Virgo 6° (August 28)

Okay so this is the only thing I’ve written on this day, obviously, now,  I have done damage control, and I am under the impression that the performer in question is following through on his contractual commitment. If you’ve been reading the posts from the last couple of days you would know that this was just a moment of respite in an otherwise stressful week at the hands of this performer and his team.

I hope to further clear up any confusion. As per my discussion by phone with E. about what we do at Afterglow, I was very clear that we never put on “concerts” I even use that word specifically when speaking to artists (or directors in this case on their behalf) as what not to do. Of course we present cabaret artists—just name one we’ve presented them—and with the term cabaret the concept of narrative is baked in. This might all sound like semantics but I wanted to be clear. E. had said in her follow up to our conversation that the two of you “were developing the piece together” in her request to be traveled/lodged to/at Afterglow which was fine by us.

Then just in recent days which were otherwise fraught (and yes I said that if you followed through all of that mishigas we would happily be put behind us—and I’m VERY happy we got there!!) M. you kept saying the word concert which, as I say, is a bad one in Afterglow vocabulary. And you only needed a short tech. And of all the artists you’re still the only one I believe that hasn’t handed in a script, stage plan or tech requirements. (That request was sent along with the tech schedule I hope you found in your emails). So I thought I better beam in and see what’s what as I had imagined this was a staged “piece” for “development” that required director and musical director in tow, not just something for which we were checking mics. Is there no blocking? No lights? No sound?

Just give us, as per the AH request, whatever script there might be and all your technical requirements as Er. (fromAH) outlined in her email I forwarded you July 26. For ease sake let me just paste that in again. I need to get all this information to Er. in coming days (don’t send it directly to her please send it to me as I’m compiling one document for the entire festival.

I’m going to resume my creative writing into this space because, as it turns out, I might have to step in and replace this artist. I won’t be able to recoup any of our losses, which is truly sad and challenging.

I’m looking at the clock and it’s dawning on me I might actually have more than enough material for this show. In fact I don’t think I’m going to anywhere near relating to you all the scribbling I’ve done in the last few to quickly prep for this. Maybe the genie really is out of the bottle. But, okay, I’m going to cut and paste because, the second thing I’ve noticed about one-person shows is that surely around this point if not before, there is typically the introduction of a song. Now I’m not really a singer, and I’m definitely not a pianist. PIANIST. (click, click) But this is also not an apology because I wouldn’t do that. I do need to change to a higher number of reader though I think. And, maybe with the exception of the title of this song, there really isn’t more than a loose themetic connection between what I’ve just said and the lyrics, here, but, look I do invite you to make some for your own sake. Chronologically, this song was written when I was fourteen or fifteen so I am moving things along.

SURRENDER

But for perhaps a brief moment in the late seventies/early eighties being bisexual wasn’t the desired and celebrated, and let’s face it, the preferred assignation of sexual identity that it is today. I know, shocking right. Because we are all, everybody is, bisexual now. but, even just a few years back, most people were like I don’t buy it; you have to choose; you can’t be both; you’re hiding, you’re lying. Can you believe it. We used to tell this joke in our Starsky + Cox show, well, why don’t we do it together, can you believe we actually used to make fun of the fact that bisexuals, now the most potent and thriving sector of the larger LGBT community, was pretty invisible. I would say something about how I always strived to put the the B in LGBT and I would cite my work with the larger bisexual community and you would say:

Hang on, hang on. G yes, the gays, I love them. The L word, yes, lesbians, they love me. T. Trans. We wear the same shoe size and it can get pretty ugly at Ruthies sometime, but B, bisexual community, I don’t know it seems like a contradition in terms.

