comparison to him. I will never turn down A COMPARISON TO Hugh Jackman. (Call me!)

Oh, Alma Mater Washington ...

For over 50 years -- which, according to some sources, is longer than I've been alive -- the choirs of the Washington High School vocal department have assembled for a combined final concert each May that celebrates the year in music, highlights the best of the school-year repertoire and sends the departing seniors out into the world with one triumphant final evening of singing. Literally. At the end of the concert, the alumni join the existing choirs for the time-honored "Warrior Chant" and then the concert closes with the gorgeous "Alma Mater" where -- after the lyric "our classmates will be gone" -- the seniors depart from the choir on the third verse, walk down the aisle AND LITERALLY LEAVE US. It was cool and exciting when I was a senior. But tonight my nephew will be doing it and it's not funny anymore.

It. Will. Be. Heart-wrenching.

I don't cry much. As in ever. I don't cry ever. But I am right now. And the concert hasn't even started.

This is gonna be rough.

Jazz hands

We've been volunteering all day at MoShow, the annual epic show-choir competition -- starring my supernova-talented niece and nephew, not that I'm biased -- at my alma mater. I spent the morning wiping up tables in the cafeteria, which was overrun with polite, tidy, eternally selfish schoolkids who barely spilled a drop of soda or smooshed a dollop of ketchup on the tables for me to clean up. How do you think that made ME feel? What kind of considerate, self-policing monsters are parents raising these days? Rude.

OBSERVATION: Every high-school girl in the world has long, straight hair. With the occasional wisp of coy waviness for the really out-there brazen girls. But otherwise, judging by their hair, every high-school girl in the world is the same person.

OBSERVATION: Our country is mired in a socially and morally devastating epidemic of high-school boys who feel empowered to make gravely unfortunate hairstyle choices. Gravely unfortunate fluffy hairstyle choices. With chunky Monkees profiles and enough bangs to require a background check and a gun permit.

But the real story of course is that the event is called MoShow and I'm a big ol' Mo and that's all anyone really needs to bring the narrative of this story rightfully to me.

To wit: Today's show-choir competition was held in my high-school gym and everyone had to walk through the crammed-with-50-years-of-photos athletic hall of fame to get there and nobody in the rational universe knows why but I was on the varsity gymnastics team when I was a freshman (don't laugh) without having ever had even three-quarters of a second of gymnastics training but a lifetime of sub-zero natural talent (I said DON'T LAUGH) and we took state that year and there's now and forever enshrined in the Washington High School athletic hall of fame a state-champion team photograph of my lithe, toned, muscular teammates looking proud and confident and accomplished in their form-fitting leotards with me grinning cluelessly in the background in my droopy, misshapen leotard looking not unlike a 13th-century desiccated corpse in a mold-eaten Mayan burial gown.

So naturally the only picture I'm posting of today's myriad adventures and accomplishments is of me standing still just as cluelessly in front of that state-champion team picture in my high school's athletic hall of fame and being caught in a weird emotional purgatory between feeling like I've stayed too long at the wrong party and feeling strangely proud that I did something completely ridiculous and out of character for me and even though the most charitable metrics would clearly show I royally sucked at it, I somehow didn't quit and now I'm enshrined in a droopy leotard melting alluringly off my little goblin shoulders in the photo timeline of my high school's athletic hall of fame.

Oh -- and just down the hall from that photo, my supernova-talented niece and nephew rocked their choir performances today and made me prouder than any old athletic display ever could.

Key words

Fourty-Three
I crossed back into the prime numbers last week. And since 43 is kind of a wishy-washy number that has neither the young sexiness of 42 nor the august milestoniness of 45, I went home to Iowa to age quietly with my family. We celebrated by doing fun uncle things, hanging out accomplishing nothing, and eating our weight in cake and ice cream and homemade pie and pizza. For a non-remarkable-age birthday, it was remarkably fabulous.

Cancerous Moles
My birthday always means it’s time to go on my annual mole patrol at my friendly neighborhood dermatologist. Because I’m a moley person. And it just seems prudent to make sure my moles aren’t trying to kill me. Because then where would they go to grow and raise families and contribute to society? You can’t thrive on a dead body. Unless you’re a maggot. Or Maggie Gallagher. Anyway! I had a couple suspicious moles removed and biopsied in 2005, but I’ve managed to escape the dreaded mole knife since then. Until now. Because in two weeks I get to have two more moles hacked out of my dermis. But at least this time they’re not in the middle of my back (which makes replacing bandages all but impossible ); they’re almost twin moles on the lower, way-more-reachable parts of each thigh. A quick read of my blog post from 2005 reminds me that I wasn’t allowed to work out for two weeks after the last biopsies as the stitches healed. A quick check of my vanity calls bullshit on that for 2011.

