Virgo 16° (September 7)

I think before it goes out of my mind I better write down some preliminary thoughts and feels. I had spent a few hours this morning sending out last minute pleas and trying to get some money in but it is what it is at this point and hopefully we shall get some groovy ticket sales going from the town folk and people visiting. I also had to make sure people knew about the party and I need to get an accurate headcount. I then moved around and had some ideas that I need to weave into the script.

The whole idea of the gods being alive. The fact that astrology finally put that all into context. That the gods were alive again. That it started up that I knew what my mother was talking about. There were some scary moments. My psychic ability would get stronger when I drank because my conscious mind would get out of the way. Talk about partying a bit. Take poetic license during that time in France as well. All the stuff about isolation puting the pot into that place and then the astral projecting shaky hands and eyeballs. I have no idea why just wrote that. I didn’t hang out with them 24/7 they legitimized me but I only saw them socially on occasion. There was no static cling the way I thought friends were supposed to be, my friendships were always very intense. I always had a best friend. I talk about how life became magic. Maybe word got out and they thought I was a bit psycho? A lot of psychosis also sort of come to light at puberty but that thing with Peter Reynolds got me the reputation that I was psycho. The dreams started. I have predictive powers I still get them. Some times I remember to tell Stella about them so that I have proof in case they come true. I’ll give you a for instance. Tell the dream about the man. We were in Boston in the dead of winter it was freezing outside.

These people didn’t want anything from me they weren’t codependent. Make a giant scroll out of the poem “As if I don’t have enough to do”Conceit that images pop out of my phone. Jewish eye candy and the Suzy Menkes story. I didn’t do anything of the sort but the ideas were at least flowing. I have to write a blurb on a new sponsor:

Geek Chic. Since scuttlebut of breweries opening in Provincetown began in 2018, the knee-jerk response was resistant; but with the reality of the PBC, newly opened in the former 141 Bradford Natural Market space, the townspeople couldn’t be more pleased. For starters, founder Chris Hartley and partner Erik Borg kept 141’s kitchen going—same cooks and menus —ramping it up all the more with beer-friendly pairings like soft pretzels and fried pickles and artichoke cakes, preserving this address’s destination status as the “omphalos” (world-navel) center of Ptown, where folks can gather for healthy fare and, now, beer. Breakfast, from 9AM-IPM, feature sa Brewski Breakfast Sandwich (eggs, cheese, pico de gallo, chipotle aioli) and  Avacado Toast, while the overlapping all-day-and-night menu, 10AM to 9PM, boasts a plethora of shared plates—Lamb Balls and Fried Snapper Escovich among them—and a range of sandwichs and salads. The PBC tap room offers three of their homemade brews—a Bearded Mistress IPA, a Golden Hook ale, and a Crandaddy Sour. They do (and will incresingly) brew other beers, but the larger quantities are processed in Jamaica Plain. What strikes you walking into the tap room is how uncharacteristic of Ptown it is (in a very  good way) as it feels more like Brooklyn or either one of the Portlands. The vibe is urban and playful, which is not lost on the gaming minded guys at the helm. Not only do they encourage the screen-obsessed to come in and wage video competition, they also have touchy feely cards, dice, backgammon, boardgames, darts and a pool table for the less virtual crowd. And on top of all this goodness: PBC is an “activist” brewery where the select brews themselves give back to progressive, valuable PTown causes—namely The Generations Project, Summer of Sass and The Commons.  Purposeful pleasure!

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 15° (September 6)

Well I never the, two weeks later, met Tony Randall, who made me a member of his theater company where I appeared in two Broadway plays

The rehearsals weren’t in the building across the street from the Time Life Building where I worked at the Book of the Month Club as the person who writes all the tiny captions and I didn’t come in early and mess up my desk and come back and lunchtime to make sure I was seen and rehearsed for a month without anyone at work knowing I wasn’t there.

While reading with starlets coming in to audition for the role of Nina in The Seagull, none of them knowing Laura Linney, who wasn’t going to be blood awful, already had the part, Elizabeth Shue never came in to read and we never did the final scene where Nina and Treplov see each other one last time and something incredible didn’t happen where we barely looked at our scripts and both somehow knew the lines and we WERE the characters and we had this out of body experience and then like Nina she fled the room only she didn’t come back and I wasn’t told to go after her and she wasn’t sobbing uncontrollably in the hallway with her manager and then she didn’t run at me and fling herself into my arms hug and kiss me with her wet face and whisper in my ear I will never for get you and then go running out of the building at which time I didn’t fall to the ground having what I told was an actor’s breakthrough where my muscles were siezing and the assitant director didn’t jump on top of me and kneed out all the trapped tension while saying soothingly good for you, good for you

Well I never had just one line in The Seagull that I delivered to Tyne Daly and Jon Voight never came to my dressing room every night after to give me notes on it.

I never lived in the West Village for twenty years during the best time to live in the West Village.

