Wet behind the ears. With frosting.

Don't try to pull the leopard throw over my eyes.

I didn't just fall off the macaroni truck.

It's not like I was born yesterday.

I was born the day before yesterday.

That explains all the people who were crowded into my lovely home, Dutchboy, on Saturday, drinking my booze and leaving a thin veneer of mushroom paté over an astonishing range of household surfaces.

It wasn't a surprise party per se (I'm way too much of a control freak to leave a whole party to Cheez). But still, there were a few surprises.

Like Susie Bright being in the closet.

Yes, Susie Sexpert, co-founder of On Our Backs, Ms. Sex-Positive Lesbi-bi-feminist herself, in the closet.

Not as an act of repression. As an act of transgression.

As soon as I said guests were welcome to poke around anywhere except the closets, where I'd crammed all the mess, Susie dove for the closet door like it was the last muff on earth.

Only to come out complaining it was too dark to see anything.

I haven't been to a darkened closet party since those junior high days of 7 Minutes in Heaven.

This party was even cattier than an adolescent kissing game. Thanks to all our leopard decor.

Exhibit A: Susie draped over my leopard dresser.











Exhibit B: Susie rolling around my leopard bed.











Exhibit C: Susie giving who knows what body part a quick rub-a-dub-dub in my leopard tub.

What can I say? You have an exhibitionist at your birthday party, you end up with a lot of exhibits.

Something about the evening brought out the sexpertise in a number of guests.

Take Len Neiberg. Mild-mannered Intel engineer by day. But once upon a time, a guy who used to shlep Patty the Plastic Pelvis around the Harvard Campus.

That was back when we were peer contraceptive counselors. Len was kind enough to present me with a birthday gift of his t-shirt from the group (mine having been lost somewhere in the intervening twelve million years since college), bearing our famous slogan, We're There For You When Things Get Hard.

Those who didn't get the contraceptive message might have turned to some of the other guests, ranging from Judith Arcana, a one-time Jane -- as in, member of the Jane Collective -- to Ariel Gore, the original Hip Mama, who came with her knee baby Maximillian, shown here with lovely my-other-mother-is-also-a-lesbian Maria Perez.


Guests also had talents that extended beyond the boudoir and the making or prevention of babies.

Sarah Dougher sang some songs, including one about Bella Abzug, another about Lady Bird Johson, and this marvelous ditty.


Naomi Bishop made me a leopard cake.
This was the best birthday present since America gave me a black president. Or a half-black president.

My party actually had 500% as many black men as the American presidency will have come January 20. For a grand total of 2.5 black men.

They arrived and departed at different points through the evening, so as not to shock the system of Southeast Portland, which does not see too many brothers.

Though it did see my brother, all the way down from Olympia for the occasion.

I was wearing a sparkly pink-orange-blue dress (shown here right after Mary Dzwkwzzndznczdncxzski [okay, maybe that's not the exact spelling of her last name, but it's about as pronounceable] spilled red wine on me). This was a bittersweet purchase from my favorite vintage store's going-out-of-business sale.

Do you think it was originally a prom dress, or a bridesmaid dress? I wondered to various guests, never having been to a prom nor been a bridesmaid, myself.

Prom! Emily and Cherese declared definitively, explaining no bride would let her bridesmaids outsparkle her.

I guess it makes sense, although personally, I had no worries about being outsparkled that night.
Thanks to everyone for making the birthday and the whole year it topped off so damn fun.

FUNdraisers

Last February, a guest looked out the window into our backyard, gestured at the deep plum-colored leaves of the smoke tree, and said of our garden, You have winter interest.

No I answered we have year-round disinterest.

Really, I have nothing against nature. I also have nothing against brain surgery. I just don't feel particularly motivated devoting my free time to either of those pursuits.

But Saturday morning, we were up early, to get out of our preferred bed (queen-size, flannel sheets, with a light toping of purring cats) to clear out the less-favored garden beds.

Because these hipsters

needed some place to put these bulbs.
All 1001 of them.

Bulbs, I mean, not hipsters. There isn't enough irony even in my yard for 1001 hipsters.

The hipsters were a volunteer gardening phalanx under the astute leadership of inimitable Indie Rocker Sarah Dougher. Who knew Riot Grrrrls had such Grrrrn thumbs?

Apparently they are the only ones who do. At least the only ones in our yard on Saturday.


How did the earth outside my home come to this bulbous state? Let's just say it all started when I had a gay old time at a charity auction.

Which you might think would have taught me a lesson about the dangers of charity auctions. But no.

Because like a perennial that blooms anew, just hours after the last hipster furrowed the final tulip, Cheez and I were out at ... another charity auction.

A really bitchin' one.

Although I must say, whoever made the call on the cupcake to salami ratio at the buffet table deserves to have his sausage sliced by a ravenous coven of hormonal harpies.