Vacation Days
I have officially used up my entire allotment for the year. Well, technically not yet; since I’m not training for a marathon this summer and therefore not beholden to a draconian weekend running schedule, I’ve booked fabulous getaways from now until Labor Day, all through the weekends when I’d normally be getting up at 4:00 to pound out anywhere from 6 to 22 miles. So watch out, Rehoboth, D.C., Saugutuck, New York, Provincetown and Cedar Rapids! I’m coming to visit you this summer!

Twenty-Five
One of my vacation trips will be to my hometown for my 25th high school reunion. There’s even a Facebook page where people post nostalgia-related comments about favorite bands and local hangouts and fashion faux pas from the mid-1980s. I’m still weirdly fascinated by the fact that this group of people I knew before the Internet existed now all have email addresses and Facebook accounts. Not to mention grown children and third marriages.

Forgetfulness
I had about four more vocabulary-word-related topics I wanted to cover here as I was formulating this blog post in my head, but once I sat down to actually write it, I can’t remember what they were.

Pill Organizer
I’m now on so many old-man medications and supplements I had to break down and buy an old-man pill organizer. Here’s a picture of it open to the pills I took on my birthday last week:
Fun game for pharmacology aficionados: Guess what’s wrong with me based on the pills you see! Decoy alert: One of pills I take every morning is plain old vitamin D.

Friends of Sally

I remember Sally mostly for her spunky personality. She was a year behind me at Washington High School, and she always brought her big smile and her ready laugh to our choir rehearsals and performances. If I’d been her socially awkward sitcom boss, she would have been my wise-cracking sitcom secretary. And she would have gotten all the fan mail. But though I really liked her, I don’t recall us ever hanging out much beyond cast parties and group trips to Donutland after our show choir finished rehearsing on Monday nights.

I graduated in 1986 and came back the next few years to choreograph for the show choir, but aside from seeing her there, I can honestly say Sally hadn’t entered my mind since probably some time in college.

Sally’s class had its 20th reunion in July, and I emailed my friend Reed afterward to get his full report. He told me the gossip I was hoping to hear about people I hadn’t seen in 20 years—who was married and divorced and gay and probably gay and who had blossomed and who was still hot—and then he said that Sally had been there, looking weak and frail and bald. And that she was struggling against some form of cancer.

A couple days later, my sister—who was two years behind Sally’s class but who is more connected in the Cedar Rapids mom network than I am—sent me an email filling in the details:

Four years ago, Sally had been diagnosed with a rare and extremely aggressive form of breast cancer. Her case was so advanced by the time it was caught that it had already spread to other parts of her body. She had been given about two years to live at the time, but she’d been fighting it so aggressively that she was able to walk into her 20th reunion two years after she was supposed to be dead. But she’d been so sick, she hadn’t been able to work and was forced to go on public assistance. To make matters worse, she was raising two boys, ages 7 and 5, on her own.

Her classmates were so moved by her plight and the plight of her boys that they set up a web site to tell Sally’s story and collect donations on her behalf. The site promises that Sally and her boys will receive 100% of any donations made, though it looks like there is a 1% added fee collected by myevent.com, which hosts the site.

Again, I haven’t seen Sally in 20 years, but I know she’s real and I worry about her and her boys. I just made a donation. And I know there’s no tax incentive or stuffed bear in it for all you strangers out there, but here’s the link if you want to make a donation too:

Friends of Sally

Jake Regrets: The ugly truth

I was a homely child. I was a homely child until I was about 23, when I joined my first gym—and even then it took a long-ass time for my body to fill out. And for the chicks to start noticing me. Or at least noticing me noticing other guys, who took their own sweet time noticing me back.

I have bravely posted photographic proof of my young homeliness on this site, only to be met with mockery and derision from certain readers who accused me of trying to pass off cuteish pictures of myself as proof that it was sometimes challenging even for my own mother to hug me.

Well now the gloves are off. Or at least the dignity is. Whatever was left of it. Because I dug around in the darkest corners of my old photo albums and found some of the last remaining Photos of Shame that hadn’t been destroyed by me or self-exterminated in a heroic act of community service.