I never wrote for the New York Times Styles Section, nor wrote celebrity features for Glossy Magazines, interviewing Jean Reno in Paris on the set of Ronin or Peter Greenaway at his studio in Hampstead. Or Helena Bonham Carter at the Lenox Hotel during which she kept her hands down her pants taking them out to sniff them at intervals.

I never went to Paris, doing runway reports for magazines, and field producing for Fashion Telelveion, to be there when my wife was working there with designers, and I never saw Kate, Cindy, Naomi, Christy, Tatiana, or any of the supermodels walk in countless shows.

I wasn’t an on-the-spot reporter for Instyle where I would ask people like Roman Polanski and Catherine Deneueve what the first record was they ever bought or what is your favorite article of clothing.

While reporting on a party for InStyle, Darren Starr didn’t come up to me and ask if I could act and say I was exactly the person he needed to play a reporter role on his new tv show Central Park West and made an appointment for me to come in and read and Central Park West wasn’t cancelled the next day.

Well I never with my wife did astrological readings for friends in Milan and Paris late night, after a day in the fashion trenches, and this didn’t lead to our writing horoscopes for magazines under pseudonyms.

Well I never got a call from a publisher who was secretly reading our column in Teen People to offer us a deal to write a book for adults based on our premise that the signs were broken down by gender.

We never launched our book at Barneys and Parker Posey who was playing the manager of Barneys on Will and Grace didn’t come to the launch and confuse the hell out of everybody

Well I never met Princess Caroline twice, once when she didn’t come to our book launch in Paris at Colette and say slash lie probably that she heard so much about us

I was never with my wife on Chelsea Handler’s show several times and she never called me a funny little nugget.

We never bought a house on Cape Cod in the late 90s but ultimately settled in Provincetown where I started a festival

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 14° (September 5)

Now, I have one more trope, device call it what you will. I’ve not seen it used before so I think I invented it. It should speed us along and will serve as some scaffling for some future stories. I’m calling this a quasi-epic poem, without rhymes, to which I will add stanzas over time. It is titled: Well I Never.

Well I Never met a girl at Logan Airport at whom I made funny faces, then started dating, married and am still with 36 years later

Well I Never Flew to Paris and, jet-lag dreamed, I was French currency, in coins, being poured through a sorting machine.

I never climbed an alp with my girlfriend to stay in a ruin left over from the 1968 Olympics and nearly together froze to death

Well I Never staged a sit in when I discovered our school in France cost BU $1K that year but our parents were paying $16K

I never organized an educational field trip for a dozen of us to go to Rome and had the whole thing paid for by Study Abroad office

Well I never met, my girlfriend and I, an elderly man after midnight, in a bar who spoke in tongues but we understood him and my girlfriend never never remembered him being young not elderly

I was never given the nickname Credit Leone for swiping taxi receipts from French cabs and giving them to students to get reimbursed by the program

I never went to Paris every weekend but one because it was eight francs to a dollar and hotels cost nothing in those days

Well I Never flunked most of my classes including Cubism because I didn’t speak French until that year was nearly over

I Never returned to BU for senior year and got straight A plusses but still didn’t graduate with honors. Then moved back to Paris.

I was Never swept up by an Italian futball team and taken to a Club on the C. E. where naked women danced around giant plastic phalluses

A man in a car with a driver never picked me up off the street to take me to an ceremony on the C.E. for a French futball team celebrating a win and was lobster on gold plates as the players sat on a multi tier dais pouring champage over each other’s heads

Well I Never danced at Le Castel with my girlfriend next to a woman was it Jerry Hall? whose gold lame dress only covered on breast

I never worked at a magazine called Passion that was this big because it was the 80s by day and at a restaurant in the Marais before it was the Marais called Dizzy Place not Dizzy’s Place or The Dizzy Place.

I never met my tribe of people that year, still my dearest friends, and one of them didn’t one day write the Harry Potter books

Well I never lived in Harvard Square for a year and wore a Marrimeko uniform working at the Harvest restaurant dancing away nights at Man Ray

I never crashed a party in Allston where someone put pcp in the pot or dosed my drink and then ended up being arrested at the 7-11 for eating Vienna Sausages out of the can and was thrown into a cell with scary people who were soon screaming to get out because I was scarier. I didn’t sing Sweet Chariot substituting words that suggested I was a Mafia prince and when my girlfriend and a friend picked me up I didn’t dive roll out of the car going 40 miles an hour on soldiers field road and absorb the impact with multiple forward rolls, seeing the math and blueprint in my head, then spring to my feet and run back to the 7-11 because my bike was there and I didn’t crouch down and propel myself into the air and clear the eight foot fence without touching and get my bike and smash my way out and back to my house where another chain link gate enclosed the shared driveway between my house with my landlords house and I didn’t see the math in my head again that told me where to ram the fence with my bike so that it came out of its cement pilings and then ride over the fence with my feet never having left the pedals and run into kitchen back door and take off all my clothes and start breaking all the dishes in the house and back into the backyard and the landlord’s golden retrievor wasn’t going crazy and crash through it’s screen door to jump around with me and I didn’t wake up naked in the back yard spooning the dog which comforted me all night long and I didn’t stumble into the house and look in the mirror and every muscle in my body wasn’t supersized so I looked the the Hulk and I wasn’t so sensitive to light that I couldn’t go out of the house in the daytime for a week

