All I want for Christmas is December 26th

How did this happen? How did this nice jewish girl from Philly end up stuck with Christmas? OK, I admit it. Around 5 PM on Christmas Eve, I usually get the Christmas spirit, and rush around buying jars of fabulous jam made by the Trapist nuns in Italy for everyone I will see in the next 24 hours. And the tree does look beautiful, each ornament individually placed with an invocation for the coming year. I pulled a little wooden hen out of the box and invoked “a chicken in every pot”.

But the next day is hideous. I am far too co-dependent to enjoy the opening of the presents. I hate the “this one’s for you, this one’s for you.” Then, after the presents are over, there is all that dead time for the rest of the day and night.

Even if you wanted to ignore Christmas, it’s pretty hard to do since everything is CLOSED. Except for Chinatown and the movies, which is what all good jews do on Christmas.

I have been begging my non-jewish girlfriend, who just happens to be pagan, to let us go out for Chinese food for Christmas dinner instead of doing all that shopping and cooking and cleaning up. Especially since Christmas comes so close after Solstice. Every year. It’s not like Chanukah, which may come the day after thanksgiving or Christmas eve. No one ever says, “Wow, solstice is early this year.”

So here we are, six days before Christmas, planning two major parties. Solstice we stay up all night on our vigil for the returning light. Then, four days later, the house will fill up with family for Christmas. I think this year, by the time my birthday rolls around on New Years day, I will be content to sit around and watch the college football bowl games and do NOTHING!

come out, come out, wherever you are

Last Friday nite, we were sitting around the living room with an old college friend of Deborah’s and her 53 year old sister from Idaho. The sister, let’s call her Linda, moved to Idaho when she was 19 and had never seen a homeless person until Friday. She has grown children and grandchildren, and looks like Linda Evans from Dynasty. Or was that Dallas?

The night before, they had gone to Mecca and the Lexington Club, your friendly neighborhood dyke bar, which I thought a bit odd for two straight women. I forget exactly what we were talking about when Linda said, “I am in the process of coming out.” Jokingly I said, “As what?” “As a lesbian” she answered.

I almost fell over. Her sister's jaw dropped too, as she realized why she had been on a tour of the lesbian hot spots of San Francisco. Now, I have been a lesbian for a LONG time, and know that we come in all shapes, sizes, ages, etc, but somehow it always surprises me when someone who looks so straight wants to become a lesbian.

So how does a married woman in Idaho go about finding a woman? Craigslist! We sat by my computer, and I showed her Craigslist Idaho, the dyke march 2008 video on hillgirlz.com, and the SF pride website. All of the partially naked women at the dyke march were pretty surprising to her, and she asked me if all of those women were “that way.”

It made me feel so lucky to have come out in 1972 in the height of the second wave of feminism. (As a mater of fact, I just picked the up the 35th anniversary issue of Ms. Magazine. I remember when it first came out.) I moved to San Francisco in 1974, and have probably taken for granted all of the freedom we have here as gay people.

When I toured with the Blazing Redheads in the 1980s, we met lesbians in all these small southern towns, and the only time they could hold hands with their lovers in public was at women’s music festivals. It’s hard enough to imagine being a lesbian in some of these places, but being a 53 year-old married grandmother in Idaho trying to come out!

This woman is tough as nails, and will be happy no matter what she is doing, but I am just reminded of woman all over the world who want to be with women but can’t because of political persecution or their own internalized homophobia. I feel lucky.

settling in

Well, I’ve moved. Luckily, over the past few years I have been down-scaling and down-scaling to the point where this last move took two hours start to finish. Now I am faced with the unpacking.

It’s funny how you move your things-furniture, pictures, tchotskes-to a new place, and there you are-- home. This time it was a bit different, since I had already spent so much time up in the attic room that is now my office/the guest room that it felt like home instantly.

We were just up there for an hour or so with a friend, and she and D were sitting on the bed talking as I was unpacking boxes and showing them odds and ends from my distant and not so distant past. The picture of me in a mini-skirt and long hair at fifteen is always a crowd pleaser.

My passport photo from 1981 when I was off to Amsterdam to play with a salsa band for three months. My collections of cigar boxes, marbles, and colored glass ashtrays. And lots of old photos.

Remembering all of the things that have gotten left behind in all of my numerous moves over the last ten years makes me sad, but the happiness I feel now is worth it. As my mother said when she moved out of the house where she lived with my father for 42 years to move to a retirement community, “It’s just things.” Yes, those things represent memories, but the memories will just have to live in my mind, as there isn’t enough room to cart it all around with me.

So we are now in the process of blending two lives, households, and creating memories of our own. And to borrow a phrase from that witchy woman I live with, “I’m for it.”

l'shana tovah

Yesterday, a new Whole Foods market opened one mile from our house. I know a lot of people don’t like Whole Foods, but I do, because almost anywhere in the country, at least the places I go, you can find organic products and mad-cow free meat. And they hire people with pink hair, tattoos, and piercings. A least in the Bay Area.

