Pride in VT
July 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized
I’m whiling away the time at the big Pride dance here in Burlington by blogging on my phone. I don’t really dance, I don’t feel like drinking, and this eighties cover band is playing Jesse’s Girl so loud it’s making my nose itch. Now I’m outside with my friend who is also named Alison while she has a cigarette.
114 Responses to “Pride in VT”
Ouch. That must be loud indeed. Isn’t the end of July a month late for Pride, or do you folks up north have to wait for mud season to end and black fly season to begin?
alison bechdel really is a geek! blogging from pride. ;-D do y’all do vt pride when you do as so not to interfere w/ other prides? SLC did theirs the 1st week of june, eugene is in august.. that way people can go to big prides – e.g. SFO, NYC, etc. if they want.. one weird thing is that atlanta! is in october?!? can’t figure that one out.. i remember piedmont park filled to the brim w/ happy queers listening to coretta scott king and the indigo girls in either 95 or 96. it’s gotta be one of the big ones around the country, eh?
I hate to say it but you’re beginning to sound like Mo and the gang when they were at the Pride Festivals in the strips. They would sit around analyzing the situation and miss the good old days.
Do you know the New Yorker cartoon by William Haefeli?
@NLC (#4)
No, but I do now! Cute.
Well, at least I know what to do the next time I’m bored at a party! My local Pride isn’t until the end of August so I’ll have to wait til then.
NLC, I remember when that cartoon came out…when was it? Maybe 6 or 7 years ago? At the time I was annoyed by it. I’d been envious of Haefeli for a while—who was this guy anyhow, suddenly showing up with his gay cartoon characters in the haute bourgeois New Yorker? And when I saw this one, it especially burned my ass. Okay, so the New Yorker was running cartoons with gay content, but only because we were all over being queer, I muttered bitterly to myself.
Now, a few short years later, I feel pretty much like the guys on the couch. I’m not Proud of this, but I probably wouldn’t have gone to Pride yesterday if Holly hadn’t been so psyched about it. Look, she’s so proud she’s dancing all by herself in front of everyone to Sambatucada, our local Brazilian Samba street band. From this angle you can’t see her rainbow mardi-gras beads.
I’m glad I went, but it seems we left the afternoon festival too early.
See those rainbow flags? Apparently for a finale the crowd uprooted them and danced around twirling them madly on the lawn.
I have never been to a pride event of any kind. I’m just not a “big crowd of people who may or may not be drunk or high, but will mostly likely act wild and could quite possibly get out of control” type of person.
I remember a certain earlier cartoon where a certain ‘Mo-totype’ suffered from the chronic disability of being unable to dance … 😉
So, to channel a past strip, is there a Gay Shame Dance where everyone faces the wall, heads hung low?
I didn’t go to Pride this year because I couldn’t find anyone to go with, and there’s no lonelier feeling than being alone at Pride. (YES, I have done it, and it was awful. Go ahead, color me loser, I can take it.)
NLC, thanks for that cartoon – very funny! Now it’s back to packing – Good NIGHT I can’t believe how much stuff I own.
@9 Ian: Er,Mo can dance.The summer they met,she and Harriet spied each other “across the crowded room” by chance at a women’s dance. After discussing the Iran-Contra sitch),they rocked out;Mo actually enjoyed herself.
Brighton Pride is next Saturday, it’s always the first weekend in August. It’s becoming bigger than London’s. Their parade is a proper parade too, not just a miscellaneous line of floats, it’s themed – this year it’s Beside the Seaside. One of my alltime favourite Pride moments was when a marching group of about fifty Wonder Women appeared round the corner of the Pavillion.
@Feminista #11: Yes, Mo can dance. But there was a strip about a woman who can’t dance who was a precursor of Mo’s in the looks department. This was in a strip that happened before the regular cast took over.
PS @Pam I #12: Will you be making a Pride cake to celebrate? I thought your cakes (mentioned on the previous post) were amazing, esp the typewriter!
By the way, just how many of those Wonder Women were actual women? I can’t be the only baby gay that pretended to be her when WW was on TV. I’ve overcome the urge to wear a swimsuit, tiara and play ‘bullets and bracelets’ these days … 😉
Pride in my city isn’t until August 15-22…for the last two years it was in September. I skipped out last year but the year before I went (and it rained).
Pride in KY is in mid June but didnt get to make it this year. Last year went and spent the day and then went to see Melissa Ethridge that night.
Thought that photo was capturing Holly just after she threw and frisbee and was looking to see where it was headed…. love that cartoon… too funny.
@ Ian – too far to carry a cake, the trip down is always hazardous, with most of gay London on the same train/motorway.
The massed Wonder Women were mostly well above the average height for women – beyond that, I could not possibly guess at what was ‘real’.
It’s a good thing Holly was there to show everybody what to do when the rhythm moves you. It’s a samba band, and everybody’s sitting around like they’re at the Philharmonic. Listening to Cage’s 4’33”. Sambatucada must have been wondering what was keeping all of you from falling over.
I LOVE that William Haefeli cartoon.
@Andrew B (#19)
Many classical orchestras hand out cough drops to cut down on the psycho-contagious coughing that often occurs during performances. I wonder if they’d think about nixing that for Cage’s 4’33”, although the rustling of the wrappers might add to the background.
I didn’t go to Pride this year because for some strange reason it was at a much different venue than previous years.
Question for Alison AG:
Is it possible to list the date of the last comment for each thread next to the number of comments on the home page? Something along the lines of ’47 comments, latest dated 27-July-2009′.
I’m usually pretty good about remembering how many I’ve read, but sometimes it slips my brain, and seeing the date of the latest comment would really help.
