Hawleyblog

Star Trek Movie Fundraiser

My friend Mil has started a fundraiser to benefit Doctors Without Borders that ties in with the new Star Trek movie. Mil is hoping that fans of the TV series and movies—in the forward-looking, egalitarian spirit of the Star Trek universe—will donate to a group that gives medical care to those devastated by war, famine, and disease without regard to nationality or ethnicity. Check out Mil's Star Trek Movie Fundraiser Web site.

Bea Arthur

I'd have to turn in my official Gay Blogger laminated ID card if I didn't write a post about the death of Bea Arthur. I adored The Golden Girls, and Dorothy Zbornak was my favorite character. No one could deliver a zinger like Arthur, who died of cancer at the age of 86. She was also a terrific singer and a huge gay icon. RIP, Bea.

A Delightful Dinner Party at My Place

I had some fellows over last night for what proved to be a delightful dinner party: Frank, whom I know from work; Jeff, whom I went to college with (I wrote about him here, and he blogs here); Stash, who blogs here; and Father Tony, who blogs here and here, and his husband, Chris. I'd met Chris, Tony, and Stash at GB5, the gay blogger gathering in the city last May. I'd invited Dan and Paul (whom I last wrote about here) too, but Paul's Aunt Dale was visiting from Oklahoma. "Aunt Dale, hon, it's me, Bill. The next time you want to come up from the land of Okies, let me know first, so you don't fuck up my plans. Mmmkay?"

After asking what everyone couldn't or wouldn't eat,* I settled on making beef stew. I'd considered making a beef roast with mashed potatoes and some other vegetable side dish, but I figured that would have kept me at the stove too much. But with the stew, I could finish making it even an hour or so before the guests arrived and just keep it warm on the stove.

I got about 3 pounds of stew beef from Wilklow Orchards at my local farmers market last weekend, so I'd be able to start thawing it at midweek. I forgot to tell Stash, who's really into ramps, that I used ramp bulbs and scallions as my aromatic base for the stew. For my veggies, I used sweet potatoes, carrots, celery root, and red Adirondack potatoes, whose flesh is mottled red. For seasonings, I used only salt, pepper, and cardamom. I'd meant to buy a bay leaf or something else to give it a little extra zing. The stew—whose only other ingredients were water, tomato paste, and the flour I coated the beef in before I started cooking it—was done about 4 or so. That gave me time to fiddle around with it a little. I ladled off a good deal of the broth, added a splash from the bottle of wine I'd been nursing after my late nights at work last week,** and some more tomato paste. I boiled it down so the flavors would be concentrated and added it back into the stew.

The meal started with a mixed greens salad in the Citrus Vinaigrette I've mentioned on here several times. I've been buying my greens from R&G Produce at the Union Square Greenmarket after work on Friday. I love their lettuce and mesclun mixes. For the vinaigrette, I used a combo of orange and blood orange juices.

I made Crusty Cornstalk Rolls to go with the stew. After I'd settled on the main course, I remembered that Gourmet had run a feature story containing several dinner roll recipes a couple of issues ago. They all sounded delicious but this one seemed most likely to be a crowd pleaser and not too difficult to pull off. And besides, I got to squirt water into the oven three times while they baked to encourage crustiness, and that was fun. Chris took a photo of me posing with the rolls—while they were still joined together on the "stalk"—that Tony posted here.

I unexpectedly found corn meal for the rolls at the Greenmarket on Friday. Oak Grove Plantation of Pittstown, in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, ground it themselves. The bag was knotted very tightly, but I thought of a (to me) clever way of loosening it. I inserted a corkscrew into the knot and was able to untie it with minimal fuss after a few twists of the wrist. Look out, Heloise! Here comes Hawloise!

Dessert was Vanilla Fudge Ice Cream. It was a big hit, and everyone had seconds. I made two batches, so I have a little left over. My Granny is coming to visit a week from today with Dad and Jean, and I told her on the phone yesterday that I'd save some for her, so I've got to show some restraint this week. :-)

Everyone brought red wine. I grabbed a bottle at random, and it was one of the malbecs T&C brought: the 2007 Terrazas de los Andes. Next, we had the 2006 Morro Bay Split Oak Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon that Frank brought. I enjoyed both of them. We didn't get to the 2007 Baqueano Cabernet Sauvignon-Malbec that Stash brought or the other malbec—the 2008 Altos Las Hormigas, which I've had and enjoyed before—that T&C brought. And I'm particularly eager to try the wine Jeff brought, which is why I hoarded it and didn't share it, a California Pinot Noir from Parducci Wine Cellars, a family-owned enterprise that's very environmentally conscious.