Well I recently attended the international bisexual men’s conference

Another pilgramage to Cologne

And I ended up saying to the other guy there….ba dum bum

Even just a few short years later the joke doesn’t make as much sense now. Not only does a greater part of the younger generation identify as bisexual or eschew labels altogether, because of a more visible and outspoken Trans community advocating for a non-binary perception and reality of gender, it just follows that, if only retroactively, the Bi’s were like um, that non-binary thing. It applies to us too. And because most people will admit (or not) to having a same-sex experience, we’ve gone from nobody being bisexual (that there’s no such thing) to seemingly everyone being like, yeah, you know there’s a great area. And that is mainly being driven by those we would heretofore label straight men who, now this is just my theory, have felt left out of the conversation. So instead of hiding, repressing their same-sex experiences, or even just their feelings about it, they’re like me too. Not that me too. Different me too. Which, as someone who has gotten a bit handsy over the year himself, is probably a good thing. I’ll just say this: That someone as supposedly woke as I always thought I was, I’ve had to recognize the times in my life that I have been, shall se say, overly insinuating. I admit it. I’ve been there. I’ve thought my attentions harmless or even flattering. I want to say I was never “that bad” but that’s a stupid thing to think let alone say. I can say my intions have only ever been harmless, but I didn’t get to decide that. And I think that what Aunt Mickey didn’t realize when she introduced me to Paulie when I was thirteen was that I had already had sexual interaction with both sexes because I grew up in the seventies and we had the opposite of helicopter parents and we were latch key and often “baby sat” by predatory hormone raging teens who were only a few years older than we were. That boys specifically were left in the company of only sligtly older boys who were likely lectured on how to treat girls but whose parents never laid down any rules about targeting other boys. My situation is not unusual. The physically developed fourteen year old boy who quote unquote molested me when I was a pre-adolescent with undeveloped (click click) didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. He was just doing to me what was done to him, in large part back through history. I was taught to be a gentleman with girls, but bets were pretty much off with boys. In some ways sexual interaction between boys of a certain age didn’t feel that different from sports. So maybe I wasn’t using creepy words playing Mad Libs with my friends, but I know I wasn’t alone in experiencing the things I did at a tender age. There were alpha males I went to junior high with, some of them who have high profile jobs, even whole careers, on television, who were caught playing with each other on field trips. They would go on to spend their adult lives denying it, mainly to themselves, and certainly never would have labelled themselves with B. For me, it’s the old chicken or the egg question. Who knows if I would have been turned on to guys if I hadn’t been turned on TO IT by another guy. Maybe, maybe not. There’s no way to know and I have never cared. I have always been happy with the B and I’ve made no bones about it. No pun intended. I’m happy to count myself among the number that includes Cary Grant and Marlon Brando and Tom Hardy and Robbie Williams and David Bowie and Mick Jagger. It is rumoured that this song by the Rolling Stones was written by David Bowie’s wife Angela who, in her autobiography, claims she walked in on David and Mick in bed together. I invite my own wife to join me on it.

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 5° (August 27)

Headed into Provincetown today to get the posters out there and circulating. That’s all I wrote on the actual day of this post. You’ll have to go back a couple of days to realize that I am in a bit of a time warp. I was thrown a major curve ball early in the week and it caused me to lose my way with my Blague at the same time it has also necessitated my writing a one-man show in the span of just a few days. So I’m going to continue on from where I was on all that….

The day of my christening came and Mickey was holding me as the priest did his whole water thing, dripping in on my forehead or whatever, and well, even to this day, I’m sure this is true for most of you, but just the sound of dripping water, let alone the feel, can inspire, well as my mother put it. And as if on cue, your little thing rose up and you let loose and peed right in Mickey’s face. That was a sign I guess, or an excuse, or something, for which my mother was blamed, as if she was working her powers through my little, as my father would call it cummasicuam, an Italian dialect version of come si chiamo which means “how do you say” in this case a watchamacallit because, the Italian side of my family, not mafia per se, but maybe a bit bookyish, not bookish, decidedly not bookish, but bookyish, never talked about sex or body parts or anything of that nature. They didn’t even call it a peepee. Cummasicuam. Watchamacallit. I we getting a picture of my formative influences? Anyway, it was another eight or so years until we moved to the suburbs, originally an old Dutch settlement called Wyckoff, a name which you can imagine every young boy growing up there had fun with, and not knowing that her sister had moved to the next town over, Peggy and Mickey literally bashed their shopping carts together at Stop n’ Shop; but still I didn’t meet my aunt until I was thirteen. Of course on my birthday every year I would get gifts from her address to Master William Leone, that’s my real name, William Leone, and they would be weird gifts princely gifts like velvet waistcoats or a chain for a pocket watch or a monagrammed tie clip. I had met two or three of my first cousins once or twice—they were weird, wild animals for the most part, and overly sexed, now that I think of it, as a young age, the youngest Anne Marie or Am A-M, who was just three years older than me, I remember, once, we were doing mad libs, I was 11 and I would say Noun and she would say Masturbation; I would say Verb and she would say Fucking. She was fourteen.