I never moved to Hoboken to work at Avenue Magazine on 57th Street while my girlfriend also worked on 57th at Bergdorf Goodman

Well I never studied acting with Uta Hagen who didn’t hate me because a class applauded an exercise I did and she didn’t have this thing called the Hagen Wagen where a student had to bring in lunch for everyone and I made a Full Mediterranean meal, including humus in a bread bowl and she never said “what is this shit?

My neighbor Tony Goldwyn never offered to give me a list of agents and he never called to invite me over greeting me wearing nothing but those tiny striped nylon Richard Simmons shorts and I never made a lame excuse and went running from his brownstone and never kicked myself later.

Well I never had Julianna Margulies over with her then boyfriend to play charades and she was never really good at it

Well I never studied comedy improv and came up with a sketch where I was Tony Randall doing a commercial which went like this: “Hi I’m Tony Randall and I want to talk to you about Oscar Wilde Camp for Sensitive Boys. At Oscar Wilde you don’t learn the usual ruff and tumble fistacuffs and other sports and skills. No. At Oscar Wilde Camp you learn proper ascot tie, quipping, inuendo, Maugm. That’s right Oscar Wilde it’s truly camp.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 13° (September 4)

Today we have clients and I won’t get a lot accomplished otherwise. I will go to Orleans and get posters and such but I will cancel out on going to Provincetown and postpone that until tomorrow. Here are some more thoughts on paper but this is becoming more of a novel than a show. I think I’m where I need to be though and I will have to do a ton of cutting anyway.

What you might not have noticed was that I employed yet another device I guess you can call it in that last bit. Something called poetic license which is absolutely another element, the fifth element I think now, maybe in the constructing of a one-person show. This one anyway. So I didn’t study theater in college; the high school mentor acting teacher and drama department head moved away after my sophomore year and took all inspiration with him. But as fate has it I ended up on the Performing Arts floor of my dorm at Boston University and to this day are close friends with people I met there, many of whom went on to do great things. I was an English major and by year two I was bored and wanted out. While sitting with the same stoned faces on Buswell Street where I lived, now, at the Earth House next door to Marc Maron, and, as I say we both ate at “Veg”,

I felt myself falling into a rut. Freshman year I did okay academically but I partied too much. Sophomore year I got super academic for the first time in my life and got straight As proving true what every teacher since Kindergarten had told my parents: He could be the top student if only he applied himself. I did so now because it was an individualist pursuit. I was sick of my surroundings, and as I say I was sitting with the same stoned faces of so-called friends I have to admit I didn’t like and I got one of my flashes. Call the Study Abroad office. I picked up the dorm phone, hit Zero and asked the operator to connect me. Got anything going to France? Funny you asked: We have a final meeting for a first ever year abroad in Grenoble but all the other students are already signed up. You would have to get us parental permission and a letter from one of your French professors stating you are proficient enough to matriculate directly into a french university. I went to call my mother when the phone rang her ring. Parental approval check—she would call the Study Abroad Office. The only problem was my French was terrible. But I asked my professor who, it turned out was predatory, called Adrienne who had invited me over to her apartment once and terrified I didn’t go and she felt slighted. I need you to give a proficiency test

You never came over. Small stand off then she gave me the test which I didn’t pass. She changed a few answers for me so it looked like I did and I went to the meeting at the Study Abroad office. You might say my life started then I could have started the show here. Every single good thing in my life can be traced to my deciding to go to France, literally, in a flash.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 12° (September 3)

Today is Tuesday and I’ll be damned if I remember what is supposed to happen this day. There is a lot of fundraising going on and I need to circle back to the Sparklers next and start getting them in. And getting the party into place. And getting the comp list into place. And all that jazz! Who is going to come and see me anyway. Nobody probably. I hope these stories coming out this week do something. I need to get a paper I just remembered I will run out and get one after we eat lunch.

In the social heirarchy of my highschool there were various levels of popularity, and as I said I was the lowest of the low, among the pariahs. At the very top were the beyond crowd, a small, elite, sophisticated crew including a soccer player who made varsity his freshman year whose French father was the chef at LeCirque, and the cheerleading captain whose family owned a cycle shop and lived with a single mother in a mid-century modern house like in that film the Ice Storm. At the core, there were three girls, all of whom had straight blond hair, and three boys who were swarthy, brooding and intense. And then a half a dozen characters, mainly loners or type-A academics, who floated in and out. And then there were the four hundred and fifty everybody in between on various scales of popularity. It’s those people you have to watch out for. That’s where the bullies and tormentors lay. Somewhere in that samey samey sea of docksiders, Lacoste shirts, grosgrain, teabury pink and kelly green, red-faced, sweaty Bruce Springsteen fans, which, if you actually grew up in New Jersey, made you very ordinary indeed.