Still, the booze was flowing, even after the last lick of coconut icing was long gone.

Drink early, bid often, I advised a fellow guest, just to show I knew how things work in this world.

I'm afraid I'll drink too much, she confessed, and end up taking home something awful.

We've all done that, I reminded her. Better to do it at a charity art auction than at a bar.

At least if you get drunk and bring home something from an art auction that you don't really want, you can give it away.

If you get drunk at a bar and end up bringing home something you don't want, then give it away, it probably means you're headed for an uncomfortable swab and a course of doxycycline. Not to mention an angry call from anyone (everyone?) you gave it to.

There was no live auction at the Bitch Magazine fundraiser, which meant it was harder to get into heady bidding danger. But I still managed.

Mostly because I really wanted this fabulous pro-drag mockery of matrimony, an original drawing to watch out for by Alison Bechdel.

And so did my friends Daniel and Matt.

I bid.

Matt bid.

I waited until two minutes before the silent auction ended, then snuck back into the room and bid again.

Daniel marched in after me and bid.

I began writing my name under his while he was still filling in his email address, writing just slowly enough so that I finished after him, precisely as the Mistress of Ceremonies counted down the closing of that section of the auction.

Then I made a big nasty X along the rest of the bid form and cackled It's mine, all mine, like I was a 44 year-old bridesmaid beating back every other single woman at the reception to catch the bouquet.

I felt a little bad about how I trounced Daniel, who is a very sweet person and dear friend.

But then again, they don't call it Thoughtful and Polite Magazine, now do they?

Besides, I'd already done my virtuous deed for the day. Or the week, really.

Because that's how long it took me to make 12, count 'em 12, original drawings to donate to the auction.

They sold in sets of 4. (Click on each image to see it in its full glory)

Set 1: Great Moments in Feminist Pop Culture

Set 2: Great Moments in Feminist World History


Set 3 (and the high seller): Great Moments in Feminist US History

Ed Emberley and Angela Davis - Surely there's some joke in their about the COINTELPRO planting false fingerprints to frame the panthers.

But by the end of the evening, I'd had a touch too much vodka to make it.

Cheez had even more gin than I did vodka. And thus he was the winning bidder on something every queerer than the Mary Transvestite Moore number that I snagged.

Who is the first homo couple most kids know?

Think back to your earliest childhood exposure to "that lifestyle."

Even before the Birkenstocked Peppermint Patty and her BDSM buddy Marcy (how does Patty get Marcy to call her sir?) put something "funny" into your funny pages.

I'm talking pretty in preschool.

Who knew Sesame Street ran through Chelsea?

Or that Cheez and I bore such an uncanny resemblance to its inhabitants?
Or that Bert, Ernie, Mary Tyler Moore, Cheez, and me, Macaronimaniac, could live so happily ever after, just waiting for our bulbs to bloom?

Home Sweet Homo: Or, Pardon My Real Estate Pontification

What's in a name?

A lavender-menace worth of demographic and geographic convergence, as it turns out.

When my squeeze the Cheez and I were taking the plunge into homeownership, we must have looked at about fifty different houses. In two weeks.

What can I say, I was trained to shop at Loehmann's, where if you don't snatch up a bargain fast, some other broad will, and won't you be sorry.

In order to remember all those houses, we gave them nicknames.

La Maison des Deux Ages, a 1918 Craftsman Bungalow onto which someone had added a second story (in both senses of the word), replete with 1970s vertical wood paneling, sky lights, oversize fish tank, and let's-get-naked-under-the-stars balcony hot tub.

Russian Survivalist House, which contained enough store-bought Borscht to stock the fallout shelter of two small Soviet satellite nations.
Or perhaps three, depending on whether there would be access to post-Apocalyptic sour cream.

Asparagusless House, where our realtor snapped the last spear of asparagus growing in the garden and ate it. He was sort of a jackass.
Polish Wetnurse House, which contained an illegal mother-in-law unit decorated with several stunning portraits of Pope John Paul II, a huge Polish flag, and an entire deep freeze full of breast milk.
And then there was Dutchboy, as we named it — for its Dutch-style gambrel roof.

We were in love.

We're buying a house called Dutchboy, I told my friend Matt.

Matt, who when he is not busy listening to me discuss my latest major purchases, is a linguist, promptly informed me that Dutchboy is slang for the male equivalent of a fag hag. That is, a guy who hangs out around dykes.
We moved in and, lesbo and behold, discovered that the neighbors on one side were a pair of retired Montana school teachers, very comfortable shoes and Subaru station wagon.

And on the other side, our neighbor was a Rottweiler-wielding, pantsuit-wearing, Hot Flash Dance-attending single Sapphic.

Dutchboy really is a Dutchboy! I told Matt. Surrounded by lesbians on both sides. What are the chances of that?

In Southeast Portland, his boyfriend answered, higher than you might think.

Home Sweet Homo!