Most important to the success of the evening, we had a great time hanging out. I don't think I've seen Chris since GB5—or at least not since a short time after it—and he's such a doll. I learned that he and Tony's first conversation was based on a lie: Chris started chatting with Tony about a movie he'd seen, and Tony pretended that he'd seen it too. They've been together for 25 years, so the lesson I'm taking from that story is, if you want to find true love, lie lie lie. About movies. "Nathan, sweetie, I just loved you in Dracula 2000, which I've seen 15 times! And each time it's better than the last. Now let's get busy with some sexual role-playing! You be Mal, and I'll be Mrs. Reynolds. Only with a lot less cleavage. But more penis. Definitely more penis."

Jeff told a fun story about coming out to his parents. He was pretty nervous about it, so he was hanging out inside his parents' home in Old Bridge trying to gather his courage while his parents were outside in the yard. His mother actually asked him, "Are you coming out, or what?"! And then he did. Though not in the way she expected.

We talked about a lot of interesting things—pop culture, our families, circumcision—and the woofers got some lovin'. And then all of my guests, who mostly didn't know each other beforehand, walked over to Flatbush to pick up the Q train together. How cute is that?

*When I lived in Stockton, I had some people over for a comfort-food dinner of meat loaf and mashed potatoes. I didn't know that one of my guests couldn't eat wheat; had I known, I wouldn't have put any bread crumbs in the meat loaf. That guest ate a lot of mashed potatoes.

**It was the High Note Malbec that Dad and Jean had enjoyed so much. I give it a thumbs-up too. I found a store here in Park Slope that sells it.

A Current Affairs Post That Starts Out Torturous

Holder Must Appoint a Special Prosecutor to Go After Bush's Torture Regime

Enough of the bullshit about looking forward instead of backwards. If Obama thinks the Bushies and those who did their bidding should be allowed to get away with their evil deeds, he should publicly acknowledge that he didn't really mean it when he swore on Lincoln's Bible to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution." Sign the petition calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the torturers here.

Torture Didn't Work

The Washington Post wrote that no useful information was obtained by torturing Abu Zubaida, the man whom Bush had wrongly identified as "Al Qaeda's chief of operations."

Torture Didn't Work, Part II

If torture is so effective at getting terrorists to spill the beans, why the hell did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed need to be waterboarded 183 times in one month?

Jane Harman and Alberto Gonzales: Partners in Sleeze 

Jane Harman, a Democratic representative from California who was a Bushie tool, was caught on an NSA wiretap offering to help out two American Israeli Public Affairs Committee officials accused of spying for Israel if they'd help her get the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. Harman was going to be investigated by the FBI, but Alberto Gonzales stopped the probe, saying Harman would be essential in defending the administration against the illegal wiretapping story that was finally going to see the light of day in the New York Times. Harman did indeed rail against the NYT.

The Bush-Evilness-Enabling FISA Law That Obama Voted for Resulted in Widespread Abuse of Wiretapping Powers

No one could have predicted that.

Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Wall Street's Ownership of Government

Goldman Sachs paid Summers $135,000 for a one-day visit in April 2008. It was a bribe paid several months in advance, Glenn Greenwald writes in a post that outlines the many lucrative ties between Obama's economic policy team and the banksters.

Secession and Racism

Glenn W. Smith writes at firedoglake that, of course, it's not coincidental that the wingnuttiest of the teabaggers began talking about secession only months after a black man became president.

