Gemini 19°

So I was saying in the last post how pessimistic I was prior to the Full Moon, meaning, now, on the other side of it I feel more expansive and directive at the same time. I feel like cutting my losses and lowering some bars. I’m an overachiever by nature and have carved out a decent career for myself which I would like to make decenter. These past seven, nearly eight years I’ve been planning and then presenting live performance festivals and series and one off productions all under the umbrella of a non-profit festival dedicated to progressing and proliferating new and important stage artists, mainly solo ones, from solo playwrights to the most uncategorical of performance artists, with neo cabaret and alt comedy and sketch and opera and spoken word and hip hop and electronica and dance and high drag and interpretative dance and everything in between.

It’s a tough road to hoe, particularly non-profit, and each year I try to produce all aspects, including the fundraising, myself. I would love to hire someone to help but I’m never able to afford anyone in the moment and then it would take time to teach someone, so ultimately I’ll have to make some kind of manual, some kind of playbook, by which to execute this. Every year is different of course. And this year brings new challenges. We are in a different space which is absolutely fantastic. And I’ve started a capsule festival too for Cambridge and my costs are rather through the roof at present and yet I persevere. And still I have been more overwhelmed than in the past . Much of that feeling has been due not only to the giant list of busy work and technical work I need to exact, it’s also the writing of (at least) a dozen different missives that will be disseminated in myriad directions, for which I think I need to make a list, because suddenly my scope has widened in a way that was threatening to spread me too thin. So I’ve decided to devise a questionnaire, asking myself some pointed questions, and then, at least, in repsonding to the questionnaire as if someone else presented it to me, I might be able to get some thoughts on various “pieces of paper” that I can then shape and send to the pockets of people that need to receive them.

You’ll see what I mean when you read the next Blague.

Gemini 18° (I”m only behind 18 degrees) I”ll catch up fast.

Something about being post this last Full Moon has made me feel slightly less, I shouldn’t say pessimistic, but: pessimistic. It’s so unusual for me to feel that things are going down tubes even though all you hear leads me to believe that.

We took our morning constitutional today in Wellfleet which takes us along the pier and there was a boat that read, on the stern, where the boat’s name typically is: Trump 2020. There was nobody around that looked like they might take ownership, inspired under our breath expletives as we strolled by. Then walking back up into town this suv came barreling too fast down the road and, on its bow it read: Trump 2020 and it was filled with loud, ham-faced bully folk, all men. Sorry you have small dicks.

It says in our book Sextrology that Geminis have small hands. We wrote that way before president lump lumbered into office. Why are we struggling to connect the dots? I ask the media. Can’t someone go out on a limb and say the lump isn’t concerned with Russian hacking our election because they were part of it? Can’t someone say that the lump’s celebritory tone in the oval office with the Russian diplomats was a bit of a confab of fascism?

Gemini 17°

Much of our childhood, my sister’s and mine, was spent indoors. It was Jersey City in the 1960s and 1970s so it was pretty radical. We walked to and from school. Otherwise we were in cars. We played in the playground of our apartment building but we couldn’t walk to West Side Avenue, which bordered the property.

I moved to the suburbs in 1972 at eight years old. It was new and comforting and I immediately attacked nature, getting  myself too wet with creek and too muddy with field. In etrospect I can analyse my psychology at the time which was very much hinged on belonig. I met a family in our neighborhood and I pretended to come from their own home town. That’s how crazy I was as a child. I had just moved to Wyckoff. A part of me needs to move back again.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Gemini 16°

Well there has to be one post in all this catch-up that’s just effing filler. I have so much to say about everything all the time but sometimes I have nothing to say about anything at any given time. So you decide which aspect of my personality you like best while I retreat to the lounge and untuck. I am of the mind that, as cardinal signs, Stella and I are pioneers. The trick is to turn off that pioneering and circle back, with your wagons, to create some kind of party to celebrate the abundance of all one does. Weren’t there like covered wagon raves? Wasn’t there a commercial for a dogfood called Chuck Wagon? I didn’t like it when the dog couldn’t chase the chuck wagon into the wall. I was like, watch out, dog, the chuck wagon has its own reality.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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Gemini 15°