So one morning I got one of my flashes only this time it was of me; and I decided to act on it. This was my flash and this is what I did. I was in the cafeteria, sitting by myself as usual, and I crossed the entire room, walking through that preppy snarling sea, and up to the table where these creme de la creme kids were sitting and I said hi and sat right down and, as if I had been there every day since, they said hi and started chatting and asking questions about classes we had in common and what I thought of this or that and, like in my flash, I remained cool and unflustered and just answered and quipped and I never sat alone again. And what I realized with, just like when you’re at the very bottom of the social food chain it’s basically the same as being at the very top. At the bottom you’re not included and at the top you aren’t either. Only here the choice is yours. It’s not up to the hundreds of insecure middledwellers jockeying for position. This whole notion of this circle of friends being elites was an invention of those in betweeners just as they invented the category of pariah I had previously been relegated to.

The alchemy had changed in an instant. I had changed it. Or these psychic flashes did. But that was me anyway, right? Okay maybe it was some kind of outside source or higher power intervening but as I’ve come to learn that is also me. I don’t believe in A higher power necessarily I believe in MY higher power. Anyway it literally worked like a charm. And those Mr. InBetweens who had previously attacked and tormented me were suddenly silenced. I could almost see them biting their tongues as they passed me in the halls now because they couldn’t bring themselves to insult one of the elite crowd since it was their own invention. Meanwhile, I had known these new friends for years I just never spoke with them before, a fact of which they were blissfully unaware.

We had dinner parties and listened to vintage music, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Starship and CSNY, not typically together, but on lesser known solo and duet records. We took the train to New York to see matinees of Equus, Deathtrap and Bent. Everyone was kind and had a moral compass. There was light sexual experimentation of varying kinds. And the boys smoked pot and went camping and took mushrooms or mescaline and laughed till our faces ached. But I was in with some classy people and it wasn’t determined by money or membership at the country club. It was based on books and food and culture and travel, even though these people were athletes they weren’t jocks. Everyone went off to a good college and stayed loosely in touch and I had a model for the kind of tribe I would seek to find as an adult. I wanted to be around kind people. The word kind has that double meaning. And what I’ve learned is that people who are reallly at the top of their game tend to be the kindest people and they use their influence to help other people. Those with trumped up ideas of themselves are forever those middling insecure types, the bully cowards, who hoard and lie and cheat and steal, things that only entail their lower reptilian minds.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 11° (September 2)

Stayed in all morning and got a ton, I mean a ton of busy work done. Today, first thing I will make copies of Surrender and Angie so I can practice them over the next three nights and right myself little notes on what to play in the right hand. I will get the tech stuff to Erica. And then I was about to sit and write and just couldn’t without a little break—the devil made me do it—and then a note back from those two menaces. I decided to reach out to Penny and we ended up talking for about two hours or more. It was very helpful and I emerged feeling super empowered. I don’t know but I’m going through some shite:

And not only that but I am stalled too because I’ve found myself with just six days to write this show that it became four days as I was triggering myself and suddenly writing to Midge Hurst things like I did The delivery of which is just so cringey and embarrassing but I hope so devoid of guile that it will be received in the spirit it was sent. I seem this year to be in confessional mode telling all my friends with whom I grew up in high school that this thing happened to me and also it is why to this day I hold up the B. And why it is that my best friend all through junior high and high school was also well, you get the idea. His name I will not name but somehow, some way, this kid with whom I became close friends in sixth grade and who was thus my best friend during this summer of 1975, did I tell him? I didn’t tell him? somehow he knew? These mysteries of life at these innocent, lost times in our life where, you know what?, everything was magic, they become the occult, the personal occult we explore. Occult simply means hidden. And at a time when life is accelerating so fast and all the first adult things happen too soon we hide them. We crush them down into our subconscious. They become the occult, hidden. Exploring our own occult is one and the same with exploring the occult, it is shot through with the same intrigue and latent power. I have no idea where I’m going with this. I was meant to speed the plow, in my premier autobiographical show, from eleven to adulthood, at this point of the show but I can’t seem to get out of neutral; and at the same time being this hurricane stalled over the Bahamas, I am raining down, I am broken, I am exposed and seriously stalled and I think I am forever in this place.