I scanned six pictures before I put all my albums in storage, and I’m presenting three of them to you here (in chronological order so you can more easily chart my descent into unsightliness). The other three have a theatrical theme (go figure) and qualify for their own special category of horror. Which means I have a Halloween post all ready to go. Less work for me!

In the mean time, grab your stomachs and avert your eyes, because you’re about to see some pictures of me that, when you consider the fact that I’ve never been placed in a home for frightening children, qualify my parents for sainthood.

You’ve been warned.

The summer of 1984:

Things I had discovered in 1984: Canvas shoes from Target. The gender-bending subversiveness of wearing an ankle bracelet. White fake Ray-Bans with little black music notes all over them. Gravity-defying hair. Things I had not yet discovered in 1984: Going to a gym. Having the good sense not to wear tank tops in public. Having the good sense not to wear white fake Ray-Bans with little black music notes all over them.

My 21st birthday:

I’m not sure what’s most disturbing about this picture: the bar mitzvah clown smile, the Disney villain eyes, the dinner-plate glasses, the scarecrow neck, the weird-ass way I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist or the pink-on-white shirt that hung on me with all the sex appeal of a party dress on a toddler. The girls on my floor (Loser alert! I was living in a co-ed dorm!) had decorated my door with pink 21s. Probably to match the shirt. Or the homosexuality. I’m not sure where I got the wine, but I am sure I had only a sip of it to celebrate reaching such a milestone age. Because actually drinking a whole glass of alcohol on my 21st birthday would have been something the cool kids would do.

College graduation:


First of all, I guess I had a cute little habit of saying Yay! about situations that met my approval when I was in college. Unfortunately, Mom (who correctly thought Yay! would be fitting sentiment to express over a college graduation) and the cake decorator (who probably didn’t have an advanced degree in spelling) ended up producing a graduation cake that said yeah in my honor. Which only underscores what the rest of this picture is saying about me. For instance: The glasses. Bigger than my face. Lower than my eyebrows. I’m just a home perm and a cameo brooch away from being Sophia Petrillo. And don’t get me started on the shirt. I’d thought it was one of the coolest shirts ever when I first found it wadded up on the tumble table at the local County Seat. It was red and white, see, but it had blue stuff sewn in to the collar and sleeves (and, inexplicably, that saggy pocket) to make it look like it was layered. It was also probably a small, yet it hung on me like a Mayan burial gown on an immolated corpse. And in any case, the whole look was in direct violation of the contract I signed when they gave me my English degree: no bright colors, no perky smiles, no Sally Jesse Raphaël glasses. And no misspelled pastries.

The oracle said nothing about syndication

My friend Beth and I were the Lunt-Fontaines of my junior high and high school. Except we never got a theater named after us. Or made it to Broadway. And at our age it would have been kind of gross if we got married. And while I was never the leading-man type, Beth certainly had the looks and the talent to play any role that came her way. In any case, we did a lot of theater together, and we eventually did get married. Kind of.

Our debut in junior high (as I’m sure you all remember from the national coverage) involved the two of us acting out some Shel Silverstein poems in a speech contest. We were apparently entertaining enough that we made it all the way to the state competition, where we were pitted against people doing monologues about death and divorce and abortion while we skipped into the room with ”I cannot go to school today,” said little Peggy Ann McKay…

I don’t recall if we won or not, but since it’s my blog I’ll just say we both got the Tony that year. And it was handed to us by Liza.

Against my better judgment, I’m showing you what we looked like back then, at the dawn of the 1980s. Notice how stylish and put-together Beth looked. Then notice me with my Sears Braggin’ Dragon® shirt, my pencil-thin arms, my shoulder bones that could cut glass, my basketball head, my adult-size nose and my overall homeliness. Then weep for me and for all humanity that had to look at me.


Fast-forward to our junior year in high school, where we were in the chorus of West Side Story together. Once again, Beth looked stylish and sassy in her silver satin (alliteration runs rampant!) and I looked like an anorexic Ralph Macchio with a finger wave and a drop-shoulder jean jacket right out of a Pointer Sisters video. The Jets are looking kinda gaaaaay toniiiiiiight!


The next year, we were the leads in—of all things—Oedipus Rex. Because high-school kids + Greek tragedy = theater magic! I have to say I do look kind of majestic in my glue-on beard and my poly-blend robes, even though I’m a foot taller than my 16-year-old wife and mother. And the crown totally offsets my nose. Fortunately, this scan from a yearbook photo that spans the fold between the pages blurs out a lot of my skinny armness and dubious husband-and-fatherliness and what had to be frighteningly clueless acting. Tragedy indeed!


