Virgo 18° (September 9)

Things don’t necessarily improve. Take this WordPress site for instance: I had to update the version I was using but it is so much worse than the previous that I will probably end up leaving the platform altogether because it has failed to progress and innovate It has gone backwards. I have rejigged my schedule and making some necessary phone calls. The spark of the gods, divinity, is what Aries is all about. Taurus holds up a mirror. That’s really all that needs being said today. There is plenty food for thought below to chew on. I have to keep things moving.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 816-820. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

Okay so just woke up at 4am—I’ve gotten six blagues behind—so we’re just approaching the New Moon, which just transited Venus, opposed Saturn, as the Sun is about to transit Mars—so things are feeling intense beneath the surface. Anyway I awoke from a dream and/or Stella woke me up because I was talking in my sleep which I know I was, as I’m quite aware:

I was exactly in the same part of Provincetown as I was in the last dream I awoke to the morning before actually, a dream I spoke about time and again to Stella all day yesterday. I kept saying I know I keep talking about this dream but I feel it is significant, and we were unpacking it still into the evening. But this second dream from which I awoke at 4am, today (it’s 4:19 now) only related to the previous night’s dream in geographic location. The first dream was a dream, this last one was a nightmare:

My parents were alive and my family (I have one estranged sister, the “evil quint” in S+C stage vernacular of yore) were all trying to go on a day trip, I think, just out to some forested beach or something, and there were different themed routes to take. We decided to “book” the Flintstone theme. Don’t ask. But it was one of those classic dreams where you have a goal of trying to get where you want to go but wherein you keep discovering obstacles, a bad object exercise like I used to do in Uta Hagen’s acting class.

To be specific, the dream had the quality of trying to keep kittens in a bag. Everybody was sort of running late getting ready in their hotel rooms. Friends of my family were also staying in the hotel, in other rooms of course, but loosely moving too and fro among all the rooms as if they all belonged to us. I for one had some pointed problems with keys, which were my exact keys to my old Mercedes (anxiety over a need to start that car daily to make sure the battery isn’t being drained by some rogue connection, in reality that is). Anyway, there was something about finding a legal parking spot, but then I left my keys in the car, and I had to go back, but by that point my father was missing, and I felt he was using my running back for two seconds to grab my keys from the car for which I just finally found a spot, as an excuse.

I went back into the hotel where he supposedly was and went into his hotel room, where he said he needed the bathroom, but someone else was in the bathroom, or just coming out, an off-spring of that friends-of-the-family, David Vermeuel. But somehow my father got into the bathroom and I heard him talking on the phone, and I knew what that meant. In the dream it was my mother’s birthday. I was starting to speak up, to yell at my father through the wall, making it clear I knew what he was doing.

Somehow he was now in the room with me still on the phone, one of those heavy phones, not rotary, with buttons, but not the Streamline or whatever that slicker seventies phone was where the buttons were on the receiver. This phone had that classic bone-shaped receiver, with the buttons on the standing base of the phone, that heavy receiver that felt (I know from actual experience—I wrote about it once in a Christmas show—and I will find that piece I wrote and maybe print it in the next blague) like, and also recalled the shape, of a lightweight hand-held dumbell with which some type-A character might, with one in each hand, actually run, jog or powerwalk.

I pulled the reciver from my father’s hand—oh, I had already heard a woman’s voice coming through the phone receiver, as you kind of could in the seventies and eighties, and I started commenting loudly then pointedly shouting derogatory soundbites in my father’s direction, so that when he entered the room from the bathroom, now he was almost flaunting the fact that he didn’t actually run back to use the bathroom but to call this woman. I grabbed the receiver and said something like: it’s my mother’s birthday and then I launched into calling this woman what I felt she was but I was attempting to do so in Spanish because I realized that was, at least, the language she spoke. So I started saying puta, puta.

But you know how it is when you’re dreaming and you’re angry and you’re trying to get the words out: it’s a struggle. And this is symptomatic of the fact that, even though you’re dreaming, you actually trying to say the words for real i.e. talking in your sleep. You’re yelling, or trying to yell, in your dream, but to the person actually sleeping next to you, it comes out as deep gutteral moans. Meanwhile, back in your dream, it’s so hard to get the words out. They die on your lips. And the struggle to utter is lodged somewhere, or everywhere between your gut and your throat.

Now three particular things are going on here all at once. I believe my father did (often) have someone (probably not the same woman) on the side. In later life I might have caught him on the phone—although he would have preferred I thought he had a mistress, which is sick enough, instead of what he was really doing: performing his role as a bookee, which is something he apparently was in his later life, or so says the one and only semi sane cousin I have with whom I would, perhaps, once a year by email (although I really can’t even do that anymore because it’s always depressing and somehow stirs the pot of my family connections which are actually non-existent); also my mother had Alzheimers from which she died and my father it seemed to be used that as an out to get away with bad behavior of some sort he wanted to hide, leaving my mother at home not knowing where he was or just how long he’d been gone, so that was all the first thing.

The second thing is that just before going to bed we were watching Cria Cuervos, a Spanish film starring Geraldine Chaplin as a dead woman whose husband, now remarried, dies in the act of fornication with another woman, a friend and neighbor, in the first scene. Chaplin is a ghost who only one child, a daughter, can see. So there’s the adultery trigger and it explains the Spanish lady whom I called puta figuring it most be close enough to whatever word means whore in Spanish.

The third thing is that I caught my evil quint once on the phone on Christmas Eve after she just arrived about four hours later for an elaborate seven-fishes dinner I prepared, talking to her (not-so) secret either boyfriend or husband—yes this is how dysfunctional my family was, my parents and sister, who were locked in some bad-karmic knot, I would often say, like the three prisoners locked in a prism hurtling through space in the opening scen of Superman 2. Yes that’s an old reference so you can see how long I’ve had this perspective, as it dates back to the late seventies or early eighties. Anyway upon discovering my sister, now further delaying our dinner, after having just arrived, secretly muttering in a corner of an upstairs bedroom, I verbalized my outrage at which point she started beating me with the heavy receiver of that exact kind of phone. In the dream it was olive green, in reality I’m guessing beige. So much in my family enviroment, real and metaphoric, was.

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I said in the previous Blague that I would cut and paste a snippet from one of our live Starsky + Cox Christmas shows that related to the dream I recounted in Cancer 22°. Here it is verbatim. It is important to note that I totally forgot, in the telling of this to the live audience in this one-night-only presentation, the most important bit at the end about my mother forgetting. It still landed; but it would have landed harder if I hadn’t omitted that last part:

One of the last Christmases I ever spent with my family….first, I should pause to say that Peggy and Mickey didn’t become friends but they were drinking buddies, sometimes they’d go to the city, to Elizabeth Arden for the day and stay overnight at the Waldorf, but mainly they were ladies who lunched until dinner, driving their Caddies, blind drunk in furs, with giant rings and sometimes hats on. Evil Auntie Mame and Vera, my mother being an amalgamation of every actress who ever lit up the silver screen. She moved and looked, often exactly like Bette Davis, she spoke like Polly Bergen or Sandy Dennis, she dressed like Gena Rowland, and emoted like Ann Baxter. In later life she was constantly mistaken for Rue Maclanahan. Peggy and Mickey were both alcholics who died of Alzheimers, only my mother had twenty odd years of sobriety before the end.

So, that Christmas. One of the last. Ever the over achieving enabler I decided to shop, pre-chop, pack and cart by train to where my parents now lived “down the shore” in Belmar New Jersey not only a full menu of items for Christmas dinner—giant turkey, veges and all the fixins—but also the makings of a full on Christmas Eve “7 fishes” traditional Italian meal. Now my sister, who arrived four hours late to our wedding, and on heroin, which really agreed with her—she was lovely that day for the first time ever—but she could never be on time for anything. And Christmas eve, my mother was already showing signs of her Alzheimers and my father was deep into his Folinari white wine, which he drank, with copious ice cubes, mainly because the crest on the label was the family name, Leone. The seven fishes were put out and nobody was eating but a taste of each; as my sister, who arrived three and a half hours late. Amid apologies and excuses, she went to sit down, but made an that I just need the bathroom quick face. We waited, she didn’t surface. I poked around the corner, she wasn’t in the bathroom, I went through the kitchen up the stairs, all the bedrooms were dark, but I heard a faint muttering—she was hiding behind my parents smashed together twin beds talking to somebody.

            Now I should explain that my sister was married, I think, for sixteen years to a guy called Warren who died, I think, and lived in, of all places, named for the planet of delusion and dissolution, Neptune, New Jersey the next town over; she pretended not to be married and to live with my parents, which she sort of also did, while living with Warren. I never met him, you see, because he was black and couldn’t exist because my father was so racist that he made Archie Bunker look like Meathead. So she led this sort of double life and had obviously just come from one Christmas Eve dinner with a family of inlaws she pretended not to have and was on the phone to Warren or someone now. Did I mention my sister was a Gemini? Yeah. So was my father. Yeah. So during all this my mother, who is really exhibiting symptoms of her disease, was trying to find some bits of pricey jewelry of hers that she was planning on gifting Stella for Christmas. She couldn’t find them. She’s rifling through the house. My father’s adding more ice cubes to his wine with a vengeance now, having all but polished off the entire gallon of Folinari bianco and my seven fishes have long since faded into dried up smelly memories, and I see my sister and I’m like what the fuck are you doing?

      And her reaction? To lunge and charge at me over the bed and start beating me upside the head and face with the heavy receiver of my parents beige streamline phone which had an extra long cord for her assault and battery convenience, all the while shouting No no no never again like a trainee at womens violence prevention workshop. My father, alerted, flies up the stairs, drunk and red faced, and also starts to beat me, assuming, of course, that I am somehow the culprit here. And only my mother, ironically, is seeing clearly; and drags me and Stella-Lynne who is also now on the scene into our room to keep the assailants away and comfort and reassure us. You did nothing wrong, they’re animals. And so, safe, my sister having returned to her other life and other selves, we fall asleep.

