I’m lying beside Carol in her big bed in her historic house in Old Town, Chicago. I’m convinced that Carol is one of Marge Simpson’s missing sisters. She’s flat on her back, chain-smoking, alternately offering me her thoughts on Legally Blonde, which we are watching, and telling me various sexual acts her boyfriend likes to perform on her. “But you know,” she says in a voice that suggests she had her first cigarette at age six, “I don’t need a man to have an orgasm.” She pauses. “I don’t need a vibrator either. I can just think about it and it happens. It’s a Scorpio thing.”... [continue]

Tuesday was the birthday of my young, hot boyfriend, Warren. The good news is, he’s not getting older, he’s getting hotter. The bad news—for me, anyway—is that we were 2,161 miles apart. I was unable to give him a birthday hug. I will never again have the opportunity to hug him on that particular birthday. It’s over, I blew it, missed it, let it slip away.... [continue]

Ken Webster has done it again. Black is this year’s black. Blackbird is this season’s latest thought provoking, stomach punching, try-all-you-like-you-won’t-be-able-to-shake-it offering from the little theatre on 43rd Street in cahoots with Capital T Theatre. Its directed by David Harrower and starts Ken Webster and Xochitl Romero as a pair (let’s not call them couple) that meets up after a decade and a half of a highly advisable, partially law-enforced separation. ... [continue]

About twenty of us, women all, gathered in plastic molded chairs and waited for the presentation to begin. On the screen, the first image of the instructional PowerPoint appeared: an illustration of a tube of lipstick. Only instead of lipstick, the thing sticking out of the tube was an erect penis. ... [continue]

Austin Shakespeare’s Artistic Director Ann Ciccolella offers an updated take on one of Shakespeare’s über-bummer tragedies, Macbeth, with pretty solid results mixed in with a little bit of Huh? Marc Pouhe as Macbeth gives a strong performance and is mighty easy on the eyes. Sharron Bower as Lady Macbeth is wonderful—cognitive dissonance personified with an utterly evil soul wrapped in the façade of loveliness.... [continue]

Steve, the father of my young, hot boyfriend Warren, lives in Houston. Warren asked Steve if he was going to come up here to avoid Hurricane Ike , which looks to be heading straight for the Texas coast, prompting major evacuation. Steve told Warren he’s not going anywhere, that we should come to Houston. Warren explained he’s got his hands full with Hurricane Spike, so we’re staying put, too. So, okay, I guess the comparison is fair—at times. Let’s see, Hurricane Spike has been known to blow into a room at gusts of up to 120 mph. And sometimes massive downpours fall from her eyes, since she’s a sensitive artist and all that. Plus, having been raised in hurricanes her first eighteen years probably had more than a little influence.... [continue]

Like Republican VP nominee, Sarah Palin, I, too, am a hunter and a fisherwoman. In fact, I like to combine the two by shooting fish in a barrel. Which is why, though I know I’m way late to the over-saturated sport known as hurl-shit-at-the-unvetted-candidate-chosen-for-her-good-looks-lack-of-penis-and-radical-conservatism, I just can’t resist. Let’s examine the obvious, shameless marketing first. Apparently, to illustrate her point that no woman should ever be allowed to have an abortion (except in very extreme cases, which I will get back to in a minute) Palin came up with an elaborate plot not only to have five children, but to make sure one of them has Down Syndrome, just so she could point to her holier-than-the-rest-of-us self. Even Pappy and Babs Bush didn’t stoop so low as to play the Retard Card, despite the fact they, too, have a mentally disabled son, one who managed to land a job in the White House.... [continue]

Having been raised by one hoarder and once married to another, I myself am a big purger. No way do I want to ever again live in a house crammed with crap. Nor, when I check out, do I want to leave my son to sort through 5,000 coffee cans of rusty nails, a vast collection of headless Barbies, and a stack of National Geographics dating back to the 1800s. So, several times a year, I go through my already very small pile of possessions and I purge. I take bags of clothes and kitchen stuff to my favorite thrift store, Top Drawer. I redistribute CDs I’ve imported to my Mac. And, once in awhile, I part with books, which is a little bit more difficult, as books and yarn are the two things I would hoard if I did hoard. ... [continue]

