Even the Yellowhairs who were once on top can now be found squatting to a Rihanna song in a class called Gary's Glutes Camp in an attempt to reverse-engineer a butt. These are dark times. Back in my Wildwood days with Janet, you were either blessed with a beautiful body or not. And if you were not, you could just chill out and learn a trade. Now if you're not "hot," you are expected to work on it until you are. It's like when you renovate a house and you're legally required to leave just one of the original walls standing. If you don't have a good body, you'd better starve the body you have down to a neutral shape, then bolt on some breast implants, replace your teeth, dye your skin orange, inject your lips, sew on some hair, and call yourself the Playmate of the Year.
How do we survive this? How do we teach our daughters and our gay sons that they are good enough the way they are? We have to lead by example. Instead of trying to fit an impossible ideal, I took a personal inventory of all my healthy body parts for which I am grateful: Straight Greek eyebrows. They start at the hairline at my temple and, left unchecked, will grow straight across my face and onto yours.
A heart-shaped ass. Unfortunately, it's a right-side-up heart; the point is at the bottom.
Droopy brown eyes designed to confuse predators into thinking I'm just on the verge of sleep and they should come back tomorrow to eat me.
Permanently rounded shoulders from years of working at a computer.
A rounded belly that is pushed out by my rounded posture no matter how many sit-ups I do.Which is mostly none.
A small high waist.
A wad of lower-back fat that never went away after I lost my "baby weight." One day in the next ten years, this back roll will meet up with my front pouch, forever obscuring my small high waist, and I will officially be my mother.
Wide-set knockers that aren't so big but can be hoisted up once or twice a year for parades.
Good strong legs with big gym teacher calves that I got from walking pigeon-toed my whole life.
Wide German hips that look like somebody wrapped Pillsbury dough around a case of soda.
My father's feet. Flat. Bony. Pale. I don't know how he even gets around, because his feet are in my shoes.
I would not trade any of these features for anybody else's. I wouldn't trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn't even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did.
At the end of the day, I'm happy to have my father's feet and my mother's eyes with me at all times. If I ever go back to that beach in Wildwood, I want my daughter to be able to find me in the crowd by spotting my soda-case hips. I want her to be able to pick me out of a sea of highlighted-blond women with fake tans because I'm the one with the thick ponytail and the greenish undertones in my skin.
And if I ever meet Joyce DeWitt, I will first apologize for having immediately punched her in the face, and then I will thank her. For while she looked like a Liza Minnelli doll that had been damaged in a fire, at least she didn't look like everybody else on TV.
Also, full disclosure, I would trade my feet for almost any other set of feet out there.
Delaware County Summer Showtime!
(All names in this story have been changed, to protect the fabulous.)
Gay Wales
In 1976, a young Catholic family man named Larry Wentzler started a youth theater program in my hometown called Summer Showtime. It really is a terrific model for a community program. Young teenagers would put on daily Children's Theater shows for the community, giving preschoolers access to live theater at a very low cost for parents. The older kids would direct those Children's Theater shows and perform in Broadway-style musicals by night. In the process, all the kids would learn about music, art, carpentry, discipline, friendship, and teamwork. It's a fantastic program that continues to this day, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
Larry didn't set out to create a haven for gay teens, but you know how sometimes squirrels eat out of a bird feeder? Larry built a beautiful bird feeder, and the next thing you knew-full of squirrels.
I took a job as the night box office manager at Summer Showtime because my eleventh-grade boyfriend said we'd have fun there. He promptly broke up with me to date a hot blond dancer girl to whom he is now married, God bless us every one. I should have known he and I weren't going to make it when for my seventeenth birthday he gave me a box of microwave popcorn and a used battery tester.You know, to test batteries before I put them in my Walkman. Like you give someone when you're in love.
Those first few nights of being freshly, brutally dumped and sitting alone in the box office were not so great. I was heartbroken and, because no one had central air back then, I had to cry myself to sleep on the floor under the air conditioner in my parents' room. But then, like Dorothy's in The Wizard of Oz, my world went from black-and-white to color. Because, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I was embraced by the gays. They loved me and praised me. I was so funny and so mean and mature for my age! And with my large brown eyes I really did look like a young Judy Garland Lorna Luft.
Before my evening shift, I would hang out with my new friend Tim, who ran the costume department. Tim had the highest, loudest voice you've ever heard. I could sit there for hours listening to him screech along to "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" while hot-gluing Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat together because none of us could really sew. Parents of the world, this is where you want your seventeen-year-old daughter spending her summer-snorting her DQ Blizzard out her nose from laughing so hard. The only person funnier than Tim was his meaner, louder, higher-pitched brother Tristan. One family, two impressively gay brothers.