Just in case no one’s given you a pat on the back lately… every time I post a comment and can reference the comment number, I utter hosannas in your direction.
Thanks.
hehe……4’33”……heeeheeheee….
sorry, that’s about as verbal as I can be this morning…..
@Andrew #19—the not dancing thing is one thing I wish could change. Friends and I went to a great concert–also by Brasilians–in a park last night, and the only ones dancing were uninhibited kids under the age of five. I sure wasn’t gonna be the first adult to get up and shake it, and all my peeps are shy things. People barely _moved_ on their blankets, but a few of us did clap during the last song! (And, nice reference to 4’33”! For those of you who don’t know what this is, John Cage composed a song that was four minutes and 33 seconds long. It was of total silence. Now you can join Kat in her giggles!)
One of the reasons I fell in love with Brazil was the dancing whenever music is played….
#7 – Go Holly!
I am occasionally prone to spontaneous dancing as well.
You should both come to La Féte de la Nouvelle France in Quebec City in August and hear the crazy tribal drumming a young troupe of musicians do each year.
I can get very world-weary about Pride – I do always go, to keep up my now 31 years continuous record – then when I hit the drummers, it makes me remember why I go.
And we have to keep doing it every year, for the young ones. Even if we wonder why we do.
Brighton rocks.
Speaking of John Cage, his life partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham, died yesterday at the age of 90.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/07/27/ST2009072702295.html
@hoh #28: Oh, that’s so sad. When I first started learning contemporary dance, it was the Cunningham style that I learnt. I knew a fair amount about him (although I usually preferred the work of Martha Graham) and you always learnt something new each time you saw one of his pieces. Definitely a pioneer!
I’m with Holly – dance for pride. Celebrate that we can. It’s not something to take for granted.
I remember coming out in the 80’s (gawd showing my age) – people thought I would kill my career for coming out, gay adoption was against the law in my state – now legal, I had to fight several corporations to get domestic partnership benefits – and my partner and I were the first openly gay couple to the company Christmas party. I’m happy to say much of corporate america finally figured out it made sense to give us the benefits regardless of what the law says…. and oh yeah, I managed to break the leadership ranks even with that big old dyke label. However, I wouldn’t have had the courage to even try without the community support along the way.
I know there is still a lot of room for improvement -but the community gatherings helped bring us together.
Pride and National Coming Out Day should be declared holidays!!!!
Facism is on the rise, my friends:
Check out this recent town hall meeting where a woman is contesting the President’s birth certificate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNjLpWDWCaE
Prejudice defies logic. Let us not be complacent.
@31: Stupid people in large groups will never fail to amaze me.
they scare me
What’s your friend’s name when she isn’t having a cigarette?
Speaking of John Cage (which we weren’t exactly, but whatever), I just got finished with a baroque workshop whose director lives in Cage’s old house….
I agree with those who like spontaneous dancing. Not that I’m any good at dancing, but sometimes, it’s just necessary!
Newsflash – The Little Stranger is on the longlist for the Booker prize – ie it’s one of 13 titles that will go down to a shortlist of six in September.
The Booker is the biggest deal literrrary event in the UK, does it have any international kudos? With a dyke Poet Laureate and all, we could have a very queer booky year here,
Hey I’m a poet.
@ HOH, thanks for the notice of Merce Cunningham. I was fortunate enough to see him some years ago. The Cage comments had had me thinking about him and that incredible performance.
Thanks for the info, Pam I.
I’m well familiar with the Booker, but that may be because I lived in London……any other Americans care to fill us in?
Most regular readers of highbrow literature in the USA would know that the Booker is a major award in the UK. (He confidently asserts, based only on his own experience.) Journals like the New York Review of Books and probably even the New Yorker will mention that a book is a Booker winner, or was short-listed, when discussing it. I have to admit I’m not even perfectly certain that the Booker is for fiction only (it is, isn’t it?), and I doubt that most Americans would be familiar with it. But quite a lot of Americans probably wouldn’t know what the Pulitzer prize is, either.
@ksbel6 (#32)
Stupid people in small groups can be pretty amazing too. For example, take the three Phelps clan crazies who showed up at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan last week (take them, please!).
Their form of protest? The usual fag and Jew baiting signs, stomping on American and Israeli flags, and one woman who blew her nose in the Israeli flag.
A group of New Yorkers taunted the Phelps clan right back. Wish I had been there, chanting “Fuck Phelps” and “Phelps is a fag” along with them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/nyregion/28nyc.html
The Times of course, simply says the crowd shouted “sexually charged vulgarities.”
Quoting from the article:
—
Westboro’s philosophy is rooted in Marxism — Groucho Marxism. “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” Groucho sang in “Horse Feathers.” That pretty much sums up this group. It seems to be anti-everything. It is conspicuously anti-gay and anti-Semitic, and has gone out of its way to earn contempt around the country by picketing the funerals of soldiers and Marines killed in combat. It calls those deaths God’s punishment for America’s acceptance of homosexuality.
A woman and two girls from this group spent 45 minutes outside the Jewish Community Center. They carried signs with anti-Semitic and anti-gay slogans. They stepped on an Israeli flag, and dragged an American flag along the pavement. The woman even blew her nose in the Israeli flag.
Since being obnoxious does not violate the Constitution, and since these people were clearly beyond reasoned argument, and since there were only three of them, you might have thought that a wise response would be to ignore them. That’s what officials at the community center had sensibly urged. But a cluster of New Yorkers, 20 people or so with nothing better to do, gathered to taunt the Topekans.
They did so in a manner that makes New York an inspiration to the world: They shouted sexually charged vulgarities. A teachable moment it was not. Free expression had been reduced to distasteful simultaneous monologues between the bigoted and the crude.