When I saw the fliers for the opening of the new store, I saw that there was going to be a bread-breaking at 8:45 AM before the store opened at 9. I needed to be there. My girlfriend thought that I was out of my mind, but I just said, “I like stuff like that”. After all, I was born on January 1^st, and I like to be the first whenever I can, so to be one of the first shoppers in the new Whole Foods was appealing. And I wanted to be at the bread breaking.

I was also on the Golden Gate Bridge that day in 1987 when it was closed to cars to celebrate its 50^th Anniversary, and there were 800,000 people on the bridge, and the engineers didn’t know if it was going to hold all of that standing weight.

And then there was the day in 1989 that the Bay Bridge re-opened after the earthquake, and Tony Bennett was there singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Guess who was there. Yep, me.

So I went to Whole Foods on my way to work yesterday. There were about fifty people there, eager to shop in the new store. The bread breaking was pretty quick, and I realized how much I have been influenced by living with a pagan as I waited for them to call in the elements.

This morning when I mentioned to my girlfriend that there were actually quite a few people at the bread-breaking, she said, “People need ritual.” It gave new meaning to why I like to share momentous occasions with large numbers of people. I grew up as a reform Jew, but I all but abandoned the religious part as one more patriarchal religion. For the last year and a half, I have been a part of the pagan holidays, but haven’t quite adopted them as my own yet. Kind of sad that the bread-braking at the new Whole Foods is what I turn to to fill the need for ritual in my life.

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I had dinner last nite with friends and am going to the beach this afternoon to empty my pockets of everything from last year I want to leave behind. I realize that I don’t have to go to Temple to honor this holiday, that I can create my own ritual in a way that makes sense to me. As I ponder the meaning of this day, I am thinking about the need for more ritual in my life.

i love seattle!

It is a beautiful city…very green with hills and lots of water. A lot like San Francisco, except the green in the summer part. It is also a very “green” city. One neighborhood library that I saw has a living roof, and there are blue recycling receptacles everywhere, including in the hotel room! And most people here are really, genuinely friendly. There is not that preciousness that people complain about in San Francisco, although from the rate of gentrification, it might not be too far off.

I love the water here. I always thought that the mountains speak to me more than the water, but now I realize that meant the ocean. Here, there are bays and lakes and channels everywhere. It is really a seaport town, and there are shipyards and fishing boats and all the industries that support them. I love it!

Yesterday I went to the Chittenden Locks. Real locks, like we learned about in elementary school. Lakes Washington and Union (freshwater) are 6 to 26 feet higher than Puget Sound (saltwater), so our friends, the Army Core of Engineers, dug out the channel and installed a system of locks. The large lock will accommodate a ship 78 feet wide and 700 feet long. And it is all done with gravity, no pumps.

So if a boat is going from Puget Sound to Lake Washington, the lower gates open, the ship sails in, then the lower gate closes, water from Lake Washington flows into the lock, and the water level rises to the level of the lake. Then the upper gate opens, and the ship sails on its way. I was literally awestruck by how beautiful and fascinating it was. Since I went there alone last evening while I was waiting for D. to arrive, I had to share my excitement with strangers. I’m sure I was the one who appeared strange. The locks are actually one of the largest tourist attractions in Seattle, and I can see why.

D. arrived, we had a great crab and oyster dinner on the piers, and today we are off for more exploration. I love vacation!

sleepless in seattle

One thing about working for “the man” is that you get to stay at fancy hotels for the corporate rate. I just checked in to the Fairmont Hotel in Seattle where I will stay for three nights. My girlfriend will arrive tomorrow evening from witchcamp, so tomorrow I will explore Seattle on my own. I hear there are some great bookstores here, and someone told me that the public library near the Pikes Market is an example of some incredible architecture.

It was a long trip. The plane was an hour late, and there was a long line to pick up the rental car. I arrived at the hotel at 1 AM famished, so I asked the valet parker if there was a Denny’s nearby. He gave me a strange look, as I guess not too many people check in to the Fairmont and ask where the Denny’s is. He said, “It’s pretty far away. Try room service.”

The room is a big as the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, and there were five chocolate covered strawberries on the desk, which I promptly ate. Now I am eating my BLT from room service, which came exactly as I ordered it. The tomatoes are even heirloom. Now that’s something.

I feel like I should stay awake all night just to enjoy the room!

this kitchen is closed

that’s what my mother said as she walked back into her house at 5:30 AM from the hospital after my father died. It also happened to be their 59^th wedding anniversary, and I was tempted to highjack the anniversary cards from the mailbox that afternoon, but for some reason decided against it.

This kitchen is closed! Mine, that is.

For five days I was in charge of feeding and transporting a 15 ½ year old young man. I started to say boy, but he really is a young man. After five days, I can’t even begin to imagine what is was like for my mother (and so many millions of others, especially those who work outside of the home.)

