This Memorial Day, I struggle to remember the past month
So, in the last few weeks, I had two blockbuster cultural events. One was going with Eric to see a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar featuring Ted Neeley, the crazy screaming Christ from the film, which was, in my opinion, the pinnacle of 1970's cinema. Of course, the big draw being the hope that he would scream a whole lot as in the film. The fact he's rather old and plump made the prospect of him screaming like a crazy bitch all the more exciting. But in the first few songs, he curiously backed away from screaming, which caused us to worry--perhaps after so many years of screaming like a crazy bitch, he had so lacerated his vocal cords that it was no longer possible. I thought I sensed the same blend of concern, sorrow, and disappointment tingling through the rest of the crowd. But then, a few songs in, the Holy Spirit descended upon him and he began letting rip with the crazy, shrill screeching once more, and everyone burst into ecstatic applause and screaming immediately, proving to me again that I really am mostly on the same page as my fellow Twin Citians, and not just projecting my bizarre personal disorders upon them.
We also got to see Dolly Parton perform on the University of Minnesota campus, which was awesome even before the show started, as it was sort of like an Upper Midwest Mardi Gras. Everyone was so excited and intoxicated and costumed for the blessed event, the best being this very tall, stout Dollyfied drag queen who ended up standing in the semi-mosh pit at the front of the theater throughout the show, which was so comprehensive as to have an intermission. It would of course be futile to attempt to describe the awesomeness of being in the same building as Dolly Parton in words, but suffice it to say it was even awesomer than you would imagine. Not only is her voice as perfect as ever, she also spent a lot of time telling us little stories or musings, and I didn't know just how many instruments she can play. Over the course of the show, she operated a piano, a guitar, a banjo, a harmonica, a fiddle, and a dulcimer, all encrusted with white rhinestones. She saved "9 to 5" for next-to-last, producing one of the most exciting explosions of mass rocking-out I've seen in quite a while. It was kind of like the scene in "Sound of Music" where the dude is singing "Edelweiss" and everyone proudly stands up to sing their forbidden national anthem, crossed with the culmination of "Captain EO" where Michael Jackson is shooting people with lasers that make them leap and cartwheel and breakdance, except that it was more instantaneous, everyone springing up screaming immediately to begin leaping and flailing their fists around in the air. Of course, she closed with "I Will Always Love You." While this is always a damn fine song, it was just transcendent hearing it from Dolly's living mouth, surrounded by a crowd of angel-hearted Minnesotans. Looking around it was just beautiful, for as we were discussing with these two elderly lesbians at the bus stop afterwards, there was this amazing generational range of people there, united in Dollyphilia. Of course, there was an even more intense concentration of gayness than one already finds in any building in Minneapolis, but there were some straight people, too, and old people, and chubby moms with their teenage kids, and whatever the hell people like me are, and everything in between, all of us so happy and maudlin together in a big dark cavern together.
So, moving right along, I also went on an absurdly brief jaunt to California to see our friends Natalie and Joseph get married. It was absurdly brief, and kind of felt like it ended before it even began, but I am very glad I went. Above all, I just knew I had to be there to see them tie the knot, because they're awesome, and even though I only know them through Eric, and see them for a few hours every couple of months when making an absurdly brief whirl through the Golden State, it's always a very special occasion and I think they rule. I hadn't really thought beforehand how groovy it would be to meet their families, too. Since her side is mostly from the angsty world of inland California and his is from the Upper Midwest--rural Wisconsin plus some immigrants to the Twin Cities, it was kind of like a grand summit of my two favorite superpowers. I guess a lot of his relatives hadn't really ever encountered gay people before, but seriously, they were so thoroughly nice and friendly to us, I wouldn't have guessed there was anything out of the ordinary going on. And certainly, once we were well advanced into the drunken dance party portion of the evening, a perfect sort of harmonious communion was established. But the whole day was awesome, the ceremony was in these other lovely friends of theirs' backyard, and even though it was the sultriest day ever, and the dogs next door were barking ferociously through the opening of the ceremony, it was really genuinely beautiful. Weddings are a nice altered state of consciousness anyway, but it is a lot specialer if it feels less like an artificial ritual than a genuine expression of the personalities of the people involved. So, basically, it kicked ass.
