Gaeity Girls and Those Who Love Them

Well, fine, I'm on a (gay) roll with inexplicably yogurt-loving, antisocial lesbians. I came upon this brilliant old (last October) post on Deutschland ȕber Elvis about attempting to teach irony to German police, while looking for something totally different (Schoenberg somethingsomething, if you care). The story is great, it's well told, and I can viscerally relate to odd encounters with traffic cops.

However.

What I want to know is why do The Gay People love the musical theatre? And, once we've figured that out, why don't The Straight People, and why don't The Lesbians (whatever side of the yogurt fence they stand on)?

My exhusband is gay, so rest assured I have even less insight than the straightest of all other straight people. Clearly. All I can tell you is that he seemed ungay enough for me to marry him and, looking back on his lax attitude to home furnishings and clothing, not to mention his complete silence on hot guys and ideal gay vacation spots at the time, the only thing I can look back on with any sort of reasonable self-accusation is his fondness for the musical theatre.

And, boy, did he love it!


Whereas, I and my lesbian and inveterately heterosexual friends will never be persuaded to care at all where precisely it is that the wind (allegedly) goes sweeping down the plains. The less advanced of our two races easily get Lerner and Loewe confused with Leopold and his friend! Apart from a sentimental fondness for Marlene Dietrich resulting in casual knowledge of a few too many 1930s cabaret songs and Holländer riffs, and possibly here and there a cruel delight in the spectacle of Marlon Brando breaking into 'song' with no defensible narrative impetus, we just don't care. And we can't be made to.


Yes, I admit I crank up the Kurt Weill every so often, but it's only ever the Brecht-Weill, and it's never Teresa Stratas; I never forget myself and let things slip into Gilbert and Andrew Lloyd Anything. And if ever there were an argument that from the very start Gays Are Gays and the Rest Is Rest, it is to be found at the crucible of Musical Theatre. If we can have a Nalgene, we can certainly have a Gay Gene, and if little Jake or Tyler or Ronan knows what the Hills Are Alive with, and whether or not there is One Maiden Breast (Oh!) and can sing a musical list of Argentinean place-names before he knows whether to pass the Phillips head or the hex bit when Daddy is again sandwiched between the Ikea sofa and the Crate and Barrel rug, then the fight should be over, the debate won, and all the gay men and their straight female friends should retreat to their corner in victory (and eat celebratory yogurt to the strains of 'Gypsy' or 'Cats,' erroneously convinced that they are too fat).

Meanwhile, we contentededly chunky straight and lesbian people can go out for some pizza and double bock, knowing there is nothing we can do to make ourselves like Broadway or Celine Dion, but feeling a little better knowing we don't even have to try. It's an argument that everyone wins!

Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

I don't know. I tried to write an entry about how senior citizens aren't what they used to be anymore, and I thought I did the math wrong, so I scrapped the whole bit, only to try it one more time after deleting everything, upon which I discovered I had it right all along, up until the point I redid it. I didn't have to 'borrow' from the zero at all, since I was subtracting a 0 from a 7 before that... Which means, to those of you who don't know math as well as I do, that 2,007-70=, as I previously and rightly believed, 1,937.

So, nothing about Chuck Taylors versus Novachords, or Gene Krupa or Bing Crosby before the 'Road Pictures.' It's sad, too, because it had funny bits. Moreover, it explained things much better than 1927 did, an equation I found inscrutable in many ways, most of all the heads tilted sideways when I mentioned things like Lyonnaise Potatoes and Pork Chops, or Holländer, or the shock of the New Look.

And then I read a story about a seminal philologist that moved me so strongly I actually attempted to 'contribute' a 'comment.' At which I also failed, apparently, because I don't know what I pushed instead of 'Yes, show me, I'm trying to do something here!!' when Firefox let me know it had shut down a popup and did I want to see it. Nothing happened, so I reloaded and recocked, and whether it's the firing pin or the trigger assembly or the action is too light, something went awry and I went straight to the Technical Issues page, and by this point I was all in (seminal philologists can do that to me, even Calvinist ones), so I had to set up my Outlook, as that's the address the Technical Issues office wanted, even though they could reach me far more handily elsewhere.

But I seem to have achieved greater success with the manly Hand Balm I started, which makes sense because you can blunt some of the technical issues of scent and still have good results. It seems quite likable now, but we'll see as it cures. So far it is strong on oregano and saffron, as I wanted, with vetiver, cedar, and oakmoss in the bottom, and very little bergamot for a tiny bounce and to coax out the citrus notes in the vetiver. Who knows, but it smells great on me right now, and the oregano is settling in so beautifully.