And taking care of my father for 59 years! He would have died years before if she hadn’t counted out his pills very morning, leaving the evening doses in the little red plastic measuring cup on the counter. That little cup was a fixture in our lives for years.

*************************************************

I just now took a break from writing this to call a friend who I haven’t spoken to since last November. Her partner told me that her mother died this morning in Toledo, Ohio. I was thinking of my friend all day. Now I know why.

(Now I get this sandwich generation concept; raising children, and taking care of and burying aging parents.)

My friend’s mother was afraid to fly, and rarely came to California. I met her mother years ago, when she came on the train, and we went to Townsend Restaurant for Sunday brunch. I didn’t see her again until a few years ago when she flew out here for her daughter’s lesbian wedding. She was so excited that she had flown, and was planning all the trips she could now take. I’ll have to find out if she ever did. I am sending much love and many blessings for her journey.

no kids, no plants, no pets

That’s always been my motto…no kids, no plants, no pets. I said that to a relatively new friend of mine, and she said, “Oh, nothing that needs nurturing.” That gave me SERIOUS pause. Literally, I stopped in my tracks, my eyes got wide, and I thought, “Can that possibly be true”?

I have always thought it was more of a responsibility issue. I always knew that I didn’t have the patience to raise children, and both kids and pets mean that you have to be home a lot, which I am not. I like the idea of being able to walk out the door of my house, turn the key, and not come back for a month if I don’t want to. Yes, that gives me a lot of freedom, but you remember what Janis said about freedom. The plant thing is just because my housekeeping is sketchy enough without all those dead leaves dropping all over the place.

So what have I done with all that freedom? Usually gotten involved with women with kids and pets. Nearly every serious relationship I have been in has been with a mother. Is it because I am hoping that some of that maternal nurturing will be left over for me, or because it allows me the space, while they are spending quality time with their children, to roam around out there in the world? I am both an extrovert and a seven on the eneagram, so I need lots of external stimulation.

After some serious thought, I decided that my motto did not mean that I was unable to nurture. I bring my girlfriend coffee in bed every day, pack her lunch if we have leftovers, and drive her son all over town.

Last week, when I was out of town, her son and his friend wanted a ride to a party at 10:30 on Saturday nite, and when D. said no, they said, “If Judy were here, she’d take us.” I think my friends see me as someone who will drop everything and lend a helping hand, if possible. So all in all, I’d say I am a pretty good nurturer.

So what did I do this weekend when my girlfriend was away at witchcamp? Took care of her 15 year old son for five days straight, cooked and cleaned up, watered the plants on the rooftop garden, and made sure the cats were fed and let out (no litter boxes here, thank god).

Although I am thoroughly exhausted and don’t understand how women have survived child-rearing, I must say I do have a feeling of satisfaction. Per the magnet on the refrigerator, “I say, if the kids are still alive at five, I’ve done my job.”

No kids, no plants, no pets..... that's not exactly how it turned out. And I couldn't be happier.

my first pagan hand fasting

My girlfriend priestessed a lesbian, pagan hand fasting last weekend at a retreat center in Charles Town, West Virginia, on a former plantation. It was on the last full day of spiralheart witchcamp, so we took the red-eye, or the shut-eye, as the airlines like to call it, to Washington, D.C. and then drove to West Virginia.

I actually liked West Virginia, at least the part of it that we were in...the NE corner about 1 hour outside of D.C. where West Virgina, Virginia, and Maryland all meet. You can always judge a place by the reaction when I walk in to an all male, all white barber shop and sit down in the queue. I think shock sprinkled with southern hospitality trumped any potential hostility.

The ritual was beautiful, the bride was stunning, and the butch groom had dress clothes on for the first time in years. It was mighty powerful, as most of the people in the circle had been at the witchcamp for almost a week, and the energy in the octagonal wooden room was palpable.

In addition to D., there were at least five other participants. Four different women called in the directions and welcomed the ancestors, and a gay man welcomed our queer allies and reminded us that certain kinds of love are still illegal, at which point, my damp eyes gave way to sobs.

They jumped the broom on literally the same land where slaves had jumped the broom in unions that were also not recognized by the law, and the rings were passed on a purple ribbon around the circle of at least fifty people, and everyone gave a blessing and a wish to the couple.

After the ritual, D. came over and asked me how I liked the hand fasting. “ I want one”, I said. She laughed.

Our hotel was in Harpers Ferry, WV, where John Brown led a slave uprising in 1859 and seized the Federal Weapons Arsenal. The town is very old, especially by California standards, and had an old haunted hotel with a view of a gorge on the Potomac River. (Click on the other pics on that page to see how beatiful the gorge is.)

There was a great flea market one block away from our hotel (not the haunted one), and we got sick at some of the LOW prices on stuff that was way too big for us to schlepp home. All in all, the vibe in West Virginia felt good to me.