We also got to briefly flutter back into Oakland for a few hours, which made me ever so happy, feeling as I always do when I'm back there like an old man who has come to see the beloved homeland he was exiled from just one last time before he dies in peace. I would have liked to see everyone, but again, having basically a few hundred minutes to spend, I think it was better to just concentrate on being with Kat and Nick again rather than trying to sloppily rig up some hurried exchange of small talk with a bunch of other long lost friends in that tiny peephole of time. Besides which, though many of my favorite people in the universe do live in San Francisco, I do always hate having to be in Fran Francisco. Especially when I have a very limited amount of minutes to spend basking in Californiality, it can be frustrating spending a chunk of that time in one of my least favorite, and I would say, least representative, pockets of that noble land. Anyway, that was beautiful, then the next day, after riding back along the Capitol Corridor, we got to spend a bit of time with our god-daughter Emily, who is so adorable and cool. The first time we kicked it, she seemed to be having kind of a rough day, besides which, all brand-new babies are pretty similar. But this time, she was totally in her own awesome baby groove. She likes to kick a lot, and makes these rad baby screeches (somewhat along the lines of the aforementioned Jesus scream), and crawls around rather like a seal. It would seem we are more alike than she would like to believe!
So then it was suddenly time to leave, and I felt way more melancholy than I had expected. I mean, I hadn't really planned, until the last possible second, to go anyway, but then I felt great sadness about it being over so fast. It wasn't like going back there from New York, of course, when I felt like I was being released from a dungeon flooded to knee level with cold urine for a short parole in a sunlit meadow of tulips and poignantly cooing doves, before being promptly dragged back into the dungeon. I was going from one place I loved to another, but it was still sad, mainly of course because almost everyone I ever knew is back there. I guess now it's more like being a ghost who can only descend from heaven to spy on a few loved ones on Earth for a few minutes during every total eclipse of the moon. Being poor, transcontinental travel has never been that easy a feat, but with it getting even more difficult and expensive, as modernity kind of crumbles around us, such chasms just feel more vast and impossible. I just wish, even more than before, that Minnesota and California could just be right next to each other. It would be most convenient if Minnesota could swap seats with Nevada, but not only would it then have to give up all its lakes and plant life, but the shapes just wouldn't fit together at all. The best would be if it could swap with Oregon and Washington. I mean, no offense to the Pacific Northwest, they just don't have the soul that CA and MN got going on. Some compromises would be necessary: I would be willing to have Idaho grow a little protuberance on its left flank, and WA and OR might have to be shrunk slightly, with their Eastern portions submerged in Lake Superior and Wisconsin, but I don't think anyone would mind that so much. So, yeah, that's my plan, and I'll get right to work on that.
Since any hope of brevity is lost, it is worth noting that I passed through Salt Lake City in the course of my epic voyage. I was apprehensive about this. For one thing, I assumed the airport would be especially unhospitable to smokers, given the state religion's theological objection to tobacco. But not only were there plenty of smoking lounges--they weren't even like the state-of-the-art smoking areas in Denver, they were just random rooms by the gates with no doors, not much ventilation, and lots of ashtrays. Nice. And I must say, that is one of the most fascinating looking patches of geography. The lake and abutting desert totally look like Jupiter or something--the lake's got all these little islands and veins of dinosaur salt between patches of lake of varying shades of blue and green, and this one weird trapezoidal stretch of bright burgundy water. It's all the weirder since there's this sudden cutoff between the Jupiter side, and then this (again) very Sound of Musicky scene of lush green mountains with lush green valleys. So weird. I would never want to live in Utah, but I wouldn't mind hovering over it a lot.
