Last night I had a dream that I was having trouble falling asleep. It was very frustrating. More frustrating was the reason why I was having trouble... because my bed was full of dead birds. In high school I had recurring dreams that i was wearing a fanny pack (shut up) full of dead birds and I didn't want anybody to know.
Ahem...
"To dream of dead or dying birds, foretells a period of coming
disappointments. You will find yourself worrying over problems that are
constantly on your mind."
Well, that sounds bad. I hope my dreams are telling me something about my personal life and not about MilkMilkLemonade. I'd much rather have a shitty personal life than shitty art.
Anyway, I woke up this morning wondering if they still made L'eggs. I really hope they do.
Many thanks to reader Meg, who pointed me in the direction of this amazing Mary Hartman, Mary Hartmanparody a mid 70's episode The Carol Burnett Show. God, I wish I were alive in the 70's.
I'm sorry, but I can't stop obsessing about this. Attempts to find bootlegs have been fruitless. I suppose I could go to the Museum of Television & Radio, but there's 310 episodes to watch. Maybe I could watch three or four episodes a week? For a hundred weeks?
Sigh. I wish there were shows this good on the air now.
Speaking of housewives, NeNe's hair looks good this season.
If he were standing in front of me I would punch him in his greasy face.
I'm hard pressed to think of a human being I dislike more than Ron Prentice, the uber bigot who founded Protect Marriage dot com and acted as pied piper to the homophobic rats of California. He is a cruel, truly tar hearted, grinch of a man who cares nothing for California families and wouldn't know Christ if he took a dump on his lawn.
After prop 8 I used to write him letters and then post them on this blog. It was meant to be my own individual protest. I stopped doing it after a while because it hurt so much. It hurt really badly to dwell in the discrimination against me and my family in the country that I love. I'd like to think that most of the people who vote against equality, in California or elsewhere, do so out of ignorance. After all, it's hard to vote against equal rights for people that you actually know.
But then again, I have very intimate friends and even family that seem to blithely ignore that The Boyfriend and I face hideous bigotry on a near daily basis. Maybe that's because we don't openly communicate with our loved ones when something is hurtful? I honestly don't think that most straight people understand that I never, not once, felt safe as a child- that even in my own home I felt like I was in danger. I get really, really angry sometimes when my very close straight friends and family won't join me in marches or other activism. But then they'll invite me to their wedding. What do we have to do to make them understand? How much longer do we have to beg, not only for simple equality issues like marriage, but for the simplest things they take for granted, like safety?
Ron Prentice is beyond understanding. I'm an atheist, but he and his cronies are the closest things I can imagine to true evil.
Note to the fancy gays who think we ought to wait politely until 2012 before fighting this: NO.
I've been hard at work rewriting MilkMilkLemonade, my play inspired by vintage PBS children's programming, vintage children's book illustrations, PETA videos, gay identity politics, and recurring nightmares from my boyhood.
I've been unearthing a lot of old kids stuff, some familiar, some not, and I came across The Pogles' Wood, a BBC program from the mid 1960's. (I had actually been looking for Once Upon a Hamster.) The Pogles' Wood concerned a family of country folk who live in a tree. That's one big fucking tree. Or some small country folk.
This particular episode, "King of the Faeries", was deemed too frightening for children:
And I don't care. I love these meme's and I love Mad Men (Peggy Olsen is my soul sister.) Also, it allowed my to live out my fantasy life where everything is in shades of purple and blue.
Following up on my post about You Can't Do That On Television and its resident hunk, Alisdair, I decided to follow-up on three of my other early gay crushes.
The word hunk is kind of gross and embarrassing and therefore useful. I'm taking it back. Everybody start using the word "hunk" again! It reminds me of Chippendales.
Chris Young
Chris was the star of The Great Outdoors, The Book of Love, and PCU.. I did some research and apparently now he's married with kids and owns his own company. Good on him. He also produced some music videos for Kelly Clarkson's 2006 tour and this masterpiece, Tank Boys, which is too awesome not to rule!
Scott Coffey
God, how I swooned for Scott in Satisfaction. He's got those adorable puppy dog eyes! Now he's best friends with Naomi Watts (they met on one of my teenage favorites, Tank Girl.) Scott lives in Brooklyn (just like me!) and is gay with his long time partner (just like me!) He's up to all sorts of awesome things. His boyfriend better watch his back, because if I get the opportunity to push him down a flight of stairs I'm taking it.
Maxwell Caulfield
The go go boy who won a contest and starred in the greatest movie musical of all-time (except for Xanadu and The Apple) Grease 2. He was also Rex Manning in Empire Records. Also, there used to be amazing naked fan drawings of him online, but I can't find them anymore.