Now fast-forward 20 more years to our class reunion last month. Even though we hadn’t seen each other since our 10-year reunion, Beth and I made it through the whole weekend without one poem or explosive dance move or destructive marriage. That’s our friend Jen on the right, and if Beth and I wrote and starred in our own sitcom (Oedipus Simplex, Thursdays on NBC), Jen could be Aristophanes, the wacky neighbor who always drops by in a silly hat or something and then says a funny catchphrase like “You guys are for the birds!” and steals our thunder. It’s the least we could do to thank her for having the presence of mind to bring her camera to the reunion so we could have this picture in the first place.

I have always been a skinny person.

I graduated from high school at 6'1" and 155 pounds, and I graduated from college four years later at 6'1" and 155 pounds. Tired of being ignored by the guys I was attracted to, I joined a gym soon after graduation. Then I was a skinny person who worked out obsessively five days a week. I slowly bulked up, but I have never become much more than a skinny person who filled out a shirt a little bit better than before.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to laugh at my horrifying skinniness. And then to laugh even harder at my pathetic attempts to hang out with hot guys pretend I was some kind of athlete by joining my high-school gymnastics team.

And nobody is better at gymnastics than a bag of bones. Especially a bag of bones with no gymnastics training.

In 1982, I became a freshman. At the time, freshmen were the big kids at the junior high school instead of the little kids at the high school in my home town. There had been some kind of join-the-gymnastics-team recruitment demonstration at a junior-high assembly that year, and my delusional little mind somehow reached the conclusion that competitive high-school gymnastics was something I should really get involved in.

And, for some reason, they let me in.

The team was small that year, but it comprised some really good gymnasts. And me. And while the other guys spent our afternoon workouts perfecting their tumbling routines and swinging majestically over the high bar and soaring over the vault without aborting in midair like big girls, I putzed around on the one piece of equipment where they planted me because we really needed another body to compete on it: the pommel horse.

After the rings, the pommel horse is the only piece of equipment that requires tremendous upper-body strength and almost no visible shoulder bones when you’re wearing a droopy gymnastics leotard tank top. And I was just as bad on them as you’d expect. Especially because I had no idea what I was doing.

I actually competed on the pommel horse in every meet we went to, though. And I always got a courtesy score, which is a nice way of telling you you suck but you get a nice 2.0 (or maybe it was a 3.0) anyway so you can head home to your parents with some shred of dignity.

But enough about me and my dubious talents. I have a picture of the team:

I am on the bottom left, for those of you who really can’t tell. See that boy sitting to my left? Biggest. Crush. Ever. See the boy in the bottom right? He came in a close second in Jake’s Gymnastics Crushoff. (Both of them were seniors, though. Popular seniors. And I was SO not on their radar.)

Here’s another picture of us, the moment we they actually won the state championship:

Take another look at my arms. Are those the arms of a gymnast? Are they even the arms of anything bigger than a cockroach?

Ironically, though, my presence on that state-winning team actually earned me a JV letter—before I even physically attended my high school. That’s right, bitches—I’m a letterman.

The next year—not having fully absorbed my lesson in humility and droopy leotards—I went out for gymnastics again. Unfortunately, our dreamy superstar seniors had all graduated, and our remaining superstars weren’t enough to carry us to state victory again. And, of course, I hadn’t bothered to look into any kind of ongoing gymnastics training over the summer.

Notice once again what a non-athlete I look like in our team photo. And check out my wrist wraps! They’re code for Jake means business. Just as soon as he irons the unsightly wrinkles out of his special pants.


Fortunately, the Iowa high-school gymnastics program was killed the next year, saving me a mountain of embarrassment—and clearing up my evenings for more productive things. Like dance rehearsals.

And my post-graduation gym workouts eventually beefed me up from 151 pounds to a peak of 201 pounds and back down to a 190–195 range, where I currently stay.

And I just met with a new trainer today, who revamped my entire workout and kicked my droopy-pantsed ass. I just may look like a gymnast by summer.

The Jets are gonna look real gay to ni-i-ight!

The year was 1985. I was a junior in high school, and our theater department (which was pretty kickin’—we did about five shows a year in two different theaters) did West Side Story.