Anyway, I was finally going over during Christmas, at age thirteen, to meet Aunt Mickey who looked like a severe version of my own mother who was forever being mistaken for Rue Maclanahan, a fellow Pisces, all of five one, with her tiny hook button nose, aristocratic airs (despite being raised with no hot water) all Estee Lauder youth due, her soft, sage, siren sense of drawing everybody in. When she drank, she caved in on herself. Not Mickey, who was taller and tough with a long, sharp pointy nose; she stood like this; her hair was a dyed version of my mother’s natural sandy red, a little to bright, her fingers covered in huge rocks, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, all gigantic, and she carrid a giant key chain which you knew was mainly a weapon. The first inappropriate thing she did—she was surely drunk and unlike my mother, came out of herself, emboldened—the first thing she did was I need to introduce my two favorite people (I’m just meeting her remember) to each other and we have to be friends. She dragged my tiny thirteen year old self over to meet her best friends son, Paulie, who looked like Andrew Stevens and Rex Smith had a love child and, who I realize now, of course, was gay, and Mickey was trying to put us together. The second inappropriate thing she did, before it was time for me to go (which I knew because my mother was sending me mental signals which were confirmed by my father’s beigy pink champagne Cadillac Coupe de Ville outside, back to pick me up where he left me, probably, just forty minutes before), was to usher me upstairs where she said she had something to give me. I was terrified. On the way I caught my first ever and only glimpse of Mickey’s son Tommy who by then was already a heroin addict who would die of AIDS. She led me up the shag covered, fairly dramatic stairs, of her colonial style home and to her impossibly large bedroom where she opened a closet-dressing stuffed with hanging clothes and stacked clothes and boxes and racks of shoes. She got up on a low round foot stool, like the ones you still see in libraries, and reached up so high her arm disappeared from view and pulled down these folded items, fabric it was, and said they were a present to me. M’ok. They were tied with string or ribbon or some combination thereof. She put them in a bag. When I got home my mother asked to see what Mickey gave me. And as she loosened the string or ribbon I could see the light of realization being cast across her face. “Son of a bitch, she said, these are all my suits and dresses—she’s taken them apart at the seems, stitch by stich.

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 4° (August 26)

Monday and a horrible day of back and forth with a performer who suddenly threatens to back out of the festival. I know I sound like Penny Arcade, but this younger generation of performers do not have the same esprit du corps as the ones that came before. They are on one hand really poverty conscious always whining about having no money and on the other they act like prima donnas who feel they should already be rich and famous. They don’t seem to appreciate always what’s on offer because they don’t stop to smell the roses, or hit the bech, as the case may be. Pete beamed in to see if we can do lunch but we are facing a full client day so we have rescheduled for Wednesday. There is possiblity still left….I never finished that sentence. If you read yesterday’s entry you’ll know that some shite is going down and that I’m scrambling to suddenly write a show which is fine except that it will take me all night and I really don’t care whatever comes out today comes out today I will try to write for about six hours straight and see what happens…..

