Virgo 6° (August 28)

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

SURRENDER

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

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

Well I recently attended the international bisexual men’s conference

Another pilgramage to Cologne

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

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

 

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

 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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