We all play like that sometime. I am too good at not. I think this is true of Stella too, but I should have been a spy. I am stealth on wheels; on toast; on ice; i’ve run out of things. Growing up with a secretive older sister indoctrinated me into espionage. She had puzzle boxes I opened. I had a favorite mini screw driver that could open locked doors. And yet I”m not a snoop. I really don’t want to know about other peoples doings. I steer clear of that burden. But when I was young I believe I sensed my sister was in trouble and I wanted to find the answers. And so, yes, I have mad spy skills, developed from a very young age. But I mainly channel these talents, now, into my investigative, psychological work with people.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Gemini 14°

If you pay close attention to my life you know I have a sister and you also know I don’t have any contact with her and haven’t since before my mother died in 2006. So that’s eleven years. It also, turns out, that our worst president in history has the same birthday as my sister. As an astrologer, and as a person, I am not surprised by this. My mother died three years after my father did. I have just the one sibling. I have no children and won’t if I can help it. So I’m very “floaty” in life when it comes to the anchoring family provides. I have a surrogate family of sorts in England whom I love. And (I was going to write: I have lots of friends around me) yet the fact is I’m very isolated, or is it isolating. Well it’s definitely that. I can go days without seeing other people and not even notice the fact. More and more, as I get older, I turn into what might be considered a misanthrope; but, given social media, and the illusion thereof, people assume I’m very connected and “out there” which I am when I have to be but it is rare that I am. Mostly, I shuttle between my home office and kitchen, go for a walk, go (back) to yoga and try to deal with the day-to-day with a smile.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Gemini 13°

The first gay bay I ever went to was the Odyssey in Asbury Park. There was a sort of gay beach in Belmar where I lived with my parents, or, rather, my mother, summers. And being a bicurious fourteen year old who had already had some, mostly unwanted experience, I would let myself stroll to the north end of town where that beach was, close to the bridge to Avon-By-The-Sea. While I was strolling the length of Belmar, by the water, as I did pretty much daily, I lingered a little longer at the so-called gay beach and sat on the “cliff” that was made by the recent high tide.

It didn’t take long for someone to swoop down on this fourteen-year-old in the form of someone called Simon who was, yes you guessed it, a seminary student. He was eighteen or nineteen so of drinking age in New Jersey at the time. He invited me back to his “blanket”. I went, we chatted. Two other guys, Todd and Sean, joined us. I was so young that eighteen year olds looked like grown men to me.

Simon’s parents (and he), it turned out, lived two blocks from me. I have spoken before about the fact that my father was pretty much absent in summer, staying in our house up north in Wyckoff. My mother was a Pisces so she had no clue what I was up to; and besides, she drank and watched a lot of tv, eating pretzels or Snickers bars or Breyers vanilla ice cream, while stroking her twenty-five pound cat, Kerry, who, apparently, was also Irish.

Simon took me to play racketball once. I think it was an attempt at some semblance of heteronormative male frienship. Then he took me to a gay bar, The Odyssey, which was not just any kind of gay bar I realize now in retrospect. I would go the the Odyssey again and again, mostly ironically, with my fellow new-wavey straight and probably not so straight friends for years after. But at this time, in the late seventies, the new wave hadn’t quite hit. It was deep disco still and this place freaked me out. I remember seeing men kiss for the first time ever when I was at the Odyssey. I was suffused with excitement and revulsion. Howard, the famous eighteen year old bartender wore tons of turquoise. He looked like he should be on Eight is Enough. He wore v-neck three tone cotton short sleeve shirts with big collars. Just like Grant Goodeve and Willy Ames.