So I left off yesterday saying: . I am reminded—oh this is a good thing, I am getting improvisational ideas that I haven’t put down on paper—I am reminded of a story of a performer friend of mine who was doing a benefit with other folks, some very famous, for something in London I don’t remember it’s not important….but the story goes something like this:

This one young performer was newly sober and back stage and having a panic attack, performance anxiety in the extreme, and was shaking in the wings, and suddenly Marianne Faithfull appeared, as she often does (trust me) and this young performer said oh my god I’m so nervous I don’t know what to do and Marianne said well why don’t you have something to drink and the young performer said oh I’m a newly recovering alcoholic and I’m in the program and can’t drink and Marianne said well yes, I can relate, because so am I; so why don’t you just do what I do have only have some white wine. Anyway I haven’t had the chance to hone the delivery of that so…Okay, so I decided a couple of days ago, when one of our young performers fucked— I mean said in his inimitable millenial fashion that he just couldn’t swing performing the festival after all this year I thought well we put a lot of effort into this and we have never cancelled a show, we have replaced people, but never so last minute and so what to do I’ll speed write a one-man show and so I thought okay what are some of the things people do in one-person shows, solo plays if you will, and so I made an outline of certain things I’ve noticed because I’ve seen and produced and presented hundreds of shows in my life so one of the first things I’ve noticed about first-time shows by certain aritsts (and very often all their shows thereafter) is that they are autobiographical if not narcissistically so. So I figured, great finally I have a place to put that part of me, I mean I don’t think I’m a malignant narcissist, well at least not all of the time, maybe sometimes when I drink too much (drinks) but that doesn’t happen more than a few times a week so, yeah, it’s a bit of Russian Roulette, but we should be fine. The first title idea I had for this show was actually Quinn Cox Drinking Red Wine and Seeing what happens which, well let’s just call it the invisible subtitle.

The last of the baby boomers, I was born a city kid in Jersey City to be exact. We lived in an apartment building complex called College Towers near what was then called State Teacher’s hospital. This was before the white witch exodus to the suburbs of the 1970s. My mother, a celtic Pisces with red hair and freckles and eyes that looked inward and she was born Margaret Anna Mary McDonough, but everyone knew her as Peggy—and she was a good witch. And she had a sister, Muriel, whom everyone called Mickey, and she wasn’t. She was a mean girl. And was what you would called fast back in the days before slut shaming and had a child out of wedlock, living with my mother and her parents in their cold water walk up flat, and, as my mother put it, news traveled fast and guys were “coming out of the woodwork” assuming she was cut from the same sexual cloth as Mickey, which she wasn’t. My mother was a good girl who worked from the age of fourteen (as I later did) scrimping and saving to buy herself clothes, suits and dresses, that she could wear on interviews and to secretarial school and for church and socials and for other good girl reasons. These suits and dresses would consistently go missing; of course my mother knew Mickey was stealing them but she never saw her wear them. Anyway it was that type of dynamic, growing up with a bad seed (as I later did); and by the time my mother was pregnant with me at the age of 32, late in the game, and nearly six years since her first child, Peggy and Mickey had been estranged, already, for nearly a decade.

Early in the pregnancy, the phone rang and my mother picked up and it was Mickey who said, no more no less, you’re going to have a child, it will be a boy, and he will be born on my birthday, September 28, which I was. Now these sorts of predictions, apparently, weren’t strange in their small world, but it was typically my mother who had the psychic flashes, which she largely kept to herself, she later told me, as they happened so often and so early in her young life that she tried tried to train her mind to fight them off becaue they frightened her. Apparently she never could fight them off completely. And it was at those times when I would see her standing looking out a window or seated in a chair, trancelike, with those eyes pointed inward that I knew she was in some sort of stat of revelation. All my life I never had to pick up a phone to call my mother, I would simply send her a message to call me. Or,the other way around: I would get a flash the phone would ring and seconds later it would. The phone also had a special ring when she called.

 By the time I was born, which was some thirteen or fourteen years after Mickey’s first child, she had married her baby daddy and had a total six children. Fertile Murtile my mother called her with a slightly abhorrent tone. Anyway, my mother decided, due to the psychic flash and because, as a good witch, she was hoping for some repair with her only sister, perhaps for her own mother’s sake, as her father, my gradfather died, during her pregnancy with me.