—
Ok, so it wasn’t a highbrow teachable moment. Whoop-dee-doo. So sorry this Times writer is so concerned about keeping his mind open that his brains have fallen out. Great street theatre makes lowbrow teachable moments, but they are teachable moments nonetheless. Humor is often more effective at getting the message across than all those sober and dignified protests that the boring Times folks seem to prefer.
I keep hoping the Lubavitchers (a large Chassidic sect) will show up en masse at one of these Phelps protests with their “Mitzvah tank,” a large RV outfitted with speakers blaring Chassidic music in Yiddish.
Now THAT would make great street theatre.
I am a “lurker” who has read this blog for a couple of years- enjoying the cleverness, passion and compassion I’ve found amongst you. What finally gets me to write is the post re: the Phelps family. My most recent memory of them was when they picketed Cambridge City Hall the night Gay Marriage passed in Mass. I came around the corner into a sea of the happiest, flying high, openhearted people of all ages, sexualities and genders celebrating together. It felt like the air shimmered. Across the street, on the steps of the Post Office, was the Phelps clan, with a half a dozen people, and horrific signs, chanting hate. I started to feel furious that they were “ruining” this amazing night. And then I did something I do in my work, which is to put my body in the position of my client’s bodies, to feel what it is like to be them- complete with facial expressions and muscular contractions and energetics. Standing there, being the Phelps’ even for a moment, which was all I could tolerate, it was so clear that underneath all that hatred there is so much fear, and not belonging, that my anger just melted away into sadness. That evening was such a phenomenal expression of the human spirit and they were so cut off from anyone but themselves and their own circular thoughts. Now when I hear about them my first reaction is compassion. (Not that Buddha-natured with everyone, apparently, as I was screaming myself hoarse in the car tonight when the Republican Senators were telling us why they couldn’t vote for Sotomayor.)
Nel, thanks for that… I’m also a lurker, but I really loved how you captured that moment of trying to be inside someone else.
And in a completely different vein, now that I’ve delurked, I’ve recently moved… and I found in a box an unsullied DTWOF calendar from 1997. Part of me wants to keep it, to go along with my collection of all of the DTWOF books… but it doesn’t actually fit on my bookshelf where the other ones are… so I’m going to offer it up to this blog. I’ll send it to the first person who emails me with a heartfelt reason about why you’d like it…
heliotropic09 at gmail dot com
I went to my first Pride parade in NYC this year 🙂 I came out a few years ago but last January I decided to finally embrace my butch dykiness. Having been dumped in Jan by my 2 year gf over the phone after I flew out to CA for Xmas because she wanted to be with our new housemate we’d met 3 months earlier instead pretty much was the worst rejection of my life to date, but it had the unforeseen effect of making me fearless of the possible rejection I might face if I dressed like a guy and cut all my hair off. Pride was kinda special to me bc I don’t really see so many butches where I live and nyc was just swarming that day. I didn’t stand out at all 🙂 I doubt I’d want to go every year, altho havin a beer at Stonewall was pretty neat (so over-priced tho!!)
@CateinBC (#43)
By my calculations, that 1997 calendar will be perfectly good in 2014, the dates and days of the week will line up perfectly with 1997.
Oh, you mean someone might want it for the drawings? Whoops, my inner nerd is showing. :).
re: The Phelps Clan
A group of them came to my hometown when we held funeral services for a marine. The school district volunteered its auditorium since it is a place that outside noise has a hard time filtering through. Our Freedom of The Road Riders also quickly volunteered to help block the noise. However, our local law enforcement was told that if the group did not feel like they had a chance to protest without interruption, they would sue the city, so the FOTRR never started their bikes. Apparently they make most of their money by filing suit against cities for violating their rights in one way or another.
@ksbel6 (#46)
Most of the Phelps’ are attorneys, so I’m sure they send nice threatening letters to nervous municipalities and organizations reminding them that they will be sued if they interfere or are perceived to interfere with the Phelps’ display of hate speech.
They must have the KS state bar association quaking in their Guccis, the only one who has been disbarred is Fred Phelps Sr., despite their abuse of the law to harrass people.
Interestingly, a bunch of them wotk for the state of Kansas. There’s got to be something that reeks about how they’ve managed to get and retain these jobs.
Did you hear the Phelps’ protested Ed McMahon’s funeral? Now what did that poor guy do to piss them off? Laugh at too many of Carson’s jokes? Are they upset with him because they didn’t win the Publishers Clearing House contest he plugged for all those years?
In Eccentric English Cats (TM) news, apparently we now have a commuter cat who likes to go for bus rides …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8174850.stm
Oh, Ian, that was wonderful, and immediately posted on my facebook profile! Now, if Casper’s “owner” could get him to pick up a few groceries while he’s out and about, she’d be set!
Nel, thanks for your comments about the Phelps clan. I’ve always wondered what trauma lurks in this family to make them so consumed with hatred. Michael Lerner, of Tikkun, helped me understand the dynamic of underlying fear of racism, anti-Semitism, etc. Re: screaming at the Senators: makes sense, because I think they use and manipulate this fear to gain and maintain power. It’s also cathartic!
Hey Nel, I was there too. In fact, I was so swept up (up up and away) – I don’t even remember the Phelps’ being there – wow!
@judybusy #49: glad you liked the story!
Hey… the so-called “birthers” (people in the United States who attack President Obama’s right to be president by claiming he “wasn’t born in America” are not impressed by the State of Hawaii’s Certificate of Live Birth for Obama, issued in the state capitol of Honolulu in August of 1961, two years after Hawaii became an American state. They claim that a certificate of live birth is “not the same thing” as a birth certificate. Well… the State of Kansas issued a certificate of live birth for me in 1954, 93 years after Kansas became an American state. If Obama’s “not a citizen”, I guess that means I’m not one, either! That makes a pair of us. Don’t tell. They’d banish us, you know.
and back here in Cambridge…
Police: Boston Cop Used Racial Slur In Gates
E-Mail
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/mostpopular/20215609/detail.html?taf=bos
bleh.