(Piano starts to play Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas….)

And when we awake, it’s Christmas morning. And we tiptoe downstairs to find that my father has not only thrown away all of the smelly 7 fishes Christmas Eve dinner but also the entire Christmas day dinner items I had precut and packaged for cooking with ease, along with, yes, the giant turkey; and not just in the kitchen garbage, but in a hefty bag filled with uneaten dogfood and dog waste outside in a trash barrel next to the garage. And as if this isn’t bad enough, my mother has absolutely zero memory of her tidings of comfort and joy—they’ve been erased Alzheimers-style from her mind and are now replaced with the story my father told her that morning about my having attacked my sister, which my mother thinks is her actual memory of the night before. So, pre cellphones and internet, we found, via the yellow pages, a car service that would bring us back to our one bedroom rent stabilized apartment in the West Village and did what Jesus, what Jesus and Mary, being Jews, would do, we got Chinese food delivered. Or as my mother would say, we ordered Chinks. Incidentally, my mother never found the jewelry that she planned to gift to Stella because my sister, who couldn’t bear anything not going to her, would have stolen it, scapegoating my mother’s disease as she and my father would both do for the next ten years of Peggy’s life; invariably, my evil quint would have sold that jewelry for drugs or money to gamble away in Atlantic City. So this is my gift to you—I hope it makes you feel better about the holidays with your families this Xmas.

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And somehow I again slipped eight days behind. I could resort to the third Questionnaire I created but never used, a tactic I employed to pull myself out of a twenty some-odd hole in my Blague output. And though I might want to look at that anyway (I find I as myself some very good questions and also I have learned to love to dialogue with myself—in fact I think the dialoguing actually amplifies self-love) I don’t quite feel the need to utilize it. Something tells me I have eight Blagues worth of stuff in me today. It’s been a very productive time but also one of those moments/phases in life when I feel loaded. Not on anything imparticular; in fact on nothing at all other than what feels like a dammed raging north sea of emotion. I say north because it expresses the nature of my feelings better than, say south.

Astrologically I’m wont to pin this backlogged time to the period in which I’m not so much stuck but almost to full to bursting to know exactly what it is, or how, to express it. The word express here having a very little meaning. I need to get these thought-feelings out of me. Anyway it cosmically figures that this backing up (rather than dearth) of entries might be due to this having been the transition time from the sign of Cancer to that of Leo. I can’t separate that notion from the fact that I am in the middle of producing two festivals (one being a first, just five days hence, in Cambridge at Harvard/American Repertory Theater’s second stage), each festival’s to-do list having hundreds of line items; while also being in the middle of writing and otherwise preparing our 2018 Haute Astrology books, twelve in all, and working on a business plan which is begging for completion. All this while Stella is finishing a three-year masters program which took her, recently to Canada, leaving me alone for about nine days.

When alone I typically take it as a time to relax and eat bad food (or surplus of good restaurant fare0 and indulge too much in other fun too. But this time I’ve had to be up and at-em everyday, preparing myself three meals and keeping all these projects on track in time and space. I also have been doing much in the way of press interviews and promotion in additon to all the administrative and design tasks that go into everything. And moving the needle on so much else it would make your head spin. Honestly, I have felt these last two weeks, like the busiest person on the planet. And yet, I didn’t get spread too thin; rather I played it like a drummer sitting before the most elaborate kit you’ve ever seen, hitting every tom, high-hat, snare, bass, triangles, bells and whatever the fuck drummers have splayed out before them, hitting my every mark with speed and precision.

And all the while doing that, I let this Blague go (just a bit) as feelings began to mount inside me; the kind of feelings that have physical repercussions like stomach aches, dizziness, sleeplessness, sweating and a number of other symptoms which, trust me, I know all emanate from my emotions. And not realizing this was happening when it was happening I only got a handle on this in hindsight when suddenly I hit a wall or a milestone or both. I had this realization that I can no longer effort on certain projects but rather have to play the cards that I’m dealt. More than that: That I have to rally these my rogue feelings in the formlation of something new and real. I had this simultaneous realization slash averted nervous breakdown (maybe?) slash total releasing of the past and all its people, places and things that have plagued me.

Put it this way, if I were to admit that all my life I have been a people pleaser seeking approval and thus feeling hurt and rejected a lot of the time by situations, family, folks that either disappointed or derailed me to some degree, I suddenly felt the cutting of all loses. I suddenly felt that I can no longer trade in all the what-ifs. I suddenly felt that enough has to be enough because all I can give is my all and to give more robs me of what truly belongs to me. I also feel a fire under me that I have rarely felt before.

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Picking up from the last post, that fire under me one might call that the fixed-sign of Leo after being completely away in a flood of emotion, Cancer being the preceding cardinal-water sign. Everything has that kind of logic in astrology. I like short sentences. I tend to use them after seeing Bette Davis play Margo Channing. Anyway, Leo is about passion while Cancer which comes before it is about feeling, pure and simple, surely the stuff of what passion is made. Leo needs to create a life. To be the creator in life. No longer at sea but getting on with it, pouring all those feels into a fortress of ones own making. You can’t have one without the other really. But while Cancer is a great sign to be in when you’re purging and releasing in the process of getting to another shore. Then Leo is all about playing the hand your dealt and getting on with it in a spirit of nobility, something which must be earned and built stone by stone. And so I look to the projects of the last seven years and I say good for me job well done. Whether or not I continue with them is no longer an important matter to me. At this point I’m ready to create a new beginning, to birth a new plan, or rather, to use the Leo vernacular, to birth some new offspring. And even with that I’m not beholden to any immediate outcome. I have so many irons on that fixed-fire of Leo, heart and hearth of my true home, my interior castle, all of which are equally thrilling and enjoyable, all falling under one Starsky + Cox umbrella that I don’t need so much to pick and choose as I do to judge which iron looks readiest, now, to take from the fire. I have a private consultancy, books, events, creative collaborations, performances, productions and a completely new company to launch. I’m in no rush to determine what should happen next althought I am continuing to nurture and feed my existing endeavors, always taking them ever higher, trying to make them all the better, just as I want to instill total faith and creativity and sincerity in my new endeavor, to truly make it the best experience it can be. Because truly, the real work is in being a better person every day, forgiving yourself for your asshole ways, seeking forgiveness from others, and doing better next time, tomorrow, later today.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.

Virgo 17° (September 8)

Went to beach for walk but they have extended the season sticker situation and so we had the wrong car—went for walk in town instead. I still couldn’t bring myself to work, a momentary block, but I didn’t just watch mindless TV. I decided at least I could educate myself today so I viewed a four-part series on the Wars of the Roses and then The Story of Europe, which is narrated by this historian in a bowtie. So at least I’m not now terribly depressed. I drafted what was in my head yesterday regarding the farmer and his antics. So at least that is out of my brain and into a file which is part of the process in all of this. My plan is to take a huge breath and deep dive over the next three months to get most of this book drafted. I also have a plan in mind for real estate which we will begin focus on next Fall. I don’t believe we will be in theaters by next year either. This is just my suspicion; and so I will keep things moving on that score as best I can. All told we should plan an excursion north for the month of September of next year and be prepared to be away for a minimum two weeks; that is if all goes well this year—we just have that hump to get over. Anyway, the whole idea of pasting all the past text below is that I don’t need to do more than check in here. I am going to use everything I have and start throwing and giving things away with some rapidity. Time does fly and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. It would be quite nice to retire fully in the coming years. Then again, we first need to have a democracy to rely upon. I am concerned the blob won’t go. We need a miracle end to him, some well-directed divine intervention to rid ourselves of this problem.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 811-815. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

If this morning is any indication then the Full Thunder Moon tonight , just after midnight, is going to be s w e e p i n g…….Moon in Sagittarius a sign ruled by Jupiter, named for the chief god who is armed with lightning and thunderbolts; a mutable-fire sign befitting that fire in the sky synonymous with flashes of genius on one hand and the devastation of excess on the other.

You may have noticed from the previous post that I have been having an issue, without naming names. But, in case I do need a pro bono lawyer, the publication of that last Blague will serve as a reminder to me of what has been going down. I’d like to think people are stupid rather than cruel, but I suppose both states of mind come under the heading of thoughtless.

It’s boring being right all the time. And the good one, so-called, who does everything thoughtfully and thoroughly and ever in consideration of how it affects others. It’s so much work being constantly forgiving. Few people take into account the collateral destruction of their moves. I’m tired of always picking up some sword of righteousness, I really am. Shadiness is an effect, even, when it’s not an intention.

Anyway the atmosphere feels thick. Where we live there are chickens—two coops in fact, divided by age group. The older hen house is currently going nuts. One time last year they screamed like this and a fox had taken one of them. That doesn’t seem the situation today. And they are all inside, not out in the pen so I can’t tell what’s up. And I don’t care. They are annoying and they make me sad. I hate the treatment of any animal as I thing. I can tell, even from the way they wish to interact with me on any given day, that they are sensitive and if not intelligent still sentient beings. Right now, though, I wish they’d just shut the fuck up.

I think there is something in the ether, though, all said. There is a tension in the air. Can you feel it? No because you’re not reading this. Nobody is. Someday someone might discover my Blague, or maybe I’ll even promote it, at some point but I really do have enough on my plate right now.

