Lots of flotsam today so let’s get busy.

First, shameless promotion: Black and Blue and the AllGood Café tomorrow night. Meet me there! The Dallas Observer advanced the show here.

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A month or so ago, my brother sent me this link to Missing Money, a site that searches for unclaimed property (i.e. money). He’d searched my name and found money owed to me. I went to the site, filled out the brief form and forgot all about it. Well shiver me timbers and blow me over—a check for $371 turned up in my mailbox last week! Try it.

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The email subject line said: Press release

The message said: Hope your readers find this press release of interest.

The press release was an attached Word document.

If ever a presentation begged to be ignored, it’s this one. A subject and message that tells me nothing, and an attachment from someone I don’t know. Maybe it’s a perfectly legitimate release with information that my readers would find of interest but I’m not going to investigate. Hit delete, get on with my life. The world is full of cluelessness.

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Here’s a nifty little tip from the NYT tech blog. If you use Firefox, you can bring up the Quick Find box to search a page by just hitting the forward slash key (same key as the question mark). Seconds saved every week!

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Texas Tech University psychology department has launched a series of short podcasts about this and that, psychology-ish, featuring interviews with experts here and there. Here’s the homepage. They’re a little homespun sounding but that’s OK.

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I don’t know why this story is buried on page 3 of the business section, but it’s big exciting news to me. Gas prices are causing people to “stampede” to small car. Can I get a HELL YEAH?

Unfortunately, this is bad news for SUV and truck manufacturers (i.e. American companies). But it's good for the planet, the highways and my blood pressure, since the mere sight of a Hummer makes it soar. I'm very sensitive that way.

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Another of my pet peeves is the luxurification of the world. Have I discussed that before? How we seem to be devaluing all qualities—quaint, cozy, charming, kitschy—in favor of luxurious? It’s one of my favorite rants, I’m happy to go into it if I’ve neglected to rant it here.

Anyway, the DMN has a story this morning that seems to back my point, about a direct sales company called Home Interiors that was extremely successful until new owners decided to aim for the high-end market instead of the cozy low-incomers for whom the brand was developed. It didn’t work and now the company is filing for bankruptcy.

I love having my prejudices affirmed.

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The snarky chick-oriented website Jezebel puts an interesting and believable spin on reports that the depression rate in women is twice that of men.

The Jezebel writer suggests that this isn’t because twice as many women as men get depressed but because women are so much more likely to go for treatment when they do. She speculates that many more men are depressed than ever seek treatment. If some dude is walking around depressed but undiagnosed, does he count? she asks.

It’s a good post, take a look.

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Jezebel has also alerted me to a Ms. magazine article that sounds interesting, about self-objectification or "viewing one's body as a sex object to be consumed by the male gaze."

The post continues: More and more women are viewing themselves as sex objects, says Caroline Heldman, Ph.D., an assistant professor of politics at Occidental College, and it's due in large part to the veritable onslaught of advertising images that we're subjected to.

I think this is right on right on but the only solution offered, evidently, is to avoid media images objectifying women, but that would pretty much mean locking oneself in a dark room.
Read the post yourself.

I certainly wish I could stop constantly comparing myself with other women--both media images and women I see every day. It’s a miserable pastime, a distracting little drone in my head: I’m fatter than her…I’m thinner than her...fatter…thinner…fatter…fatter…older…younger….fatter…

What a useless waste of brain energy.

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Hey, the cool website WorldHum linked to my post this week about how rising travel costs might discourage dabblers from traveling. OK, so I alerted an editor to the post in a bit of Shameless Self Promotion, but he liked it enough to link so that was very gratifying.

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Finally, in what may become a weekly voyeuristic feature as long as I feel like it, this week’s Google searches that brought people to this site are:

xoloescuintle price

Thank God I books for sale Castagnini

inside the brain of a narcissist

Narcissist Bully

negative reviews of elizabeth gilbert's eat, pray, love

gmail emails not reaching their destination

derivation of lithium name

cashmere bouquet plant

customer support gmail

crossdresser in saree

outlook autofill subject line

mayeaux pronunciation

odd looking dogs

give me obama email adress and guest 2008@yahoo.com

Xoloescuintle Dog

jack kent cooke Conundrum

gmail to yahoo not getting sent

Labels: automobiles, beauty, black and blue, culture, economy, fashion, fat, feminism, flotsam, jezebel, news, nightlife, personal growth, psychology, public relations, rolling stones, sexism

My friends Chuck and Susan in fine disco form


According to the public radio show Marketplace (spinning off a Forbes Magazine article), while gay businesses in general are booming, gay bars are facing extinction. (Story here.)