@Kate L (#52)
More than you’d ever want to know about birth certificates can be found in the Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_certificate
In under-reported good news, check out the list of awardees for the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Gay, lesbian, black, white, Hispanic, Native American, female, progressive, geek, and a couple of old white guys (balanced by Dem and GOP leanings).
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009-Medal-of-Freedom-Recipients/
Quoting from the White House blog:
—
The awards will be presented on August 12. Here is a little bit about this year’s recipients:
* Nancy Goodman Brinker is the founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s leading breast cancer grassroots organization.
* Pedro José Greer, Jr. is the Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs and Florida International University School of Medicine. He is also the founder of Camillus Health Concern, an agency that provides medical care to over 10,000 homeless and low-income patients each year in Miami.
* Stephen Hawking is an internationally-recognized theoretical physicist, and is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
* Jack Kemp was a U.S. Congressman, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Republican Nominee for Vice President in 1996. He died in May, 2009
* Sen. Edward Kennedy is one of the longest-serving and greatest Senators of all time. He has worked tirelessly for health care reform over the last five decades.
* Billie Jean King is known for winning the famous “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, and championing gender equality issues not only in sports, but in all aspects of life.
* Rev. Joseph Lowery has been a leader of the civil rights movement since the 1950s, and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King.
* Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow is the last living Plains Indian war chief, and author of works on Native American history and culture who has served as an inspiration to young Native Americans across the country.
* Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official from a major city in the United States. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, and encouraged LGBT citizens to live their lives openly.
* Sandra Day O’Connor was a Supreme Court Justice from 1981 until her retirement in 2006. She was the first woman ever to sit on the Supreme Court, and has received numerous awards for her outstanding achievements.
* Sidney Poitier is an actor known for breaking racial barriers. He is the first African American to be nominated and win a Best Actor Academy Award.
* Chita Rivera is an actress, singer and dancer, who has broken barriers and inspired a generation of women. In 2002, she was the first Hispanic to receive the Kennedy Center Honor.
* Mary Robinson was the first female President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Since 2002, she has been the President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative.
* Janet Davison Rowley, M.D., is the Blum Riese Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine, Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. She discovered the first consistent chromosome translocation in a human cancer.
* Desmond Tutu is widely regarded as “South Africa’s moral conscience,” and was a leading anti-apartheid activist in South Africa.
* Muhammad Yunus is a global leader in anti-poverty efforts, and pioneered the use of “micro-loans” to provide credit to poor individuals.
—
Ever mindful of two-URL blog purgatory, here’s the official press release about the Medal of Freedom awardees:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Obama-Names-Medal-of-Freedom-Recipients/
They actually use the word “lesbian” to describe Billie Jean King. Hurrah.
I think the usage of “LGBT” in print to describe our community sometimes has the effect of minimizing who we are. LGBT sounds so much more benign than LESBIAN or TRANSGENDERED. So much less threatening to the mythical “average Joe” or “average Jane,” at least in the minds of the white bread press flacks.
All this LGBT stuff sounds like a food additive at the end of a long list of processed ingredients… “BHA, BHT, and calcium proprionate (to retard spoilage)” at the end of the white bread ingredient listing comes to mind. Bad stuff that we refer to by initials because we don’t really want to know what’s in this gloppy stuff we’re eating. Could be DDT for all we know.
Funny how we don’t use acronyms to describe all that fair trade sustainable organic eco-friendly stuff we eat.
What would the acronynm for “fair trade sustainable organic eco-friendly stuff” be anyway? FATSOES?
(… goes back to munching on rice cakes topped with organic peanut butter … or they might really be made of styrofoam, I can never be sure …)
Uh, that doesn’t look so good in print. Persons of size, don’t beat me up. That was not a fat joke. It was an acronym joke.
(… goes back to her peanut butter …)
That is a great list…I love Stephen Hawking.
I learn something new every day… the Christian Science Monitor thoughtfully provided this bit of TMI (Too Much Information):
—
At least one space mystery has now been solved.
What kind of underwear do astronauts take up into the great unknown? Hanes? American Apparel? Perhaps something in a more athletic fit, like Body Armor? Try again. According to astronaut Koichi Wakata, who is returning to earth from months at the International Space Station, he’s been sporting a brand new pair of J-Ware briefs. For the last few weeks. Straight. Without changing.
But don’t worry. These aren’t any ol’ normal kind of underwear. These are high-tech briefs, designed by a team in Japan to be odor-free.
—
http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/07/30/in-space-no-one-can-complain-about-your-month-old-underwear/
Glad THAT mystery has been solved. This is one bit of space high-tech gear that I hope never makes its way into daily life. Yuck.
(… goes back to reading J-Ware instruction manual … “Yellow in front, brown in back” …)
Re the Medal of Freedom Award descriptions above, there again is the often-repeated and somewhat mythical statement about Harvey Milk, that he was the “first openly gay elected official from a major city in the United States.” I guess it depends on if you count Ann Arbor as a major city — I certainly do — but in 1972, Nancy Wechsler was elected to their city council as a 22-year-old liberal Democrat, a member of the Human Rights Party, and a more or less out lesbian. When she didn’t rerun in 1974, her seat was won by another HRP member, Kathy Kozachenko, who was very clearly out. In October 1975, Janna Zumbrun (an open lesbian-feminist activist) was appointed to the City of Austin Human Relations Commission, making her the first lesbian to serve in Austin city government. And, for an even bigger win and major office, two years before Milk, out lesbian and women’s rights advocate Elaine Noble began serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. She served two terms as representative for the Fenway-Kenmore/Back Bay neighborhoods of Boston (which was working-class, NOT queer-friendly turf), winning 59% of the vote and making her election all the more groundbreaking.