We spent the rest of the weekend in a suburb of DC with the witchcamp teachers and organizers, and I was privy to hours and hours (and hours and hours) of camp debrief and some deep pagan theological discussions. One of D’s friends asked me if I was pagan, and I said “No, but now that we have been together for over a year, I am familiar with all of the holidays.” D. asked me which one I liked best, and I said Brigid, because I like all the books of poetry on the altar and the Brigid poetry slam in blogosphere. Although for Beltane, the antique postcards of maypoles are also very beautiful. Oh yea, and the sex part is good too.

The changing of the seasons means the changing of the altars at the house, and as a visual learner, just noticing the changes in the altars teaches me the meaning of the holidays. This weekend opened up a lot of questions for me, mainly just about the nature of “the divine”.

As Marga Gomez would say, “Who has it ? Where can I get it?”

a desk of one's own

Well, my days as a serial monogamist are over. There has been a steady stream of dating, but I never met Ms. Forever. Until now. I recently asked my girlfriend to marry me, and she said yes. They say Capricorns are late bloomers, which may be true, as I didn’t get this relationship thing figured out till I was 52.

So after you ask a woman to marry you, and she says yes, there are some plans to be made. When we first started seeing each other, her 15 year old son was not too keen on the idea of his mother having a girlfriend. As matter of fact, I couldn’t even walk into the house when he was here. We have come a long way since then, but at the time, we were talking about not living together for four years-after her son went off to college.

As I have begun to spend more and more time at D’s house, we have bought some furniture and rugs together. A series of events this summer resulted in my staying here every night for over a month. We had been casually talking about my moving in around December or January. The other night, she said, “Why don’t you just move in now. Like October 1^st.”

It’s always challenging to move in to someone else’s house, but we have come to recognize our venn diagram of taste in furniture. She has even agreed to let me paint ONE room white…well, off white. I now have a desk and computer over here, so I have one little spot that’s all mine, and I can feel my tastes migrating back to antique oak (from the mid-century blond and clean lines I came to love when I was in LA).

Sometime in the next couple of years, there will be a large party of some kind to celebrate the fact that I am “the freak ball she wants to spend the rest of her life with.” The where and what are still very much up in the air, but one thing I do know, I want faerose to make the cake!

talk to me

We saw “Talk to Me” today, the movie with Don Cheadle about Petey Greene, an ex-con who became a radio disk jockey in the 60s in Washington, DC. WOW! It is a fabulous movie.

Why is it only playing in one movie theater in all of San Francisco? It is hard to believe in this day and age that a politically relevant movie about racism and the civil right movement is not playing on at least as many screens as Pirates of the Caribbean or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Maybe it is true that the primary market for the movie industry is 15 year old males. I’ve heard that for years, but it is hard to actually accept it. But what about all the art houses, like the Embarcadero? I read some on-line reviews, and several people mentioned the limited release of the film.

I sincerely hope that word of mouth turns this movie into a sleeper, and that it gets a wide release. The soundtrack alone is worth the price of admission.

A few things struck me. Petey Greene sat in the same high-back wicker throne that Huey Newton sat in. I wonder which came first. And when we got home, we were telling my girlfriend’s 15-year old son about the movie, and he asked, “What’s a disk jockey?”

It was one of those moments when you feel really old, but glad that you were around in the 60s. So go see it, dig the music, and make sure you bring plenty of Kleenex.

the accidental garage sale

Today I worked like a rented mule. Two men from the San Francisco Day Labor Program and I put 2,740 pounds of junk from my girlfriend’s garage and carriage house into a 14- foot rented truck and took it to the dump.

This task had been planned for a few weeks, so it was a bit serendipitous that a few days ago a flier was left on the door announcing a block-long garage sale. How could we say no?

A few words on the carriage house. It really is a stable in the back yard that actually housed a horse. There is a hay loft on the second floor. There must not be too many of these left in the Mission, because two gay men who stopped at the garage sale almost fainted when they caught a glimpse of it through the open garage door. They were members of the Victorian Alliance, and D. took them on a tour. They begged her not to tear it down or upgrade it, but to leave it in its state of “arrested decay”.

Because we were cleaning out the carriage house during the garage sale, everyone wanted to come back there, and people were literally buying things as I was unearthing them

We found some original tools from the early 1900s, but the best moment was when one woman asked, ”What about the stuff in the truck? Is that for sale”?, at which point she jumped up into the truck and started digging around. She took a few things, and I couldn’t stop marveling at the magic of it all.

After we cleaned out the carriage house and the truck was loaded, we started giving everything away for free. Seeing the look on people’s faces when we said “it’s all free” was payment enough.

We also did some rearranging and clearing in the house. Then we went and celebrated Bastille Day at a cute French restaurant in a tucked away corner of Nob Hill. We had a fabulous meal! When we left, I asked the waiter if he could call us a cab. He said it would probably take half an hour, and the best thing was to walk four blocks to California Street. Since we could hardly walk, that sounded like a horrible idea.

