Hello, Tech Rehearsal!

Meriwether—my severely parted old-timey coiffure is named Meriwether—and I have on our Sunday clothes and we’re ready for our 12-hour Hello, Dolly! tech rehearsal. But it’s the last gasping hours of the Victorian Era and even though the Second Industrial Revolution is in full swing, WHAT IN ALL UNHOLY TARNATION IS THIS RECTANGULAR CONTRAPTION IN MY HANDS?

Also: Mega Plaid Tweed will one day make a most excellent band name once “punk” is invented. And “bands.”

Also: Yes, there is a purportedly heterosexual Jake growing out of my shoulder. He will be surgically excised at the tonsorial parlor forthwith.

Apparently I have an alert fan

1. Bitch Kitty heard my car pull up tonight and stood in rapt attention like this until I came in the door!
2. Mom took this artfully composed, figure-flattering photo to document the event.
3. THEN! BITCH! KITTY! SAT! NEXT! TO! ME! AND! LET! ME! PET! HER!
4. For about 34 seconds.
5. Mom also documented this event with a number of photos.
6. But I looked fat in every one of them so they are wisely not seeing the harsh backlit light of technology.
7. But still ...
8. PROGRESS!

I HAD SHIT TO DO TONIGHT

But this morning’s awesomely brutal Hello, Dolly! choreography rehearsal literally sent me home into to a three-hour coma. AND LOTS OF CREAKY JOINTS. So instead of doing active shit tonight, I passively sent some photos from my phone to be printed at Walgreens as possibilities for the dramatic Jake-stars-in-the-theater wall I’m curating for my bedroom. My verdict: meh. The cropping feature on the app isn’t entirely accurate, and the cropping feature on the app isn’t accurate at all. Neither is the cropping feature:

And did I mention passive? Because I also bought two pints of Ben & Jerry’s when I picked up the photos and headed right home to binge on Lifetime Intimate Portraits of Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Betty White and Estelle Getty. WHICH. IS. SO. NOT. GAY. NO. NOT. AT. ALL. SHUT. UP. SHEESH.

Rude.

Western Electric. 1974.

That top photo is giving me a panic attack.

Didn’t make it three miles

Also didn’t factor in time to get ready for rehearsal. Hello, shower!

When you’re on a video conference call and the host office’s conference room tables aren’t lined up on the end facing their video camera AND THAT’S ALL YOU CAN LOOK AT

I just had 5-Hour Energy for breakfast!

I still haven’t taken the left and right labels off my monitors from when my office moved 18 months ago! Peach-pear La Croix tastes like dust and sadness! Let’s ride bikes! Squirrel!

2.13 miles. 12:00 pace. 3.00 runners.

You know how it’s almost impossible to take a decent picture of the moon with an iPhone but you keep trying over and over anyway in case it’ll finally work just this once?

I think this is that once:

Dear Pete:

My BOOT EDGE EDGE T-shirt and I reached 14 people (16 if you count the couple I ran into again after my turnaround) this morning, so we have achieved critical voter mass, at least in the 6:00 am CEMAR Trail demographic. There is still work to be done, but I am exhausted and my T-shirt is clinging to me like a drowning Titanic victim and I need to shower and get on with my day.

I ran my same three-mile route as always, but this time my watch registered me at 3.05 miles—no doubt because for once I wasn’t running at the speed of light (so people could read my shirt) and my watch could actually keep up with me. Science is amazing.

Rob is a dick

Well, technically he’s a Rob. But he pushed me to run an 11:09 pace this morning, which is so much faster than the 12:22 pace I ran three days ago that I choked at 2.04 miles and we had to walk the last 0.96 miles home. And now my elevated heart rate is going to make me sexier and sexier as the day goes on. WHICH IS A TOTAL DICK MOVE. Typical Rob.

Blech

I think my sweaty T-shirt weighs more now than my entire body did when I started my run. It’s oppressively humid this morning, and thank goodness I ran before all the shadows disappeared because the sun isn’t playing any games with its death rays of skin-boiling heat.

I ran a little farther than normal—emphasis on “little”—before I turned around, but my running watch registered the net benefit as only .01 mile. (.01 miles? I wish I knew a decent writer who could tell me.) Anyway, we’ll treat that .01 as the teaser at the end of the credits to entice you into thinking there will be a sequel.

Now, TO THE SHOWERS!

#Pride101:

In 1983--at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the United States--the CDC instituted a lifteime ban of blood donations from gay men (specifically “men who have sex with men,” a distinction necessitated by a sizable population of MSM who refuse for any number of reasons to be identified as gay or bisexual). The ban was actually even broader than that; it also included women who have sex with MSM and transgender people. At the time, HIV was--and was perceived by the broader population to be exclusively--a “gay disease” and was gleefully used by religious hate groups to perpetuate their vilification of--and mock and exploit the deaths of--gay people. The ban was an extreme measure, but as 1980s technologies in HIV detection weren’t very effective it was seen as prudent--with no resistance from leading gay organizations--and it no doubt prevented an even larger American HIV epidemic. As HIV spread beyond the gay population, the infection demographics leveled out and HIV-detection technologies advanced, in 2015 the guidelines regarding blood donations from MSM were reduced from a lifetime ban to a one-year-of-celibacy ban. Today, the Insti HIV test--considered to be the most accurate--has a 99.96% accuracy rate, with results provided in one minute. (For the record, the relatively small populations of people with certain medical conditions, people on certain medications and people who have had blood transfusions are subject to restrictions and bans.) With often desperately low stockpiles of donated blood in the United States, there is no reason to specifically ban blood donations from MSM based on outdated demographic medical information and stigmas regarding HIV. But progress is being made; many 2020 Democratic candidates include a repeal of the ban in their platforms. The march to erase the stigma and embrace 21st Century medicine is on, and gay people without other risks are proudly willing to step up and do our part as blood donors.

Flashback Friday: Passing the Baton Edition

Nine years ago right now I was enjoying a nice, relaxing 200-mile Madison-to-Chicago relay with 11 other runners in two vans in some of the most sweltering weather in recorded history. We passed the baton for 36 non-stop hours with loads of sunscreen all day and reflective vests and road-finding spotlights strapped to our heads all night.

Fun fact: This all happened in a dark, purposeless, existential-void period in our history before smartphones and GPS running watches were invented (CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?) and when people had something called "conversations" to pass the long hours of waiting in their leapfrogging runner vans. It was so bleak that WE ACTUALLY HELD SWEAT-STAINED PAPER MAPS IN OUR HANDS AND RELIED ON RANDOM ARROWS CHALKED ONTO THE GROUND TO FIND OUR WAY AS WE RAN ALONG THE RELAY ROUTE. And we hoped to hell that we didn't get lost on moonless, werewolf-filled country roads at 2:13 am because we'd basically have no way to figure out how to get back on track and/or how to let our teammates know where to find our fang-torn bodies come sunrise.

I can go the distance

So I usually try to push myself to three miles on my first run of the season—both to set the standard that I can do it and to see what chronic running injuries are on the Season’s Stupid Summer FlareupsTM menu.

My body actually felt up to running three miles when I woke up. My head felt like it might explode before I got to the corner of our block. But it didn’t. And the weather was just the right amount of cool and just the right amount of humid ... AND I JUST RAN THREE FREAKING MILES WITHOUT STOPPING.

Granted, I ran it at the pace I ran the New York Marathon. So I have some speeding up to do to achieve any kind of 8K dignity. And my ears that were screaming EEEEEEE at me when I started are now death-shrieking E!E!E!E!E!E! at me as I sit on our front stoop trying to cool down. But my head doesn’t seem to hurt any worse than when I started. Though it most definitely still hurts. Because why get completely back to normal all at once? That would just be selfish.

Private message for Rob and Scott so don't you other bitches read it: The big orange DEAD END signs are gone at our three-mile turnaround and it looks like the trail keeps going off to parts unknown. We must explore this mysterious new frontier like the urban pioneers we are. And I spent my entire run fantasizing about caulking my baseboards and priming my walls—so PLEASE come talk show tunes with me on our runs again like real men.

I’m tired of waiting

I have an 8K I want to run in three weeks and I need to train and my head pain is as low as it’s ever been over the last four weeks and I’m wide awake anyway and I’ve kept my running watch charged all this time just in case and I’m wearing my lifeguard shirt in case I drown so even though my ears are still screaming EEEEEEEEE in my head and my hair looks as lush as my hostas FUCK THIS HEADACHE PAIN—I’M GOING RUNNING!

I may be back in three minutes or three miles. Stay tuned ...

Our revels now are ended,

... but not before I stopped by our friendly neighborhood Dick’s Piggly Wiggly (which is apparently now Tammy’s Piggly Wiggly but I’m a Piggly-Wiggly-giggly little middle-schooler so I’m gonna stick with Dick’s) to stock up on klarbrunn—which sounds so European! without garish American capital letters even!—sparking water. (I heartily recommend the blueberry/passionfruit flavor. That is if you can find any; I just bought the entire stock of it.)

Now I’m back on the road with my Broadway podcasts and my cigarette-lighter-radio-broadcast-thingie and my carbs coma and my birdie videos and my happy memories.

And my full tank of gas this time.

Ice-cold Cherry Bubly? Check.

Two freshly homemade pies? Check. Gay-ass Longaberger pie carrier with gay-ass fruit-print ruffled liner? Check. New thingie I just bought to stick in my cigarette lighter and broadcast show tunes and podcasts from my phone to a radio station? Check. A library of more show tunes and podcasts than one person could listen to in five lifetimes? Check.

Full tank of gas to get me to my Galena weekend reunion vacation without having to stop?

Shit.

Next to Normal—a searingly brilliant rock opera examining the lives of a family whose mother is struggling with bipolar depression—opened on Broadway 10 years ago today

The show beautifully captures the swings between the ridiculous highs and the soul-crushing lows the disease brings to us living in it and to the selfless teams of people who care for us.

I’m fortunate enough to have seen the original production, very soon after I’d been diagnosed as bipolar and had found myself caught in a rather terrifying struggle to wrap my confused, exhausted brain around the fact that mental illness was no longer a mysterious entity in other people’s lives; it was MY LIFE, and I had no idea how to manage it or what potential and very real horrors to expect from it.

The musical is rough to experience from any perspective, but seeing it for the first time tore me apart ... and then put me back together with its closing anthem, “Light,” which features an almost casually placed lyric that is at once devastating and hopeful and never fails to sneak up on me and emotionally gut me even though I know it’s coming: “The price of love is loss / but still we pay / we love anyway.”

Back when I saw the show on Broadway, selfies were new and weird and shameful—and for you young folks, it was the Middle Ages when our smart phones had single cameras that didn’t let us see on our screens what our selfies would look like so we just had to hold our phones in the air and hope for the best—so I took this selfie as one-shot quickly and discreetly as I could to ensure an entire city of complete strangers wouldn’t judge me. It turned out rather well, although I cut off the last letter of the sign. Which means as far as any of you know, I actually just saw a knockoff production called Next to Norma:

Coe College in Cedar Rapids opened a production of Next to Normal last weekend that runs through this weekend. I was asked to have a QA with the cast a few weeks ago to help them create hopefully more informed characters, and I’m honored to be giving talkbacks with the audiences after every performance this coming weekend—starting this Thursday, April 18, which is my birthday, and I can’t think of a better way to keep my mind off the number fifty (ahem) one. I’d add a link here, but I can’t get one to load on my phone that I can copy. So google it and come see the show if you can. The show will change you.

Day after day,
We'll find the will to find our way.
Knowing that the darkest skies
Will someday see the sun.
When our long night is done,
There will be light.

Repping the I-P-R in the Central PAR!

My kick-ass Garmin running watch that stalwartly got me through every mile of last year’s Summer Of Running Away From Being 50 not only stopped syncing with the app on my phone this year but it didn’t even hold its charge from three days ago. Grrrr. So I’m running on a 10-minute-mile assumption using my phone—with selfie/Facebook breaks at every mile, duh—and just enjoying the scenery. And the hills. HOO BOY there are hills.

But!

My kick-ass runner-tech running shoes that I bought solely because they look totally cool are unfortunately—on this, their first-ever run—noticeably exacerbating my pronation issues, so as soon as I get back to the hotel they’ll be demoted to just kick-ass runner sneakers that look totally cool.

But in the mean time, my break’s over. Onward!