I was half-excited and half-scared, because I really thought it quite likely the plane would crash on take-off or landing. There seemed a perverse logic to me dying in Utah. But I did, of course, have the competing fantasy, that I would crash, ideally in the very center of the Lake, and then survive and swim across it to one of the alien shores. I thought that would be a mysterious metaphysical victory over Mormonism, imagining myself emerging triumphantly from that weird-ass brine to demand a lifetime of free round-trip tickets between MSP and LAX. Take that, Joseph Smith! In your comically whiskered face, Brigham Young!
We also got to see Dolly Parton perform on the University of Minnesota campus, which was awesome even before the show started, as it was sort of like an Upper Midwest Mardi Gras. Everyone was so excited and intoxicated and costumed for the blessed event, the best being this very tall, stout Dollyfied drag queen who ended up standing in the semi-mosh pit at the front of the theater throughout the show, which was so comprehensive as to have an intermission. It would of course be futile to attempt to describe the awesomeness of being in the same building as Dolly Parton in words, but suffice it to say it was even awesomer than you would imagine. Not only is her voice as perfect as ever, she also spent a lot of time telling us little stories or musings, and I didn't know just how many instruments she can play. Over the course of the show, she operated a piano, a guitar, a banjo, a harmonica, a fiddle, and a dulcimer, all encrusted with white rhinestones. She saved "9 to 5" for next-to-last, producing one of the most exciting explosions of mass rocking-out I've seen in quite a while. It was kind of like the scene in "Sound of Music" where the dude is singing "Edelweiss" and everyone proudly stands up to sing their forbidden national anthem, crossed with the culmination of "Captain EO" where Michael Jackson is shooting people with lasers that make them leap and cartwheel and breakdance, except that it was more instantaneous, everyone springing up screaming immediately to begin leaping and flailing their fists around in the air. Of course, she closed with "I Will Always Love You." While this is always a damn fine song, it was just transcendent hearing it from Dolly's living mouth, surrounded by a crowd of angel-hearted Minnesotans. Looking around it was just beautiful, for as we were discussing with these two elderly lesbians at the bus stop afterwards, there was this amazing generational range of people there, united in Dollyphilia. Of course, there was an even more intense concentration of gayness than one already finds in any building in Minneapolis, but there were some straight people, too, and old people, and chubby moms with their teenage kids, and whatever the hell people like me are, and everything in between, all of us so happy and maudlin together in a big dark cavern together.
So, moving right along, I also went on an absurdly brief jaunt to California to see our friends Natalie and Joseph get married. It was absurdly brief, and kind of felt like it ended before it even began, but I am very glad I went. Above all, I just knew I had to be there to see them tie the knot, because they're awesome, and even though I only know them through Eric, and see them for a few hours every couple of months when making an absurdly brief whirl through the Golden State, it's always a very special occasion and I think they rule. I hadn't really thought beforehand how groovy it would be to meet their families, too. Since her side is mostly from the angsty world of inland California and his is from the Upper Midwest--rural Wisconsin plus some immigrants to the Twin Cities, it was kind of like a grand summit of my two favorite superpowers. I guess a lot of his relatives hadn't really ever encountered gay people before, but seriously, they were so thoroughly nice and friendly to us, I wouldn't have guessed there was anything out of the ordinary going on. And certainly, once we were well advanced into the drunken dance party portion of the evening, a perfect sort of harmonious communion was established. But the whole day was awesome, the ceremony was in these other lovely friends of theirs' backyard, and even though it was the sultriest day ever, and the dogs next door were barking ferociously through the opening of the ceremony, it was really genuinely beautiful. Weddings are a nice altered state of consciousness anyway, but it is a lot specialer if it feels less like an artificial ritual than a genuine expression of the personalities of the people involved. So, basically, it kicked ass.