I find it telling that all the predecessors of Harvey Milk were both lesbian and much more to the left than he was, yet he’s become the poster child for “first gay in public office” status.
You’re right, HoH, that word, lesbian, has increasingly whitewashed by queer, gay, or LGBT.
P.S. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nancy Wechsler was a reader on this blog. If you are, Nancy, I’d love to hear from you about your memories of running for office back in 1972 and why you think your achievement gets overshadowed by a white male moderate.
Re: Harvey Milk
My guess is he is reported as the first openly gay to be elected because most people refer to gay women as lesbians, and use gay to mean homosexual male.
From Nancy Wechsler to Sarah Palin. What a long, strange trip it’s been… here is the resignation speech by Governor Palin, read as beat poetry…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgiqSNNuhQg
@Maggie, ksbel6 (#60-62)
While it’s true that gay is used specifically for the male queer, it’s often used as a generic term for all queers.
It sometimes feels like female invisibility is trumping queer invisibility… the thinking goes something like this: “…if we’ve got to talk or write about these folks, let’s just call them all gays, it’s an inclusive term, just like mankind includes women.”
Yeah right.
I didn’t know about those lesbians elected to office in Ann Arbor; thanks Mag. Minor quibble, I’d call Ann Arbor a small city, it’s boosted by the university population, but it’s not a major city in my book.
Nonetheless, this is a pretty impressive list of awardees for the Medal of Freedom. No doubt the blockheads on the right will be condemning Obama for the inclusion of gays, lesbians, commie-symps, etc.
(… goes back to thinking about Groucho Marx, who was not awarded the Medal of Freedom… “I would never want to be part of a club that would have me as a member” …)
@hoh: I agree with that entire statement, including the one about the size of Ann Arbor. It is however, my favorite city in the nation and someday I will be rich enough to live there. I just love to spin that cube on campus 🙂 Go Blue!!
@ksbel6 (#65)
The Ann Arbor cube is identical to the one in Manhattan on Astor Place. You could move here if cube spinning is your life’s passion, but Manhattan real estate prices make Ann Arbor’s prices look like pocket change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamo_(sculpture)
I thought the Booker Prize was pretty international. Didn’t Arundhati Roy win it? Weren’t ‘The incredible adventures of Cavalier and Clay’, and ‘Middlesex’ (Geoffry Eugenides), both by American authors, both Booker winners?
Oh, and Pride in Melbourne is in January when it is hot. Or if the wind turns around, it may be cold. It ends up at the sea. Take a jumper. (Sweater.)
And yes, older lesbians, please go for us ‘young ones’. That’s what makes me really proud, thinking of, and seeing, the people who stood up, came out, and did the work that made my life easier, before I even knew what a ‘Lesley-ann’ was!
“Mummy, what’s a Lesley-Ann?” (aged six).
PS this is my last post from London. I’ll have to think of a new name.
Comment, comment. Not post. Comment.
@australian in [enter country name here] (#67)
The Booker Prize is limited in its international scope. It is open to writers in the UK, Commonwealth, and a few former Commonwealth member states (Ireland, Zimbabwe).
Roy did win (he’s from India), but not the other two you mentioned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Booker_Prize
Years ago, the Ontario Lottery had a promotion where they would give a $1 off the price if you presented a losing Ontario Lottery ticket at the bookstore when purchasing a Booker-nominated book by a Canadian author. It gave me a great excuse to buy a Canadian edition of something by Margaret Atwood as a gift for a friend.
The Canadian editions were printed and bound with much higher quality standards than the American editions. Don’t know if that’s still true.
#70, it’s probably only a typo, but Arundhati Roy is a woman.
@Andrew B (#71)
Yup, a typo, although it’s actually a vestige of my left hand neurological stuff, what I term my finger-brain disconnect.
I often drop the letters S, D, and E when I type, and I still transpose letters typed between left and right hands. I command my left hand to type a letter, but it’s slow on the uptake, and the right hand gets its letter typed first.
At least now I can feel the little nib on the F key so I don’t accidentally shift over on the keyboard home keys and start typing what looks like an eye chart.
It’s so much improved over where I was last year that I shouldn’t ever complain. Nerves take freakin’ forever to heal, and whatever little issues I’ve had are so minor compared to the major stuff I saw other folks dealing with in physical therapy.
Kate L,
Thanks for the link. Shatner is no Lord Buckley but his reading was funny.
Trying to think of acronyms that are not negative (a la BHA, BHT, DDT…). Off the top I came up with VIP so far.
Billie Jean King is a rock star (colloquially speaking). I just love her.
Shatner’s reading was wonderful. Does anyone else get the sensation (when they bite into a York Peppermint Patty?) when reading Palin’s tweets and facebook entries of some sort of psychological disorder? I think I recall that certain disorders manifest themselves in particularly unusual writing patterns.
It sure would be interesting to submit the samples to a group of psychologists (after changing some of the proper nouns to prevent the psychologists from deducing it’s Palin) and ask for a diagnosis. I know psychology doesn’t work like that, but my, wouldn’t I like to know.
And, unrelated to that, does anyone have a good Vegan or vegetarian brown gravy recipe?
BUT WHAT IS SHE NAMED WHILE SHE IS NOT HAVING A CIGARETTE THOUGH???
**blogjack**
Heck, no. NOT **blogjack**. Turn, rather, of the great mandala.
