Oh the Humanities!

Trust me.  I'm a doctor.

Albeit not the kind Jewish mothers kvell about.  

More the kind lavender ladies croon about. 

Which is just (closer to) fine with me.

The best thing about getting a Ph.D.?  The tiara I bought myself to celebrate finishing the damn degree.  After spending a year writing a fascinating and insightful dissertation that I'm pretty sure nobody has ever read (and yes, I am including my advisor in that assessment), I figured I ought to have something to show for it.

So why not something sparkly and glamorous and likely to be coveted by drag queens?

Who says a girl has to be biologically a boy just to wear herself a crown?

Are you a princess or a queen?  the neighborhood crazy lady queried, as I marched into the post office, tiara-clad, to mail something off on my way to school to file my dissertation, that fateful long ago day.

Neither I answered, only slightly put off that the person calling me out on weird wardrobe was the neighborhood crazy lady I am a doctor.

These days, seldom having any occasion to dissert, profess, or

 serve as a beauty pageant runner-up, I only find cause to don the tiara once a year.

My birthday.

Because everything, even chocolate cake, is better with rhinestones.

And, apparently, a bra strap hanging out.

Ah well, it was mostly a glamorous birthday bash we had here at Dutchboy this past Saturday.  

Even if it was a little lacking in the sexpertise of yore.  

And my actual birthday, which was Monday, was pretty rocking too.  

My boss brought me a cupcake. And she didn't even pretend to have baked it herself.

Then I Delved into some Shakespeare. 

Specifically, into the final class of the Shakespeare seminar I've been teaching.  

Because, you know, having a new full time job plus my usual twelve thousand hobbies just didn't seem like enough to fill my days, without a good dozen hours of reading Elizabethan English every week.

The seminarians were really great.  One of them said she took the class because she liked my article in Bitch magazine critiquing the global politics of Viacom's Dora the Explorer franchise.   Si, se puede, as Caesar Chavespeare might have put it.

Another seminarian told me I was the first good teacher she ever had.  The fact that she has a graduate degree is perhaps more a statement about the lows of higher education than the heights of my Delving.  But I do not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Or, in this case, a Greek bearing gifts.  Which she was, both in terms of Hellenic heritage and in terms of giving me a handcrafted, locally grown, chocolate vodka.

If that wasn't enough of a Jewish girl's dream day, I came home to discover the postal carrier had delivered the latest issue of Bridges, which in case you never heard of it is like Bitch mit a bissel Yiddish thrown in.  And there, right on pages 75-77, was a poem by little old me.

About a course I had to take to get my Ph.D.

So now, in addition to being a doctor, a tiara-donner, a righteous 9 to 5-er, a Dora-critiquer and an intrepid Delver, I am also a published poet.  

Next thing you know, we'll be seeing Robert Pinsky traipsing around in a rhinestone crown with his bra strap hanging out.

The Scariest Thing at the Fred Meyer

There is something eerie and disturbing about food that is disguised as other food.

I thought this genre reached it height - or should I say its depth - with marzipan pigs.

I was wrong.

It's a hamburger! It's fries!

It's cake that looks like a hamburger and fries!

Not to be confused with the best cake in the world, which I made this weekend for my squeeze the Cheez's birthday.

A lovely chocolate cake. So rich, so moist, so well loved that no one ever guesses my secret ingredient.

And if that grosses you out, MORE CAKE FOR ME!!!!

Hey, at least it doesn't come with frosted red fake "ketchup."

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.