That summer I got to know four families in which half the children were gay. In case you're interested from a sociological point of view, they were always Catholic and there were always four kids, two of whom were gay. What Wales is to crooners, my hometown may be to homosexuals-meaning there seems to be a disproportionate number of them and they are the best in the world!
Tristan would egg me on to trash-talk the little blondie who had "stolen" my boyfriend. Of course I know now that no one can "steal" boyfriends against their will, not even Angelina Jolie itself.But I was filled with a poisonous, pointless teenage jealousy, which, when combined with gay cattiness, can be intoxicating. Like mean meth. And guess who played Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, by the way? You guessed it, old Battery-Tester Joe. I got to watch him in the show every night and then count my stubs in a four-foot room while he and the blonde left to get pizza.He would've never given her a crappy battery tester. And if he had, she probably would have shoved it up her twat and tried to turn it on. (This is the kind of mean stuff Tristan and I bonded over. Clearly it's very toxic.)
The unstated thing that Tim and I had in common was that we had crushes on all the same boys.The only difference was, I was allowed to talk endlessly about my feelings and Tim was in the half closet.Nobody thought he was straight, but he wasn't "out" either. He certainly never made a move on anyone. His crushes would manifest themselves in other ways. Tim had a real job working at Macy's, and sometimes he would use his disposable income to, you know, buy Rick McMenamin a baseball glove."You were saying the other night after rehearsal how you needed a new glove, so... anyhoo," he'd trail off. The nice thing was, the straight boys didn't freak out about this, and they definitely kept all the free stuff.
Lots of teenage girls have taken comfort under the wings of half-closeted gay boys, but how many of us can brag that her two best friends in high school were twenty-five-year-old lesbians? I met Karen and Sharon one day in the middle of our giant thousand-seat auditorium. The kid who ran the lighting booth, a roughneck girl named Rita who would only answer to "Reet," was climbing from ladder to ladder hanging lights for The Jungle Book and cursing like a sailor with a corneal paper cut. Karen was the improv teacher and Sharon was the head scenic painter, and the three of us found ourselves spellbound by the spinning mobile of profanity that was hanging from the ceiling. It was like looking in the monkey cage but you can understand the monkey, and what the monkey is saying is "Fuck all these fucking zoo people." We started laughing and were inseparable for the next six years.
Karen and Sharon had been a couple at some unspecified time in the past but were now just friends with asymmetrical haircuts. We spent days and weeks doing nothing, calling one another ten times a day to schedule our nothing-doing. An entire evening could consist of renting a movie, such as The Stepfather or that one where spiders come out of Martin Sheen's face, and making nachos. Do you remember what a cultural phenomenon homemade nachos were? If you are under thirty, you probably don't even realize there was a time when people didn't have nachos. We just stood around eating crackers.
You know that game Celebrity that you and your friends invented in college? Well, first of all, you didn't invent it. It was developed by NASA to keep girls virgins well into their twenties. And second of all, we played it better than you because we played it four nights a week. We wore it out. "Okay, this is Joan Collins's character from Dynasty." "Alexis!" "No, her full name." "Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter!"
When we finally got tired of playing, around midnight, we would switch to a version called Celebrity Boff, in which you could only write down the names of celebrities you would sleep with.Playing Celebrity Boff with two half-closeted gay guys, two lesbians, and one straight girl made for an easy game. Jodie Foster's name was always in there four times. Antonio Banderas appealed to all sectors. "This is that same one we keep getting-" "Princess Stephanie of Monaco!"
It is a testament to my parents that they never reacted negatively to the four-year-long pride parade that marched through their house. They welcomed these weirdos (they were weirdos in other ways, not because of their sexual preference) with open arms and fed them all until they were sick. Only once did my mother say, "That Karen is a little butch, don't you think?" I feigned ignorance badly, "I not know what you mean!" and slipped out for a night of same-sex nachos and name yelling.
I guess I should also state that Karen and Sharon never hit on me in the slightest and it was never weird between any of us. Gay people don't actually try to convert people. That's Jehovah's Witnesses you're thinking of.
No one was ever turned gay by being at Summer Showtime, because that's not possible. If you could turn gay from being around gay people, wouldn't Kathy Griffin be Rosie O'Donnell by now? The straight boys quickly learned to be accepting and easygoing, and the straight girls learned over the course of several years to stop falling in love with gay boys.
By August, I was coming out of my gloom. I took a free afternoon dance class where we basically just did jazz runs back and forth across the lobby. The teacher called me "Frankenstein Arms" because I would move my right arm in unison with my right leg, like a Frankenstein. Since I had been thrown over for a dancer, this stung. But I persevered.
I was the youngest person in our group of friends and I always had a curfew. I was notorious for freaking out when it was time to go. It didn't matter if we were at local eatery the Critic's Choice enjoying mozzarella sticks after a rehearsal or at Tim and Tristan's house watching Sleepaway Camp-the one where the demonic little girl turns out to have a penis-when I had to go, I would shut a party down. "Hurry up. I don't want to get in trouble." Pleated eighties Bossypants.
When the summer was over, I had made about twenty-five new friends and was no longer weeping into my mom's radiator cover. But most of the kids in Summer Showtime went to the Catholic schools down the road or were well into their twenties, so I didn't see them as much once school started.After the Greatest Summer
I had to take eleventh-grade health in twelfth grade. I had postponed it the year before so I could take choir and Encore Singers-it was kind of a big deal to be in both, whatever. I was alto 1, but sometimes they had me sing second soprano. I had a solo in "O Holy Night" in a performance at the mall. In downtown Philadelphia. Enough! Stop asking about it!
The health teacher, Mr. Garth, had a thick blond mustache-the universal sign of intelligence-and a rural-Pennsylvania accent that made him say "dawn" instead of "down" and"yuman" instead of "human." One day, in what I hope was a departure from the state curriculum, Mr.Garth devoted an entire period to teaching us "how to spot and avoid homosexuals." I could not believe what I was hearing.
I don't know what happened to this guy at the Teachers College of Anthraciteville, but he had some opinions. "These homosexuals, they'll trick ya. They'll fine out what kinda music ya like, what kinda candy ya like, then they'll invite you dawn to their house." As I listened, incredulous, I couldn't help but picture a young Mr. Garth being lured into a van by Paul Lynde. "Hey there, sonny, my friends and I were just going into the woods to enjoy some Jethro Tull and a Mars bar. Interested?" Oh, the shame that must have washed over Mr. Garth as "Minstrel in the Gallery" came to an end and he realized that was no Mars bar! But there was no turning back. He had already eaten half of it.
My blood started to boil as he continued. "If you're talking to someone and you think they might be a homosexual, just run. Just get out of there and tell the nearest adult." I stayed after class to tell him that I thought he had misspoken. "I think what you meant to say was 'child molesters,' not'homosexuals.' " He just watched my hands move as I talked, not unlike a dog. It became clear that my school life and my Showtime life were separate.The Greatest New Year's Eve Party of All Time
The line between Showtime friends and school friends was breached on New Year's Eve 1987.
My Summer Showtime friend Brendan had a New Year's Eve party. Brendan was a very dramatic boy who would say things to me like "Did you ever think that maybe the man that did that to your face did it to mark you so he could find you later in life?" See what I mean about the question being a reflection of the asker? When Brendan lost himself in a long dramatic rant, you could always shut him up by saying, "I like that monologue. Is it from 'night, Mother?"
He had a beautiful face with pouty lips and that swoopy hair that was so popular during the second Reagan administration. He was the scenic artist under Sharon and he would do things like paint the entire floor of the stage an hour before a performance (ruining the white shorts the kids had been asked to bring in from home to be in the chorus of "Free to Be... You and Me"). Then he'd disappear for two days, emerging with a ten-page letter of apology. He was a mess, and his New Year's party was expected to be awesome.
I was a teetotaler at the time, and none of my close friends were big drinkers. I went with Karen and Sharon, and the place was already packed when we got there. The kitchen and dining room were full of Brendan's athletic Catholic school friends; the living room was packed with theater nerds.Brendan's mom had locked herself in her room upstairs. There was an unclaimed dog turd in the hall outside the bathroom.
People sat in small groups, talking about the other small groups that were just out of earshot.My ex and the dancer made a brief appearance, but I held my head high. I was wearing my best Gap turtleneck and my dates were two adult lesbians, so yeah, I was pretty cool.
The Summer Showtime kids had to weave nervously through the jocks to get to the Doritos.Brendan's long-suffering Catholic school "girlfriend," Patty, tried to bridge the gap between the two groups. A sweet, quiet girl with short curly hair and a face as Irish as a scone, Patty seemed to be the only person at the party who didn't realize what Brendan's deal was-even the family dog had registered his disapproval again on the kitchen floor.
Brendan and I ran into each other on the front lawn. He seemed to be in a particularly Oscar Wilde mood. "May I kiss you?" he asked. Sure, who cares. After a tender, playacted non-French kiss, Brendan suddenly "came out" to me. In my experience, the hardest thing about having someone "come out" to you is the "pretending to be surprised" part. You want him to feel like what he's telling you is Big. It's like, if somebody tells you they're pregnant, you don't say, "I did notice you've been eating like a hog lately." Your gay friend has obviously made a big decision to say the words out loud. You don't want him to realize that everybody's known this since he was ten and he wanted to be Bert Lahr for Halloween. Not the Cowardly Lion, but Bert Lahr. "Oh, my gosh, no waaaay?" You stall, trying to think of something more substantial to say. "Is everyone, like, freaking out? What a... wow."