Todd and Sean showed up that first night. Nothing untoward happened. I was very clear that I liked girls (too?) and I approached being there, a place that came to be something of a home, as an anthropological study. But the truth was I was intrigued and I belonged there as much as anybody. As much as the seriously butch men (and women) dressed in leather playing pool in the part of the club when you first walked in. As much as any man occupying a stool and drinking their Cape Codders or Budweisers or Seabreezes making a ritual experience out of drinking and hopefully hooking up. As much as the drag queens—the best I ever saw was called Michael and she set up an entire dressing room table and did a Dreamgirls lipsynch to And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going that still gives me chills to think about—she would swipe all her paraphenalia off the fake dressing room vanity. As much as much as much.

Gemini 12°

Hello I am the director of the non-profit Afterglow Festival in Provincetown which enters it’s seventh year in September; and I’m also director of the Glowberon series at the American Repertory Theater/Oberon in Cambridge which enters year three this September. Meanwhile we are realizing a long-held dream of starting a new summer festival in Cambridge (venued at Oberon) that we hope some day will rival the scope of an Edinburgh fringe. The new venture is called the Glow Festival and we are starting small this year, with five performers/acts over four days, July 27-30: Justin Vivian Bond, Penny Arcade, Marga Gomez, Tammy Faye Starlite and Brian King & What Time Is It, Mr. Fox? will appear. Like Afterglow, Glow is non-profit 501 c 3 charitable arts organization to which donations are tax deductible. We have a bunch of expenses, including, in effect, renting and paying the staff of Oberon. Ultimately we shall seek big sponsorship to grow Glow into what it might become. Meanwhile, we are super grass-rootsing it using a model that has worked great with Afterglow. So please, if you would: Become a SPARKLER of the Glow Festival by making a tax-deductible donation of $100 online or by mail AND we will send you a special code so that you can buy tickets to the festival at a 20% discount. Not only that: as a SPARKLER you can attend our opening night party which is just prior to Justin Vivian Bond’s show(s)—7:30 and 10PM on Thursday, July 27. (This is Justin Vivian Bond’s only 2017 New England appearance—and Penny Arcade is making her Boston/Cambridge debut.) And, of course, you write off the donation. You can donate at www.glowfest.org OR send a check to PO Box 129 Provincetown, MA 02657. Just be sure to write a little note to say that this is a Glow Festival donation (as opposed to an Afterglow Festival donation). In the next few years we hope to be bringing progressive talent from all over the glow to Cambridge each summer!

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Gemini 11°

I remember when we left the West Village, asking a friend to promise me that I would come back. I had lived there for twenty years. Things really changed. I would imagine that more changed more rapidly in the West Village of New York than most places. I loved my neighborhood although I can’t really stomach it now when I visit. And good thing because I was just perusing one-bedroom listings and they rent for over $5K. For a lousy one-bedroom in what was the best part of the city to me but is now a ghost town of empty shops that even the richest brands can’t afford to rent. Who lives there now? I mean besides Liv Tyler and my friends who own Tea & Sympathy and, I suppose, Lady Bunny, still.

It was a dream place in the 1990s. Before the Magnolia Bakery. Before the Sex and The City tours. It was perfect. I would walk to HB studio for acting classes. We could eat at Mappa Mundo or Tante Baci for total $30. I felt bad for people who lived in Brooklyn. We would get videos from Mrs. Hudsons. You could lie out and sunbathe on the piers. I don’t know anybody practically that still lives in that neighborhood. It’s sad to me that the joy of living there can no longer exist—even if one does still live there, so many of us have left. And there is nothing to do there.

I’m spinning the globe again wondering where on Earth I can live.

Gemini 10°

I still get quite a thrill out of the psychic moments I encounter when working with clients. In fact I’m more excited and shocked by them than they are at this point. Yesterday I “got a name” as I often do. It was a specific name. An unusual name. And not a derivative but an actual full name nobody uses anymore (if they really ever did). Well that turned out to be the name of a pivotal character in a client’s life—someone who was impacting and symbolically standing for a lot of change in said client’s life. I think our clients have become desensitized to my ability to channel this sort of information reaching my brain—how?—through unseen means. Seriously, I’m still shocked by occurances of my own psychichood.

Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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