I don’t think that’s the way to go

Actually it’s fine that I got stuck in the summer of my eleventh year because I’m going to very quickly employ another device here, a sort of equivalent of the movie montage—let’s call it the Encapsulation technicque—and I’m going to use it to speed us from seventh grade to college, ready? We begin with me being a social outcast as I start junior high, low man on the totem pole, the usual name-calling of the faggot sort suddenly cutting me deeply now. I kept to myself. I continued my mythological and metaphysical studies. I dove into chorus and theater which I didn’t know at that time shared an origin with ritual magic and earliest religious rites but it does all fit together. I had a bright singing voice before puberty hit and I always had the solos. I was Randolf in Bye Bye Birdie so the first words I ever sang in a musical were Ed Sullivan, Ed Sullivan, which is kind of cool since we share the same birthday and are both impressarios. I played all the lead roles in eighth grade. And all through high school I was being groomed for a theater career, taken under the wing of older students, and for brief shining moments when plays were running I experienced brief waves of, well I won’t say popularity, but a reprieve from the tormentors who continued to attack me, and yes the stranger things. I would get flashes, future glimpses of these individuals, as if the fear, or adrenalin I suppose, that they triggered in me would surge and manifest in these images in my mind; I’d see these bullies driving away staring out of the rear car window or falling down a flight of stairs or being, themselves ridiculed and red-faced crying, things like that. Then these images would bear out. Bullies who would threaten to beat me up after school would that day break a limb or one psycho kid who pledged to kill me before the start of a new year moved away. Once, and really only once, a redhead kid Peter Reynolds, who looked like that pugnose puppet on Pee Wee Herman, Randy, remember him? Well this kid jumped me and pinned me and started pummeling me and all I could do was warn him which made him laugh. I don’t know why I knew to warn him, but he just kept it up, and then he spit in my face and then I don’t really remember much except a full body adrenalin sweep and springing to my feet flinging him off me as if he was blown back by an explosion then jumping on to him and pinning him down so hard his wrists were disappearing into the grassy soil. And though I never punched him or spit on him or anything he was screaming and crying and yelling get him off me get him off me with this wild trapped animal look in his eye. And people pulled me off and I continued home where I puked my guts out.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

 Virgo 10° (September 1)

Sunday. Rabbit, rabbit and I awoke at 3:33 so something is coming full circle. I am on a roll today writing. I will go and get some wine in Eastham and the traffic will be terrible. La S. is going to make a delicious farfalle with eggplant and goat cheese and we are going to sit in the living room and I will read her what I have. I’m feeling more delicious than I have in a while. I don’t care who likes me. I do like the idea of a little lift each morning. But it is different to learn people are on drugs. I don’t think we should be made to feel everything is fine when it isn’t. We need to be disgruntled. It’s what we’re supposed to do and feel. Anyway, I need to push my narrative along today if I’m going to hit my marks which I can easily do if I just should my mind up. It is actually September fifth at four thirty two in the afternoon and I am feeling the stresses of what I’ve bitten off. Anyay I’m dealing (well) with a number of things going on (I think). If I could only say what I really want to say. Writing is a trigger for so many things for me. But writing this show now is causing this strange loop of triggering. I can’t explain exactly what I mean but it just seems I’m caught in a moment. I know that certain desires conflict with certain goals, but maybe that’s just an old story I tell myself. All I know is that I’ve been me for a long time now.

So cutting and pasting. I’m talking about how IN WRITING this I got stuck in this groove and the obvious answer is because this was that summer where sexual shit went down but it is more than that. There’s the witchcraft and the incantations and there all of that. And I look at my school photos now sixth seventh grade and it is like day and night. But that’s the story and it’s a good story so a plot twist isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And here we go with perhaps another device, I’m not sure but, I would call this bit the encapsulation because I can pretty much sum up the entering into seventh grade, well into college in a paragraph: Entering junior high you are suddenly grouped together with students from, in my case four other schools, and hormones are flying everywhere, and suddenly the landscape is about heteronormative power couples walking the halls with their hands in each others back pockets—look out for the comb!—remember when combs in your back pocket were such a thing that they actually wore a hole in the corner of the pocket? Well that person in the powder blue shirt was the lowest of the lowest on the totem pole. And I found that I had so-called friends from grammar school who were so insecure and so jockeying for social position that they targeted me as an object of ridicule in an attempt to make themselves popular with this new uneasy mash-up of hormonal young egos being thrown together into what amounted to a junior-high snakepit. Midge. Whom I’m friends with now because I’m amazing but she threw me specifically under the bus. She got chummy with Adele Mimnaugh (the greatest mane ever but for Yvette Mimieux) and, also, to this day, I’m friends with. I’m very forgiving. And anyway, Adele wasn’t really buying it. She and (the then love of my life) Laurie Best, who was “so-outta-m’league—and this other kid, Mark Bennet, who is also dead, I think?, and who was also troubled, and would not have not intersected with my crazy cousins the next town over, we, in 7th grade, became a foursome on a fieldtrip to Philadelphia and Gettysburgh. Yeah, that’s the sort of perk public school once afforded in the quiet dutch settlement of Wyckoff.  This was not the fieldtrip where those alpha male boys were discovered … red handed??? probably more than that—and outed pretty violently—NO this was a romp through Philadelphia and Amish Country, eating shoo-fly pie, but nonetheless: Mark Bennet and I who shared one double bed fell asleep to the sound of giggling coming from the other boys, Steve and Tim, obviously in the throes of some sexual interlude. Why did we only just laugh at that ourselves? Because something in our basic natures said, yeah, well, this is normal. Mark and I weren’t feeling it and my gut is he was on the very straight end of the spectrum for sure; and I knew who my friend and my bedmate was and it never entered my mind ape our neighbors. Good grief no. I feel my straightness sometimes so accutely and it actually manifests as revulsion. I understand how certain straight people feel revulsion at the thought of being with someone of the same sex. I’m also 100% convinced they just haven’t met the best best friend for them.

