Shakespeare and the City, and other signs of the Apocalypse

In Shakespeare’s day, the actors were all men or young boys, so the women were played by men. This gave rise to some fun the author and actors could have with the audience. In As You Like It, for example, a female character dresses up as a male to be able to be with the man she loves. There is great fun in the play (and one assumes in the audience) to recognize and toy with a male actor playing a woman who dresses as a man…

I can’t believe I have to pull for the Celtics. By family obligation, I pull for West Coast teams. Or I should say, any West Coast team not from San Francisco. Our obligations are with Los Angeles. My favorite football team is the Raiders, but that’s ok, because they are not in San Fran, and for a few shining years played in L.A. In the glory days of the 80s, my bets friend (a Celtics fan) would replay the series one-on-one in the heat of Mississippi. But I just can’t stand Kobe Bryant.

Oh, and Tubby is the best coach UK ever had. The finals were guaranteed to have one of his players in it—Rondo or Prince. Nuff said, all you haters.

Back in college, me and some other guys wanted to be writers. I had one of those terrible realizations. I spent all summer writing, to come up with publishable material. I treated it like a job—waking up and writing til the afternoon. I lived in an apartment with 3 other people, and rent was $75 a month. That was the summer I lived on peanut butter. Then I discovered it would be hard to be a writer. One, I was not so good, and two, John Kennedy Toole had written the very book I was working on that summer…

Well, one of our friends found a way to make some real cash writing. He wrote porn for Penthouse and was really bringing down some jack. The crazy thing: he was gay. He told me how he pulled it off, and because there are delicate eyes out there, call me and I’ll tell you what he said. Anyway, I have laughed about that for years, told people the basics of the story and said, leave the porn alone, you never know who’s really getting in your head.

With this Sex and The City thing, the joke’s on us. Sex and the City, a la Shakespeare, is the fantasies of gay men about what it would be like to be a hot nympho with an unlimited shoe budget. Hopefully guys don’t want, and gals don’t want to be, drag queens.