As we stood on the corner pondering our fate, a few full cabs went by. D. said maybe one would drop people off at our restaurant. Lo and behold, one stopped, let people out, and we hopped in. We were reaping the karmic rewards of our free garage sale.

Let’s see how the spirits rest tonite.

take me out to the ball game

I don’t really like baseball, but I do love AT&T Park, formerly known as SBC Park, formerly known as Pac Bell Park. It’s one of those new stadiums that never had a non-corporate name. Somehow the pre-corporate stadiums always manage to maintain their pre-sponsored name. “The Stick” will always be “the Stick”, no matter how many never-before heard of corporations buy the name.

So once or twice a year, I like to go to the park and sit up high and look at the bay and do nothing for three hours. Some people bring their laptops and “work from home”. I just like to sit there.

Last night I found myself at the ballpark at the Home Run Derby, part of All-Star Week. It was mostly through my own naiveté. I thought I was buying tickets for the All-Star Game for my girlfriend’s son.

He is the ultimate athlete. Through a friend, he met Jerry Rice, who said to him, “You look like a ball player.” His feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks. So it just didn’t seem right that the All-Star game would be in San Francisco for the first time in 23 years and he wouldn’t be there.

So I went on Craigslist and bought two tickets to the game, or what I thought was the game. Turns out they were for the Home Run Derby the night before. No wonder I thought I was getting such a good deal. You can imagine everyone’s disappointment when I realized that he didn’t have tickets to the Big Game. So after I calculated how much money I have saved by reaching 53 years of age and never having had children, I decided rather than selling the Derby tickets, I would go myself and get him another set of tickets to the All Star game, where he is right now.

So I invited my friend and colleague Craig, and off we went. If I had only followed my intuition and brought my overcoat(summer in San Francisco-you know how it is), the evening would have been perfect. At one point, I said that baseball would really be boring now, after seeing only home runs for three hours. Like having only dessert for dinner or eating an artichoke heart without having to eat all the leaves first. Home runs are exciting.

It’s been a mighty expensive week.

a tale of two cities

I just got back from New Orleans. I went as a tourist, plain and simple. I have one word to say after spending four nights and three days at a beautiful hotel in the French Quarter. GO!

The best thing you can do for New Orleans right now is go as a tourist. It is as safe- if not safer- as any another tropical tourist destination I've been to where you combine (a) white tourists with money and varying degrees of class consciousness with (b) the poor people who live there, and (c) heat and humidity. I was not asked for money once, which is not what I would say about Havana.

It brought home to me that two parts of a city can exist side-by-side, and the reality of the people who live there couldn’t be more disparate. That split existed in New Orleans before Katrina, but the gap is even wider and more apparent now. Aside from being shown on international television during "the storm", as they call it, almost two years later families are living in small FEMA trailers a few blocks outside of the French Quarter.

One whole section of the "projects" is shut down to protect the safety of the former residents, while identical projects on the other side of the freeway are occupied. The story, unconfirmed by me at this point, is that they want to put a golf course on the site of the public housing units that the tenants are fighting to save.

One story I read today said there they found burn marks, traces from bombs, on concrete sections of the levy that divers brought up.

This all couldn’t possibly be about a land grab to gentrify New Orleans? I had heard theories of this at the time, but even I couldn't go there. But seeing who has rebuilt and who hasn't makes it all so black and white, as they say. Why rebuild your house when it could happen again? The levees are not being improved, just patched.

On my way to the "swamp tour", I saw miles and miles of abandoned suburban, garden-style apartment complexes whose shells were basically intact. I saw blocks and blocks of wood-frame houses in an African-American neighborhood relatively close to the French Quarter that were boarded up, and what few houses were occupied had FEMA trailers parked in the front yard.

I am inspired to return as a vounteer, possibly with a project to rebuild green. But I say just go. Go shopping on Royal Street in the French Quarter and see those beautiful old trees and mansions in the Garden District and eat the best grits and fried oysters and oyster po' boys and crab meat cheesecake and the "you-name-it-it's good". And go hear jazz and support the musicians. They need us. For better or worse, tourism is their major industry. Who knows, you might even see a ghost. (hmmmmmm..i swear i tried to get that link to work about 12 times....that link just might be haunted)

more pics (see post below)

That's me driving that horse!

Quite a lot of bouncing up and down, since I don't really know how to post. It's a lot harder on the knees than and I thought, and that bra my girlfriend has been teasing me to wear would not have been a bad idea today. Another butch fashion dilemma...what to wear horseback riding.

one picture is worth a thousand words

My god daughter L. loves to ride, as you found out yesterday. I have been wanting to learn so that when she is big enough, I can take her riding on the weekends. I have been threatening to take lessons to catch up with her, but she tells me, "You'll never catch up."

So today I went to Friendly Acres for a two-hour ride. Given that I haven't been on a horse in 20 years, it went better than I expected. I even managed to take some pictures and a short video clip. I tried to upload the video clip, but I need some technical assistance. Here are the photos.

The minimum age to rent a horse is five, so I left a message for Molly to see if it's OK to take L. there with me. There was a man there with his six year old daughter, and everything looked under control.

What a beautiful day. Riding a horse along the ocean and actually going down onto the beach. I recommend it.

off we go to the rodeo

Today I found myself somewhere where I NEVER thought I would be. The rodeo. Not the Junior Rodeo, where seven year-olds ride 25 year-old horses around barrels. I mean the real rodeo, with bucking broncos and steer wrestling. Real cowboys from Utah and Arizona. And Castro Valley, that little bible belt of Alameda County. And let’s not forget that confederate flag on one of the trucks in the parking lot.

My god daughter rides horses. She is six. Two years ago I spent countless hours on the internet and telephone finding a riding teacher that would take her at four. I found Molly.

Molly said that she can teach “the little ones” if they have good balance and are obsessed with horses. My god daughter qualified. So once a week, she goes to Castro Valley for her horseback riding lesson. And after two years of lessons (probably way before, but Wednesday at 2 PM is hard to get to for this nine-to-fiver), she can ride that horse.

Molly is involved with the rodeo. So anywhere that Molly and horses are, my god daughter wants to go. So we went. Somehow I was under the naïve impression that we were going to the Junior Rodeo, but I wasn’t so lucky. I knew when they started broadcasting John Wayne reciting over some patriotic-sounding music that I was in uncharted territory.

I suspected that the star spangled banner would be involved, and that my usual reluctance to stand up might not be in my best interests today. I was surprised by the racial diversity, and that a Native American man near me seemed to be actually singing the words, but I was indeed the real diversity today, a jewish butch dyke.

Despite the cruelty to animals part (although at times it seemed the animals had it all over the humans) it was actually quite interesting. Cowboys (and girls) pay money to enter rodeos with the hopes of winning prize money. Unfortunately, we both got tired before the cowgirls. But we did get the autograph of the “queen of the rodeo”.

So here come these guys who actually get up on a bucking bronco and try to stay up on it for eight seconds. I truly wish I had seen the women riding bucking bronco, but when it’s time to go…….What I did learn today is that to get these horses to buck, they tie a strap around its belly, back toward the rear legs. They don’t like it, so they buck. Also in the arena are two other people on horses who have to remove the strap from the bucking horse as soon as the rider falls off. Now there’s a niche job.

Then came the steer wrestlers. Two men on horses chase a steer out of the chute. One of the men actually slides off his horse, aims for the running steer, and tries to grab the steer’s horns and wrestle it to the ground. Testosterone makes people do funny things.

Luckily, after a few rounds of that, my six year old god daughter commented that there might be a lot of traffic on the way home, so I took that as a clue to get the hell out of there.

Then I went to La Pena to see the Lesbian Hip Hop group from Havana, Cuba. WOW. We live in interesting times.

the spirits like mid-century moderne

I am a third generation junker. My grandfather would go to church bazaars and buy up everything that was left over at the end. Boxes of bright red nail polish and dozens of short sleeved men’s shirts with those weird little diamond patterns. Today they would be sold on Valencia Street in a vintage store, but in 1966, we thought they were the squarest thing going.

One time he came home with two four-foot tall carved wooden African statues. We laughed about those things for years. After my father died two years ago and we were clearing out the house, I thought about those statues and how much they must be worth now. My cousin Robert still has them in his basement, and he said I could have them. Getting them out to California would be a challenge, but maybe the next time Antiques Road Show comes to town………

My girlfriend, on the other hand, is a first generation junker. She was teased by her family about going to flea markets and wearing “old clothes”. But she has a passion for junking that is hard to believe is not inherited. Imagine our delight at finding collectible ceramic candlesticks for 99 cents each.

In the past year, we have gone to Philly, my home town, twice. We discovered an antique store in the Italian Market area of South Philly, one block from the best cannoli in the world. The guy that owns it grew up “in the neighborhood” and sold fish out of that store for thirty years. Now he’s into “junque”. He talks loud and fast and loves a bargain.

Last week, when we were there, we found some pink Mikassa plates with a small peace sign on the bottom from the 60s. D loved them, and I teased her about being converted to my love for “mid-century”. She usually finds the straight lines of the mid-century moderne too cold and sterile compared to the lush, sensual décor of her house.

She bought the plates and I schlepped them home on the plane. The other day, I noticed two of them under plants on her altar. I screamed, “That’s not what those plates are for”, and she said it's OK, they could always be washed.

Last night we heard a crash, and one of the plants on a pink plate was on the floor. Today I told her that the spirits didn’t think the pink plates should be used for that either. She laughed. A little while ago, the other plant on a pink plate crashed to the floor as well. “I guess you’re right”, she said. “The spirits like those pink plates and don’t think they should be used for planters”. You know you’re right when the spirits throw their vote with yours.

casper, the friendly ghost

Do you believe in ghosts? I mean really believe in your head and in your gut that ghosts exist. Well, I am on the verge of having to say yes.

Of course, like every california baby boomer, I observed the various "spiritual movements", and would describe myself as being spiritually conscious. I believe in "higher power", and know that it comes in many forms, from the traditional GOD to an ancestor we talk to. I have even seen pictures of ghosts and basically believe it to be so. But REALLY believe? That's a leap of faith I have managed to resist until now.

My girlfriend is a witch, and her 100 year-old house is filled with "spirits"….the dead. We talk about them all the time, but in 12 years, she had never seen one. Her son started seeing them when he was practically a toddler.

I have lived places before that I "felt" were haunted, but I never saw anything. When I lived in Puerto Rico, I stayed in a rooming house, and I had the sensation that the room was haunted. A Cuban friend came over, and after I said that I thought the room was haunted, she said she had seen an old man sitting in the chair. The landlady confirmed that an old man had died in that room.

But actually SEE one!

Last summer, I helped d. clean her studio in the attic, where the spirits like to hang out. We worked for hours and threw away boxes and boxes of stuff. We scrubbed the table tops with chisels. We cleaned. At one point, we were near the closet, and we heard banging to a quite irregular beat. We looked at each other, and both knew what it was. There was just no other explanation.

Occasionally, this one friend of d's comes over and talks about which spirits she is seeing. I usually leave the room during this line of discussion, and my level of nervousness about getting up in the nite increases dramatically.

The other nite, d. came in and said she had just seen a ghost. I said, "Don't tell me about it", and she said she had to share what she had seen. She said it was like a white wisp that floated by into the front room. She said "it was like…it was like" and I said "like Casper". We laughed.

As they say, all stereotypes come from somewhere.

To be continued…………..

why blog

A good friend of mine asked me why I have a blog, and I answered, "blogging is all the rage right now." "But why do you have one", she asked. I thought for a I minute, and the first thing I thought of is …external validation. Having been a performing musician off and on for the past 30 years, I know all about external validation. But more about that later.

Back to the primary existential question…If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If we are sitting alone in our room, do we exist? If we write in our journals, is it for us alone or for that amorphous witness out there?

My girlfriend is a pagan blogger, and she is part of a world-wide network of pagan bloggers. Communities are formed and kept alive through blogging. Is it about mirroring ourselves through other people's stories?

I just left a band that I have been in for over a year. There were a lot of reasons why, but primarily I just realized that I would rather be doing other things on Sunday and Monday nites. I used to get so mad at a friend of mine who thought that everything boiled down to "do the positives out-weigh the negatives"? How simplistic can you be?

But over the years, I have come to realize that it just may sometimes be true. I have stayed in bands I really wanted to leave because I needed the external validation. I guess I really have grown up, because having Sunday dinner with my girlfriend, her son, and any number of wild and wonderful friends is really more fulfilling. There will be more bands in my future, but a son is only 15 once.

go bears

A few weeks ago, I went to a Cal women’s basketball game. I never knew there were so many 6’2” and 6’3” women. The women who were a mere 5’10” appeared downright diminutive by comparison.

As it happens, this year is the 35^th anniversary of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination against students and employees of educational institutions. What this meant was that schools and colleges had to provide equal funding for men’s and women’s sports. You can imagine the uproar that caused.

As a result of this law, the percentage of female high school varsity athletes increased from 7% in 1972 to 41% in 2007. This also means that the number of women who have received basketball scholarships to college has increased respectively. Imagine the opportunity that this has given to thousands of women to not only go to college, but to travel the country for the games.

As a matter of fact, sitting right in front of us at the game were two scouts from the WNBA. Now there’s something that didn’t exist in 1972.

My 15 year old nephew, who is a high-school basketball player himself, didn’t want to go to the game with me because “girls are too slow, and the game will be too slow”. I have nothing to compare it to, because the only men’s basketball game I ever attended was during a work-related function in a luxury suite at the Staples Center in LA, and the focus was not exactly on the game. “Girls” may be slower, but there sure were a lot of three-pointers thrown at Cal that day.

I remember once at the airport, while I was waiting at the carrousel for my luggage, I noticed a young woman standing nearby. She exuded so much poise and confidence for a woman her age. I thought to myself, “She’s an athlete”. How lucky for her.

I think about all of the things that have changed for women and girls since 1972, and am proud for the small part that I have played in bringing some of them about. I know that sexism and homophobia still exist in the sports world, but I look at those strong young women on that basketball court and know that they are yet paving the way for the young girls who are following in their footsteps. Go bears.

dyke march

Well, it’s that time of year again. The dyke march committee is revving up to put on the largest annual women’s gathering in the world. It’s a lot of work, especially raising the money. It costs about $25,000 to put on the dyke march and rally, and it always amazes me when women say, after arriving at the park complete with stage, sound system, trolley car for disabled and old women, and a sound truck, “What does the dyke march need money for?”