Food. I fucking love it. But I have had plenty of weird food issues over the years and, as is so fun to do with one’s issues, I like to hang much of the blame on my childhood. I am not dissing my mother here. Considering she had nine kids to feed on my father’s trucker salary, she did an admirable job. But if I never see a deep freezer or drink powdered milk again in this lifetime, it’ll be far too soon. I’ve never had a steak in my life. More than one person has suggested that if I were to try one, I’d reintroduce land animals into my diet. I’m not interested. I quit beef when I was eighteen and looking back it was less about hurting the cows (though I love them enough to have two tattooed on my body) and more about what passed for meat when I was growing up.... [continue]

I used to donate a lot of blood, starting back when I was eighteen. I gave at least a couple of gallons over the years, maybe twice that, before tattoo sessions and piercings and low iron and sex with a guy that had HepC knocked me off the list first temporarily, then for good. Something else I did a lot of was this—I took my kid almost everywhere with me, from the time he was born. Henry couldn’t have been more than four months old on his first long distance road trip. And not much older than that the first time he attended one of my readings. I took him to movies, restaurants, rock shows. I took him to bars, too, mostly (but not always) because I was doing a reading. He was the youngest kid ever let into Emo’s (he was three) and he even had his own special skanky chair at the gone-but-not-forgotten Electric Lounge, where I took him weekly for poetry slams. ... [continue]

Before West Side Story, before Beverly Hills 90210, before Sex and the City, before so much of the drama—high and low brow—we have turned to for entertainment over the past several hundred years…before all that, there was Shakespeare. Master of Play Beth Burns takes her best shot at Shakespeare with a production of the comedy Twelfth Night at the Scottish Rite Theater. The production is perfectly cast. These actors are all so clearly smitten with the bard’s work that you can feel the love as they deliver, and deliver they do.... [continue]

Once, I heard the writer Walter Kirn interviewed on Fresh Air and he was saying how, when he was a teenager, Mormons came to the door and his parents let them in and before you know it, they converted. And Terry Gross was like, Whoa, Walter, hang on a minute, who lets Mormons in and then buys what they’re saying? And Walter said something like, You know, Terry, of the eighty qua-billion Make Your Penis Enormous spams that go out, there are at least a couple of takers. His parents happened to be in one of those vulnerable places so they fell for the crap. (Note: I am entitled to pronounce Mormonism crap. I was, I am not shitting you, once married to a Mormon. Fucking really.)... [continue]

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I wrote an essay called Quit Your Job that ran on MSN.com. That piece landed on one of their most hits ever lists. This was back during the high-tech boom, there wasn’t a recession like there is now, and so quitting one’s job wasn’t that big of a risk. Anyone with a fifth grade education and rudimentary computer skills could get a gig at one of the gazillion startups. If you didn’t like what you were doing, you could find something else. That’s not the case these days and still, I know, if I encourage people to quit jobs they don’t like, even if they don’t follow through on my advice, the temptation remains strong. By applause, how many of you spend a lot of your cubicle slavery time fantasizing that you could quit to pursue your passion?... [continue]

From the moment the cast of Skate! zips out onto the rink at Playland Skate Center, there is an intense, joyful buzz created by a cross between the energy it generates and an ecstatic sentimentality as the audience is hurled back in time to childhood days at the rink. Anyone who has ever roller skated will, within the first five minutes of the performance, be seized with an urge to take up the hobby once again, to commit to skating every day for the rest of forever.... [continue]

I first saw Southpaw Jones back in ’04 when he was playing in the tin roofed barn behind the original Moxie and the Compound. The very first song I ever heard him sing was The Cruelty of Teenage Girls, and in that moment my life radically and permanently changed for the much, much better. And I’m not even saying that because I read a recent article in Wired telling me that hyperbole is the path to more page views. I’m saying it because, thanks to Southpaw Jones, I got my picture in the New York Times, I was afforded the privilege of home ownership, I collect royalty checks for decent sums of money, and—I am not shitting you—I regained the ability to walk again. ... [continue]

Oh. My. God. People—you must, mustmustMUST go see The Clean House at Zach Scott Theater immediately. Whether you literally have some sort of OCD that prompts you into unstoppable cleaning sprees or are more of the metaphorical sort who's forever trying to tidy up this wicked, funny, messy thing called life, this show is for you. Smaranda Ciceu plays Mathilde, the hilariously sad twentysomething Brazilian housekeeper who hates to clean. This proves to be problematic for her power-achiever MD employer, Lane, played to perfection by Lauren Lane. On the other hand, it provides a thrill for Lane’s neatnik sister, Virginia (Barbara Chisolm) who lives to dust, scrub and rearrange. Tom Green who doubles as both the ghost of Mathilde’s father and as Charles, Lane’s nutty husband—also an MD— has got obsessions of his own. And Ana (Alicia Kaplan) also pulls double duty as the ghost of Mathilde’s mother and, among other things, Charles’ distracting (to put it mildly) patient. ... [continue]

Warren, my young, hot boyfriend, came over on Monday night. Euphemistically speaking, we played Yahtzee and Scrabble. The next morning, I emailed him a picture of a bucket of mackerels. I also made sure I thanked him at least forty times throughout the day, telling him how much I enjoyed the unexpected visit and his amazing skills at, uh, shaking the cup and rolling the dice and really knowing how to lay down those tiles, if you know what I’m saying. I’m sure Warren knew what the mackerel picture was about and I have little doubt that he was aware of what I was up to with all the praise. Because Warren and I both spent some time last week reading Amy Sutherland’s new book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage. And in doing so, we learned techniques once reserved for animal training which, Sutherland has discovered, work remarkably well on humans. ... [continue]

In March 1997 a doctor said to me, “Your jeans are going to fit a lot better once we get that out.” So tactful. The that to which he referred was a cyst-morphing-into-a-tumor that had wrapped itself around my left ovary. This was discovered at a post-abortion checkup. I paid cash for the abortion. The removal of both the tumor, which as it turned out had malignant cells in it, and the ovary (the two could not be disentangled) were covered by insurance. Luckily, I required no chemo or radiation. I don’t recall that my jeans fit any different when all was said and done.... [continue]

When I heard yesterday that Austin slam poet, Shannon Leigh, 20, died this past Monday, I felt sick. I didn’t know Shannon, but was consumed for a couple of reasons. For one, my son is nearly the same age, and the idea of parents outliving their children is commonly held to be the worst kind of pain. My heart broke for her parents. The other reason the news caught me is that, though it’s been years since I’ve been part of the community, there was a time when the Austin slam scene was a huge part of my life. In fact, it was the slam that got me performing in Austin. As far as I know, Wammo—he of Asylum Street Spankers fame—was the first to introduce the slam to Austin. Slamming, which started in Chicago in 1984, caught on fast here. It didn’t take long before there was a regular, wild, weekly gathering, one that for a long time found its home in the long gone, much missed Electric Lounge.... [continue]

Back in the old days, when I still drank, I’d finish up a bartending shift on 6th Street, by which I mean throw back a few cocktails. Then I’d float, heavily buzzed, on down to the 311 Club to see CJ. The 311 was not really “my” kind of place. Except for CJ, a bartender so amazingly skilled I would go just to watch him. Okay, well that and get a little drunker. The thing about CJ was that he could make any customer—big, small, young, old, stupid, suave—feel like his one true love in the few moments it took him to mix a drink, run a charge card, and wink like he meant it. Maybe it was an act, all this showmanship, but I had the feeling that CJ genuinely liked people and wasn’t just shaking it for tips.... [continue]