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Sorry folks I deleted the last post apparently I don’t know what month it is. So Moon in Capricorn not Sagittarius. Mars and Sun are conjunct opposing a conjunct of Moon and Pluto. That’s intense. Mars is pure directive energy named for the war god, it is survival of the fittest, competitive, aggressive. We might all be feeling ourselves. Pluto Moon spells transformation on a deep emotional and psychological level. Pluto, named for the god of death and the underworld, symbolic of the subconscious, signals endings which are only ever regenerations. That means our relationships to experience—work, creative projects, rituals and, yes, relationships themselves—are changing, such that you won’t feel the same as you did before about some things. People, places, things may be knocked off pedestals and Self-Reliance becomes the theme of the weekend.

Identity issues are playing a big part today. Beware of being co-dependent. For me that means being mindful to not be too forgiving. I really am a pushover when it comes to sincere emotions. If someone is contrite, even though they may’ve done me wrong, I find it hard not to soften. I suppose it’s simpler that way; in some ways; not all. But it never adds up to anything positive to voice your opinions in certain situations; people can hold a grudge against you for magnanimously pointing out grievous errors, even those for which, say, if you were to sue, you’d win. But the squeaky wheel doesn’t always get oiled. Sometimes it gets removed and replaced with a new one.

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In my dream I was hurtling through space in a craft experiencing a heightened sense of what I usually experiece in an airplane hinged on the question, “how the hell does this thing stay up in the air.” I think it most relates to a recent flight I took in Belize in a very small plane with a pilot like a Sumo wrestler. Every time he shifted his weight which he did every thirty seconds the plane would make this jolt to one side. But back to the spacecraft. I kept watching the controls. And it was such a lonely feeling being up there, just zooming through space. You couldn’t even look at the window it was just a blur, which doesn’t make sense, but none of this does. I kept wondering why we hadn’t, or why we wouldn’t end up hitting, an asteroid or something. How can we chart every object? And the craft was surely small.

I suppose, with the projects I create, I do feel like I’m hurtling forward, and, at times, out of control which isn’t the funnest of feelings. I have to work very hard to ground myself or at least to not feel as if the projects are flying me instead of me it. Funny how on the days you least expect it you can get some pretty grand ideas. Now, truth be told, as a Libra, I get a thousand great ideas a week, a good number of them surely worthy of some life pursuite, whether what shop should open locally, to what screenplay would make a great film. But I’m only one person with one lifetime.

My best ideas come when I walk away. Which, when you live near one of the world’s most beautiful beaches, a heady expanse of sand and sea, particularly at low tide, the two mile walk in that setting is certainly conducive. Walking away, trying to shake out the tension of mounting work, though, ironically, always inspires more projects to put on some grand plate in the multi-course banquet of creative ideas.

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What I really didn’t know about Wellfleet was how yah it really was. The town has always been the hippy chic character on the Cape where each town has it’s own personality. Wellfleetians, the yearround ones, are really their own breed. They have names like Josiah and Caleb and Nathaniel and other such old-testament monikers that match a place near where those pilgrims first landed. Their are families whose female ancesters had the honorific Goody attached to their names. It’s like that. In the fifties, sixties and seventies (and eighties probably), Wellfleet seemed to be the Cape town distinguished by attracting a Jewish intelligentia which is still in evidence. Jewish surfers with PhDs? Wellfleet is hub of that universe.

I’ve been going to the beach most days early in the morning and the roads through the woods out to the wild ocean are filled with joggers and cyclists and other type-A personalities, hardly any cars. These active folk are everywhere and make Wellfleet seem so much more well-heeled than one might have originally imagined.

There are many boat, if not yacht people, and many right-wingers in so lefty and kibutzy a place. They are loud and boisterous because their boats aren’t as big as they wish they were. Anyway, we’ve been keeping Sirius radio’s Yacht Rock on, initially, for the novelty. But also they play some great songs and some bad ones too. There are the de rigeur Christopher Cross songs and ninety-nine percent of all songs seem to include Michael McDonald singing back up or side melodies.

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To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.

Virgo 16° (September 7)

So here we are, finally, at the official last day of the summer season and I’m going to be honest: I’m really happy about it. It was not just an isolated summer but an alienating one; and I definitely added some more bodies to the poubelle. In some ways I’ve never felt so focused as I do now. There are a lot of white people out there just trying to do things; but I’m so bored with all the self-promotion and the desperate lengths people go to. I’ve redacted the next thought because I actually can’t be assed to think it. I am going to keep magnetizing and unfolding and eliminating and reducing and consolidating and chucking and ditching/

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 806-810. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

Today feels like the first hot day on the Cape. I made the mistake of going onto Facebook and seeing someone posting about this great old property in Provincetown, which I always dreamed of turning into a theater, which CVS wants to buy, but the town turned them down, so now CVS is suing the town.

One of Provincetown resident who fancies themselves an artist and an activist was urging people to sign a petition to stop CVS from doing whatever they’re doing while another resident, whom I believe has been in town way longer, was saying they wanted the cheaper meds that CVS would mean. Now, how much cheaper could CVS meds be than the existing Stop & Shop pharmacy and why do we need two pharmacies. But on the other hand, this person trying to “save” Provincetown from inauthenticity is someone who has never worked a day in their life and still had enough trust fund to buy a house and makes their money from renting to visitors who pay through the nose to be here in this increasingly gentrified landscape. Anyway, the irony was just ricocheting every which way.

The Spring is absolute bliss on Cape Cod and I always forget that fact until it gets horribly hot and there are people everywhere and the traffic is bumper to bumper and you can’t get on the beaches because all the lots are full. And so it goes. We hit the beach in the early morning or evening, especially, at low tides and walk and walk and walk and walk. I have in fact managed to learn to live life rather well, on not very much money I shoud say, enjoying certain luxuries other people have lived their whole lives for. I decided at thirty-years old, that I was going to live near the ocean and I haven’t not since.

After having been a homeowner for so many years, I gave that up nearly a decade ago. I’m ready to own again, I think. But the way of the world is that one is continually priced out of certain pictures. I really don’t want to be one of those people. And yet I’ve never really frontloaded material solvency so I can’t say, even, how possible that might be. I do know I can leave this neck of the woods and get a lot more for less; but there is something about this area that will forever be home and so I’m going to keep the vision of owning some groovy place here, by the sea, firmly in my minds eye.

I have so much on my plate these coming weeks. For one I’m trying to finish our Haute Astrology horoscope books for the coming year, and I have two festivals to plan and pull off and also a business plan to edit. And of course ye old fundraising for all that I do non-profit. That’s really just in the month ahead and I’m determined to make it fun and fabulous, even if it kills me.

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I recently came across a bit of old, good, green pot I had stashed, no doubt, in a moment of paranoia or resolve. I cannot remember when it could be from, but, of course, I had to smoke some, though nervous it would backfire and I’d end up in the emergency room with maladies imaginaires. But that didn’t happen. Instead it created a sensation of calm and cushioning that took me over, like a wave, much in the way it did in my youth until, somewhere in my thirties, it started triggering spinning siren lights and wails inside my brain. It returned me to a late-teenage sense of élan, of salad days, and it made me realize how far I am from feeling that kind of chill on any given day. Unfortunately or fortunately, there wasn’t enough of the green stuff to keep testing this effect which I would have undertaken with scientific apblomb. By the same token, it might have been playing Russian roulette with my nervous state. So it was just as well it was short-lived.

And anyway, I took away from this experience the notion that calm is closer than I think; and that I needn’t live my life in some kind of heightened state. PTSD. I know I have it. How can I not given the way I was raised and the rollercoaster circumstances of my adult life, devoid as it has been, of any real kind of support system other than the beloved obvious.

In some ways I think that’s why I work primarily as a consultant. It helps me to no end to help other people through their challenges. It’s almost a selfish career choice on my part. But back to the sensation that the pot imparted.

I didn’t so much as flashback, which I think is more a mental thing, than I did throwback emotionally to, I’m going to pinpoint it as: the age of seventeen. At seventeen, the summer before going to college, I didn’t work, which was rare for me since I always worked, since I was a high-school sophomore. Not having had a childhood, I had never read The Chronicles of Narnia, and my close friend Ken who was off to RISD that year gave me his entire set to read, which I did, all in one go, sitting alone, on the beach, in my low striped chair; after which I read Salinger’s Franny and Zoey, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, and Nine Stories. I would go to the beach before 8am and return around 6pm, having quickly ran home, at lunch, to grab a something, as we lived just a block from the ocean.

It was a grand old house and I miss it. It was big and blue and had three floors and was set on a corner. We had a mullberry tree that was wonderful out front and a wrap-around porch. Of course my father “removed” the mullberry tree, I believe, because somebody in a car crashed into it and I suspect my father (lied and…?) said the tree was killed in the accident, probably for insurance money. He was that type about whom writing makes my arms and shoulders freeze up. I wouldn’t want to be smoking pot and thinking about the things my father did, or who he was, when I was growing up. That would surely impart the opposite sensation of that little bit of vegetal flavored pot which buffeted me so pristinely upon its finding last week.

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The 4th of July. Another one of those amateur-hour holidays where people get too drunk and too crazy. For our part we will sneak in to enjoy some festivities then sneak out again ere long.

The world, and surely American society, is a polarized place. And living where we do surrounded by type-A individuals with more dogs than kids and lots of disposable income it can seem ridiculously disparate. The truth is so many of the people here latched on early to some rich, older person who gaven them their start. Sex always seems to play a part. Especially when it involves other people’s money. Funny that Sex and Other People’s Money are attributes of the astrological 8th house. As is Death.

Anyway it won’t last long. I tend to get depressed if surrounded by too conspicuous a form of consumption. Or when I see half the people I know waiting on the other half. I’m too empathetic by half. I hope I’m not getting into Holden Caulfield or Seymour Glass territory if I can help it, as, I vaguely alluded to this yesterday, that I am wont to do in summer. Let’s just say, if we were to hang out together today, you might find me intense. I have a lot on my plate. And I’ve put myself under pressure—it’s my own doing and I trust I do what I do for a reason. I think I’m just wearying of life lessons learned. And still holding on to certain hurts, aren’t we all, seemingly in endless supply. And we all do stupid things of which we’re not proud, too, as a result. And we can’t beat ourselves up over that either. It’s important to come clean and express yourself.