But the day of the march of the march is nothing short of exhilarating! When I look at the pictures from dyke march 2006, I get shivers down my spine. The sheer number of women, and the diversity of race, age, size and physical abilities is astounding.

When the current dyke march committee formed three years ago, we made a commitment that the dyke march committee, as well as the talent on the stage, would be at least 50% women of color. In order to achieve parity on the committee, after the 2004 march we decided that new members would be women of color only.

Why is it so important to have parity? If we look around, there are not that many organizations that are truly racially diverse. Is it just because “we just gravitate towards people who are like us”, or is racism so prevalent in our society that we, in our little subcultures, cannot see how it divides us?

When I posted on craigslist that the dyke march was looking for women of color to join the committee, I stated that this was not an attempt to exclude white women, but an attempt to achieve racial parity on the committee. I was ecstatically relived that there were no angry calls of “reverse racism”(something that I don’t believe exists) from white women.

In another organization I was in, parity was achieved by women joining in pairs, and if you were white, your partner had to be a woman of color. It may seem that these are artificial or contrived methods of creating a multi-racial organization. But in this society, and yes, even within the lesbian community, we are still divided across racial lines, and seemingly contrived measures are sometimes needed to bridge the divide.

At the dyke march meeting yesterday, there were more women of color than white women. That doesn’t mean that we are finished, that we don’t have struggles about a variety if issues, including class and race, but if we aren’t all at the same table, the dialogue will not even occur. And on the day of the dyke march, watching the talent on the stage that represents lesbians of all colors, I see the organic results of our work.

retirement?

The passing of our dear friend Heather MacAllister, at age 38 from ovarian cancer, gives new meaning to the word retirement. In some ways, it is a miracle any of us have made it this far. The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up after "the bomb", and we all knew that the world could end at any second. Not that I really believed it would, but somehow knowing that it could prevented me from starting things that took more than 25 seconds to finish. Hence, for that reason, among others, I finished college when I was 40. Why go to college when the world was going to end?

Yet, here were are. Several of my close friends turned 60 last year, and there is a whole group of us 1953-ers in my circle. Since I was born on January 1, 1954, I throw my lot in with them.

I never thought I would stop wanting to go out to events that start at 9 PM. At parties, we now sit around and talk about menopause. We joke about "how did this happen", while appreciating the wisdom we have hard-earned. My line on turning fifty is, "All those things that used to bother you? You can't remember what they are."

About a year ago, in the middle of Heather's battle with cancer, we were all talking about knee replacement surgery. I turned to Heather and said, "That's what happens when you get old." Her response was, "I'll take it."

Heather was a brilliant choreographer, fabulous dancer, and one of the biggest personalities I've ever had the pleasure to meet. She gave us so much. She will be sorely missed and vividly remembered.

where do you draw the line?

Men…where do you draw the line?

Literally.

That has become a real question these days, not just a figure of speech. I know people have been doing dissertations on "gender" for decades, and if I hear the phrase "gender is fluid" one more time, I might get sick.

But it is fluid. It is a continuum. But where do you draw the line? And why do we have to?

People of my generation, the baby boomers, are constantly put down by the younger set for being so square, so old-school because we believe in the binary code of gender. But do we really?

Many of us came out during the second wave of feminism. "The Man" was the oppressor, the enemy, the one who had more power, the one who made more money than us. Actually, that part is still true.

Just yesterday I heard on KPFA that over a life-time of work, a woman will earn between $500,000 and $2,000,000 less than a man with an equivalent education. The higher the educational level, the higher the disparity. Interesting, somehow I thought it would be the other way around.

These days, so many women are becoming men, many of them very young. Is becoming a man through surgery and hormones actually buying into the binary code of gender more than just moving though the world as a big ol' butch?

Many organizations, including the dyke march committee of which I am member, have struggled over definitions regarding gender. No men. Women only. Where do you draw the line?

making music

I've always said that music is my primary form of communication. Oh, I enjoy writing and sitting around chewing the fat as much as the next guy, but there is nothing like being in a room with some folks, and everyone is in the groove, and the bass is the heart-beat, and the drums are the pulse, and the horns are screamin', and that sweet guitar is just wailing away. That's living!

And if you add on top of that a funky singer who can really get down, I'm lost in the ecstasy.

Then there's playing out. Watching people dance to your music is the ultimate high. They're feeding off you, and you're feeding off them, and the spiral keeps getting higher and higher. That's what it's all about.

And you don't have to be Charles Mingus or Chick Corea to get there. Ever heard of the One-Note Samba? Don't be shy. Just grab an instrument and start noodling.