As I said I stuck to myself. The above shit is not going in the show but it is recorded here.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 9° (August 31)

Saturday. Mental Health day. I am going to watch a bunch of episodes of television I missed and then a few movies and that’s going to be my day. I’m having a hard time turning the corner but I just have to do it. As explained several days ago I got derailed from writing this for about eight days and now I’m playing catch up and actually writing bits of this show I suddenly have to do since a thankless creature canceled their show. I just rubbed Ben Gay into my eyes. I am procrastinating but I should remind myself that I don’t have to be doint any of this it really is a choice. The way I see it is there are 3-4 sections remaing.

The first section consists of coming out of this Angie thing and talking about how I can’t get beyond the 11 year old and why can’t I. Maybe I did open a can of worms. The magic the despair. At 13 I looked disgusting seriously disgusting. When Mickey introduced me to Andrew Stevens and Rex Smith’s love child Paulie this is what I looked like. I became a stoner. I astral projected listening to Pink Floyd under my Koss headphones. I almost lost my virginity to the older girl next door but my mother came home. I don’t know if any of this works I think I’ll try a different tack.

You know I know I’ve been sort of going back and forth, chronologically a bit here. I white-witch excited to the suburbs when I was eight in large part due to what, or rather whom, my father called the Mullingyams, which is an Italian dialect version of the word Mellanzane which means eggplant, his charming word for black people. In Jersey City I was often styled as an albino junior member of the Jackson Five, for instance, one outfit I had was a wet-look alligator vinyl aviator suit, bell bottoms and bomber jacket with matching Tito type hat that came with a faux silk white shirt with attached scarf, which I wore, of course, with platform shoes. This is how I dressed for school. Culture shock moving to Wyckoff where everyone, boys and girls, were in Levi 501 jeans or cords, Adidas or Puma sneakers, and Lacoste, or sorry Izod or striped long-sleeved rugby shirt, depending on the season. It took me one trip to the Gap to blend in but years to assimilate internally. In large part because I was only ever in town for the school year–we always rented and ultimately owned a summer house at the Jersey shore—so I never got to bond with kids from my town in summer the way others did. It seemed the return to school each year was like one giant inside joke I was never let in on. Also a few times during my upbringing I missed the first two weeks of school due to some mystery illness which I now realize was some form of Munchausen by Proxy because, as sick as I was, my mother always managed to take me shopping and to lunch and to see films that I was too young to see like Sweet Charity or Cabaret or Ryan’s Daughter or The Other Side of Midnight.

 And I know I did get as far as age thirteen in this story telling, but oh man—you know I had a feeling this was happening when I was writing this—but I didn’t realize to what extent I mean I seem to get stuck in the summer of my eleventh year. I have so much here (holds up book with pages and pages) and I mean, on and on and on. Why would I write so much. Why do I get stuck at this point.Yes that was the summer I was quote unquote molested—but there has to be more to it than that doesn’t it. I mean my first one-man show can’t get stalled at this one juncture in my life, do you think? I don’t know maybe I’m meant to question it. Maybe its a fourth trope of the solo play. Appealing to the audience. Solicity their participation at least in so far as asking them to draw their own conclusions. I know is that I refuse to get stuck here for pages and pages So I’m going to distill it for you and try to move on.

First of all I actuall hate that word, molested, as it relates to me anyway, I prefer the term, initiated. It feels less victimy, more empowering perhaps, more Greek, somehow which is fitting because in the previous school year, sixth grade we studied Greek mythology and I became immediately obsessed and I would remain so for the rest of my life. Also at the Jersey Shore in summer I had no friends but for the kids of the friends of my parents, most of whom I called Aunt and Uncle, who would stay, for a weekend or longer, in rotation. My father only visited us on weekends, my bad seed sister never spoke to me or acknowledged my existence, and my mother read giant Maeve Clincy novels under an umbrella in her beach chair in the day and drank increasingly more with girlfriends from Jersey City who also stayed “down the shore” or alone watching the black and white TV in her bedroom, door half closed, the hallway a play of light and shadow with each scene change of An American Family or Upstairs Downstairs or Marcus Welby or The Movie of the Week. 