There are few places on earth where I truly feel comfortable and I think Paris is surely one of them. I like the anonymity which never feels lonely. The city is so interactive on an intimate level and yet has this natural formality contained in grey stone, often capped with grey clouds. The perfect solitude. Some days I think I’d like to live in Paris and have a cook and a housekeeper and a lovely large apartment and then choose different places to go in summer including back home here where I must always have a place.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.

Virgo 15° (September 6)

Last night was definitely the last night of our official fun-time summer, some of which managed to be quite fun despite the state of the world. But it is already back to school for us today and we had planned a beach walk but just cut ourselves some slack and are doing a bit of cleaning up and getting our brain around the colossal work and schedule at hand the next four months, which also entails a slew of doctors and overdue checkups and procedures which are never fun but necessary. This time last year I was preparing to do a show (pinch hitting for a thoughtless narcissistic performer who bagged out last minute) along with an entire festival and a series in Cambridge at A.R.T. where I went for a show on my birthday at the end of the month. I was looking forward to a move to Europe—it was such an optimistic and rewarding time. Now, I cannot complain because things are still going well for me despite all this isolation and sadness and death. What a difference a year makes but part of being this yankee helping to save our democracy is pulling oneself up by the bootstraps and digging in to fight the good fight We are in a cold civil war with a militarized uneducated racist population of white supremecists and they have the guns. We will have to find a way out here and leave behind a life we built; I’m not so naïve to think we are easily going to elect a new president and experience a seamless exchange. It’s going to be a fight no matter what. Enjoy your Labor Day weekend.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 801-805. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

Question No 15: Is there a very personal way that you can reach out to Boston people, or people anywhere really, to tell them what you’re doing, generally, even if they don’t live here, and ask them to help fund what you’re doing. Someone like a childhood friend you grew up with. Everybody really. Maybe it makes sense to create a FB page with very clear instructions and invite everyone on your FB list one at a time? Maybe ad a donate button? Dunno.

Yes this is the main thread which has been working through this questionnaire format and also through the theme of this particular day. I’ve been making a lot of notes on the subject. The trick is to be succinct and get the point over. I do believe I need to make myself a document with a bunch of different blurbs on it which I can cut and paste at will and fling at people doing what they do. I don’t want not to give someone the opportunity to help me and it’s possible that everyone on my list is potentially someone who could help in some ways if only to tell their friends, in Boston or Cambridge, for instance, what it is we are actually doing. I want to refer to this as the great comb through.

But I wonder why you underlined this childhood friend bit that does seem curious. Do you feel that people from your youth owe you or something. Or do you…I…think that, no, I just think they’d like to be a part of what I’m doing non-profit. For the cause. The cause. What is the cause?: The cause is to save theater and live performances in places where it is something of a legacy but is in danger of being lost to commercial ventures in the “entertainment” industry and overall gentrification. Otherwise the entire genre dies. Yes I know works get developed and moved to Broadway from ART and what not but its not as grass rootsy as what we do. I love what the REDCAT in L.A. does; and of course we produce and perform at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York and San Francisco and New Orleans and Austin and Portland and Seatlle and Philadelphia and Chicago and other American cities, not to mention all the European and UK capitals, readily provide a home to what might be considered “alternative” live performance artists.

I’m looking ahead to the next question and I see that I’ve answered part of it and, yes, I should add names and addresses to my mailing list. Duh.

Question No 16: Do you think it makes sense to have one document with condensed bits of speech at the ready to cut and past for any occasion? Should you feed addresses into your mailing list?

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Question No. 17: How does what you do non-profit marry to what you do for-profit. Are they both cosmic on some level. Is it about upliftment on some level?

Well it is all about lifting spirits which I do through my metaphysical work with clients in private sessions or in writing what I hope are empowering books for people. I see theater and performance as doing the same thing—our spirits are lifted through the experience of live theater which is about creating an alternate reality—which is what therapy or any kind of counseling does, it opens the subject to a new way to experience.

A few years ago I was thinking about going back to school to get my masters in a combined degree of theater and spirituality, the stage as a sacred place, religion and theater being once one and the same. Something along those lines. I might get back into that notion in the coming years and try and put something together for myself. Theatre schools are expensive—I recently had the thought to pursue this by way of some divinity school or another. We shall see. I do feel it is a direction I will one day go. I really like teaching acting especially. So who knows: could be fun just to get that degree. There was an actor teacher who was pretty famous who had my same real name. I actually had to ask his permission to use my full name to get my Actors Equity Card. Once upon a time I had a temp job and ther person hiring me heard that someone with my name was coming in to be her temp—she was in a state of fear that it was her college acting teacher.

And then there is the following question…

Question No. 18: Have you given any more thought to going back to school. What about Harvard? Have you thought about getting that ball rolling toward getting some kind of MA?

I have thought about Harvard extension but recently I met someone who went to Harvard who was sort of making fun (in a nice way) of a friend who was in the extension classes at Harvard who was telling people he went to Harvard. I didn’t know that was super cheesey. I was planning on doing the same thing if I got my MA through Harvard extension. But I guess, to those who “really” go to Harvard, this is seen as a bit oh-no-you better-didn’t.

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Question No. 19: Why do you like papier maché and did you recently have a dream about it where you were making giant papier maché figures, dressing them in real antique courtly constume?

Was a running out of questions when I wrote this or did it seem important to pose this question, I wonder. Anyway, yes I love papier maché very much. Not that I have much experience with it. It’s just that, when objects, big or small, need to be made as a set piece or for, other, well, i don’t know if I’ve ever done pm but for making set pieces, it’s something I seem to be able to do quite easily. Need a top hat? I can make you one out of pm that, at least from a distance, looks just like a top hat, especially if I tie a ribbon around it. I can make masks out of the stuff or wee objets and the like.

Oh right, yes, I had a dream the other night (maybe a week ago) that I was making all these giant figures out of papier maché and then dressing them in sort of Tudor gowns. That’s what you get for binge-watching that entire series, which was on Showtime, ten years after it began. But for the one-note-notiness of Jonathan Rys Meyers, who is often, himself very good, the show really is brilliant, particularly when it comes to the direction and photography. The show looks beautiful and is shot from very interesting angles and with just the right effect. I remember seeing Natalie Dormer’s demise as Ann Boleyn many moons ago and it lost none of its effectiveness in the revision. In a way it really was the pioneer of many series which have come after, some kind of cartoony English fodder—Merlin, Mary Queen of Scotts, on and on—but also I can see Game of Thrones in the Tudors. My guess is many people moved from that older show to the newer one. Many of the actors, besides Natalie Dormer surely did. In both, she is a queen trying to keep her tenuous hold on her power while having a gay brother whose going to be persecuted for being so.

Anyway the figures I was making out of papier maché and then dressing in silk and damask were absolutely giant sized. Like enornous totem puppets. Ornate, beautiful but a bit scary. They weren’t animated but they were, on some level, alive, like a wall of silent guardians or archetypal totem poles were to be consulted and considered in the making of ones decisions or the taking of actions. They formed this sort of Greek chorus and maybe they weren’t totally fixed, perhaps they swayed or swiveled a bit, their finery also blowing and swaying in some artificial breeze. As I write this I think of the first ever production of Rites of Spring. The effect of this theatrical moment in my dream, whether or not these figures were created (by me?) in papier maché

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Quesiton No. 20: Can you have fun being more itinerant, moving around the Cape and Boston and all New England, really, connecting the dots. Don’t you miss taking and posting pictures, being out and about. Try to search your feelings and ideas on this. Having gotten through all the other questions and feeling rather caught up on your ideology. Do you think you can create words and pictures now as you move forward and realize you are never truly behind but right on time and if you end up getting to the next project which requires the raising of money don’t you trust that you’ll put out an all-points bulletin to get the help, financial and otherwise, you need to not sink below your necessary fundraising goals?

First of all , I have to pause to say that, although my blogging hasn’t been perfect and it certainly hasn’t been all about the Cosmic Joke (French: Blague), except that it has, I have managed, after more than “thirty days in the hole”

to be writing the actual Blague entry that should correspond to this day, that is to say, I have caught up to myself, bitches, and when I say bitches I mean lovely people. And perhaps some defeated demons in my head. Other than those I don’t want to deal in detractors but roam among the optimistic and just keep doing what I’m doing and letting enough be enough.

If you did read through this whole Twenty Questions thing I just did (there are actually Thirty, but I don’t feel like revisiting those now and, besides, I said I caught up to myself. Were you not listening? That, in itself, is a good feeling. But I’ll tell you another thing, whitey: You won’t see me skipping a Blague again, not for the life of me. I mean, not where I can’t easily catch up (as he already opens the doorway to dysfunction?), but rather comitting to the original idea of this mother: and that is to do some combination of being funny, day to day, and pointing out some cosmic joke or other, but those are few and far between, while, by the same token, truly funny things are by nature cosmic, so…yeah, I’m brilliant; whatever. Nobody is reading this (other than us).

That exercise as an “action item” (I remember there are action items mentioned in the questionnaire 21-30 which I haven’t, as I said, cared to revisit quite yet), this exercise, I mean of asking yourself twenty questions surrounding something that might seem insurmountable, whether a creative process or a project with myriad moving parts. To ask yourself twenty questions about it, you’re already feeding yourself the answers. Confidence very well might just be confiding in oneself. Which brings me to a new topic: In having this literal conversation here, as both interviewer and interviewee, I’ve been having these fun, joke conversations with myself in type on a screen that is supposed to look like paper, which it does. And…and, and, I’ve been enjoying this reparteé with moi-même and, I don’t know how else to express it: it’s provided excitement in the form of an electric, neural and also, surely, emotional surges and senses of vitality and, dare I say, a sort of self-love at first sight because, up until this moment, I have never been to me.