This is a good thing because it means we find it less necessary to segregate ourselves according to sexual orientation. One person interviewed suggested—and he may be quite right—that the trend applies more to the coasts than to the rest of the nation, where the risks of hitting on the wrong same sex person may be a lot riskier. Hit on the wrong person in New York City and you’ll probably get a “no thanks,” or maybe a night of experimentation by someone who will claim to have been too drunk to remember the next day. Hit on the wrong person someplace like Wyoming and you may be beaten, tied to a fence and left to die. (You know what I mean.)

But I digress … my intent is to reminisce about gay bars in the 1970s, when I was a card-carrying, Halston perfume-wearing fag hag in four-inch heels and Qiana.

The disco movement may have been popularized by the breeders of Saturday Night Fever (a movie I adore), but it was launched by gay men. The first time I danced until dawn was at a disco called Galaxy 21, on 23rd St., near the Chelsea Hotel, which (like the rest of New York City) was a whole lot seedier then. Nancy Spungen had not yet died there; it was still the kind of place where that kind of thing happened.

I was in 11th grade. Galaxy 21 had three stories and that was the first time I’d ever heard Donna Summer faking an orgasm in “Love to Love You Baby.” After a night of dancing and drinking vodka tonics, I went with friends to breakfast at the Cosmos Coffee Shop, on 58th St. Then I dragged my friend Susan home with me to face my parents. We we were met by the stone-angry face of my father waiting for us at the kitchen table. Yikes. Yeah, I was in all kinds of trouble.

But a fag hag was born.

Our casual weeknight hangout was The Barefoot Boy, a dark, woody (no pun intended), cozy neighborhood bar in the East 30s where I learned to do the Hustle. This place was popular with older men looking for younger—chicken hawks, we called them. It’s also where I tried poppers (amyl nitrate) the first time. Yuck. Never liked it but people dancing by sometimes just stuck under the noses of other dancers for a snort.

Sometimes friends and I went to Ice Palace on 57th Street for their Sunday afternoon tea dances. I saw Ethel Merman sitting at the bar there once, surrounded by fluttery young men. That was when she had a disco album. Ice Palace had a “no open-toed shoes” policy which was designed to discourage women. We went anyway, in closed-toe shoes.

When Xenon opened, that became the hangout for my me and my friends. That wasn’t so much a gay bar as full-out glitzy disco—kind of the poor man’s Studio 54, where I went just once. I saw Robin Williams there. He gave my red pumps and vintage robin’s egg blue silk capri pants a good once over, then looked disappointed when he saw the rest of me.

Xenon was great over-the-top fun, with lots of smoke and flashing lights, a giant neon pinball machine, a spaceship that lowered from the ceiling…

Disco Sally, world’s oldest fag hag, a tiny little lady who I believe was an attorney, was often there, surrounded by an adoring gay entourage. I saw Eartha Kitt there once, dancing with a boa constrictor that was a regular (yes, the snake was regular); and Sylvester Stallone, who was surprisingly short; and Truman Capote, hat and all. And there was a guy, I forget what we called him, who spent every night doing interpretive dance alone.

When I moved to Dallas in the 1980s, my gay bar hangout was the Crews Inn on Fitzhugh, where my friend Stan (RIP) and I would get absolutely blotto on wicked strong happy hour drinks Friday nights. Yikes, I can still remember how quickly those hit, and I remember reeling out of there.

I went to the Village Station only once, as I recall. Same with the Roundup. I was new to Texas at that time and seeing people two-step was interesting in itself. Seeing guys two-step together was like entering a parallel universe. I recall feeling that women were not welcome at the Roundup.

I went to JRs once or twice, too, but by that time I was losing interest in bars in general and gay bars in particular because it was beginning to sink in for me that gay boys weren’t just looking for the right woman.

One of the attractions of gay bars for me at the time was that I could go and have fun and never get hit on, which I actually liked. Plus, I always had someone to dance with. (Old joke: Why did God make gay men? So fat chicks would have someone to dance with.) And gay men told me often how FABULOUS I was, especially when I wore Qiana and Halston perfume, which actually was a gift from a gay boy I knew in high school. I slept with this gay boy at one point--I suspect I was a last ditch effort for him. It wasn’t much fun for either of us…

If gay bars go the way of record stores, it will definitely be the end of an era. Not a bad thing. But they were great fun for me, back in the day.

Labels: 1970s, dallas, disco, memoir, new york city, nightlife

Black and Blue rocked the AllGood Café. Rocked it right.

Mike Snyder, who owns the AllGood, was tired and grumpy when Black and Blue arrived and told them to go on by 9 and get it over with so he could get the hell outta there. Nobody expected much of the evening.

