I have my Summer Olympics Tivo set for Dara Torres. No pressure. I am gay for Dara. I know she wants me. The Natatorium is an indoor venue isn’t it? All those new billion dollar Chinese sports complexes look like gossamer, erector sets in the hands of young methed architects. I do not want my slightly asthmatic, darling Dara sucking in bad air in her freestyle sprints , or her goggles getting all smogged up. Unless I do it.
Gray skies are gonna clear up. Not really. No matter how many odd/even car use days the Chinese government imposes or how many southern factories they shut down, they cannot do anything about the sandy particulate blowing in from the fourth largest dessert, the Gobi. Get out those old Gobi boots. It is deep.
Put on a happy face. George has left the country to attend the Summer Olympics; it is #29 on his Bucket List. We are told he is attending just as a spectator. How else would he attend? As a competitor? Although who would not want to see someone broadside him in a BMX open field event? Can’t wait to see him high-fiving President Hu Jintao in the stands – “Heckuva job, Hooey.” I am already sick of Bob Costas.
While Barack Obama was on his Olympian tour, and the crowds were going wild because he was not Bush, John McScary hired some old Rovians for his Presidential “Embrace Your Extinction” Tour. Within days the Straight Talk Express became the “I Know You Are, But What Am I?” Digress. They dragged out Paris Hilton, Britney Spears. In addition to accusing Obama of personally running up gas prices and losing the war, they accused Obama of being black and running for president. So far they have stopped short of calling him an uppity Negro who does not know his place. So far.
While the Bread and Circus Product Placement Olympi-ad mercifully distracts some from crashing banks, anthrax cover-ups and sub-penis envy, I am doing last minute lobbying of OOC for larger time clock numbers at the pool for my myopic 41 year old naiad shero. Let the Games begin.

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Happy Ides of July!
It’s a beautiful day here in Ptown and we were out at Herring Cove and some of the gals were in their beach chairs. It was low tide. We were talking, just idly letting the sand sift through our fingers. Well, one thing led to another and before you know it, we were all wildcatting for oil. Anyone can do it now, because George “the pusher” Bush issued an executive order lifting the ban on offshore drilling. He treats SUVs like SVUs.
Pretty soon everybody was staking claims and getting pretty mean. Especially the babes from Texas. It’s in their blood. There will be blood. They could care less about piping plover nesting grounds. They ripped down our one and only windpower windmill, and started using the blades for deep digging and swatting other prospectors away. I don’t know if they’ll get their rigs up before Rosie and Kelli’s R Family Love Boat gets to town on Thursday, but I sure hope the wildcatters have the decency to hang some lanterns to alert boats. I think it’s a law of the sea. But the land, like Lucy, is lawless.
Ptown is a sanctuary city. We grant asylum to anyone who jumps ship and wants to stay. But I think the RFamily Barge should worry about stowaways. Like me. Don’t get me wrong, everything is going great this summer. After all, it’s Bear Week here, not Bear Stearns Week. But after the incendiary and insulting “satiric” New Yorker cover with Michelle and Barack Obama, Bush’s incoherent press conference, CA bank failures, and John McBush supposedly rising in the polls, I might have to get on my Navy Seal drag, hop a tender and stowaway with Captains Rosie and Kelli.
And then leave my cell phone on and mess with the ship’s navigation system and head due south. Brazil, here we come!

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Trifecta news day – the man who played Bozo the Clown died; a transgendered man in Oregon gave birth to a baby girl; Jesse Helms died of “natural causes” in North Carolina at the age of 86.
The man who told his friend Orrin Hatch that he was going to sing Dixie to Carol Moseley Braun until she cried, who delivered his state to a lagging Ronald Reagan in the Republican primary, who loved all things Pinochet, who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, who was a vile and constant homophobe has finally died.
In 1984, I went to Raleigh-Durham to perform at a benefit to raise funds to help defeat Helms in his third Senate re-election bid. Liz Snow, an old friend from Syracuse, New York, who worked at Ladyslipper Records, picked me up at the airport and briefed me on Helms sleaze campaign stories as we drove to the hall.
As we clunked along in Liz’s mini-truck, in the middle of a particularly horrific race-baiting story, at the last second we saw what we both thought was a huge log across the road. A second before we hit it, we saw that it was a huge snake. Liz gunned it and screamed, “It’s Jesse Helms!” We flew through the air like a Dukes of Hazzard car chase scene. Helms was a snake, a huge speed bump to progressives in the South and the nation. Good-bye, Jesse Helms. Let’s hear it for natural causes.
Happy Independence Day!

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Happy Summer Solstice!! And Merry Christmas while I’m at it because that’s how fast tempus is fugiting.
It’s Day #14 of my Hillary withdrawal. For at least seventeen months, I saw her every day, knew where she was going, who she was having dinner with – now nothing. It feels like a sad, if amicable, breakup. Now we have to start seeing other people. Sigh.
Perhaps the biggest shock upon coming out of the Democratic primary bubble is to realize that I had been lulled into thinking that everybody was now trying to work in an adult, democratic, progressive, civic manner. Silly me.
Out in the unreal world of Bushland, George and John McBush, his mini-me, want to drill their bits into ever inch of Mother Earth. They are squeezing the last little bit of speculative oil out before His Category 43ness leaves. They are back to photo-oping on broken levees. They are ignoring Iraq’s ungrateful but fond wish for us to leave, now that it’s going so well. [‘For whom?’ being the unasked question.] They are spreading manure lies about Barrack HUSSEIN Obama’s religious beliefs. They are going after Michele Obama who is resisting their demands for an extreme makeover.
In short, they got nuthin’ but fear and hate, their two favorite cards.
Happily, I’ve been following a different Haight. Despite the flagrant flaunting and taunting from CA friends, “Sooooo, when are you two getting married?” my gal pal and I recently reconfirmed our own vows not to marry. We do however, vigorously support the freedom of others to marry.
While we don’t have the itch to hitch, we can’t get enough of our friend’s lovely stories of all the weddings in CA. With gas at $4.65 a gallon in LA, I encourage newlyweds to locate their bridal registries at the local gas station.
And na na na na na na, back at you CA – one word: Celtics. And so much for that illusion of grownup behavior.
Our Empirical State is making progress. When Governor David Patterson issued an executive order that NYS must recognize out-of-state marriages, he spoke lovingly of the early influence of his two gay uncles, Stanley and Rodney. Rev. Al Sharpton teased him that he might have unwittingly outed them. Patterson said he was only disappointed that Rosie O’Donnell hadn’t called him. With any luck, Paul Rudnick is already writing a sequel – In and Out, Part II. I’m working on Same Sex in the City.
Happy Summer of Love! What do you want for Christmas, besides a First Lady Obama?

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Clinton Gals and Obama Gals, why can’t we all get along? Let’s take a cue from the gals in Sex and the City.
You might have missed the opening week of SATC because you were consumed with the last installments of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit. I know I was. But it’s hot out. At least go for the air conditioning. And the pleasure of sitting in a theater packed with 85% women and the gay men who love them.
Iron Man. Indiana Jones. The dude flicks of summer’s standard “Women as After-thought Film Festivals” are usually packed with men and a few of the women who love them. No reviewer ever sniffs about that audience.
The preposterism of the ‘stylized violence’ [whatever that means] of those bummer schlockbusters made passersby in Harford, CT fully expect that the hit-and-run victim sprawled before them could get up, dust himself off and go about his day. That’s my theory.
As my SATC date [with whom, coincidentally, I have same-sex in the city] and I surveyed the satisfied, post-Sex women streaming out, in a din of high happy voices, we both thought, “What a missed organizing opportunity!” NOW should have sign-up tables in all multiplex lobbies. LATER should too.
That Fab Four loves each other! More Big Love than Mr. Big. Like sister-wives without the Mormon front-loaded hair or the prairie dresses. Unless of course it was a Frontier FLDS Fashion Week in New York.
For such a relentlessly heterosexist chick flick it was more lesbian than L-Word. And I love that the lesbian who doesn’t play one in this movie or on TV, has the steamiest, most alabaster skinned, and way too brief, sex scene. Can’t wait for the DVD extras.
Yes, they are white and rich. Yes, they marry because they can. Certainly those pre-conditions can smooth the way for friendship. But sometimes they don’t. For Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte it works because they talk. Male critics say endlessly. The friends speak their unspeakables. They forgive each other. They go on. They are there for each other.
Obama and Clinton gals – let’s get it on! And get on with it.

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

This is the first Tuesday after the Democratic primaries and it is blistering hot in New York. For days it had been rainy and cool and then suddenly, perhaps because it’s the last days of school, and god is a harsh school-mistress, the weather broke hot like blazes.
We had been out of town, there was no food in the apartment and we were trying to beat the heat. I was heading to the grocery store. My girlfriend was trying to ride the subway before temperatures on the platform reached Hades levels. It was early. We had been awakened by the sound of our a.c. laboring like a jet engine at the end of a runway.
We stopped for a quick breakfast at our local diner. After eating much too fast, I handed the check and my credit card to the owner at the cash register. He asked, “Do you have to go?” He says it to everyone, eyes twinkling over the half glasses teetering crazily on his nose.
Then for the first time, he noticed my last name on the credit card.
“That woman,” he grumbled, “she is my neighbor up in Chappaqua and she’s not nice.”
“Why? What did she do?”
I was thinking all the cable trucks and secret security details must be a pain in the neighborhood.
“I said hello to her once on the street and she ignored me. She’s no good.”
We had to go.
Already I had read some article with dire advice from other also-rans about how to handle the depression that is to come. My local NOW chapter has told me to send her a letter of thanks for all she’s done. What are they, my mother? Of course, I thank her. I’m just not going to bug her for a few days.
On this hot, ordinary Tuesday morning, I hope Hillary Clinton slept in, put on her bathrobe, padded downstairs for coffee, in her own hair with no makeup, didn’t read any papers or watch any TV and maybe just sat quietly and watched peonies bloom in the back yard.

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Newsflash:
You are not going to believe this! I just got a call from that darling Caroline Kennedy on the Obama v-p search team, and she said they need a 60 year old white woman, last name Clinton. Just not that one. Would I be her stunt double? Kidding.
Hillary can’t win. She can’t even win for losing. The night Obama finally hit his lucky number, she wasn’t gracious enough for some of the prissy Miss Manners of the press. They wanted groveling, sackcloth, ashes, rending of garments, tearing out of hair. Tears, maybe.
No wait, not the tears! She might accidentally win another primary. Jesse Jackson dawdled Michael Dukakis for days. Come on.
The night of the last primaries, she won, but lost. She said she wasn’t ready to concede, you hideous sexist pigs. She didn’t say that last part. Some day I’d love to have a boilermaker, or eight, with her, up at the house in Chappaqua. She’d be doing her hobbies: scrapbooking the campaign, decoupaging war endorsements, gelding Bill and Terry. We’d be talking.
But I’m projecting. Compared to me, she’s the nice Clinton. Bitter? You want bitter? I could give you bitter. But I don’t have time.
As I have said, I am a Democratically fluid adult. I will go to the polls with the candidate we have, not the one I wished to have.
Far be it for me to step on anyone’s smile. Congratulations Barrack Obama! May you wage as brilliant a presidential campaign as your primary campaign.
Beware the pundits. They need their jobs, so they’ve got to make up stories. Set your own timetable as you have with your vice presidential choice. And we all know girls don’t ask boys to dance. Duh.
Do not ride the Straight Talk Express bus. John McCain will say “my friend”. You are not. Karl Rove is the bus driver. You’ve got the money. Do not carpool with McCain. They will make you sit in back.
The pundits have said, so it must be true, that Obama has to win white non-college educated voters. Well then, how about giving them no-strings tuition and sending them to college? But they have to guarantee they stop watching FOX news.
Already I heard one pundit say that if Obama wants to win, he’s going to have to muzzle his wife. Once again, cynicism humps my leg.

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Faster than you can say, “CA Supreme Court overturns ban on gay marriage,” his Extreme Slippery Slopeheadedness, Pope Benedict had an announcement to make. Barely taking the time to translate it from the Latin, in that oddly high voice, the pope restated the Church’s position that only unions between a man and a woman are moral.
In his text, the pope did not mention the CA ruling. He just happened to be addressing family groups in Europe. What are the chances? The CA ruling and the papal announcement – it was a news cycle secular miracle!
In another holy coinky-dink, the same day the Pope condemned gay marriage, another story broke. The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, in an interview titled “The extraterrestrial is my brother”, announced that faith in god did not contradict faith in alien life. As usual, no word on extraterrestrial sisters.
Funes said that one of the themes near and dear to the The Widow Ratzinger’s papacy is the relationship between faith and reason. The Big Bang Theory is the most reasonable theory of the creation of the universe and yet it does not contradict God probably was the guy who pushed down the handle on the explosive box.
Funes is director of the Vatican Observatory which in addition to top-notch research, also has a meteorite collection that is one of the best in the world. Hence that old line, “Hey young fella, want to come up and see my meteorite collection?”
The Church is still smarting from their shoddy treatment of Galileo four hundred years ago. It was no picnic for Galileo either. As an independent astronomer, Galileo had brazenly declared that the sun, not the earth, not even the Vatican, is the center of the universe. Funes said that mistakes were made.
The Catholic Church treats homosexuals as an alien life form, a bivalve of being and doing. You can be gay but you just can’t do anything about it. Even though we are alien, we can’t catch a break. Despite the recent announcement, queers have not been upgraded to the Church’s gay brother or sister status.
The Pope and his faithful boy pals would reason that if Alf were gay, the church would love him, but not if he married Mork. That would be immoral. Alf could marry Mindy. That would be cross-species and a little gross, but definitely still moral.
The Pope still has work to do in his Faith and Science Project. If they want to get faith and science back together, it stands to reason that they could start by fusing gay being and doing back together.

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Four years after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s gay marriage block party got shut down by a very testy legislature, the California Supreme Court lifted the ban on gay marriage statewide. Woo Hoo! Make some noise! Tie strings of tin cans on injustice’s gas guzzling bumper as it lumbers out of town.
Of course some Grumpy Gusses are already throwing rice pudding. Do they have day jobs? They reject the
CA Court’s two bedrock arguments that tradition alone does not justify discrimination and that sexual orientation must be part of the strict scrutiny in equal protection. Be prepared to smell that “choice” chestnut roasted again on the flames of hate.
But before the end of civilization as we know it – and really, is that such a bad thing? – or the anti-gay marriage people get their store-bought signatures certified for another ballot initiative, let’s pop some corks! Hip, hip, bye, bye to hypocrisy!
While our behemoth national cruise ship flounders and stalls, the little tug boats of states are working the harbor, hard-hauling and nudging a national course-correction.
I was just in Columbus, Ohio to do a show the night before the third annual Lobby Days sponsored by a group called Equality Ohio. Three hundred and sixty activists from all over the state, spent money on gas, got child care, and took time off work to converge on the Ohio state capitol to urge their legislators and representatives to pass a Senate and House Bill to end anti-gay discrimination in Housing and Employment.
After Equality Ohio’s well-organized session on the how-tos of lobbying, ordinary Ohioans, proud of their Buckeye home, walked out of the Hyatt function room, across the street to the State House to tell their stories, big and small, of the effect of discrimination on their civic and personal lives. Their laser focus on the job at hand was an inspiration.
Truth to tell, I’ve been bumming a bit through the long sexist, racist slog of the national primaries, so I’m happy to dust off my party hat, put on my pretty party dress and combat boots and whoop it up.
Thanks to the California plaintiffs and to the good citizen lobbyists of Ohio! And to the other forty-eight states where the grind of working for justice is done every day! Go Buckeyes! Go Golden Staters! Lead the way! Woo Hoo!

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments

Enough with the Hillary Deathwatches, the Eight Belles comparisons, the Wednesday morning quarterbacking, the super-annuating, the gloating not gloating, the Wright stuffing, the obliterating, the primary parsing.
Everybody take a breath, sit back, have a lovely European style coffee, and play your old “Come Together” LP. Don’t try to figure out what it means. Toe jam football. Walrus gumboot. So? Chill.
Especially you, John King. You must be exhausted from a late night of poking your ouiiga board, finger painting, expanding/contracting your counties, while the best political team on television was laughing at you behind your back. You made your OCD work for you, now take a rest.
The Jenna One is getting married – because she can – down at the Yearning for Scion Ranch this weekend. Keep Jim Baker busy. The Bush Dynasty is all compounded down in Texas.
It’s Mother’s Day weekend. In honor of Mom, let’s have a primary worry free weekend. Play some hoops. Rest your voice. Sleep in your own bed.
The Swiftboats for McBush are gassing up. Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal is being vetted. John McSupreme Court is loving him some strict constructionists. John McSharraf has his flag pin stuck in his chest. Limbaugh lower now.
Rest up, you two, dear warriors, then come together right now over me.

admin Hilarity Clinton '08 0 Comments