Now, I’d grown up on my folk’s West Side Story soundtrack. (We never had the cast album until I bought it with my paper route money in junior high school.) I knew every word, every note, every fake Puerto Rican nuance of the soundtrack, though. Hell, I’d sung along and acted out every role in the show in the privacy of my sad, friendless little bedroom for the better part of a decade. So the day our theater director announced over the school PA system (with very dramatic, very gay fanfare, which I just ate up) that we were doing West Side Story as our spring musical, I … um …

Let’s just say my show of enthusiasm probably didn’t win me any macho points.

And the role I wanted more than anything? Action. The wild one. The loose cannon of the Jets. The role that would show the world that I was not, in fact, a sad, terminally bashful little homo who does victory dances in AP History class when he hears the theater department is doing his favorite musical. I didn’t care as much about playing the role, though, as I did about singing “Gee, Officer Krupke!” It’s a totally cool song, and it starts on that hard-to-hear tritone that I was certain I was the only male in the whole theater department who could be relied on to hit it right on the money night after night. I knew the song cold—tritone and all—which meant the role was rightfully mine.

Unfortunately, my audition was too much tritone and not enough loose cannon. And Joel, a hunky little straight guy who had the presence of mind to actually act at the audition, got the part. And I was crushed. Truly, deeply crushed.

But I persevered through rehearsals in my role as Third Jet From The Left, and I got a couple featured dance roles (tritones and battements dégagés—is there no end to my homosexuality talents?) and I let myself revel in all the magic that came along with Actually Being In West Side Story.

And on opening night, when Joel (who was quite awesome in the part) went to sing my his big solo … he forgot the words. And I hung there (the set was all about scaffolding), three Jets in from the left, staring dumbfounded as he stumbled through his first verse. And I was filled with a weird mix of horror and pity and self-righteous indignation and even a little bit of Schadenfreude.

But that’s not actually the point of this post. The point is that I went through some old photo albums last weekend and I found a mountain of embarrassing pictures. And trust me: When you’re an awkward little homo in Iowa in the ’80s, every picture you take is pretty embarrassing.

But I’m 37 now and I can look back and laugh. On the outside. And I’ve been sneaking over to our scanning station at work whenever I could spare a few minutes the last few days, so my blog is going to be a very painful walk down memory lane over the next few weeks.

Here is the only picture I found from West Side Story. And man, there’s nothing sadder than a middle-class white gay boy pretending to be all butch and shit like he’s down with the PR kids, yo.

That’s my dad’s jean jacket, which was way too big. But I rolled up the sleeves. To the elbow. Just like they do in the gangs. And if you look closely, you can see the moussed-up nightmare of waves and curls I somehow decided gave my hair 1950s New York street cred. And then there’s that smirk. That I-live-a-very-comfortable-life-in-a-town-with-great-schools-so-you-better-run-sucka smirk. The whole effect is pretty scary, but not in the way I intended.

That’s Beth next to me. I was always impressed with her acting, though I think she was little more than Third Jet Girl From The Left in our show. (The next year, she and I played the leads in Oedipus Rex. Which was far more exciting than starring in some stupid old blockbuster dance musical.) Beth told me at our 10-year reunion that she was in med school, so maybe she can surgically remove the last of my embarrassment if I see her at our 20-year this year.

Stay tuned for more of Jake’s A Dork And I Have The Pictures To Prove It!

Next up: my horrifying experiment in gymnastics leotards.

I’m too sexy

Check out this throbbing hunk of man meat:

Nothing says high-class rent boy like an unbuttoned polyester Hawaiian shirt.

Nothing says my body is your playground like a poochy little tummy.

Nothing says 15 will get you 20 like the dubious charms of an awkward ninth-grade Lolito.

And nothing exudes sexual chemistry like the seductive chewing of a plastic lei—especially when it looks more like the lei is being vomited up than playfully licked.

This, I’m afraid to report, is what I looked like in 1983. Our class trip that year took us to St. Louis for a tour of the arch, some cheesy dinner theater on a boat and a day at Six Flags, where I coughed up way too much money (not to mention a green lei) for this picture in one of those put-yourself-on-a-magazine-cover photo booths. Worst of all, the shirt and the leis were smelly old props previously worn—and chewed—by legions of germy Midwestern tourists. I’m lucky to be alive even to talk about it.

And sorry, ladies: As much as my smoldering glare makes you want me to be the bananas in your cream pie, I’m as gay as a picnic on a Sunday afternoon. Worst of all, I even knew it way back when this picture was taken. Which makes me a pie tease bad choice from the dessert menu.

But I have been in the arch. If you know what I mean.