We were all surprised by the full house. Black and Blue started cautiously but over the course of a two-hour set hit its groove. By Satisfaction, DJ Mr. Rid was dancing, cute girls were dancing, L7 couples from Addison were dancing (yes! that’s the target market!), white-man overbites were occurring, a stray drunken (or something) queen in mirror shades and stylish denim and black was dancing and annoying people. Black and Blue planned to cut their set down in deference to Mike’s exhaustion but ended up playing everything they had with one repeat (Rocks Off) before leaving the stage.

It's the Rolling Stones. What's not to like? No costumes, just the rock.

Mike was a lot less grumpy by the end—one might even say giddy. The band made a few hundred dollars off the door alone, with a $5 cover. (And Mike made his money in drinks, of course.)

Much smiling occurred at the end of the evening.

We all were, dare I say it?, satisfied. (Yikes. That’s really beneath me.)

Labels: dallas, music, nightlife, rolling stones

Tom's Rolling Stones tribute band, Black and Blue, makes its debut this Saturday night at the AllGood Cafe in Deep Ellum, during the Deep Ellum Arts Festival. I'll be there, will you?

Labels: dallas, fun shit, music, nightlife, rolling stones

Tom and I bent over for our first visit to the House of Blues Friday night.

We took the light rail (Dallas version of public transport) and started with a dreary, greasy dinner at Friday’s in the West End. If we’d had a clue, we would have gone to Victory Plaza instead, where we could have overpaid for a meal but at least had more attractive people to look at while we did.

(Note to Dallasites—what went wrong with the West End? Tom and I went to the opening festivities in the 1980s, when all was excitement and promise. Now it’s a bleak wasteland. The West End Marketplace is closed and empty. Dallas Alley is dark and creepy and deserted. I did like the Archway of Random Neon Geometric Shapes, leading from Dallas Alley to the Plaza of Empty Promises before you reach the razzle-dazzle of Victory Park. But my gosh, if it weren’t for the aggressive roses-selling guys and a few misguided tourists, the West End at night would be deserted.)

Anyway, we went to the Cambridge Room, which is the smaller HoB venue, to see The Donnas. The tickets were listed on the website for $15.50 but somehow cost $37.50 for two at the box office. That pissed me off from the gitgo.

Then, as we passed through exterior gates, a couple dumpy security guys with wands approached us and muttered at us officiously and unintelligibly.

“Wha?” both Tom and I said.

“Take everything metal out of your pockets, put your purse on your wrist and hold your arms out,” they clarified, only slightly more intelligibly.

Oh, OK. The guy preparing to wand me—-he looked like an enormous five-year-old and sucked on a lollipop—-started waving his wand like I was a plane taxiing to the gate.

“What?” I said. “Purse too high up? Open it? What?”

He kept waving the wand.

“Use words,” I finally said.

Evidently, he wanted me to take a step to my left so, I guess, he could be spared the monumental effort of taking one step to his left to reach me.

“OK, I guess I’ll move over,” he said, through his lollipop.

Yeah, good idea. He gave me a perfunctory wanding, peeked in my purse and waved me on.

“You know what, Tom?” I said as we walked the ramp to the doors.

“You hate the House of Blues already?” he guessed correctly.

Happily, the Donnas were already on stage. (It was an all-ages show; I expect that’s why it was deliciously early.) The crowd was mostly men. We did note a few couples in roughly our age range. Former punks like us or tourist game for anything? Hard to tell. Tom bent over for a $5 can of Shiner, I saved for my retirement by not drinking anything.

The Donnas were Miley Cyrus punk. Very Disney slick ‘n ‘shiny. Lead singer Brett Anderson was altogether too talkative between songs and her patter was needy, focusing entirely on whether or not the crowd was sending enough love her way. She was having a good time—the crowd was loud and loving her—but that was pretty much all she could talk about. Ho hum. I did like her arms, though. I would like long, lean arms like that. Tom declared her not as hot as she was when she was younger. So what else is new?

While the band did their thang, dawg, we entertained ourselves speculating about a young-ish blonde in a short black sequin dress circa 1992 who was allowing herself to be dance-humped from behind by the parade of exceedingly dorky young men she was partying with. Tragic, really.

We were in bed by midnight, sated by calories, music and mocking. It was a good night. It would have been a great night, in its own ridiculous way, if it hadn’t been so damn expensive. The Cambridge Room pleasant enough but honestly, it will take a helluva band to get me back there.

It may have been rock and roll but it wasn't really rock and roll.

Labels: donnas, music, nightlife, pop culture