I was always alone, even when I wasn’t. Besides being vulnerable to any such initiations I was also free to explore my solo interests unseen. I could walk to the library and back, carrying stacks of books on mythology and ny new side-hustle obsession, witch craft. I somehow blended the two. I specifically remember finding old curtains in the attic which I hand stiched into robes, special vestments if you will, that I would wear when I would invoke the gods, making my own original incantations, mainly to Dionysus. I don’t know if I started doing this before or after being pinned down for a week by my initiator, Kenny Doyle, who ended up killing himself in his late twenties early thirties, but I do have the sense that my foray into wizardry for juniors was rapidly accelerated after the fact. I wasn’t really aware what was going on with me because I was just in it. Only a couple of years ago did I come across my sixth grad picture from the year before that summer and my seventh grade picture and, putting them side by side I felt really bad for this kid who, though always on the fringes went from being very forthright and funny, extroverted and the proverbial class clown to completely broke,n withdrawn, sad and now purposefully isolated not wanting to be seen. The beginning of seventh grade was one of those years I didn’t show up for two weeks. But here I am still talking about it. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? That thing they say about being broken. Well it’s definitely true because it was at this very low point that stranger things began to happen.

 At the time I didn’t know that religion and theater shared the same route.

Actually it’s fine as I say I spent a long time im the summer of my eleventh year and what happens between that time and by the time I’m well into college, well, (holds up script) I’ve got that drafted too, for the most part, but, really, I really think I can distill the next nearly ten years. And after that I have another TROPE already prepared so I’m at least goint to leave this show by the time I’m forty. We may need to rethink the autobiographical set up actually.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 8° (August 30)

So I don’t have to much participate today which is great because I’m frankly in capable of it. The reality of what I’m dealing with is hitting me hard now and so I will take my leave and S. will go and gather croissants and spend the morning at the hotel. I will stroll around outside for a bit and come back and try to make something out of my own morning, to no avail. I mean there are the artifical elements. But mainly I must think about drafting a letter. I will do so on Sunday I think. In the meantime it wouldn’t be right to print it here in any case. I will begin writing my show then too. I have a lot to do on that so I actually better get cracking. First though I will get all my festival passes requested. I will also put in all the tech info. I will sort out some of the issues with the ferries. And I will get all the bikes and all the Sparklers and all the tickets reset. I will also sign off on photo for my show and now I have to write a blurb.

Faced with a late-breaking cancellation by a scheduled artist, and already single-handedly juggling every other aspect of producing a performance festival, impresario Quinn Coxhas only a few days to write his first ever solo play, learn some simple songs he can block out on the piano, and hope some overall themes and dramatic arcs will emerge in the process. Part panic attack, part trooperism, part self-flagellation, and part transcendence of artistic delusion, Cox deconstructs the undertaking of making a one-man show, without the luxury of reflection, second guessing or a single a moment to lose. Buoyed only by a bottle of organic red wine, he must lay bare his thoughts, feelings, talents, and all other expressions of imperfection in upholding the traditional notion that the show must go on. After which time, there may be no going back. With special guest Stella Starsky(American Baroness).

This will happen later but here it is in redacted form:
Select members of our Advisory Board pow-wowed last evening for several hours on the complete situation at hand and on the email [redacted] sent yesterday.

It was consensus, “[redacted]needs to understand the meaning of the word: Contract.” The Advisors, some of whom are my elders and have been veterans in this game a long time, were appalled and  unanimously clear: That, “no matter what an artist’s own internal business might be, or whatever occurrences or opportunities might arise, a commitment is a commitment;” and even in the case of a MD supposedly getting another gig last minute, that “it is up to the artist to work it out and show up and play the tissue paper and comb if that’s all they can do.” But under no circumstances is it “okay”, nor is it “out of your control”, especially in this case where two excuses in a matter of days were meant to invoke some kind of pity. We are agreed that you are not the injured party: In review or your emails, it was instead agreed that your tone and language were “ unprofessional, rude, and just plain bratty.” As the contracted in-writing artist they feel you should be responsible for the FULL amount (putting a price tag on all the time as well as the documented expenses) and that there should be a penalty on top of that for the breach itself. They have deemed your actions “inexcusable.”

Now to you [redacted]. Though we have no contract with you, the Advisors actually took more issue with your threats than with [redacted]’s breach. They are going to be spreading the word as to the reality of this situation and they are going to “keep [their] ears open for any negative word about the Afterglow Festival.”  As some board members were unfamiliar with your name or work, [redacted], I shared some of your resume with them; and, as many of them are affiliated with theaters and other such institutions where you work, they are going to be on “high alert” for any negative commentary coming from their colleagues about Afterglow. Their consensus, too, was that Afterglow was “too generous” in footing the bill for your travel to Provincetown; that there was no reason to have a director attend in any case. They also agreed that the casual way in which you expected their to be a MD provided (which is not in the contract with [redacted]) vis a vis the second excuse you offered for [redacted]breaching the contract, was a “flimsy attempt to justify their actions.”