Fuck Giuliani and His Self-Loathing Gay Republican Friends

Rudy Giuliani is hoping that his opposition to gay marriage will be the issue he needs to land him in the governor's mansion. I'm hoping it lands him out on his hypocritical goddamned ass. Only someone as arrogant and shameless as him could talk about the sanctity of marriage while on wife No. 3. And only someone as self-loathing as the gay Republicans* who housed him while he was going through divorce No. 2 could argue that Giuliani is taking a principled stand based on his religious beliefs. Which, of course, shouldn't be the deciding factor in opposing CIVIL marriage. Is it the CHURCH of Connecticut that's allowing you to marrry, Howard Koeppel, or is it the STATE of Connecticut? The New York Post article that Joe's post links to says Koeppel also cited Giuliani's political beliefs as a motivation for this decision. I wish the Post had given Koeppel's words on that issue, but allow me to say what he must have meant: "We all know Rudy will do whatever the fuck it takes to get elected, and if he thinks this is a winning issue for him, I don't mind being turned into a whipping boy. Because I'm a self-loathing queer Republican who would rather keep my powerful friend than call him out on his obvious bullshit."

America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

Chris Hedges writes that we need to find "the courage not to cooperate." 

Cutting Social Security Benefits That Retirees Have Already Contributed the Money for While Guaranteeing the Bad Debt of Every Criminally Greedy Bankster Makes Sense Only to Our Wealthy Political and Media Elites

My boy Dean Baker says they can all fuck themselves. Well, in so many words he does.

Another Reason to Be an Ethanol Skeptic

Loads of antibiotics are used to make it, and the drugs remain in a byproduct that's fed to cattle.

Clarence Thomas Is an Idiot

You already knew that. But here's another reason why it's the case.

Hemp Is the Answer

But since DEA agents can't distinguish it from marijuana by sight, it'll never be legal in the U.S.

The Bushies Ruined the PBGC Too

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. is fucked thanks to a supremely stupid investment decision by agency head Charles Millard, who in true Bushie fashion is insisting he didn't make a mistake in switching from bonds to stocks and real estate holdings just before markets tanked.

Blanche Lincoln Is for Fiscal Responsibility

Except for when it comes to making rich people pay their taxes. 

Even the Executives at Goldman Are Too Big to Fail

The firm "spent tens of millions of dollars" buying up two executives' stakes in internal investment funds when the two men became "short on cash."

Obama Wanted Lieberman

And now he's got to live with him.

*The article doesn't expressly say that Mark Hsaio is a Republican too, but let's assume he is. And if he's not, he's at least a Republican enabler.

Jonatha Brooke

I saw Jonatha Brooke at the Rubin Museum of Art on Wednesday. I had a blast. I'd never seen Jonatha perform before, and she was as charming on stage as I figured she'd be. And ARROHK, I love her latest album, so I was looking forward to hearing that music live. She performed all of my favorite songs from The Works, and her last song before the encore was another song she wrote using the lyrics of Woody Guthrie that she said she finished too late to put on the album. It's called "You and I." She said that Woody had written four pages of lyrics along the lines of "you're this and I'm that." For example, "I'm the dump truck, and you're the gravel." (Or was it "You're the dump truck, and I'm the gravel"?) She said she selected the most romantic pairings for her song. I recall one particularly cool one as "I'm your firefly; you're my nighthawk." (Or vice versa.) I really enjoyed the song, and you would have too.

The Rubin is a museum of Himalayan art, and Jonatha said that Tim McHenry, who manages the performances there, encourages the artists to incorporate the subject matter of the museum into their show. Jonatha told the audience, as she does here on her blog, about Drupka Kunley, a Buddhist sage who was very much a Woody Guthrie for his age. He liked to drink, sing, and follow his penis—which he called his "divine thunderbolt of wisdom"—into as many women as he could. Woody was a romantic, but under the influence of Huntington's disease, he became incredibly sexualized and wrote highly erotic lyrics about the nurses in the hospitals where he spent his later years.

Jonatha told a cute story about what might have happened if she'd named the album after one of the songs on it: "Madonna on the Curb." When people searched on the Internet for Madonna, they'd find Jonatha's album and "Ka-ching!" And for the album cover, she joked, she could have shown a forlorn-looking Madonna slumped over at the curb with Guy Ritchie throwing her shoes at her from an upstairs window.

Jonatha took requests from the audience and so played "Je N'Peux Pas Te Plaire," "West Point," "Linger," and "the train song," as the requester put it, aka "Full-Fledged Strangers." She said that a couple of years ago, she saw Elton John in concert when he had a new record he wanted to promote. He said, You'll hear fucking "Rocket Man" and "Candle in the Wind," but give me four songs (off the new album). She said it's the only time she's ever felt sorry for Elton. I guess it was pretty clear that his audience didn't want to hear the new stuff and he wasn't taking it well.

I was glad to hear Jonatha's older stuff, but I so enjoyed her songs from The Works. And I'd go to hear her at the Rubin again in a heartbeat. It was just her with a guitar and piano, not even a mic. And a friend of hers joined her for the harmonyrific encores, "So Much Mine" and "In the Gloaming," that she used to sing with Jennifer Kimball as The Story.

The museum's basement theater was a very intimate setting, and people in the audience felt free to talk to Jonatha between songs. One woman yelled out, "Look at those boots!" And they were indeed awesome boots. At a totally awesome show.

A Food and Drinks Post With Even More Sweets Than Usual, Part II

I cut a recipe for Rutabaga With Butter-Toasted Spiced and Citrus out of an ad in a recent Saveur magazine. I don't recall what the ad was selling, and I can't find any references to the name of the dish on Google. It's a pretty simple but unusual way to cook rutabaga. You cut your rutabaga up into thin slices and cook them in melted butter into which you've added ground mace or nutmeg, ground allspice, ground cinnamon, whole cloves, and salt. I used cardamom pods along with the whole cloves because I still had some of each left over from the Vanilla Chai Ice Cream. I didn't have any allspice, so I left that out, as well as the mace/nutmeg, though I'm not opposed to nutmeg and I had it on hand. Maybe I'll throw it in next time, along with the cinnamon, which I did use. After the rutabaga is cooked through, you take it off the heat and stir in about 1 tablespoon each of lemon and orange juices. I loved how the rutabaga turned out. So much so that I then tried the same recipe using celery root instead. I didn't like that as much. But I'm betting this would be a great treatment for butternut squash.

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I'm still working on my ongoing weeding-out-the-old-recipes project that I've mentioned on the blog before. One more example of the kind of thing I'm throwing out is this recipe from the June 2003 issue of Gourmet. You have to construct a mold from a cardboard milk carton? And make both homemade ice cream and cake from scratch? No thanks. I don't care that it combines two of my big loves, chocolate and mint. I'll pass.

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And still on the topic of chocolate-mint sweets, I've twice now purchased a Chocolate Mint "Oreo" at the East Side location of Free Foods. I love that the delicious filling contains bits of mint leaf, but at $3.25 a pop for a not-very-big cookie, this sweet is going to be a very rare lunchtime treat.

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Will told me that his neighbors who made the delicious chocolate chip cheesecake for Mauricio's birthday are starting up a bakery business in May. "I'm so proud of them (and a bit worried)," he wrote me in an e-mail after reading part one of this post. "They've been talking about opening their own bakery since I 'been knowin' 'em,' as they say in New Orleans." I'm so there when I go down to Nola over Labor Day weekend.

Battlestar Galactica

It's over. Battlestar Galactica, aka Battlestar Nerdtacula and Battlechub Chalubtica,* has run its course. It was a great run, and I enjoyed the show an awful lot. The acting was top-notch, and the writing was frequently exceptional. And I'll always be grateful to BG for introducing me to the hunkiness that is Jamie Bamber. Godsdamnit, that man is sexy.

Hal, Bob, Jen, and I discussed the ending this past weekend. Hal thought it was just fine, but then again, he rarely has an unkind word for a TV show or movie.** If he'd reviewed Encino Man, a movie that was playing in theaters when we both had jobs sweeping up popcorn back in the day, he'd probably have said, "It's a laugh riot. See Pauly Shore in the role he was born to play: Stoney Brown." Hah! I tease because I love. To tease Hal.*** Hah!

I found a few things cheesy about the finale and the shows leading up to it. The Final 5 were an odd bunch, running the gamut from a doofus who couldn't control his frackin' temper (Galen) to a guy you could conveniently plug in to learn everything you needed to know (Sam). And having Colonel Tigh be one of the 5 was great for its dramatic value because it freaked out Adama so much, but otherwise what was the use of it? I expected the Final 5 to all have something to add to the knowledge base that would allow the Galactica to get back to Earth and to make it so Cylons and humans could live in peace. But one was clearly expendable (Tory), and only Sam and Ellen Tigh were of much value to the crew.

I didn't like that Starbuck just disappeared. I didn't like that Adama was apparently going to just let himself die alone. I wanted something better, more noble for Galen, who was one of my favorite characters during the run of the show. And I was saddened that Laura lost her whole family before the series's time frame began; how much shit should one character have to deal with?

I liked that Adama and Laura found love with each other; I think Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell had a nice chemistry. I liked that Apollo and Starbuck didn't end up together. (I guess it helped in that regard that she wasn't a live human being. Even though she bled.) I enjoyed the ending arc for Six and Baltar, including their flashback scenes.

Most of all, I liked that BSG rarely went where you expected it to go and refused to go for the simple answer to complex questions of guilt vs. innocence and good vs. evil. In that respect, it was a great rejoinder to the Bush years, in which everything was supposed to be plainly, easily viewed in either black or white.

*Back in the '90s, Bob would say "Chub!" a lot. It's short for chubby, which is a synonym for erection.

**Or a musician. I remember telling him once many years ago in an offhand way that I didn't care for the voice of the lead singer of Crash Test Dummies. He replied that I didn't have a good singing voice, as if I thought I did. I told him that the difference between that singer and me was that I didn't have a recording contract.

***Actually, I do love Hal like the brother I never had.

A Fun but Principled Visit From Sgt. Halka

Hal, aka Sgt. Halka,* came to visit yesterday after work. The main reason for the visit was so that he, Bob, and I could go to the anti-bankster protest in Union Square today. But he arrived in plenty of time for our usual Friday pizza night. And he stayed late enough this evening to enjoy a wonderful dinner of pork shoulder and pesto pasta with green beans and potatoes that Jen made while us guys were out fighting the powers that be.

Hal loved La Villa's Siciliana pizza and Tre Colore Salad last night. And this morning, we had a good, late breakfast at Dizzy's, a Finer Diner, where I've taken the fellows from Maryland and my Dad. Hal got the Eggs Bene-dizz, and I got three eggs scrambled with potatoes, wheat toast, and turkey bacon.**

Next, we went to a stationery store to get some sheets of poster board so we could make signs for the A New Way Forward protest. That's when I realized that at some point I'd lost my favorite reusable bag, one I'd gotten from Oceana that has an illustration of a sea turtle on it made from little drawings of plastic bags. We retraced our steps to the diner. Our terrifically friendly waiter asked around to see whether any of the other workers had seen it, but I clearly hadn't lost it there. We walked home the same way we'd gone to the restaurant, and I spotted my purty green bag from a distance ahead of us on the sidewalk. Yeah! It had fallen out of my jacket pocket not far from the apartment.

After we dropped the poster board off at my place, it was off to the Greenmarket. I got my provisions for the week, and Hal bought an apple, pear, and cranberry pie to take to his Dad and step-mother's house for Easter. Then we went to the Schultieses to make our posters.

The theme for the protest was that we should stop throwing money at the big banks that Wall Street's enablers are claiming are too big to fail and instead break them up, following bankruptcy proceedings, if necessary. (And it sure seems likely that if the banks were to honestly report the value of their holdings, both Citigroup and Bank of America would be insolvent.) If a bank is "too big to fail," it never should have been allowed to get that big in the first place.

I thought back to a saying our journalism professor Dr. Cole quoted to discourage us from including the word unique in our stories: "The only thing that's truly unique is my lovemaking." I decided I'd put on my protest sign "The only thing that's too big to fail is my lovin'." Hal decided he'd say something about Shitibank, instead of Citibank. I wish I'd pointed out to him before he finished his sign that Citi has only one t so maybe Shitti should as well. Bob went with one suggested in a forum thread that I started about signage for the protest: "Bail Out the People." Jen drew it for him, and it looked fantastic. She also put in cross-hatching in selected words in my sign to make it look cooler. And even more suggestive.

Speaking of "shitty," the weather was rainy and nasty this morning into the afternoon. Hal said, correctly, on the 3 train on the way to Union Square that he looked like the Gorton's fisherman on the fish sticks box. We were forced to take the 2/3 line because the superfast Q wasn't running today between Prospect Park and 57th Street and we didn't discover that until we got to the 7th Avenue station. *sigh*

We got to the rally, which had been scheduled for 2, at about 2:30. There were around 50 people in attendance when we arrived. A couple of people spoke, including the guy at left who turned around individual boxes that had together made up a large bank so that they revealed many smaller banks. And the name of a large home-improvement chain of stores. Power to the people! And Home Depot! :-)

The protest broke up about 10 minutes after our arrival. But that was enough time for a fellow protester with a white goatee to read my sign and tell me it had too many words on it. But it was clever, dammit!

What do three hip, happenin' progressives do in the city after their protest ends? We wouldn't know, because we're dorks. At Hal's suggestion, we went first to Forbidden Planet, where I snapped a picture of a librarian action figure, with "amazing push-button shushing action!" Then we got some caffeinated beverages and snacks at the East 13th Street outpost of Joe. And then it was on to the Apple Store at West 14th and 9th Avenue.

We took the A and F trains home. And after I walked and fed Rudy and Emme, we had that fantastic meal at Bob and Jen's. I took over two enjoyable bottles of red wine: a 2006 pinot noir from Madonna Estate and the 2007 Agua de Piedra Reserva Malbec.

Bob, Hal, the kids, and I walked to Sweet Melissa to pick out dessert. Hal and I were going to do that before dinner, but when Bob called Jenny as we were turning onto 3rd Street, she said everything was just about ready. Abbe and Zane each got a beautiful cookie; Abbe's was shaped like a chick, and Zane's was a butterfly.

Us adults had a decadent Chocolate Souffle Cake with three sliced strawberries on top and coffee made by Sweet Jennifer. 

Hal split to go to his father's house in Maryland. Zane requested that Uncle Bill read the pop-up version of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit as his bedtime story. And then the kids went to bed after leaving a note and some parsley for the Easter Bunny.

*Bob started calling Hal that because Hal was in the Army ROTC in college and then in the Reserves after college. Sgt. Hulka, you may recall, is a character in the movie Stripes. My favorite quote from the movie came early on, when Bill Murray's character tells one of his taxi fares that he wishes he hadn't drunk all of that cough syrup. I remember cracking up as a kid when I heard that line.

**That means I had meat twice in the same day, but that was the first time that's happened in quite a while. And at the time I had the bacon, I didn't know what we were going to be doing for dinner or even whether Hal was going to be staying that late.

A Movie on DVD, a Musical on DVD, and a Musical on Stage

I finally recently got around to watching There Will Be Blood, the multiple-Oscar-nominated movie for which Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor at the February 2008 ceremony. I'd had the disc from Netflix since September, I think. *sigh* I thought it was fantastic, an epic tale of the evil that men do for money. Day-Lewis was indeed phenomenal as diabolical oilman Daniel Plainview. And Paul Dano was terrific in the dual roles of Paul and Eli Sunday. Plainview and Eli Sunday were both fascinating characters. As was H.W. Plainview, Daniel's troubled son who was deafened in an oil explosion. It's hard to believe Dillon Freasier, who played him as a boy, was a local (near the shooting location in Texas) kid who'd never acted professionally before. As for Russell Harvard, who played H.W. as a young adult, he makes it so there will be blood flowing to a certain organ of mine. *raises and lowers eyebrows suggestively*

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The next DVD to arrive from Netflix was a recording of the 2006–07 Broadway production of Company that aired on PBS. I can't say enough about Raúl Esparza. I haven't seen any other versions of Company, but I understand that the rap against the main character of Bobby is that he's usually too dull and passive to be a compelling center for the story. That's not a problem with Esparza. He's so charming in this role. And that voice! If you don't get goose bumps listening to Esparza belt out that final "Being alive!" in the song of the same name, well, you just suck. :-)

There are so many wonderful songs in this show. The title song, "Another Hundred People," "Getting Married Today," "Side by Side by Side." I'm particularly drawn to "Marry Me a Little" and the aforementioned "Being Alive." As "BA" progresses, you can hear Esparza's voice getting more and more vulnerable as Bobby becomes more and more open to the idea of falling in love with and being committed to one person. And I'd have to turn in my official, laminated Fraternal Association of the Gay membership card if I didn't love "Ladies Who Lunch."

