California, here we come...

Next month, love-of-my-life Michael Leleux and I are going to California to get married! Of course, Michael and I have been married for the past twelve years. At least, we’ve considered ourselves married since we first fell desperately in love in small town Texas (during a community theatre production of West Side Story—it’s basically the gayest story ever), before hitching a plane to New York City to build a life together. (See my book, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy.) So it’s odd, really, how much getting legally married means to us—on a really private, validating level—to have the world give its nod to our life.
Of course, that’s what our upcoming wedding means on a political level.

But in our daily life, it means the chaos of any wedding. Our mothers are going mad making plans and driving us crazy. And really, it’s just amazing how expensive even the simplest wedding—a courthouse, a couple of new suits, a hotel and travel arrangements—becomes in no time. Especially if the wedding requires transporting a few people thousands of miles away for a few days. But as my mother keeps telling me, “You only get married once”—even though that’s something most people only say in order to avoid seeming cynical, because lots of people (my mother included) get married and married and married, and never get carried away (as the song goes). But right now, Michael and I are busy being bowled over by something we never thought we’d be lucky enough to get in the first place. What an adventure! What a head-ache! How high the moon! Stay tuned…

My Mother-In-Law

My beloved mother-in-law has been through a really rotten patch. It’s been building ever since the death of my father-in-law several years ago. It was a terrible time: there he was, wilting away at home, and she was in the hospital having this awful heart surgery. She was too ill to even attend his funeral. Just the worst. After that, there was the tragic, but startlingly swift, development of her ebay addiction. So that she was, seemingly overnight, buying things like forty-seven pairs of white satin jazz shoes, in assorted sizes. Or, dozens of those velvet fingers they put the rings on at those cheap jewelry stores in the mall, so that when you laid them all out together it looked like hundreds of people were behaving very rudely. After that, things took a darker turn, with a slow shutting down of her joy and energy, until everything culminated a few months ago in a really lousy couple of months where I believe she sort of drove her inner sedan into the drainage ditch of despair and hopelessness. It was the saddest thing I ever saw in my whole life, and absolutely nothing about it was funny.
But now, let me tell you what is funny.
She’s back.
With the help of some mountain-flattening anti-depressants, she’s Doris Day.
She’s laughin’ and kickin’ and doin’ everything but the Black Bottom, and life is one grand sweet song again.
AND this sweet old Catholic lady, a lady who once told me that Ronald Reagan caught Alzheimer’s from thinking too hard, has discovered Eastern theology, and New Age spiritualism.
This is how she spends her time now. Reading Kahil Gabran and The Secret and all of these Oprah-y books about how to unleash your inner power, like it’s a dog or something. So that now she telephones me, and says things like, “Robert, are you aware that your third eye is located behind your pituitary gland?” Or, “Darlin’, when you’re lookin’ for my birthday present, honey, try to get me somethin’ in purple. I understand it’s a very good Chakra color.”
Or, she puts strange Catholic spins on these New Age concepts, for instance: “You see darlin’, in order to have anything you want, you’ve simply got to appeal to your upper mind to intervene with your middle mind, so they can intercede on your behalf with your lower mind. And your lower mind’s happy to oblige your middle mind, because they just love one another, and everybody seems to think the world of the upper mind anyway.”
I think she’s praying to have her ebay account restored.
Anyway, I’m so grateful Mom’s been revived by something. Anything. Who’s complaining.
But the other day I did invite her to lunch, and she told me, “Oh, darlin’, I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I’m feelin’ up to goin’ out.”
And I said, “Well, you see, Mom. It’s simple. All you’ve got to appeal to your upper mind to intercede with your stomach.”
And I didn’t even mind that she didn’t find that funny at all.

Notes from the Road

Dearly Beloveds,
I have been touring the country promoting my book.
With my mother.
Which some may consider an act of unqualified bravery, but which has been, nevertheless, a great deal of fun.
We began in New Orleans—a town I adore, filled with the kindest people I’ve ever met.
Here’s a typical day.
Mother and I were scheduled to be interviewed on the radio.
Upon entering the radio station, I proceeded to regale the station manager with stories about just how much I love public radio. About how I’m just one of those people who sits out in his car until All Things Considered is over, no matter how much grocery shopping I have to do.
And she said, “Oh, that’s so nice. But this isn’t public radio.”
And I said, “Oh. Well then, what…. What is this…?”
And she said, “This is The Radio for the Blind.”
No fooling.
And I started saying how radio for the blind was God’s work. And then I asked, “But, ummm. And forgive me for being naïve, here, but can’t the blind listen to any…any radio station?”
And she said, “Well of course blind people can listen to any radio station, but we are The Radio for the Blind.”
And I said, “That’s very important.”
And she said, “We read books to the blind over the radio.”
Which really made me perk up my ears, and ask, “Oh. Well, uh. Well, are you going to read my…. I mean, are you planning to read my little book to the blind?”
“No.”
It seems that I'm a real wash-out with the blind.
But she was very, very nice about it.
Well, you can’t win ‘em all.