It has been decided that Afterglow will, without naming names, release a statement to our colleagues at the mainly downtown theaters and clubs and labs where artists, who also appear at Afterglow, perform. We will also be inviting these colleagues to an in-house conference on the subject of “artists breaking contracts,” (thankfully, is an extremely rare thing), and the negative impact it has on non-profits, specifically, not only financially but in terms, too, of the apparent exposure of threats (like the ones your making, [redacted]) that add grave insult to already serious injury. To be clear: consensus is that the amount we are demanding as compensation for [redacted]’s breach of contract is “generous to the artist.”  And that [redacted]’s language in her email constitutes “virtue signaling” and “call-out culture tactics” which also “need to be addressed by our body and the artistic community-at-large.”

Member of the board found the entire situation shocking, not only on their own behalf and behalf of the festival organization (which produces artists elsewhere, as well, on a regular basis), but on behalf of our private sponsors and grantors. In public statement and in conversation with industry colleagues board members will make it clear that: The Afterglow Festival provides so much to its artists, raising money to travel, house, feed and pay and indeed pamper artists, who would otherwise never be able to perform in Provincetown, the birth place of modern American theater  and a century-old incubator for progressive stage craft, a legacy that Afterglow also champions along with the emerging and experimenting artists it presents. The cavalier manner in which [redacted] has cancelled his show a week out from its contracted date has caused our non-profit great loss and we are in agreement that we shall continue to seek repair in the already reduced financial figure we have itemized in our email of September 1, 2019.

Let me also be clear about the invoking of your agencies ICM and Paradigm: As with our colleagues at theatrical institutions, our board members are also affiliated, whether professionally or personally, with figures who work at both these and other agencies. They have suggested that they might be making a few preemptive phone calls in these directions, as well, in an attempt to safeguard any slanderous remarks about our non-profit arts organization. Through our affiliated grants foundations and organizations, too, we are going to propose a workshop/seminar based on what emerges from our in-house conference, utilizing information and opinion that will arise therefrom in hopes of helping other non-profit arts entities negotiate breaches of contract and the kinds of threats from artists as they two of you are making toward us. All in all it is our intention to get out in front of any reputational damage, which you have blatantly threatened (in writing) to cause our organization, with the express intention of detecting it as it occurs, rooting it out, and tracing it back to its source; at which time we will be advised as to any further action needing to take place as a result of deleterious words or actions made by you toward Afterglow, its directorship, or its board.

Please do feel free to send me both of your agency contacts so that I can keep them appraised of this unfortunate situation. Meanwhile we expect payment for the minimum expenses accrued, and outlined to you, as a result of the last-minute breach of [redacted], scheduled for [redacted], to be made to the Afterglow Festival on or before September 9, 2019.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 7° (August 29)

Well I did most of the cleaning yesterday, top to bottom, mopping and the whole deal. This morning I prepped for the arrival of the inlaws, went to the dump.They will arrive in time for lunch and we have laid out a spread of cold cuts and rolls and tuna and cole slaw and there’s cofee and soda even, which we never have. They will eat and they will leave and I will work and I will cook and in the midst of it these questionables will write to say they are not coming for festival and I could have predicted it. That is almost the worst part. The banality of knowing that they were not through cancelling their contract they so wanted to cancel just days before; and for that they will receive karmic retribution I am sure of it. Meanwhile I will seek terrestrial compensation as well.

I will barely be able to pretend that things are fine. I will speak to James; and S. will come and go, gathering swimsuits and collecting wine; and then they will all be back and I will have put out an entire spread. And through pretend smiles and gritted teeth I will get through this evening. And I will go to the piano and sing. Suddenly everyone, I mean everyone looks terribly old, including myself. Maybe all the changes weren’t such the great idea I thought they were. I will be left with the decision to write a show or not write a show. I just have this feeling of fuck it. I said so the other day when I thought they were canceling the first time. I thought I would just get up and do a show because the show must go on. And that is the motto. I’m jealous of noone. I’m angry at noone. I will do what I have to do and I will do it well. The playing of piano will be the major challenge.

I do find it to be dispicable at times. The smoking of marijuana, for instance, becomes a target, a place for the aging to put all their vitriole. I really don’t understand it. How is smoking pot any better or worse than drinking alcohol. It’s so stupid and unbecoming. People are just mad, sometimes I think, because they can’t do certain things or don’t reap the benfits of doing certain things and so they have to demonize it. And I’m doing the best I can in a certain sense. I seem to be overusing the word certain. I do that because I’m sad and I use certain language as a subsitute for having had a real life. Today is depressing in case you haven’t wondered.

Well I did manage to get off a bunch of pleas for money none of which have yielded. Funny that. Pulling teeth this year. And yet I kinda don’t give a crap!

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2019 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox