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Well, It's Not Quite a Bucket List...

8/27/2013

1 Comment

 
A month ago, I celebrated my fortieth birthday in a few small, but momentous ways:  dinner with my fiance and my bff, a larger dinner with some of my nearest and dearest, a piano bar.  These are traditions and expected behaviors for me, no one is surprised that my birthday ended at The Monster - it's been my birthday piano bar of choice since my 21st, when I didn't know any better.

But turning 40 has also put me in a place of saying, "Why not?"  Pursuing ideas and interests that have been following me for years, and ones that I'm finally getting around to doing.

Three days before the actual birthday, I gave myself an early present:  a tattoo of a dolphin leaping over my anklebone.  I've been talking about this particular idea for fifteen years.  The dolphin is my totem animal, my spirit guide since I was about 19 and had a spiritual awakening watching a school of dolphin at sunrise.  I've never had any doubt that it was a perfect match, nor did I ever doubt that I wanted for formalize it in artwork.  Now, I'm a redhead, and like many redheads have a very low tolerance for pain.  So, naturally, I wanted to put it on my anklebone, one of the places I was warned about as being a very high pain area for a tattoo.  No one mentioned that having it stretch back toward my Achilles tendon would be even worse!   But once the process began, I had to finish it:  only way out of a tattoo is through.  And I did.   And I love it.  Surprisingly, I'd never connected that with the fact that my drag sister Sissy St. Clair ALSO has a dolphin tattoo on her ankle. I'm not sure I'd ever seen it before, but there you go.  Now, we just have to get Ajax, ShotZ, Trinity, Kari and Ashley tattooed...what do you say, girls?

A couple weeks later, I got to play out another longtime fantasy:  I performed a full out (if not quite full Monty) striptease in a burlesque show.  Now, I've already written about that experience, so I don't need to go into it again, but I'm working on my next number already.

Last night, I faced every gay middle-schooler's worst nightmare and joined a gay dodgeball league.  Yes, dodgeball.  I spent more than two hours throwing, dodging, catching and having a blast.  Last night was "newbies" night, the actual league play starts in a couple of weeks.  I went in fearing that I'd be the oldest and the fattest person playing.  I was half right, but you know, 40 makes you fearless.  I've got an amazing fiance and other friends to love, I've been Empress of New York, I've accomplished a lot more than I had at 15, and I'm not afraid to throw myself out there and catch.  (Yeah, shush, you.)  I think I'm going to really enjoy this experience:  I'm not trying to prove anything anymore, I'm just trying to live fully.

And that, kittens, is probably the message today.  You don't need to wait until you're 40 to start checking things off a bucket list (because frankly, I don't intend that there is a lot left undone 40 years from now), but go with your impulse, get out from behind your inhibitions and mix it up!!


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I Miss the Muppets.

11/24/2011

2 Comments

 
So it's Thanksgiving.  One of the things that Kerry and I have done for years is volunteer for / at God's Love We Deliver, followed by lunch and then usually a ridiculous dinner and a movie, leaving our own Turkey plans for Friday.  This year is no different.

However, today, children's television station "The Hub" was showing the three worst pieces of Muppet movie trash, "Muppet Treasure Island,"  "Muppets from Space," and "A Muppet Christmas Carol."  We were watching bits and pieces of them, mostly in anticipation of our annual Thanksgiving Night movie excursion, this time to see "The Muppets," Disney's attempt to reboot the franchise.

Now, a little bit of history and backstory.  I was born in 1973, which puts me smack in the target audience for "The Muppets."  I am right in the middle of generation X, saw "The Muppet Movie" in the theatres in 1979, danced as Kermit with a Miss Piggy in first grade to "The Rainbow Connection," and was young enough to experience the Muppets for the first time with a child's eyes.  I didn't understand the camp, the satire, the multiple layers until later, but I always understood that at the very heart of the, there was a message of hope, of creativity and of fitting in to the world around you while maintaining your individuality.   When I was 9, I drove my parents crazy to get me a Miss Piggy Puppet for Christmas, and then crazier trying to find hair accessories for it.  (Should i have known THEN that I was destined to be a drag queen? Probably.)  A singing Miss Piggy delivered balloons to the office where I was working the summer I turned 16.   I have ALWAYS cried at the finale of that first movie ("Life's like a movie/write your own ending/keep believing/keep pretending...").   One night about a dozen years ago, I met a new friend who immediately seemed like a soulmate. After several hours of conversation, I said to  him,  unironically, "There's not a word yet for old friends who've just met."  He got a look in his eyes and raced back to his bedroom and returned with the framed lyric from "I'm Going To Go Back There Someday," Gonzo's song which I had just quoted.

Needless to say, I have always felt a deep, deep connection to the Muppets.  When Jim Henson died, I was devastated, but never more so than the TV special several years later where the Muppets were looking for Kermit.  In the last moments of that special, he entered and spoke for the first time without Jim Henson's voice and i bawled like a baby.

Tonight sitting in the theatre watching "The Muppets" I was very glad that i had extra napkins, because I relied on them frequently:  When Kermits photo wall had a picture of him in Jim's arms;  when the cast started backing up Kermit and Piggy on an ensemble version of "Rainbow Connection,"  and just about a dozen other times.

I AM the target audience for "The Muppets."  The running theme of this movie involves trying to recapture the magic that the gang used to have.   In some subtle way, they're saying "Back in the 70's, we knew what we were doing.  Since Jim died, we've been floundering.  We sold ourselves to some German company, and they sold us to Disney, and neither of them had figured out what made us so special back in the days of The Muppet Show."  And they'd be right.  But I can tell you what made them so special:

The Muppets have ALWAYS referenced a kinder, simpler time. In the 1970's, we were at war in Vietnam, we were in the middle of a crumbling recession, national pride was in the toilet, our government was floundering. There's a great joke where Kermit pulls out his rolodex and tries to call President Carter.  Well, the Muppet Show was always vaudeville, in the 1970's a throwback to the 20's, today a throwback to the colorful halcyon days of the 1970's.  We've let things get too serious again.  We've forgotten that when we all work together, we can accomplish miracles.  When I ran for Empress, I used the platform of "Community, Camp and Collaboration."  What are the Muppets if not a shining beacon of all three of those concepts?

Let's learn from new muppet Walter (who can be a manly  muppet, while his brother can be a muppetish man).  We can accomplish amazing things if we just try.  Let's learn from Kermit and Piggy, who look at each other like Amanda and Elyot in Private Lives and realize that while they may occasionally make each other miserable, they have a love that can survive ages.  Let's look at Gonzo, who although he is a rich and famous plumber, still wears The Great Gonzo's jumpsuit under his pinstripes.  Let's learn from Scooter, who within a beat changes from "I don't go onstage!" to the host of the Muppet Telethon.  And let's learn from the producers of "The Muppets," who although they kept Rowlf (as the true alter-ego of Jim Henson) silent for years, brought him back as if to say, "Jim's spirit, his laugh-at-ourselves-first perspective and his sense that we ALL fit in, even as we are all individuals" was missing, but it's back.

I'm still emotional from having seen this movie, and that may be silly.  But it's making me reconnect with a more colorful time when we all worked together, when we all problem-solved our way out of crisis, and when we all put on rose-colored glasses, not because we were naive, but because the world was a little bit prettier that way.

I AM the target audience for "The Muppets"...but so are you.  And so are we all. 
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