Oh, my gosh: I was just about to publish this when I realized I never answered the question LOL; so I came back to write something but now I’m realizing maybe I needn’t.

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So if you read yesterday’s posting you’d know: I had worked my way out of a Blague backlog where I had to write about thirty posts in a matter of days to catch up to myself; and, in part, to do so I created a questionnaire of thirty questions—I didn’t get to the last third (yet) because I was already ten posts in when I had this questionnaire idea—but I know I have a failsafe liferaft for emerging from another thirty days in the whole.

Okay so here’s the kicker: I was so excited I was catching up to myself that “before answering the last (20th) question I said something like…”before I begin let me say…a whole bunch of stuff….a lot more than I anticipated….and by the time I finished my tangent I forgot to read the last question let alone answer it.

So I came back to the post prepared to “add on” more, and address the question, but the question was so great and a bit poetic because (I don’t know how I knew the 20th question would be the last because I actually wrote 30) but it was in the form of a question that knew that I had reached my destination where I was ready to move forward into the light of day without that nagging feeling of being behind.

Now look, I get behind because I have so much to do. So I was thinking that once I caught up on the Blague I would try to combine writing the Blague into my day which also required a lot of writing (and the taking of pictures) to create content for my four websites—this Cosmic Blague, my two festival websites, and for the Starsky + Cox online headquarters as well. And I had this vision that I would emerge as this seamless itinerant, starting last night, as I headed into the center of Provincetown to meet with friends and visits other friends’ new businesses and restaurants, and see their gallery shows, and all this sort of fun stuff from which words and pictures are made.

I had even spent the journey into town telling Stella this entire story. How I didn’t read the question until after I wrote the Blague and how the question was so poetic and it even asked me, in cheeky interview style something like “could I know move forward in words and pictures” and basically not lose the momentum and create content as I go and make my connections and feel that sort of, yes, there it is, seamlessness. Then I spent the next three hours enjoying a perfect Provincetown night not once using my iphone camera.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.

Virgo 14° (September 5)

Went down a rabbit hole of watching old episodes of this show that I wouldn’t have watched as a kid because it was a “girl’s show,” but it truly is great. My nerves are a bit distressed and I’m going to claw my way back to some semblance normalcy in this week to come. The father on the show at one point works two jobs and then his own farm, for three weeks, working fifteen-hour days. I know the smart thing to do is really front load over the next four months so that when we get to the new year with a lot under our belt. And then use the three winter months to basically finish. Then polish April through June, whilst doing the most major Spring cleaning of my life. The farmer be damned, we will tolerate no intimidation or bullying.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 796-800. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

Question No. 9. What are your thoughts on generating “concierge” information  for both festival’s websites. Do you need to make any changes to the website, hire any designers, so forth.

The concierge sections on the website are very important. And I need to make time each day for beefing them up. This is a big priority on my to-do list. I really want to make the descriptions of the various places—restaurants, hotels, shops et al—somewhat poetic.

I wrote something here recently about why I like poetry, its for the brevity, not the beauty, which was hyperbole, but still. I don’t always love writing and I need to change up the way I do write in order to keep from going bonkers. And I write soooooo many things in a given week; so I thought it would be fun to do some haiku version of the place descriptions. And beyond that to really do it for me and for truth. Because I really am only writing about the places I love and know and so I’ll have a lot to say. It’s also a great way to link to them on social media and send them little love notes on Twitter, FB, Instagram etc.

Another aspect of this at some point might be to activate our own concierge service and share deals with audience and so forth.

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Question No. 10: Do you have all the right print and electronic collateral that you need? Do you need to review with the venues what printed materials might still be effective and what exactly is needed when.

I do need to review the contract with the Provincetown venue to make sure what it is needed (and to go over all the logistics and finances again in any case). I have our names poster, which I sent in 11×17 form to the local printer as a test to be up this week. And I have a digital version which I’ve disseminated as well as what would be a giant Names Poster—I will see if the venue needs that. Then I will make ten individual posters for the Provincetown artists—again double checking with the venue. And then I think I will make five of each of the ten individual posters—that is to say 50 total which should keep catching the eye. And of course postcards everywhere. What if you mailed them to people’s PO boxes? Up and down the Cape they could go.

I do think some of these sent electronically via our Mad Mimi which I really need to ramp up would provide much more in the way of reach. It’s all about being on the street, talking to people, finding a way to say, hey, remember if you become a Sparkler you write off your donation, you receive 50% discount on tickets to festival shows, and you’re invited to celebrate with us at our festival parties and events. I have to have Missionary Sponsorship packets in my bag at all time. And cards and so forth. I should get into some stationery to send handwritten notes to sponsors

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Question No. 11: Before me move on: Do you think it makes sense to pencil some of these topics (that might require a greater deal of work) into days on your calendar. Do you have some sort of count-down going. Have you divided the weeks more sweeping themes or have you assigned certain days for certain topics. Is there a day, every couple of days, dedicated solely to fundraising?

Oh girl, you should see my office. Wait, you can. But yes, I do need to go back through these questionnaires and to begin deciding which questions you’re asking are actually whole projects within themselves. Some projects can be mostly executed in a matter of days. Whereas some others need to be begun, and then sustained, which means I’m not scheduling into my daily planner vertically, only, I’m also working horizonatally on a number of things over the next month, a bit a day so I have to institute “units of time” to borrow a phrase from that movie About a Boy.

I do indeed need to devote some days purely to fundraising but, again, through different means; and I’m thinking of new ways all the time. Everything feeds into everything else which is why I’ve found it helpful to institute this questionnaire project because it is helping me flesh out all these categories screaming for attention while I might, hopefully, be able to separate all these questions out into their own chapters of a sort of how-to (run two festivals, a performance series, and otherwise produce (and develop) works for the stage.

Anyway thank you for the reminder. I’m going to try and power through a few more questions before I start the project you describe—the putting together of all projects! Funny that. So glad we can share this time together.

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Question No. 12: Do you have a full handle on what artists need, technically. Does it make sense to sort through emails and make sure you have a full handle on that. Did you pair any other info gathering needed, like, say, travel, so that you can hit two birds with one stone?

Wow, you’re psychic, I did pair the seemingly disparate topics of travel and tech needs into one category because they are both pretty small straight forward things and relatively cut and dry and very boring and as I need to book travel sooner than later it also reminds me to gather technical information and vice versa. Again now I can really start dialoguing with my performers and with my sponsors. By and large this was a lame question. But I’m going to take it as a grace and move onto the next one.

I was just about to start a new entry when I realized the next question was also pretty boring:

Question No. 13: Do you have an updated Hotel schedule or have you let the artists know you are confirming their hotels. Does it make sense to reach out to other hotels or other such people with places they might donate to the directorship of the cause?

As I go through the travel and tech notes, I will also be able to confirm hotel stays and so forth. And to give the hotel an update on our stay. I don’t know yet where the directors are staying and I would like to make arrangements for them to have a gorgeous place. I will make this part of the realtor bit! Putting it out to them but also to the nicer hotels to say we need space for two of the directors of the festival.

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Question No. 14: Does it make sense to frontload any one performer in the Glow Festival, who might have a better chance of filling houses. Should you also put this out to Provincetown people and tell them to please ask you for some complimentary ferry tickets? Should you see if any of the Cambridge hotels—like say the Sheraton Commander—might give you a discount on rooms you can pass along to people.

I think what I need to do is tap into the Boston/Provincetown crowd which, frankly, I don’t know all that well. I sometimes imagine I’m going to go through my four thousand plus friends on Facebook and actually know who lives where and does what and to make some kind of picture of my virtual friendship landscape. Certainly get a handle on people’s geography but also their walks of life. I would love to know who is in publishing or who is in fashion or who is in marketing or what kind of crossover is going on between friends and so forth. It all remains such a mystery to me, but sometimes when clicking through I get these flashes that each of these virtual relationships, as many as they are, can take on more meaning despite the fact that the trend is going to go away from Facebook and this level of knowingness with which we’ve become comfortable. I quite agree, but what if one were to nurture even the relationships we’ve never really had—to turn our social media friendships into some version of real ones—they can never be truly real—but they needn’t be as casual as all that.

It’s getting to the point with me where I’m feeling a wave of increased abundance happening like a ground swell underneath the whole of my experience. I also know from experience that this can be an illusion or a trigger. All too often I don’t adhere to a healthy lifestyle at times when nobody is looking. It hasn’t mattered in the past that I was looking at those times. And as these pockets of alone time have become more frequent I don’t feel that same need to indulge while all eyes are off me. I don’t need to consume everything in my scopes. I don’t need to binge watch whole seasons of shows that originally aired a decade ago. I can do things I typically do in tandem when I’m alone. (This is a big step for me.) It’s as if I feel guilty or something for enjoying an experience unless I share it with those I love. And, given the fact that “those I love” is narrowed down, to any given day, to one person, my life on the whole has the qualities of isolution, often, even though it is peopled with a great number of those I know but a little.

I would like to create some kind of network but its not as if my career allows for many colleagues. I’m only one of two people who do what I do, and the other person is in the same house as me. And we don’t do just one thing. We each do a dozen things, and even where there is overlap, both of us working under the one aegis, we work separately, in different rooms, on different floors of a house and meet up for meals and coffee and walks and welcome interuptions.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.

Virgo 13° (September 4)

Will pretty much try to recover from writer’s block but not writing. Need to get the hang of this. Cannot afford too much stopping and starting.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 791-795. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

Question No. 4: What might you say to Boston- and Cambridge-based individuals to convince them to part with $100 donation so to become a Glow Sparkler and receive a discount on all this new festival’s. What incentives and perks might you offer them?