We also got to briefly flutter back into Oakland for a few hours, which made me ever so happy, feeling as I always do when I'm back there like an old man who has come to see the beloved homeland he was exiled from just one last time before he dies in peace. I would have liked to see everyone, but again, having basically a few hundred minutes to spend, I think it was better to just concentrate on being with Kat and Nick again rather than trying to sloppily rig up some hurried exchange of small talk with a bunch of other long lost friends in that tiny peephole of time. Besides which, though many of my favorite people in the universe do live in San Francisco, I do always hate having to be in Fran Francisco. Especially when I have a very limited amount of minutes to spend basking in Californiality, it can be frustrating spending a chunk of that time in one of my least favorite, and I would say, least representative, pockets of that noble land. Anyway, that was beautiful, then the next day, after riding back along the Capitol Corridor, we got to spend a bit of time with our god-daughter Emily, who is so adorable and cool. The first time we kicked it, she seemed to be having kind of a rough day, besides which, all brand-new babies are pretty similar. But this time, she was totally in her own awesome baby groove. She likes to kick a lot, and makes these rad baby screeches (somewhat along the lines of the aforementioned Jesus scream), and crawls around rather like a seal. It would seem we are more alike than she would like to believe!
So then it was suddenly time to leave, and I felt way more melancholy than I had expected. I mean, I hadn't really planned, until the last possible second, to go anyway, but then I felt great sadness about it being over so fast. It wasn't like going back there from New York, of course, when I felt like I was being released from a dungeon flooded to knee level with cold urine for a short parole in a sunlit meadow of tulips and poignantly cooing doves, before being promptly dragged back into the dungeon. I was going from one place I loved to another, but it was still sad, mainly of course because almost everyone I ever knew is back there. I guess now it's more like being a ghost who can only descend from heaven to spy on a few loved ones on Earth for a few minutes during every total eclipse of the moon. Being poor, transcontinental travel has never been that easy a feat, but with it getting even more difficult and expensive, as modernity kind of crumbles around us, such chasms just feel more vast and impossible. I just wish, even more than before, that Minnesota and California could just be right next to each other. It would be most convenient if Minnesota could swap seats with Nevada, but not only would it then have to give up all its lakes and plant life, but the shapes just wouldn't fit together at all. The best would be if it could swap with Oregon and Washington. I mean, no offense to the Pacific Northwest, they just don't have the soul that CA and MN got going on. Some compromises would be necessary: I would be willing to have Idaho grow a little protuberance on its left flank, and WA and OR might have to be shrunk slightly, with their Eastern portions submerged in Lake Superior and Wisconsin, but I don't think anyone would mind that so much. So, yeah, that's my plan, and I'll get right to work on that.
Since any hope of brevity is lost, it is worth noting that I passed through Salt Lake City in the course of my epic voyage. I was apprehensive about this. For one thing, I assumed the airport would be especially unhospitable to smokers, given the state religion's theological objection to tobacco. But not only were there plenty of smoking lounges--they weren't even like the state-of-the-art smoking areas in Denver, they were just random rooms by the gates with no doors, not much ventilation, and lots of ashtrays. Nice. And I must say, that is one of the most fascinating looking patches of geography. The lake and abutting desert totally look like Jupiter or something--the lake's got all these little islands and veins of dinosaur salt between patches of lake of varying shades of blue and green, and this one weird trapezoidal stretch of bright burgundy water. It's all the weirder since there's this sudden cutoff between the Jupiter side, and then this (again) very Sound of Musicky scene of lush green mountains with lush green valleys. So weird. I would never want to live in Utah, but I wouldn't mind hovering over it a lot.
I was half-excited and half-scared, because I really thought it quite likely the plane would crash on take-off or landing. There seemed a perverse logic to me dying in Utah. But I did, of course, have the competing fantasy, that I would crash, ideally in the very center of the Lake, and then survive and swim across it to one of the alien shores. I thought that would be a mysterious metaphysical victory over Mormonism, imagining myself emerging triumphantly from that weird-ass brine to demand a lifetime of free round-trip tickets between MSP and LAX. Take that, Joseph Smith! In your comically whiskered face, Brigham Young!