Did you know that in addition to writing and directing plays I occasionally act? It's true. Just last week I was in a short film entitled The Proposal, written by and starring Mike Lavoie and directed by Keith Boynton, as part of their 12 Films. 12 Weeks Project.
The movie is darling and looks great. I am horrible though. I look puffy and pale and I sound like a gay frog. I should only ever be cast as:
-a mean gay waiter -a mean gay receptionist -a mean gay art gallerist -a mean gay personal assistant -a mean gay flight attendant
... and so on.
I was hyper aware of how gay I seemed during the shoot and was trying to butch it up. Oh well!Everybody else is fantastic and the cinematography is quite beautiful for such a low budget film.
P.S. This is the first and last time you will ever see me in cargo shorts or a baseball cap. Breathe it in.
I stumbled across this pearl while walking down Greenwich Street on my lunch break today. I think it might be among my favorite pieces of graffiti art I've seen.
My childhood just got smashed into itty bitty pieces.
An internet friend pointed out that Les Lye, most famous as the only adult man on You Can't Do That On Television, has passed away. A quick IMDB search also tells me that Les also did some voice acting: Care Bears, The Raccoons, Teddy Ruxpin. That's quite an impressive career.
Nobody could play a sleazy, untrustworthy adult like Les could, and he played them often on You Can't Do That On Television. I was particularly fond of Barth, the proprietor of Barth's Burgers, whose sketches always ending with "what do you think's in the burgers?"
Bye, Les. You will be missed.
You Can't Do That On Television was my absolute favorite show as a kid, though my parents hated it. The reruns came on Nickelodeon at 5:30, right after Out of Control (a show I remember virtually nothing about except for the title, the fact that Dave Coulier hosted, and a punk girl who talked really fast).
(Here she is. Apparently her name was Diz.)
It was my dream to be a cast member, though I guess I really couldn't have been since I think it was in syndication and also Canadian. I mostly wanted to hang out with Moose and fawn over Alisdair (see below). I also wanted to be on Kids Incorporated, so there you have it.
You Can't Do That On Television was a whip smart, funny kids show and Les was great on it, as was the other adult actor, Abby Hagyard, who played all the adult female parts.
Also, just as a creepy closing that now makes me feel like a pedophile, my first crush on a boy was on You Can't Do That On Television's Alisdair Gillis, a total canadian fox.
But whatever. He's actulally older than me, so there...
There's only one episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman left on the box set and now I want to die. I don't know if I can watch it, because then it'll all be over. Damn you, Sony! What have you done this to me? I demand the other 310 episodes!
I know I tend to obsess over things, but I didn't expect to care about Mary and the people of Fernwood so much. And I'll never get to see some of the classic moments (except of youtube, but still... no context!) like the coach drowning to death in a bowl of chickens soup after taking too many Seconol with whiskey. I'll never see Martin Mull's character (who hasn't even appeared yet) die by impalement on an aluminum Christmas tree.
Also, in the episode I just watched, Loretta (played brilliantly by Mary Kay Place, who I've always loved anyway) seems to be paralyzed after crashing into a station wagon full of nuns. But she was on her way to nashville to become a huge country star! No!
I'm obsessed with getting Mary Kay Place's album now. Yes, that's right. She released an album as her character, Loretta Haggers. From Wikipedia:
"Mary Kay Place was nominated for a Grammy Award for the album Tonite! At the Capri Lounge, Loretta Haggers on which she sang as her MH2 character, Loretta Haggers. The album featured cameo appearances by Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, and one of its songs, "Baby Boy", climbed to the Top 60 on Billboard's Pop Charts, and #3 on the country charts, in 1976. Place also won an Emmy Award
for her performance on the show. The show's writers realized Loretta
Haggers' newfound fame made it harder to keep her character in
Fernwood, so they devised a storyline wherein the country and western
star makes an anti-semitic, career-shattering remark on the Dinah Shore talk show."
That anti-semitic comment was apparently something along the lines of, "My agent is so nice. It's hard to believe his people killed our lord!" Amazing.
Here is the cover:
I did manage to find Mary Hartman's nervous breakdown on youtube. In case you didn't read the earlier entry, legendary television producer Norman Lear once stated that Louise Lasser gave the best performance in television history on the season finale of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. He was talking about this nervous breakdown, which happens on national television when Mary is asked to appear on a talk show and discuss being a typical housewife. It's devastatingly sad and surreal, and I totally agree with Norman Lear now:
If you don't have 11 minutes, at least watch this 30 second video of Mary saying her daughter's name, "Heather", over and over again. It's pretty amazing too.
I have to try my hand at writing a serial. I've just got to.