This reminds me of question 2. But I’ll try again.

Hello! Introducing the first annual non-profit Glow Festival for Cambridge this summer July 27-30 featuring a handful of performers including Justin Vivian Bond and Penny Arcade. We are starting small year one and hope to raise a mere $10K in the next month from among would-be festival “Sparklers” donating just $100. Please make a donation of which you totally write off and you will receive a special code for 20% discount on all shows as our gift. Plus you’ll be invited to party with us during the festival. We have big dreams to make Glow a big a fringe festival for Cambridge and to continue our work to create a home for progressive live performers, here, as we have with the Afterglow Festival in Provincetown and our Glowberon series over the school season at Harvard. We do it all non-profit. So please help us, take the write off, and come play with us in July!

======================

Question No. 5: In considering social media, what do you think would make the best strategy overall and which social media outlets would you use. Do you have an original ideas on how to create interest in the artists you’re presenting and engage other individuals and businesses in the area and to liaise with other arts organizations and generate substantial buzz?

I do think that Twitter and Instagram accounts might make sense. The festival should follow performers and known audience. It might also follow some local businesses which share a sensibility with the festival. I really believe in taking the time to dialogue with audience and other creative entrepreneurs, citing them whenever possible. I do think it might be of some benefit to liaise with other arts organizations although this seems to have a parallel energy which is to say one of little connection. My desire is to find audience and to connect with people and to bring them what is sorely missing in the Boston area which is thriving, innovative performance. I think it’s important to project a good vibe with social media and I think that Twitter is better for putting out articles attached and so forth and any press or things of that nature, really information, whilst the Instagram would be best in portraying the feel and aesthetic of the brand.

===================

Question No. 6: If you were asked to put a newsletter together in one day what stories would you feature for this new year ahead?

Right well the newsletter would certainly speak of the move to the Art House this year and also that we are newly expanding next year’s Glowberon and (drum roll) adding a brand new festival for Cambridge in July. I think we would talk about news associated with our family of artists past and present. We might talk about the achievements of our sponsors and so forth. And I would add in all the quotes from our advisors and artists.

In splashy headlines. What news of Morgan Bassichis and Jay Brannan and Bitch and other long lost performers. We should talk about our outreach to other venues and the production arm. Maybe the newsletter isn’t the best way to go perhaps there are other ways and means of getting the word out there although I do like a good news letter.

============================

Question No. 7: What is the current status of your press. Are there journalists and editors who need to hear from  you and what should they know. Are you seeking coverage in as many places as you can?

The journalism thing is tricky. I have promises from the Boston Globe that they are doing something on us and Jared Bowen from Open Studio is also responsive. But then everyone disappears. Granted it is 4th of July (which seems to run a two-week spate) but my experience is that peeps have lousy follow through. What I would like to do is reach smaller press outlets harder, to maybe get onto radio, I’m also thinking that I should reach out to the local TV station and create some kind of show leading up to Afterglow which we can film? I dunno. There is much in the way of excitement going on and my goal this year is to be on one hand very relaxed and laid back about our prospects for success in fundraising and yet to pull out all stops connecting with people. I especially want to get the ball rolling. I want the feeling of having done all I can to get the word out. There is no Boston Phoenix anymore; but there is radio and such, and I should take this opportunity to reach the local TV stations as well. Okay I need a comprehensie press list for Boston. Thanks for letting me talk this through. I need to liaise with the people at ART as well and decide. It occurs that I should go after college radio and contact Harvard, Emerson and BU, for sure. I might also write whatever kind of “blog” the Herald asked me to do. Yes, welcome to the new age of journalism where newspapers don’t have staff anymore so they ask you to write the copy for them. Pay me bitch.

It does make sense to send out the entire roster that I have with a comprehensive press release and to make sure I have separate press releases for the festivals and series as well as a together one.

What’s crazy about this questionnaire format is: it seems to be opening up a lot of cosmic energy as, after just writing a few small paragraphs on the subject the Boston Globe scheduled the feature, the press liaison at ART just sent me a bunch of updates and emails for further outreach. I’m kind of liking what’s happening here. Maybe it will apply to other questions on the -aire as well.

================================

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 12° (September 3)

Not Feeling Compelled to say anything more than S. returns today with snacks from Sofra. All will be garlic for the coming days. Penne pesto and an uneasy reentry.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 786-790. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

Question No. 11: Before me move on: Do you think it makes sense to pencil some of these topics (that might require a greater deal of work) into days on your calendar. Do you have some sort of count-down going. Have you divided the weeks more sweeping themes or have you assigned certain days for certain topics. Is there a day, every couple of days, dedicated solely to fundraising?

Question No. 12: Do you have a full handle on what artists need, technically. Does it make sense to sort through emails and make sure you have a full handle on that. Did you pair any other info gathering needed, like, say, travel, so that you can hit two birds with one stone?

Question No. 13: Do you have an updated Hotel schedule or have you let the artists know you are confirming their hotels. Does it make sense to reach out to other hotels or other such people with places they might donate to the directorship of the cause?

Question No. 14: Does it make sense to frontload any one performer in the Glow Festival, like, say, Justin Vivian Bond or Penny Arcade, or both, who might have a better chance of filling houses. Should you also put this out to Provincetown people and tell them to please ask you for some complimentary ferry tickets? Should you see if any of the Cambridge hotels—like say the Sheraton Commander—might give you a discount on rooms you can pass along to people.

Question No 15: Is there a very personal way that you can reach out to Boston people, or people anywhere really, to tell them what you’re doing, generally, even if they don’t live here, and ask them to help fund what you’re doing. Someone like a childhood friend you grew up with. Everybody really. Maybe it makes sense to create a FB page with very clear instructions and invite everyone on your FB list one at a time? Maybe ad a donate button? Duno

Question No 16: Do you think it makes sense to have one document with condensed bits of speech at the ready to cut and past for any occasion? Should you feed addresses into your mailing list?

Question No 17: How does what you do non-profit marry to what you do for-profit. Are they both cosmic on some level. Is it about upliftment on some level?

Question No. 18: Have you given any more thought to going back to school. What about Harvard? Have you thought about getting that ball rolling toward getting some kind of MA?

Question No 18: How many artists have asked you to maybe reach out and help them book other shows come September. Does it make sense to come up with a short list of places you like to perform? Does your list of people include Dane Terry, Lady Rizo, Fauxnique, Joseph Keckler, Dynasty Handbag, Mary Birdsong? Any others? Does it make sense to write something up that you can send to venues. Do you have something already written that you sent to the Soho Theater? Shouldn’t they know you do a series at ART each year?

Question No. 19: Why do you like papier maché and did you recently have a dream about it where you were making giant papier maché figures, dressing them in real antique courtly constume?

Quesiton No. 20: Can you have fun being more itinerant, moving around the Cape and Boston and all New England, really, connecting the dots. Don’t you miss taking and posting pictures, being out and about. Try to search your feelings and ideas on this. Having gotten through all the other questions and feeling rather caught up on your ideology. Do you think you can create words and pictures now as you move forward and realize you are never truly behind but right on time and if you end up getting to the next project which requires the raising of money don’t you trust that you’ll put out an all-points bulletin to get the help, financial and otherwise, you need to not sink below your necessary fundraising goals?

======================

Question No. 21: Don’t you think this making of questionnaires is a good thing to tell people to do. Would you not consider it one of your “action items”. Have you created a place where you log all your “action items” that you’ve prescribed to clients which might make for good information in a book somewhere. Do you need to be more mindful of such items that you and Stella devised that have really helped people?

Question No. 22: Are you an alchemist? And if so what does that mean (to you)?

Question No 23: What is it about JD Salinger that you like so much. What is it about all the people, places and things that you list in the concierge sections of your websites that you like so much. Can you distill your thoughts so they might be at once more poetic and also more efficiently categorized?

Question No. 24: Do you need to ritualize any actions? Do you need to have a regular café or something you go to x many times a week? Should it coincide with some friendly bumping into people on the streets? Do you need to be reminded to bring your business cards with you wherever you go?

Question No. 25: Should you get some stationery printed? Would it be nice to bring back tangible thank-you notes, or note cards. Are you looking forward to enlisting another person in your household’s help once said person is finished with her own masters degree program? Do you need some help deciding on some aesthetical things?

Question No. 26: Do you need to start putting together you 10 five-minute curtain speeches with some funny bits about life. You had something about welcome signs. And you had some funny aptronym ideas which I think are written on an envelope somewhere. Wouldn’t it be fun and creative to get those things into works.

Question No. 27: Have you set up all your Instagram accounts? Are you putting pictures out there as you should? Are you asking all the artists who’ve performed at Afterglow for some helpful quotes to zhush up your info packs going out to people?

Question No. 28: Have you thought about doing a search on FB for folks who went to Harvard? Have you saying that you are asking all your creatively spirited friends who might be in a position to help to do so with a small donation. That you believe through small donations you can grow this into an Edinburgh sized festival.

Question No 29: Have you thought how Provincetown was always about people on the fringe, and now we have one. Should you be using the word fringe more.

Question No. 30. Do you need to contact Glamour and other magazines about some column writing this year. Have you thought about updating your writing resume in any case?

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Question No. 1: Why do you feel that realtors in Provincetown owe a special debt of gratitutde’s to non-profits and what simple things would you say to a room full of them or send them in an email which might inspire them to give to your non-profit.

Well I’m glad you asked. I think that the real estate agencies in Provincetown owe a special debt to non-profits for a number of reasons. Whereas there is a hotel tax in Provincetown whereby the town makes a percentage on every room booked in hotels and inns, money which goes to to town to be doled out, by the Visitors Service Bureau (VSB) to all kinds of non-profits including our great Afterglow Festival. No money is raised in taxes from real estate agencies renting houses to visitors however. Never mind the fact that houses are sold, at increasingly soaring rates, to second-home owners who rent their places in the aforementioned fashion or let them sit empty, sometimes for all but just a few weeks a year.

