1970s

Something that I have been working on, with some small success: living in the moment with a clear head & a clean heart (or possibly in reverse). On occasion I become nostalgic for the 1970s. This photo brings the 1970s back to me, & I become heartsick for the past.

Drive

Somehow I feel the failure, partly because there is a sting of truth in it, & partly because I tend toward anthropomorphism, grieving for the loss of life for a plant, believing that electronic equipment hates me, & knowing that I failed in my love for an automobile.

I have always held that Happiness is not a state of being, but rather Happiness is in the moments. For a few tiny moments in my considerable life, the stars aligned, my luck stuck, & all the points came together & everything worked. That was when I experienced an extended era of ecstatic enchantment. The blessed bliss brought prosperity, pleasure & possibilities for a life well lived.

The early 1970s: goofy, original good looks that only the young can posses because they don’t understand that it will all be gone someday. I could do nothing wrong. It all came easy to me: meaty roles in the theatre, meaty men in my bed, attention, admiration, humor, hilarity & hopefulness. Boston, LA & NYC.

Seattle 1982- 1989: Hot boyfriend, hot apartment, hot buzz about my acting on stage & in commercials, films, & TV. My image is on the side of buses, on the back page of the newspaper, on billboards, & I am mentioned in the press. We can rarely go a day without my being recognized & commented on by strangers & feted by friends. The hot boyfriend considers that it may not be all that good for me, but he remains a fan, attending all of my opening nights. I gym daily. I have single digit body fat. Sexual performance is never an issue. Never a mention that I might party too much.

Portland 2002-2006: comfortable, curious, & cultivated. We own our own home for the first time. Our Own Home. The boyfriend becomes my husband. We have respectable employment. The Husband is thin, tan, talented, sleek & sexy. He wears beautiful clothing at work & no clothing at the beach. We have hundreds in checking & thousands in savings. We vacation in NYC, seeing Broadway shows & shopping. We weekend in Palm Springs, imbibing & inhaling poolside.

For a couple of weeks, I had been eyeing a bronze Volkswagen station wagon at a car lot on the way to the gym. On one of those happy days, I walked into the lot & drove out in that station wagon. After decades of driving clunkers, I had a real automobile for the first time & it felt fine.

In my beautiful new car, handsome silver fox husband at the wheel, singing along to Tegan & Sara’s Walking With A Ghost & Dave Matthew’s American Baby from my summer mix, driving along a rustic rural road on Sauvie Island on a perfect August morning, headed to the nude beach with a book, blanket, & a thermos of vodka lemonade, having already dropped a half a hit of E… I was experiencing perfectly, profoundly happiness.

2011: barely1 ½ incomes, bills, hospital visits, prescriptions, old dog, crushing depression, strained relationships, strained budget, strained bank accounts. Yesterday, it was agreed that the Volkswagen would go. I calculated that we would save us $8000 a year by not paying car payments, insurance, gasoline, & maintenance. We will sock it away & someday purchase an old pick-up truck so we can go to Lowes, the salvage shops & nurseries. We will join ZipCar for $75 a month for 15 hours of driving (enough for the Husband to deal with clients). They pay the insurance & the fuel. ZipCar has a car parked just at the end of our block.

We will not be able to be able to be spontaneous. If the Husband forgets an ingredient in tonight’s dinner, it will require a trip to the supermarket 10 blocks away.

I have that tingle of tumult for trying something strange & unaccustomed. We will walk when willed. Bicycles are in order. I don’t need a lot: house, garden, dogs, books, music, local watering spots. Using the ZipCar & leaving the neighborhood will be our big adventure.

Your host, a decade ago, with his 1970 Ford Pickup Truck

In Seattle, I a drove a red 1970 Ford pickup truck & the Husband got around in his yellow 1960 Ford pickup. It seemed too daunting to get them both to Portland when we moved. The Husband sold his truck & I traded with my father, my pickup for a junker. I always mourned the letting go of those 2 trucks. Now with the giving up of the station wagon, I feel remorse. Why does this place I find myself in make me maudlin & make me cry? It is just an automobile; they come & they go. It always ran perfectly, it never gave me any trouble & the bronze Volkswagen Station Wagon came into my life at a point when my existence was uncommonly, uncharacteristically upbeat, & dare I say, for a moment… happy.

This photo of Junior has nothing to do with the post, except that loving him makes me happy.

A gentle reminder that the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Born On This Day- February 27th... Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky

She came into my focus as my mother sat me down at 5 years of age & explained the entire Elizabeth Taylor + Eddie Fisher – Debbie Reynolds = scandal equation. I got it. She remains my mother’s favorite star; they are the same age & were born in the same month. She is a favorite of mine & I think she is the last of the truly great Hollywood Royalty, & very possibly the most beautiful woman of all time. I love her deeply.

Taylor has been a trusted friend to the gay community, & we have loved her right back. She was very close friends & a confidant of gay men: Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Noel Coward, James Dean & most famously to Montgomery Clift. Were there ever any 2 actors at the apex of their beauty, more stunning than Taylor & Clift kissing in A Place In The Sun?



Elizabeth Taylor is a conundrum: truly classy, but perfectly campy, deeply kind, but shamelessly embarrassing, perennially lonely, & serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest appearances on soap operas… Elizabeth Taylor & I got through the 1970s together. She gave audacious performances in film adaptations of “gay” plays as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer & Cat On A Hot Tim Roof, & Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I met her once, at the 50th Anniversary of MGM Ball. I was thrillingly treated to a 7 minute conversation. She amazingly asked about me. I explained that I was a Theatre major at Loyola Marymount University & Taylor quizzed me on my curriculum & my stage roles. I told her was a huge fan of her work. She touched my arm & looked at me with the famous violet eyes & murmured: "I always thought that I was a fine actress, but I spent a lifetime feeling that I was held back because I have such a terrible speaking voice. The coaches at MGM attempted to help me & I did improve, but I will never shake the fact the dreadful small voice was what stopped me from being truly great..." She was only in her early 40s, wearing a beautiful canary yellow mini-dress with yellow flowers in her hair. She was smoking a cigarette with a holder. She was faultlessly beautiful. I nearly fainted.

I appreciate that, like me, she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of her 8 tumultuous marriages & the public denunciation by the Vatican as a home wrecker. I love her for her dramatic tracheotomy scar, of which she was never ashamed. I appreciate her love affair with jewelry that inspired a book simply titled My Love Affair with Jewelry… it looks handsome on the shelf with my own volume- My Love Affair with Whiskey. I admire her unswerving devotion to her friends, to gay people, & for gay activism & attention to fund raising for HIV/AIDS. My feelings are simpatico with Elizabeth Taylor. My mother loves us both, we have both lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, jokes about weight gain, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation.


On Oscar day today, the Oscar winning actress turns 78  & she is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for for treatment of congestive heart failure. I send her love & healing white light. A world without Elizabeth Taylor will not be a good place.

I Love L.A.

Today marks the 229th birthday of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of the river of Porziuncola). Los Angeles & I have history. My father grew up in the Silverlake neighborhood, which at the time was quite nice, yet quite bohemian. When I lived in the city in the early 1970s, the neighborhood had deteriorated, but then the gays moved in & fixed things up as they do in most metropoltan areas & now it is inhabited by an eclectic community of hipsters, the creative class &  of course... lots of gays.

I went to college in L.A. at Loyola Marymount University. I lived in Playa del Rey on the strand. My apartment had sliders that opened on to white sand & the Pacific Ocean, with a view of Catalina on a clear day. My Los Angeles life, hardly ever involved L.A.. My universe was very beach & stretched from Redono Beach to Malibu. I frequented spots in Venice & Santa Monica. My friends & I would go into Westwood or Hollywood for movies & plays, but for the most part it was beach.

Loyola Marymount University... my alma mater.

Your Host, the Post Apocalyptic Bohemian circa 1974 with one of my dearest friends- Carolyn. The Afro was real, but tamed down in the 2nd photo when I was appearing in Private Lives. Noel Coward & Afros just did not work.

Recent archaeological studies show there was a culture in Los Angeles in 8,000 B.C. Mostly acting hopefuls trying to be seen by casting directors for the prehistoric version of pilot season. There was much disappointment & a certain amount of violence when it was revealed that film was 27 centuries away.


By 3,000 B.C. Los Angeles was occupied by the Hokan-speaking people of the Milling Stone Period who could sing, dance, act & gather wild seeds. By the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the 18th century, there were 250,000 to 300,000 people in LA., all trying to get their SAG cards.


Los Angeles is the 2nd largest city in the USA & has an area of more that 600 square miles. The urban area of Los Angeles extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of over 18 million. It is the 14th largest urban area in the world. I love the city & I have watched the renaissance of areas that have turned around that I would never have dreamed possible: Hollywood, Downtown, & Silverlake, Glendale, & Venice.



Happy Birthday to the City of Angels. I will always love you: Tommy's Burgers, Hollywood, The Capitol Record Building, Santa Monica, Laurel Canyon, Griffith Park, Hollywood, Randy's Donuts, Rodeo Drive, Nate N' Als, Canter's, La Brea Tar Pits, The Getty, Venice Beach Boardwalk, Union Station, Watts Towers, Chateau Marmont,  the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel,  El Portal Theatre,  Palos Verdes, Swimming Pools, Movie Stars.