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A couple of Thursdays ago, Joyce, Nate, Missy, and I saw Hair on Broadway. I dug  it. I wasn't blown away, but I had a fun time. And the ending is superb and incredibly moving.

One problem I had with the show is that there are so damn many songs, there's little chance for them to lodge in your brain. At the end of the night, the only songs that had really stuck with me were the ones I already knew and loved: "Aquarius" and "Let the Sunshine In." I wanted more book and fewer and more-memorable songs.

Before the show, Nate said to forget about the movie, which I'd seen, because it's rather different from the show. He and Missy saw the Public Theater's production in Central Park over the summer, when it co-starred the droolworthy Jonathan Groff of Spring Awakening.

And speaking of sexy men, Will Swenson, who plays Berger, writes in his Playbill bio that he's a "Scorpio, of course." Those damn Scorpios think they were born under the sexiest sign in the Zodiac when everyone else knows that Virgos are the hottest. Sean Connery, Raquel Welch, Bill Hawley. Come on!

Here are some photos that Joyce and I took of the cast when they came out to meet the loyal fans:

There's Mr. Swenson, with his "long beautiful hair" under a hat. The two girls directly in front of him were so cute. The girl on the left was wearing a T-shirt signed by all of her friends from theater camp. And that's my girl Missy's head in the foreground.

Gavin Creel, the other leading actor, who played Claude

Allison Case, who plays Crissy. She was a real doll. Superfriendly. If I were a straight guy in the cast of this musical, I'd be sooo hitting on Allison. Hah! A straight guy in a Broadway musical. That's too funny. Where do I come up with this shit?

That was the photo Joyce took, with her camera. I took the others, with my iPhone. Hence their inferior quality.

Bryce Ryness, who plays Woof. Joyce was envious of his hair. Definitely lots of shine and bounce there.

And finally, John Moauro, who played a member of the Tribe. He and Will Swenson were the two guys in the cast who filled me with the most lust. He's so cute, and I love the curls.

A Dog Post With a Whoodle and a Newfy

On my evening walk with Rudy today, we encountered a guy walking the cutest mess of dark-brown fluff. I asked the guy what kind of dog it was, and he said it was a whoodle. He made me ask what that meant. I, of course, figured the oodle came from poodle; the wh comes from wheaten terrier. The dog was very happy to meet Rudy and obviously still a pup. I didn't get the name or sex. I didn't have my iPhone on me, so I couldn't have snapped a picture of it even if I'd been forward enough to ask to do so. But the dog in the middle photo here looks a lot like it. OMG, look at Reggie on the left! Too cute by three-quarters.

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On my way home from work this evening, I saw a Newfoundland on the steps of a house on Prospect Park West. I'd never seen it there before, though I think I've seen it being walked in the hood. It looked all comfy and immobile, like a big ol' bear rug.

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A couple of weekends ago while I was walking in the park with Rudy, we encountered an idiotic straight couple with a cute beagle. They insisted that they see an older woman walking Rudy in the morning, and their conviction became even stronger after I told them his name. I said that no older woman walks my dog in the morning. Your mother! they said. Maybe your mother walks the dog in the morning. I said no and left. But I should have said: "Oh my God! You're right! I totally forgot that my mother does indeed walk my dog each and every morning, and if it weren't for your persistence in correcting my denseness, I never would have recalled that so-easy-to-forget fact." Only in New York.

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Emme at her most innocent looking

Sunshiny Rudy

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UPDATE on April 10: I've been giving the dogs a little bit of banana with their breakfast in the hope that it'll make Rudy's poo less soft. And it seems to be helping. Rudy drinks lots of water because, I think, he wants lots of pee to mark his turf with. And that tends to make his turds mushy. Anyhow, I bring this up only because the boy doesn't like banana! (It's probably not necessary to mention that Emme loves it.) He won't eat it when I put it in his bowl, so lately I've taken to giving it to him like it's a pill. I put it in his mouth, tilt his head back, and rub his throat until I can tell that it's down the hatch.