Gentrification is rampant in Provincetown. The fact that nobody in the service industry can afford to live in in town any more is one whole conversation in itself; but Ptown is very quickly becoming a coastal town for the super-rich, to such a degree, that the real-estate agencies are the recipients of sales commisions on a scale that we’ve never seen before in town. And so what goes along with that? in the performance world it means that all the (two?) performance venues in town can put on shows by Patti Lupone and Bernadette Peters at big ticket prices, all season long. There is no such thing as new or emerging performance scene in Provincetown which is sad and ironic because Provincetown is the undisputed birth place of the modern American stage.

I would say to a realtor something like:

Dear Realtor,

I am reaching out to you as not just a business in town, but as a real estate agency, which in this point in Provincetown’s evolution, one might imagine, is a good thing to be!

With the rising (soaring?) property prices, the increased attraction of the super wealthy to town, buffered by plans to develop a new yacht-friendly wharf and musings on new luxury hotels and the like, Provincetown has changed, and no more so from our perspective as a non-profit in the performing arts.

Already, for years now, we have seen a shift toward big-ticket prices for shows by Broadway stars, in season. Long gone, now, are the days when the emerging artist could show up in town and secure themself a stage—we’ve all but lost what might be called a Provincetown performance scene, in the one place where that legacy should never be lost.

Modern American theater began in Provincetown one-hundred years ago with playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell and the town’s eponymous Players.

But beyond that, for decades after, playwrights and performers who felt marginalized came to Provincetown—from Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee to performers like Eartha Kitt, Nina Simone, Paul Lynde, Jim Baily, Lynne Carter, Andy Warhop and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Lily Tomlin, Divine and on and on.

Unlike the Fine Arts tradition of Provincetown, the town’s progressive professional theatrical and performance heritage was these last years in danger of being lost completely—this is why we founded the Afterglow Festival in 2011. Now in its seventh year, Afterglow has premiered, produced and developed solo plays that have moved off-Broadway and performance art pieces, alternative comedy, neo-cabaret, interpretive dance, electronica and hip-hop poetry, high drag performance….the genres are endless…which have gone on to headline other festivals and win awards world-wide.

Afterglow receives a small VSB grant, moneys which are made from taxing hotels and guests. As you know, no money flows toward our or any non-profit from the rentals of summer, monthly or weekly homes. And in regard to house sales, as prices go up and up, and these houses are either rented to people who don’t make a home here or sit empty for second-home owners to visit them a few weeks a year, the population of Provincetown has become nameless and not anyone we would ever be able to reach out to for help.

So many people, especially those who work in the service industry, have left town and/or are scrambling to afford to be here on the earnings they make in the span of three months. It used to be that this segment of the permanent population felt less strapped and more forthcoming with small donations to our non-profit—but we’ve seen that change as well.

It occured to me that one segment of the commercial population—the real estate agencies—was one from which we’ve never recevied a sponsorship or a donation. And yet, one imagines, it is likely the most of businesses in town. And again, though tourists who stay in hotels contribute, via the VSB, to grant money we might receive, this isn’t true of the renting of houses to tourists. I know people think a tax on rentals should be enacted, but I have no opinion on that. I only know that when I sat down to meditate on which sector did I feel might have the means and, hopefully, the kind and generous motivation to give to our non profit Afterglow, the real-estate agencies shot to mind.

We would love if your agency would sponsor this year’s Afterglow Festival with a sponsorship starting at $1K. We also offer a Missionary Sponsorship of $500.

===============================

Gemini 24°

Question No. 2: What do you think might be the most effective words you could muster to send to a dozen Boston/Cambridge busineses (who don’t know you) to convince them to make a donation, to (becoming a Missionary Sponsor of) the new Glow Festival you’re starting in just five weeks time?

I would say:

Hello Friend,

I wanted to let you know that we are starting a new non-profit progressive performance Glow Festival in Cambridge this summer, July 27-30 at ART/Oberon which we hope in time to grown to the proportion of an Edinburgh fringe, for example. We are starting small with a handful of performers including Justin Vivian Bond and Penny Arcade. As of this moment we have no sponsors to speak of and I am seeking to raise what is a fairly small budget of $15K to cover the full breadth of our expenses. I’m hoping to raise this through all small donations year one.

For a tax deductible donation of $100 we are offering to friends who can attend the festival 20% off all tickets (if you donate you’ll receive a special promotion code to use online when buying two tickets). This “Sparkler” donation also puts you on the guest list for opening night pre-party festivities (for two!). Of course if you’d like to donate more and become a Sponsor, by all means do!

And you don’t have to be in Boston or Cambridge to give. You can just do so to help me create this new festival which we can grow into something special. In a world of for-profit real estate and big ticket prices on theater and performance, non-commercial progressive, emerging and evolving stage artists need festivals of this sort to perform. They provide a safe space for experimentation and sustenance for developing works.

Cambridge once stood as a bohemian outpost for progressive performing artists, but gentrification and other factors (greed) have contributed to the slow demise of stage artistry in our city. To boot, more fringe performers from other cities around the world haven’t felt as warmly welcomed and celebrated in Boston-Cambridge as they have in other places like New York, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Austin, Toronto, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Dublin, Sydney, Paris, Berlin or even Zagreb.

Those of us who live in New England know what I’m talking about. And we know that there is an appreciative progressive audience in Boston-Cambridge which would very much appreciate our town playing host to staged works by innovative artists, many of whom live not so very far away in New York City. With my work with the Afterglow Festival in Provincetown (the birth place of the modern American Stage!) and with my Glowberon series at Oberon/ART, I have aimed to keep the spirit of progressive performance alive. And with this new Glow Festival we feel we are at the start of something big, literally: That Cambridge we have the opportunity to grow a festival that might one day rival the size of the Edinburgh fringe and make Boston-Cambridge synonymous with smart, exciting and transformative live theater and performance.

Something like that. Or I can just say HELP!

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Question No. 3: The wharf in Provincetown has been sold to Ann and Chuck Lagasse who also spruced up Boston and Newburyports harbors. If you could reach them what would you say to them which might convince them to contribute to your non-profit cause? Would what you say differ from what you might send to Ryan Murphy, in writing or if you were together at a dinner party?

Dear Ann and Chuck

I’m happy to hear that you will be waving your wand over Provincetown’s wharf in the coming years. Though I don’t own a yacht, even a miniature bath tub version, I do know some folks that do, and it might actually be interesting for them to pull up to our pier one day.

I am writing you because I run a non-profit theater and performance festival in Provincetown called the Afterglow Festival. I started it seven years ago with John Cameron Mitchell and the festival is dedicated toward saving Provincetown’s heritage as the birth place of the modern American stage.

Progressive, experimental theater and performance is Provincetown’s birth right; but in the increasing gentrification of the last two decades, especially, Provincetown has become very resort-like in its presentation of to Broadway stars, at big-ticket prices, and we felt we needed to swoop in and help by creating a non-profit which would afford to stage artists and their works in Provincetown over a week each year.

Solo plays we’ve premiered and developed have moved off-Broadway and to great stages around the world. Our artists have developed works and acts that have won them grants, awards and top honors at other festivals around the world, like Edinburgh and others.

As our population changes in Provincetown, which will become increasingly slick, many supporters having moved away due to the rising cost of living or to find more bohemian pastures. I’m hardpressed to “meet” the newcomers “at the pier” if you will, mainly people of means, and door stop them like this, holding out my beggars cap, asking for sponsorship. I believe what people moving to Provincetown love about it—its progressive spirit—will be lost lest they help (to help) us keep artistic aspects of its personality alive.

I hope you will become a sponsor of the Afterglow Festival. That sort of thing….

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 11° (September 2)

Full moon and Stella off to Cambridge. Nearly the second she left the a.h. Farmer swooped in to cut the grass where the car is usually parked. How does he know when we are here or not. And now he is outside purposefully speaking really loudly. I’m camped out in the dining room I put on some Beck to drown him out because I know he’s baiting me and I’m not giving in. I might be paranoid but I can tell from his body language that he is acting out the scene he played here, albeit a revisionist version. More than ever I’m convinced we are being surveilled in some way.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 781-785. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

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?

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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.

=======================================

One might want to read the previous Blague to understand what’s happening here. Bascially, its me trying to prod myself to write a dozen or so documents that I need to send out to varying populations of peoples, groups and individuals. (Information is so Gemini!)

Question No. 1: Why do you feel that realtors in Provincetown owe a special debt of gratitutde’s to non-profits and what simple things would you say to a room full of them or send them in an email which might inspire them to give to your non-profit.

Question No. 2: What do you think might be the most effective words you could muster to send to a dozen Boston/Cambridge busineses (who don’t know you) to convince them to make a donation, to (becoming a Missionary Sponsor of) the new Glow Festival you’re starting in just five weeks time?

Question No. 3: The wharf in Provincetown has been sold to Ann and Chuck Lagasse who also spruced up Boston and Newburyports harbors. If you could reach them what would you say to them which might convince them to contribute to your non-profit cause? Would what you say differ from what you might send to Ryan Murphy, in writing or if you were together at a dinner party?

Question No. 4: What might you say to Boston- and Cambridge-based individuals to convince them to part with $100 donation so to become a Glow Sparkler and receive a discount on all this new festival’s. What incentives and perks might you offer them?

Question No. 5: In considering social media, what do you think would make the best strategy overall and which social media outlets would you use. Do you have an original ideas on how to create interest in the artists you’re presenting and engage other individuals and businesses in the area and to liaise with other arts organizations and generate substantial buzz?