With a profound and sweeping tip of the hat to jessicabessica, this from tomorrow’s NYTIMES MAGAZINE on how cooking has been superseded by cheffing:
“If you ask me, the key to victory on any of these shows comes down to one factor: bacon. Whichever contestant puts bacon in the dish invariably seems to win.”
Chant, now, with the poet (hush up, Eliot! T.S. right back atcha):
Bacon present and bacon past
Are both perhaps present in bacon future,
And bacon future contained in bacon past.
If all bacon is eternally present…
This is the word of the Lord / Thanks be to God.
Vegetarian bacon is *horrible*
Off to Brighton.
xp
Maggie, thanks for the list of lesbian office holders! It would be very interesting to hear what they all did with their lives in the last 30 years.
I had seen the Shatner video on youtube a few days ago, and in the comments, someone mentioned Ken Nordine. He is an amazing poet, who is now 89 and still creating. His voice is so smooth and storng, it makes me swoon. He has a youtube page that I’m too lazy to make a link to. I think that’s a sign I need to go make some coffee!
In a meeting where they must have been praising Rev. Ike (money is the root of all good), GE head Jeff Immelt and News Corp head Rupert Murdoch had a secret meeting at the recent Microsoft CEO summit. (N.B. GE owns MSNBC in a joint venture with Microsoft, News Corp owns Fox News.)
The purpose of this secret meeting? To tone down the rhetoric between MSNBC and Fox News, particularly between MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. Both have recently taken shots at the parent company of the other.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2009/07/news-corps-murdoch-and-ges-immelts-attempt-at-news-channel-peace.html
Quoting from the article:
—
If Immelt and Murdoch took their message of peace and love back to their respective news channels, it doesn’t seem to have taken. Olbermann, who generally is the aggressor, has been attacking Fox News and O’Reilly on a regular basis. O’Reilly still takes occasional shots at MSNBC, NBC and General Electric.
For example, on July 9, Olbermann, commenting on reports that Murdoch’s London tabloids had to settle lawsuits for illegal wiretaps, said “why did News Corp. go to all that trouble, rather than just get the secret personal information from the Bush administration?”
O’Reilly, meanwhile, accused NBC News on June 18 of being in President Obama’s pocket and said last month that “there is compelling evidence that NBC is giving President Obama favorable treatment so that GE will be awarded billions, billions, in government contracts.”
—
Oh good, the puppet masters are tired of working on manipulating news, so now they are going to manipulate the little bit of mass media opinion about the manipulators themselves.
I guess the message here is it’s ok to skewer the personalities on the other network, but once they start aiming at the company and the corporate cheeses themselves, that’s not ok.
Bad news… a gunman in Israel opened fire on a club for gay teens, killing two and injuring 12.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124916112290899169.html
Hey Mentor!
Something really odd is going on here. Several hours ago, I posted what was comment #81, which had a de-clique-ification explanation of who Rev. Ike was, and a link to his obituary in the NY Times.
I just posted another comment linking to an article about a shooting in a gay youth club in Tel Aviv, and now *it* is comment #81, and the original #81 comment has disappeared.
Huh?
hoh (#82):
I checked to make sure the message wasn’t caught by the spam-filter, etc. (This seems unlikely if, as your message implies, the message actually appeared on the page for a while. That is, it never would have appeared in the first place if it had been “trapped”.) In any case things look OK “behind the scenes”.
Also, to be clear, the message certainly wasn’t deliberated deleted for any reason.
So, in short, I don’t know what might have happened. I’ll keep an eye out for any strangeness. (Sorry for the inconvenience; is it possible to re-post?)
Thanks Mentor!
I had it up on my browser screen after posting, and it was #81. I’m nearly positive it was still up when I posted the WSJ article about the shooting in Tel Aviv. Dunno how that happened. Odd.
(… do-over …)
De-clique-ification note for non-USAnians and those who were wondering about the Rev. Ike reference…
Rev. Ike (real name Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II) was a black preacher who was one of the first really popular televangelists. He preached a theology which included “money is the root of all good.” He exhorted his flock to give him cash in paper money (no checks, no coins), because he said the sound of clinking change was offensive to God’s ears. His followers responded by mailing him dollar bills by the trailer load. He used the money to finance his extravagant lifestyle, and once told his parishoners “my garage runneth over.”
Rev. Ike died last week at the age of 74. Here’s the Washington Post obituary, it’s filled with much more detail than the lifeless NY Times obituary I originally linked to (and yes, the choice of words was intentional!):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003990.html
And here’s the NY Times obituary, cf:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/nyregion/30ike.html
Speaking of Ann Arbor: Strange but True!
We have a large lesbian population in the A2 area, yet no women’s bars! However, we have an available “women’s night” once a month at the Aut bar in town, usually frequented by gay men the rest of the month.
@ hoh #82 re your disappearing post – I saw it, from 4000 miles away. The plot thickens.
@Pam I (#88)
I’m so glad you wrote that you saw the original post #81. I was starting to doubt myself… maybe I hit ‘Preview’ and never clicked on ‘Post’… but no, I was SURE I had closed the browser tab and opened a new one hours later when I posted the Tel Aviv shooting comment.
The last line of the original post #81 was something like, “They don’t make ’em like they used to.”
BTW, the reason I posted the NY Times obituary link in #86 was to determine if the URL somehow triggered the spam filter. I was postulating that an automatic update to the spam filter might have triggered the deletion after posting (not knowing if the spam filter worked its magic on already-posted comments, Mentor says no, only on posts in progress).
I’m stumped.
@Pam #78: I have a recipe from the Breitenbush Community for baked tofu “bacon” which is delicious. 🙂 If there’s interest,I’ll post it.
Feminista sez: I’m not a vegan,but I play one on TV.
@90 / Feminista: Heretical, your suggestion, but after reading this
http://www.indypendent.org/2009/07/23/bacon-as-weapon/
maybe a bit of heresy will do my arteries, and the planet, some good. Please DO post that recipe.
Yeah, me too, Hoh, I saw message #81, then perhaps an hour later after hitting refresh, it was gone and your query was there instead. Freaky, eh?
I second the request for the tofu bacon recipe. I too am definitely not vegan but have been close to them/lived with them and appreciate how the intelligent foodies among them create brilliant food combinations. I watch “Christina Cooks” on our (new) PBS DTV channel, and while I sometimes deplore her technique (caramelized onions are VASTLY superior in flavor to barely sweated ones) and her crappy utensils, I love how she knows her nutrition and means of satisfying palate with appetite. I also thinks it’s funny that her show is invariably scheduled immediately before or after “Barbecue U”, the ultimate meat-eaters orgy.
I saw it too Pam I. I did wonder. Maybe the blog just couldn’t bear even the mention of a televangelist who thought that ‘money was the root of all good’. Those kind of people bring out a similar reaction in me!
@Maggie J #92: Tofu bacon? I’m sceptical. To be honest, I think if you’re going to have bacon, have it. Get it from a humane supplier, of course, but have it. As I’m sure you know it won’t apply to the recipe, but the store bought ‘meat replacements’ like sausages, burgers, pies, etc are highly processed and not good for you. I’ve met a few veggies, who when you put down decent food made with fresh veg in front of them, find proper veggie food to be a revelation!
Ian, you mean folks who are pizza and beer vegetarian? I know a couple of those……it’s very funny/weird
(… Shame on me for enjoying the poetic justice in this story …)
In “Thelma and Louise meet Working 9 to 5” news, a man who cheated on his wife by having relationships with three other women ended up in a sticky situation when confronted by all four women. Literally sticky. As in Crazy Glue sticky. As in glued to his stomach with Crazy Glue sticky. As in sensitive body part glued with Crazy Glue sticky. I am not making this up.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-talk-crazy-glueaug04,0,5707440.story
(… keeps trying to wipe that sticky smirk off her face, not very successfully …)
#91 & 92: Well,it appears some of the people have spoken. Recipe will be forthcoming.
The good news is that I’m still employed in my summer job tutoring in a federally-funded GED prep.program at a local community college. And at last I got my first check.
The bad news is that I’ll have to fight for the extra dollar/hour I’m supposed to get,which will involve more documentation and work with the union pres.
As the Italians say,a luta continua.
@ #95 hoh – there was (is?) a Gay Sweatshop play from the 70s called, perhaps, Leaving Dick – that was at least one of the songs. Dick the abusive boyfriend was taken to Hackney Marsh by the sisterhood and abandoned with his dick glued to his hand with superglue. The ex-GF then lives happily ever after in the sisterhood squat.
Life imitating Art again.
I think the play was “I like me like this” by Sharon Nassaeuer and Angela Stewart Park, written and produced in 1979. I didn’t see it but a friend of mine did, and brought me the sound track cassette. It was hilarious.
Thanks Liza. Shaz and Angie are still around.
I see Gay Sweatshop’s history has now been academically archived, see http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cats/11/7091.htm In these times of everything being recorded in ten different media, it’s funny that those dusty archive boxes contain the only record of their work, as scripts and fliers – no dvd boxed sets to consult.
I really should sort out my negs from that time, as I know I have pics of some shows. My retirement project.
Re 95: I saw that too, and also laughed. Of course, the 3 women who were actually in the hotel with the jerk are facing charges which include possible jail time. If I remember correctly, the wife just sent him to the room and then tipped the others off while he was on his way? The media played it out as funny…but, my immediate response was, what would the result of all this be if it was a woman cheating on her husband with 3 different men? Much worse than some crazy glue I would imagine.
Louise Erdrich’s wonderful Tales of Burning Love has a great scene where she glues pointy toed high heels onto his feet.
@Jain 101,et al: I’ve read all but the latest of Erdrich’s novels and some of her poetry. I recommend most highly Tracks, third novel of an historical trilogy based in part on her MN (Minnesota) German American and French Canadian/Ojibwe heritage.
And now…
Tofu Strips
(recipe by Breitenbush Community,with Feminista’s variations/explanations noted with *)
1 1/4 lbs. firm tofu block
Slice tofu block in half,and then slice in strips (of approx 1″ thickness*)
Marinade:
1/4 c. oil
1/4 c. tamari
2 T. water
1 tsp.garlic powder
1 tsp.onion powder
1 tsp.poultry seasoning
1/2 tsp.black pepper
dash hickory smoke flavoring
Optional:
1 tsp. sesame oil (used as a flavoring in Asian cooking*)
1/2 tsp. nutritional yeast
1/2 tsp. curry powder
1.Prepare marinade; coat a baking sheet with a little marinade (*use stainless steel one with 1″ sides)
2.Lay the tofu strips on the b.sheet and pour on remaining marinade evenly,leaving no white spots.
3.Marinate for 30 min.,and pre-heat oven to 450 F.
4.Bake @ 450-500 F until crisp,about 20-30 min.
*Not wanting to run around looking for ingredients I’d use infrequently, I omitted the hickory smoke flavoring. I used thyme in place of poultry seasoning,and substituted reduced sodium soy sauce for the Tamari.
The second time I made this (this AM),I decided to add 1 T.of maple syrup. Mmmmm.
These strips are very tasty,and good served with a potato vegetable frittata or omelet,whole grain blueberry pancakes,or other brunch items of your choice.
A final note: baking these strips makes a mess of the baking sheet,so be prepared for some extra clean up.
hairball (#95) and ksbel6 (#100)
The woman charged in the crazy glue incident is from Neenah, Wisconsin, until recently the location of the practice of the foremost sexual reassignment surgeon in the world (how do I know this?). The guy in the hotel room is just lucky she didn’t take that as her inspiration and give him a free vaginoplasty!
#103 was from me. I’m not trying to be mysterious.
We are about to dash off to this holistic summer camp, where most of the food is vegan, and I plan to take the tofu bacon recipe with me to thrill the other campers. Since they’d be cooking it for the whole camp population, I bet they’ll be willing to spring for the hickory flavoring.
And by we, I do not mean me and St. Jerome, I mean me and my OTHER significant other.
Thx for the recipe. Smoke flavoring will make a big difference, I bet, to meat-eaters. It’s that umami thang.
Re the women collaborating retaliation theme, I’m reminded of Majority Report from the mid to late 1970s, a national feminist newspaper (back when we had those kinds of numbers) which had a wonderful section in its classifieds for women who dated men, I think mostly in the NY area, to share information about their exes. They didn’t use real names but enough other identifying information that I’m sure you’d know if a given ad was about someone you were starting to date. These ads would reveal all his worst traits that would come out once he thought he “had” you, like that he thought farting in bed was hilarious, he’d sneak money out of your billfold, etc. I never dated men but still read them avidly, laughing my ass off. The ads cost by the word, yet some women didn’t stint when they’d been burned. I remember in particular one woman ran a long ad about a particularly loathsome fellow literally for months, until I knew it almost by heart — he fancied himself an intellectual, I recall after all these decades, and referred to his penis as “Mouse”. Anyone else remember that?
@ Feminista #102 tofu – are the strips 1 inch thick and then shrivel down to thinner slices, or are they cut much thinner and an inch across?
I’ve recently found a source of fresh tofu in a local Chinese shop. About £1 a big block, ie much cheaper than the branded stuff, and tastier because its fresh. But the shop keepers and myself do not have a common language with which I can find out the provenance of the soybeans. I stay blissfully ignorant of which bit of rainforest I am destroying.
@Maggie (#106)
Oh my, Majority Report. I used to have an MR T shirt that I wore to class in high school. It befuddled 99% of the populace. It was red, with white letters, the MR logo (female Venus sign with a fist in the center), and read “Majority Report covers women.” I used to read all of MR, I don’t remember that particular ad, but I recall the ad section you are referencing.
Personals can be quite entertaining to read, as long as one is not actually looking for love amidst the ink-stained newsprint. I can’t think of the name of the freebie alternative San Fran paper, but the personals were the best reading of any paper. Some of the “W seeks W” ads were classic; among the usual no-nos listed in one ad (no drugs, disease, smokers, etc.) was the line “no U-Haul.” A U-Haul being the punchline to the stereotype joke, “What does a lesbian bring on the second date?”
HoH #106: Perhaps you mean Coming Up, which I think was precursor to the Bay Guardian, as it was then? Or maybe Plexus, before that.
This is a true story, although in this crowd it will sound too good to be true: Around 1990, still relatively new to Austin and definitely NOT looking for love (in right or wrong places), I put an ad in the “Platonic” section of our local alternative, the Austin Chronicle, looking for other lesbian/gay folks who were interested in genealogy. At that time, pre-e-mail, negotiations were conducted by phone. I got a callback from a woman who about a minute into the conversation began asking me how tall I was, if I was “height-weight proportionate” (as if I could be anything but an organism with height and weight in proportion to one another). I interrupted her to say “What does that have to do with genealogy?” She replied “Okay, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know anything about rocks, but if you’re cute I’m willing to learn.”
I hung up on her and pulled my ad.
@Maggie (#109)
She was looking for one of those plaid-covered women geologists! Unfortunately, she had the smarts of a rock.
I’m recalling comments on my Majority Report T-shirt. People asked what it meant, what was MR, etc. One of my HS teachers used to call me “that junior women’s libber” tongue-half-in-cheek when soliciting answers in class, as in “Ok, Ms. Junior Women’s Libber, do you have the answer to question #12?” emphasizing the ZZZZ sound of Ms.
Just popped into my local feminist women’s workers co-op News From Nowhere (in Liverpool, England) for a browse and “Essential” was on the shelves in paperback. It was right next to a copy of an edited collection from a gay comics ‘zine “Boy Trouble”. Zines not being very big over here I’d never heard of it but I snapped it up as well. It was the other volume to have a bit of blurb recommending it from Howard Cruse! 😉
(Maggie, #109)
Your post about genealogy reminded me of the Steve Martin movie where a woman told him that she was a cosmetician. He asked her if it was difficult to adjust to weightlessness!
Folks around the world, esp. in countries that already have national health care plans, may be interested in this feature from last night’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC that investigates some of the wild claims that conservative who are against establishing a national health care plan in the United States are currently using. That’s right, world… the United States of America currently has no national health care plan!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#32292149
Kate L (112) speaks of Steve Martin and a cosmetician. I actually had the flip side of this experience.
During high school I had a truly awful job working behind the meat counter of the local grocery store. The owners were decent enough, but the head of the department was one of the most despicable people I’ve ever known: A bully who used his position to punish all the people who worked under him –mostly high school kids who really needed the job– for his pathetic, sad life. Any sign of initiative or intelligence was inevitably belittled with a relentless stream of cruel, typically racist taunting.
Anyway: I was one of the few people in town who actually left for college and some time later, while in grad school I stopped by the store and they asked what I was up to. Feeling like showing off a bit, I mentioned the fact that semester I was taking a seminar in cosmology.
To make a long story short, the story spread like wide-fire around town that I was studying hair-dressing…
@ Hairball #108
Speaking of Uhaul:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0MxsQnWRX0