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 3° (August 25)

Sunday and I dare say I barely remember what this day is meant to be all about. I know I was meant to finish up these year-ahead books and nearly did. Yesterday I worked upstairs for hours and did manage to get things done with a little help from my friends. Trust me this festival I’m working on plus these books I’m finishing, this double process. And, seriously it will be done in the next two weeks at which time I will be full on into the new book project. So that means this year I have already written my twelve horoscope books plus we launched the tee-shirt collection, plus we are redesigning the website, plus a ninth festival under my belt and a fifth. And I want to keep a positive attitude. It will be difficult in the coming days, namely Monday and Tuesday, but by Wednesday I will start feeling like all things are once again possible and that I’m not being sabotaged and derailed. I know I seem to be saying quite the same things over and over again these days—this will soon stop—but the fact is I have to keep reminding myself of this multispoked to-do list. And try to ramp up my confidence in the process all at the same time. I wrote the above a week ago today. The events of this week—well, I won’t say they derailed me but they seriously curtailed me in such a way as is not even really funny. I did manage to write a little bit each day just to mark the actual time as it was happening. But now I have even more yeoman’s work to do.

An artist will threaten to cancel tomorrow; well they will cancel then won’t; they will attempt to get more dosh out of me. They will insult the festival. They will do all sorts of antics. Of course this artist will end up being a Gemini—sorry, Gems but when you’re ba you are truly bad. I will have sent top theatrical folks I know to see this guy’s play in London. They will write me to say they hated it, which is small compensation. It will be the last week of summer. Inlaws will visit. That will further take up my time with cleaning and cooking but it will be a welcome distraction because they are lovely people and I enjoy hosting them, I truly do. It will be a blessing because it will distract me, but I will end up anesthetizing my pain a little too much. I will convince this artist to do his show and I will get further commitment. And three more days will go by and then he (well his director whom I made a member of our Advisory Board) will cancel on his behalf, blaming their musical director for taking another gig. Which is specious and stupid and ironic because originally they thought they’d be showing up and working with a musical director, once, in rehearsal. I don’t really care. Well I do. That plus the fact that I have never had a …oops I forgot what I was going to say because another shiny object distracted me. Oh well the show must go on and I’ll probably do one myself. I don’t see any reason why not. Except I don’t have a show but I guess I can just talk and sing a few songs over the course of seventy minutes. That shouldn’t be too too hard. Now should it?

As I write this I am letting my brain alight on certain stories that might make good telling.

I will come out and say I have to admit I’m a little nervous as I have never done a one-person show before and I never planned to do one as the result of an artist in the Afterglow Festival declaring he wasn’t showing up just days before he was contracted to appear; I always thought that if I did perform a “one-man” show that I would do so after at least a few months of writing it, perhaps in the early spring, taking windswept walks on the beach in Wellfleet, returning home to make cocoa hold the marshmallows to pull on a scratchy wool jumper, settling in to type away, and then rehearsing it for a month in a spare bedroom I would designate as “performance studio”, and then hone the “piece” over a series of performances in clubs and small black box theaters and at laboratories at Bard or MIT. Instead here I am after scribbling a few notes over the course of the last several days all the while trying to fundraise and produce this whole thing. I’m making no apologies, don’t get me wrong, a performer should never apologize for anything. I will make a prediction though. Some of you are going to love this and some of you are going to fucking hate it. I have never inspired middle of the road feelings in anyone, personally or professionally. So I made the snap decision to do this. And grabbed the most interesting photo of myself I could find and slapped a title on it. Out of the Bottle because, though I mightn’t be a genius, there is a chance I am something of a genie, and also I was absolutely not going to get up here with a few scribbled notes and not drink some wine, which is an organic red from the TK region. You might say, in a very large part, that this show is in particurly brought to you by one of our sponsors, Perry’s Wine and Liquor of Provincetown. I am reminded—oh this is a good thing, I am getting improvisational ideas that I haven’t put down on paper—I am reminded of a story of a performer friend of mine who was doing a benefit with other folks, some very famous, for something in London I don’t remember it’s not important….

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