Question No. 6: If you were asked to put a newsletter together in one day what stories would you feature for this new year ahead?

Question No. 7: What is the current status of your press. Are there journalists and editors who need to hear from  you and what should they know. Are you seeking coverage in as many places as you can?

Question No. 8: What is the mission of the Afterglow Festival and how does it differ from that of the Glow Festival and even the Glowberon series for that matter.

Question No. 9. What are your thoughts on generating “concierge” information  for both festival’s websites. Do you need to make any changes to the website, hire any designers, so forth.

Question No. 10: Do you have all the right print and electronic collateral that you need? Do you need to review with the venues what printed materials might still be effective and what exactly is needed when.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 10° (September 1)

I do love Aries people. I was going to say I do love my Aries friends but I don’t have any. Okay that’s not true but I find I have very “important” Aries relationships but I can’t say I have contant Aries companions. I have dear, close Aries friends. Aries people occupy key spots in my heart. I just don’t hang around with Aries people much or rather they don’t hang around with me. All my Aries bonds have been fast and furious for the most part. That is to say that they were established quickly, in a few days and, though I might consider a great many Aries folk loving fixtures in my life, I mainly experience them from afar. Proximity seems to be counterproductive to our getting along. I seem to be very quickly turned into audience and I’m not all that good at nodding or screwing up my face into a scrunch of affectionate validation.

Seriously, I suggest to anyone reading this to use this next month ahead to align with the energetic estate of the sign of the Ram. The Golden Fleece was stolen by Jason from a grove sacred to the god Ares (Mars). The whole metaphor of that quest is one of self-propulsion (if not fulfillment). Aries energy is headstrong, initiatory, ignitive, adrenal, muscular. It isn’t necessarily about follow-through. It’s about intention, which should be pure. Who are you? What is your purpose? For what should you quest? These are Aries questions. If the answers are dunno, dunno and bagel with a schmear, you have some work to do. The work mightn’t be easy but it is basic. That is to say, you just have to get your head screwed on properly and try not to deviate from what you see as your prime objective.

Aries people are the best at this. Which is why they don’t seem to much take into account what you’re doing. They approach life (and love, too) like a battering Ram. But I love that about them, the little lambs. Mary had a little one. You do realize that nursery rhyme is all about Jesus right? The lamb.  Easter. It falls into the sign of Aries. Pass the mint jelly.

An aside from a 2017 entrée entitled Lonely Planet
Cheery subject I know but I find this very much to be in keeping with the sign of Aries which hits home the fact that, when it comes to it, we fly solo. What has made this realization more poignant in recent years was the necessary loss of certain bonds which didn’t serve me and the conscious decision, regarding other friendships, to stop doing all the work—always being the one to reach out—to see just who would or wouldn’t make the effort to nurture a relationship.  Sadly, more often than not, I heard crickets.

An aside from a 2017 entrée entitled Lonely Planet
Maybe you too have a bunch of new things you’re putting into works. Great. Don’t think about completion only focus on the start. Aries loves the beginning of things. This is your time to frame and outline all the myriad things you’d like to do, rather than to go to deep into any one thing. Surely there are existing projects you’re already deep into. But don’t try to rush the works on something newly started.

As I write this I’ve taken a quick break from sorting through all the myriad to-do lists on paper and saved on my computer, pasting what I can onto my four walls like a detective piecing together envidence on how to solve a crime. It’s kind of fun to move slightly beyond the process of those myraid to-dos, but not quite yet into the doing. It creates a multiplicity of bite size tasks that an overactive mind like myself can be overwhelmed by when the flood  my mind en masse. When that happens I typically take my drug of choice—Netflix—and try to clear my crowded noggin.

I find printing out all the electronic lists, making them physical, is in keeping with Aries love of the actual. Those daffodils outside aren’t rushing through their process of blooming. Typically waiting for Taurus, the estate of the nymphs and flower gods, to enjoy that full expression. We’re not at that stage. It’s no easy task for any shoot to work it’s way through frozen soil and stones to pop out head first. Success of this sort (is there any other?) is achieved by degrees. And we’re only seven degrees into the first sign of Aries. So slow it down! Being throrough is the accumlation of baby steps.

Anywig, I tend not to ask for help (which can be it’s own “issue). And I will admit that I have waxed martyry in my day, but mostly not. I just find it so much easier to d.i.y.. Also desired positive results tend to taste all the sweeter. The man who wrote philosophically on this subject, most notably, is a Gemini not an Aries (I’ll let you guess who that is). But energetically speaking the notion is Arien. Self-reliance is most selfless. Just imagine if we embodied this principle. Nobody would have to pick up after your tweets.

So what is self-reliance at this particular instant in history? It’s hard to say. I suppose it’s not letting the government oppress you or the news of the oppression of the government depress you. But self-reliance isn’t escapism either (not even the good Pisces brand of seeking soul-asylum). Self-reliance is being a warrior in keeping with Aries’ martial archetypes. Self-reliance is health and fitness and personal well-being. Self-reliance is taking just what you need and no more as to create a deficit for others. Self-reliance is, in fact, taking a stand for those who can’t do so for themselves. Never do we have so strong a sense of self as when we are warriors for the freedom and happiness of all sentient beings.

The first sign of Aries is all about form (Taurus, which follows Aries, is about content). You can’t have the latter without the former. Form, former. Oh never mind.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 776-780. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

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.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Virgo 9° (August 31)

Monday and still feeling uneasy in these parts. We did get to beach for a miles long walk along the water. People are playing fast and loose. Friends are visiting Provincetown but not a peep from them and I’m not making any requisite moves. Wrote nearly five pages today and I will try to double that tomorrow. It is feeling in some ways easier though I know there will be good days and bad days; I was pretty stuck over the weekend.  I have some notes on the Aries individuals that I’m reviewing and I will simply post it here. It is pretty random stuff so you’re on your own wading through it.

Aries Man most cut and dry. Aries woman most cut and run.

They are the realists. He is architect framer. Should always work at things where its about initiation. 

Aries is about embodiment. A lesson in learning solitude (for the man?).

Mars is god of blood

Taurus man page 52 quiescent (in a state of dormancy, inactivity) is that a word and yesterday and today notes To Do List also page 52 the spelling of Avant gardist Taurus man the Gardner Taurus woman the garden Aries man initiation initiative Aries woman the director of natural force embodiment of pure life force 

the myth of Mira from which we get the word Mer 

we can say 

we do say Aries man is the fat folk but I’m thinking actually it’s Taurus 

Aries man symbolizes life force carnal fire coursing through his veins Aries woman harnessing that power. Athena is a director of life force. 

chapter says Aries needs to open his quote “viewer”. But I think we change this in the new book since it is Taurus that is myopic. 

Aries nomadic, conquering herds and hordes, living “off the animal”  lots of fleece and mutton in contrast to Taurus where the Bull is the fructifying agent. 

Everytime a Bull appears in mythology it becomes this kind of love-object. Zeus as the Bull beckons to be ridden, he does not force his maleness. 

“The concept of male changes from Aries to Taurus dramatically.” And Gemini is both and in order to be so, successfully, he must be clever.

Aries Nomads versus agrarian farmer Taurus. He farms for friends and those to people his life. His life is his garden. b

Man:

Aries Man

The first house about “taking stabs” • They take everything personally • Not only do they have seeing others’ perspectives, they exhibit no irony in believing that everyone should be looking at life from theirs. • They are the biggest hostage taker. •They are the most unbeholden living life on their own terms and on their own time. If they find, as they often do, a solo vocation where they needn’t much interface with others—solo artist or business owner, carpenter, graphic designer, anything where they can create and come up with any goods alone. Other notions: Stalker tendencies (if denied what they want), hard workers (bad bosses), strong body odor, bossy bottoms, bluster and bravado, Up for anything not for too long, thumbsucking and having to change their diapers. They adore without being clingy. In charge. Always moving onto the next thing. They have short tempers and are prone to tantrums. “Charismatic mansplainers. Active adventurous, but not in it for the long haul. In it for the “moment” and ultimately good with being in the moment (via meditation, etc). He can’t  deal with rejection in the least (while his so-called opposite sign of Libra’s whole being and existence is hinged on negoatiating it, along with all things one-on-one relationa)l. No sign takes what life may bring more personally than does Aries. Impuslive. He sees the world/existence as possessing the same qualities as he—that reality/existence is impulsive, competitive, dog-eat-dog, raw and rather random.

Not to say all Aries are Buddhists, but their natural brand of spirituality is hinged on the upper-case Self as the highest form of power, while they tend to be pretty self-y in the bedroom as well.

what kinds of offspring did Ares have? 

Needing final list of jewelry styles. Aries men needs to be more the Shepherd archetype leading the flock solo endeavour. The hero archetype maybe even work in heracles having to go through self imposed trials. Iron Man. Reading house lists for ideas. Aries is outwardly challenging loves to debate. Jim Parsons? Issa? Kumal? Jessica Williams. Eddie Redmayne. The woman in the Danish girl. John Oliver. How were work with clients .

Aries man is the most self obsessed of the astrological characters. He fascinates at his own experience personal experience that which is right in front of him the metaphorical equivalent of the baby playing with his own body and entertaining only that which is in his immediate via. He wears an open expression like Ewan McGregor, typically pitched forward in conversation talking at others with a challenging glint in his eye. Very rarely someone you’d describe as laid back . Forever proving a point , convincing others of his position. Even if the strong silent type there is a sense of seething beneath the surface. He is never retiring. Learning to be a team player because it does not come naturally. Site Michael imperioli. 

Aries man is the most indie of the sign. Vincent Gallo. Diane von Furstenberg. Ares is the God of blood. Research his foreign equivalents. He is most cut and dry. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 771-775. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

There are no previous Blagues worth posting today.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. 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 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox