I just somehow managed to eat one of these

I still can't get the taste of corpse and regret out of my mouth.

#antecedents

Act 1, Scenes 1-3

I just finished our first rehearsal. And it turns out that acting isn't just words and pointing and smiling through your step-touches and saying instantly viral yet endearingly timeless catchphrases that can generate lucrative licensing revenue in perpetuity. No -- acting is kind of difficult. And kind of exposed. I may have to work a bit at this.

Also: rainbow Snoopy shirt

Our labordays now are ended

The holiday weekend is over. Time to take down the custom wall decorations, put away the white pants and abandon your resolution that THIS YEAR is gonna be the year you whip yourself into a jealousy-machine summer bod.

And I realize I stole this picture from some long-forgotten meme page that no doubt stole it from someone else, but this dude has a really cute smile and clearly my off-kilter sense of humor so if one of you could get his number for me that'd be great thanks.

CedaRound: Westdale's Brutalist Past

When Cedar Rapids' Westdale Mall was built out in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, right before Christmas of 1979, I thought it was so far away from us it might as well have been next to my grandma's house in Denver. We already had Lindale Mall with its mirror-clad sunken food court right in the middle of the main concourse between its two anchor stores -- Younkers and Sears, which gave us a nice, simple spectrum of shopping in one straight line -- so what on earth could Westdale Mall have that could make this city any better? Nothing, that's what.

Plus it was HUGE. So huge it was disorienting from the outside. It was laid out in a giant cross with four -- FOUR! -- anchor stores on two floors with sloped landscaping on the outside so in some places you actually entered on the second floor. Cra! Zy!

Plus it was inescapably ugly -- even to my 11-year-old eyes. I didn't yet know anything about architectural styles or aesthetics or the way buildings and public spaces should behave on a human scale, but I recognized right away that Westdale Mall was essentially a massive concrete scab at the edge of the city ... an unimaginative jumble of angles and exposed building materials and raw, unpainted textures surrounded by an uneven sea of yellow lines on cracking asphalt. It was cheap, lazy architecture that only furthered my disinterest in traveling clear across town to shop in it:

Of course, it didn't take long for me to discover that Westdale Mall was home to Chess King and The Gap -- which, in my little inchoate gay mind were equal wonderlands of fashion discovery -- so I eventually got over my architectural snobbery and ended up spending all my paper route money at our big new concrete mall building a wardrobe of considerably wide-ranging ... um ... taste.

One of the anchor stores there was Petersen Harned Von Maur, an ultra-high-end -- it had a live piano player! -- department store with a European-or-for-all-we-knew-Caribbean-sounding name that was so exotic to Cedar Rapids that I, as a one-teen representative of Cedar Rapids' entire shopping demographic, barely felt worthy to shop there. Not that I could even afford the stuff on their sale racks.

Fast forward to now. I'm an adult with an enthusiastic passion for architecture with a lifelong career in retail and consumer marketing. The mighty mall -- once the promised land of retail shopping across America -- is with few exceptions dead. And Westdale Mall -- with the exception of three of its four anchor stores -- has been demolished. Those anchor stores are now free-standing buildings, and the rest of the entire concrete-scab-on-a-cracked-asphalt-wasteland is quickly emerging from its ashes into a mixed-use shopping complex filled with tons of pre-fab chain stores and fast-food restaurants -- which is unavoidable for survival -- but also small clusters of stores and sloping landscaping styled inventively with referential, lightly thematic architecture ... and now a boutique-concept hotel is going up and many of undeveloped lots are starting to be graded and plotted. Westdale -- now it's just Westdale -- is reinventing itself with robust enthusiasm, and I see something new and frankly exciting every morning when I drive by it on my way to work.

I now recognize that the exposed building materials, corrugated concrete exteriors and egalitarian lack of adornment of the original Westdale Mall were perhaps just the last gasps of the easy-to-build-but-past-the-point-of-extinction Brutalist architectural period, which had merged the efficiencies of post-war pre-fab construction with the ideals of creating serious, durable architecture free from adornments that could potentially fall out of style or alienate certain classes of people.

And as for those anchor stores: Montgomery Ward has been torn down. Younkers and JCPenney have been handsomely re-clad and are operating as giant -- and hopefully successful -- stand-alone stores with a new anchoring purpose. And Petersen Harned Von Maur -- that intimidatingly fancy-pantsy department store with the pan-European name (Wikipedia tells me it's German and Austrian) and its live piano player -- is as we speak getting a new paint job to gussy up its corrugated-concrete backside (which you can see on the left of this photo) and a bricked, corniced façade on its front (which you can begin to see on the right) to transform itself into a not-so-intimidatingly-fancy-pantsy Ross Dress for Less.

And I feel no snobbery about any of it.

 

Good, you got it!

Think about it ...
Lots of other gentlemen'll
Soon be comin' for a shave,
Won't they?
Think of!
All them!
PIES!

#TheImportanceOfProperFootwear

This project ran way longer than I expected

Unlike normal people with social lives, I spent my holiday weekend evening making a wall of my favorite running bibs and medals, which looked way cooler in my head than it ended up looking in this cacophony of color and shine and WHY ARE THERE NO DAMN GOVERNMENT STANDARDS MANDATING THAT ALL RUNNING BIBS BE THE EXACT SAME SIZE? SERIOUSLY.

Note: Hanging a medal rack in drywall when you've forgotten to charge your drill so you use the bad-idea-man's pound-n-pull-nail method of "drilling" holes instead only results in creating bigger and bigger holes in the wall. And in your heart.

Also note: I have NO idea what I think of that lamp. I keep deciding it's ugly and then I find a beautiful visual dialogue between the austere, confident architecture of its base and the ornately lined florals of its shade. And then I get distracted by show tunes and SQUIRREL!

Also note: There may or may not be a couple disco-ball necklaces from my sordid past as a Chicago pride parade float dancer hanging among my medals.

Also note: "Don't Forget Me" from Bombshell was playing on that super-cute little speaker when I took this picture. Actually, it still is as I write this. Because I -- again -- may or may not have been playing it on auto repeat for the last hour.

Also note: Yup.

If you need me, I'll be playing show tunes and doing some light decorating in my room

Mission accomplished!

I know I'm probably the only one who cares about the details of my 10K -- and to be honest, my only real interests were that I finished and that I had fun with my friends -- but I ran it in a lumbering-old-guy 1:20:01 at a lumbering-old-guy 12:46 pace. Which would qualify me for an award only if I were running against a legless vegetarian zombie. In any case, I had a blast, I crossed the finish line, I hung out with my lovely, rockstar friends when it was over ... mission accomplished!

I ran 6.2 miles for an Easy-Bake Medal?

Guess who is home from his race and just now realized that in all his hurry this morning to find his super-cool running glasses he totally drove to the race and back without his prescription glasses.

Guess who also just declared a winner for the ugliest race medal he's received in 27 years of running.

Lightning round! Guess who also desperately needs a shower and a nap.

Welcome to the club!

Congrats to my friend David his first race -- and on his first 10K, which is quite ambitious for a first race distance. My stubborn hyper-masculine pride won't let me say whether or not he beat me, so I won't even bring it up. Hey, look -- free bananas at the finish line!

I finished the 10K!

Then I needed a helper to figure out how to do this photo thing with sweaty fingers.

Mile 15 of the 10K!

#IThinkTheSignsAreMiscalibrated

Let's do this!

I'm about to run a 10K with these insanely nice, insanely talented theater friends. I've shared the stage with each one of them and I love that our friendships have bled over into the running world as well.

When you're so completely nothing like a hero that you don't even know how to spell the word

So. Much. Blue.

I want to paint my bedroom, and I think I've decided to go with a deep, rich blue for the walls and a mineraly putty gray for the trim. But there are SO! MANY! COLOR! SHADES! TO! CHOOSE! FROM! and even with this epic haul of samples from the paint store I'm still not finding anything that matches the vision of daring but impeccable taste that's in my head.

Plus I think I still like this distressy, kodachromey glass lamp but I'm not sure anymore. Its mix of mercury silvers and rusty browns could nicely bring the honeyed oaks of my wooden furniture and the blues of my daring-but-impeccable-taste walls together. Or not. So. Many. Decisions.

In any case, the beanbag juggling cows will always have a place in my décor, whether they match or not. So your opinions of them are invalid.

Packet pickup!

I wore the shirt from the very first race I ran to pick up my shirt and bib for tomorrow's race. Plus then I just took this really weird both-shirt selfie right in the middle of crowded NewBo. And nobody noticed. Nobody congratulated me for my clever continuity of wardrobe, nobody laughed at the fact that I'm taking group selfies with imaginary shirt-wearing friends and nobody even said "You seem remarkably well-preserved for your age; let me buy you an ice cream" -- even though I'm sitting remarkably well-preserved right in front of an ice cream shop as I type this. Rude.

September morn

We danced until the night
Became a brand new day.
Two lovers playing scenes
From some romantic play.
September morning
Still can make me feel that way.

Flashback Friday: Look I'm Doing A Pushup Edition

This oh-hello-you-caught-me-right-in-the-middle-of-doing-a-push-up photo was taken in 2008 (I think) on my first photo shoot with Scott Barnes, who'd found me through this here blog thingie. We did a range of I'm A Serious Model shots in the finest selections from my Gap wardrobe, but then we added a few show-some-skin shots where I could be all gratuitously flexy and maybe find a boyfriend. I remember neither of us really caring for this shot at the time, but now that I'm old and droopy I kind of love it. It's proof that I used to be a total dish.